Samurai Were Actually Embarrassed of Their Swords Oh, come on. This, at least, just has to be bullshit. A quick Google image search of "samurai" returns a gazillion results, 99 percent of which depict the famed warriors with sword in hand. There are drawings about them using swords. There are photos. Hell, pajamas, katanas, and weird hairstyles were their whole thing: Samurai damn well lived by the sword. What else did they have?
Actually...
Yes, the samurai did have an ancient tradition centered around a weapon. However, it sure as shit wasn't the sword. In fact, ignore every movie and video game about samurai, because they only carried swords as awkward last resort weapons.
Kyuba no michi, "the way of the horse and bow," was there centuries before any semblance of Bushido. It's exactly what it says on the tin: Samurai were all about flinging arrows at peasants from horseback. It makes sense, really -- they were professional soldiers, and in that line of business you quickly learn that only idiots fight the enemy at stabbing distance. Bows were revered over swords to the extent that many Japanese nobles actually downplayed their swordsmanship. After all, pointing out how great your sword skills were was basically announcing that you're a terrible archer. And saying "I'm a terrible archer" was more or less like saying "I'm neither a man nor a warrior."
The introduction of firearms in the 16th century finally killed the samurai supremacy as mounted archers. As they left the battlefield and settled for a new life as bureaucrats and officials, their formerly reviled swords started taking on actual importance as elaborate status symbols. And because bows weren't really an option anymore, the sword became the go-to weapon of the honorable, sword-wielding, bushido following and completely fictional samurai they retroactively invented to feel better about their crummy desk jobs.
Maybe it's an unintentionally good metaphor. Big data is the new useless but symbolic catchphrase that you use to make your company look modern.
I don't want to be able to time lights. I want traffic lights to go away. I want cars that can either drive themselves and time their interactions with other cars or assist the driver with maneuvering between cars at an intersection.
And rather than stopping at a stop sign or a traffic signal, you can just zip through the intersection, barely having to slow down. [CHEERING] Right, so I already heard the comment, I couldn't imagine sitting in one of these cars. You're not in the driver's seat with your hands on the steering wheel. You're in the backseat reading the newspaper
It's a win-win-win-win situation. The public wins - not wasting time driving, safer, faster. The city wins - less accidents, less time off work due to accidents, hospital visits, less money spent on infrastructure like overpasses. Those savings will make up for the lost revenue from red light cameras. Oil companies win - due to Jevons paradox there will be more gas consumed. Car manufacturers wins - they sell more cars with this feature. The selling feature is they reduce travel time, which is kind of what they've always tried to sell with bigger engines and higher top speeds. This will actually deliver reduced driving time.
So you're that guy who races up to red lights and then has to slam on the brakes.
Here's what happens. You and I are stopped at a light with you in front of me. There's another light 20 seconds away at 35 mph or 10 seconds way at 70mph. The first light turns green and the second is due to turn green in 20 seconds. You arrive at the second light in 10 seconds and have to come to a complete stop. I arrive in 20 seconds the moment the second light turns green but I have to stop because of you. Everyone behind me also has to stop because of you. Your actions caused us all to decelerate and accelerate unnecessarily.
Actually, I wouldn't stop. I'd slow down giving you enough room to accelerate so to minimize my change in speed, but most people wouldn't apply that forethought.
The concept of aliasing is not applicable to the timing of traffic lights for a number of reasons. First, you're going the wrong way, a more reasonable answer would be 17.5 mph also works for lights timed for 35mph, but that's not true either. The timing is a phase variance, not a change in frequency. There's pretty much nothing you can do to beat the system of lights timed for a given speed other than drive that speed. That's a pretty optimal solution anyway.
BBC had a documentary called Out Of Control where they show this technology. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM_iiPFkNas&t=52m1s It's a very interesting hour-long program. It makes me wonder if it is me that's posting this to slashdot or my subconscious overlord inside my brain.
These are all very important points. I think there are some examples of them in the video.
For example at 9:00 the speaker talks about how proud they are that their car didn't run down some pedestrians crossing the street. The car stopped just meters from them while making a left hand turn, blocking an oncoming car. The higher level decision that I'm sure the parent would make in practice is to judge the intentions of the pedestrians on the street and not commit to the turn. Although it's not clear in the video, it looks like the pedestrians didn't even run the light. The speaker doesn't acknowledge that their car blocked the oncoming lane resulting in a fairly dangerous situation. As you can see in the video, the oncoming car eventually swerves around the Google car.
Later on, at 12:00 he jokes about how a car nearly sideswipes him while merging onto the freeway. The speaker doesn't acknowledge the Google car's role in that dangerous situation. It's a simple lack of defensive driving on google's part. Yeah, they are not at fault for driving down the freeway, but it's not hard for a human to anticipate the fact that a car in a merge lane tail-gating behind a big semi-truck is going to change lanes at any moment. The Google car had an empty lane to the other side that it could have changed into at no cost.
I think these driverless cars are an insanely great innovation for our society, and I was really impressed with their TED talk too. But I just wish that now that they have the nerdy computer technical issues resolved, they can work on higher level algorithms, perhaps consulting with defensive driving professionals. I think defensive driving algorithms would be pretty interesting too, involving game theory and optimization. They seem to get it right with their four-way stop video, where they say they had to drive forward a bit to show their intention to proceed.
Wired had a nice article about the motivating power of statistics, and the positive sociological pressure that motives members from feeling they are part of a group. There's five excellent reasons to keep track of your workouts in this article.
Kde's Step is a good basic physics simulator. It is part of kde's education project.
From their description:
Step is an interactive physics simulator. It works like this: you place some bodies on the scene, add some forces such as gravity or springs, then click "Simulate" and Step shows you how your scene will evolve according to the laws of physics. You can change every property of bodies/forces in your experiment (even during simulation) and see how this will change the outcome of the experiment. With Step you can not only learn but feel how physics works !
There's a similar project out there called "Seventeen or Bust" whose goal is to find primes that will eventually prove a conjecture. To date they have eliminated 11 of the 17, leaving only 6 candidates left. I prefer to donate my cycles to them since there's bound to be a big party when the last candidate is eliminated and the goal is completed.
I'm surprised this is modded as 5 for funny.
I'm going to a wedding tonight and looking forward to the celebration. Having a bunch of drinks is part of the celebration.
Taxis will be $30 each way, and the bus and trains will be 50 minutes and stop running way before we plan on leaving. Biking would be about equal time as the city transit, but it's a wedding we're going to.
While my non-driving friends are going to be celebrating to the max tonight, part of the back of my brain will be designing car-driving algorithms.
A good general explanation is given by the RCMP (what the hell mounties have to do with computers, like most of Canadian society, is entirely beyond me) Mounties are our computer people who specialize in hard drives, hence their name. Makes sense, doesn't it?
a multiple of 7 (49, 24, etc..), then you must say "Buzz",
Protip: If you make it above a number that meets all 3 rules, start over because you have missed the point of a drinking game. Something tells me that you wouldn't make it above 24.
Challenge your friends to build this self supporting structure. Hofstadter would call it a strange loop. Think of how this loop in concept is similar to other concepts involving loops, such as logic or consciousness.
Work out the Birthday problem for your group. Calculate the probability that some pair of the guests will have the same birthday, then determine if it's true.
I'm surprised there is no discussion about the other problems linked in the article.
I don't want to ruin the solutions for anyone but I'll make a comment that while scanning through the "solutions" from other commenters on that page, the ones who used the word "obviously" were far more likely to be wrong (the more times they used that word, the more wrong they became). Ones who worked through the combinations were more likely to get it right. An exhaustive search rarely deceives you, these problems were designed to deceive your intuition.
"Hotter than the surface of the sun" describes an inequality of temperatures. The surface does not require a precise description for the inequality to hold. Temperature as a function of distance from the sun's centre is what's important, and even that does not need to be all that precise.
"Morocco is south of the southern coast of Spain" does not break down under the difficulty of defining a coastline.
SSH? I often use SSH clients from my computers to log into and manage my servers. A computer should do this. Does the iPhone? That's because the iPhone is a piece of shit according to this unbiased review.
In 1876, James A. Garfield discovered a novel proof of the Pythagorean Theorem using a trapezoid while serving as a member of the House of Representatives.
And lastly, the Internet is lousy for browsing. Browsing is about finding out what's available within a very broad class of stuff. Search engines can tell you that documents share keywords; they can't tell you for certain that the documents are actually about similar things. And within the search results, they're organized according to (roughly) how popular they are, as measured by how many sites link to them. They're not organized based on their similarities to or differences from one another.... There've been efforts to classify the web, but so far nothing really good has popped up....
StumbleUpon does a great job, in my opinion, of allowing you to browse a topic on the internet. Webpages are tagged by the collective, so it allows for fairly accurate browsing of topics like "history".
RMS is also a believer in giving credit where it is due.
Just a few comments down the thread RMS says
This is the fourth time that the Maintainer of GNU Emacs has been
someone other than me. Previous maintainers include Joe Arceneaux,
Jim Blandy, and Gerd Moellmann.
Video Editing. Don't TELL me about Cinelerra. I've MADE a presentation quality video on Cinelerra. In the time it took me to do that, I could have gone to the dentist and had teeth pulled and made 6 videos in Vegas, and had a more enjoyable experience.
I'm in the process of getting acquainted with Cinelerra and am reminded about how frustrating the gimp was to learn. I found that "scrubbing" a video would cause it to lock up, so I spent my first day trying to edit video clips together without using the viewer. My frustration was somewhat mitigated that I never lost a single change due to its near perfect and extremely fast "load backup" function.
Loading backups every 10 seconds is no way to live, so I sought out other alternatives, including Kdenlive (which instantly crashes on every click), and Avidemux and Kino which don't seem suitable for working with multiple clips. I even used Blender of video editing and it worked awesomely, but I couldn't help shake the feeling that I was using the wrong tool for the job. I also had my worries that the video editor in Blender would have the same steep learning curve as the rest of the interface.
Google helped me determine the cause and solution for Cinelerra's freezing. A "preference" check box called "stop playback locks up" was unchecked. What the hell does that even mean? Do they mean "prevent the playing-back of video from locking-up the program"? If so, why is that option in "Preferences"? Even the Gimp wouldn't classify such an cruel option as a preference... oh wait, judging by its name, it probably would.
Actually, I was wondering if we could hook it up to another robot and finally answer the question, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" You can watch your computer dream of electric sheep as a screensaver.
Some light bulbs have design flaws that cause them to be a fire hazard. As a matter of economics, if a light bulb will save me $100 in electricity over its lifetime, but has a 0.1% chance of burning down my $400,000 house, it's not going to save me any money.
Slashdot Mirror
The quote 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai.' is a bad metaphor. I'll let the cracked authors explain why.
http://www.cracked.com/article...
Samurai Were Actually Embarrassed of Their Swords
Oh, come on. This, at least, just has to be bullshit. A quick Google image search of "samurai" returns a gazillion results, 99 percent of which depict the famed warriors with sword in hand. There are drawings about them using swords. There are photos. Hell, pajamas, katanas, and weird hairstyles were their whole thing: Samurai damn well lived by the sword. What else did they have?
Actually ...
Yes, the samurai did have an ancient tradition centered around a weapon. However, it sure as shit wasn't the sword. In fact, ignore every movie and video game about samurai, because they only carried swords as awkward last resort weapons.
Kyuba no michi, "the way of the horse and bow," was there centuries before any semblance of Bushido. It's exactly what it says on the tin: Samurai were all about flinging arrows at peasants from horseback. It makes sense, really -- they were professional soldiers, and in that line of business you quickly learn that only idiots fight the enemy at stabbing distance. Bows were revered over swords to the extent that many Japanese nobles actually downplayed their swordsmanship. After all, pointing out how great your sword skills were was basically announcing that you're a terrible archer. And saying "I'm a terrible archer" was more or less like saying "I'm neither a man nor a warrior."
The introduction of firearms in the 16th century finally killed the samurai supremacy as mounted archers. As they left the battlefield and settled for a new life as bureaucrats and officials, their formerly reviled swords started taking on actual importance as elaborate status symbols. And because bows weren't really an option anymore, the sword became the go-to weapon of the honorable, sword-wielding, bushido following and completely fictional samurai they retroactively invented to feel better about their crummy desk jobs.
Maybe it's an unintentionally good metaphor. Big data is the new useless but symbolic catchphrase that you use to make your company look modern.
Say your car gets 10 L /100 km. Your fuel tube will have cross sectional area of 0.1 mm^2.
The inverse square meter interpretation would say that since 1 car requires a fuel cross section of 0.1 mm^2, then we could power 10 cars with 1 mm^2.
So fuel efficiency of this car can be expressed as 10 / mm^2. It's the number of cars you could power with a 1 mm^2 tube of fuel.
Just like Hz is cycles per second, not just 1/s, this is cars per square millimeter, not just 1/mm^2.
I don't want to be able to time lights. I want traffic lights to go away. I want cars that can either drive themselves and time their interactions with other cars or assist the driver with maneuvering between cars at an intersection.
Google is working on this.
And rather than stopping at a stop sign or a traffic signal, you can just zip through the intersection, barely having to slow down.
[CHEERING]
Right, so I already heard the comment, I couldn't imagine sitting in one of these cars. You're not in the driver's seat with your hands on the steering wheel. You're in the backseat reading the newspaper
It's a win-win-win-win situation. The public wins - not wasting time driving, safer, faster. The city wins - less accidents, less time off work due to accidents, hospital visits, less money spent on infrastructure like overpasses. Those savings will make up for the lost revenue from red light cameras. Oil companies win - due to Jevons paradox there will be more gas consumed. Car manufacturers wins - they sell more cars with this feature. The selling feature is they reduce travel time, which is kind of what they've always tried to sell with bigger engines and higher top speeds. This will actually deliver reduced driving time.
So you're that guy who races up to red lights and then has to slam on the brakes.
Here's what happens. You and I are stopped at a light with you in front of me. There's another light 20 seconds away at 35 mph or 10 seconds way at 70mph. The first light turns green and the second is due to turn green in 20 seconds. You arrive at the second light in 10 seconds and have to come to a complete stop. I arrive in 20 seconds the moment the second light turns green but I have to stop because of you. Everyone behind me also has to stop because of you. Your actions caused us all to decelerate and accelerate unnecessarily.
Actually, I wouldn't stop. I'd slow down giving you enough room to accelerate so to minimize my change in speed, but most people wouldn't apply that forethought.
The concept of aliasing is not applicable to the timing of traffic lights for a number of reasons. First, you're going the wrong way, a more reasonable answer would be 17.5 mph also works for lights timed for 35mph, but that's not true either. The timing is a phase variance, not a change in frequency. There's pretty much nothing you can do to beat the system of lights timed for a given speed other than drive that speed. That's a pretty optimal solution anyway.
BBC had a documentary called Out Of Control where they show this technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM_iiPFkNas&t=52m1s
It's a very interesting hour-long program. It makes me wonder if it is me that's posting this to slashdot or my subconscious overlord inside my brain.
These are all very important points. I think there are some examples of them in the video.
For example at 9:00 the speaker talks about how proud they are that their car didn't run down some pedestrians crossing the street. The car stopped just meters from them while making a left hand turn, blocking an oncoming car. The higher level decision that I'm sure the parent would make in practice is to judge the intentions of the pedestrians on the street and not commit to the turn. Although it's not clear in the video, it looks like the pedestrians didn't even run the light. The speaker doesn't acknowledge that their car blocked the oncoming lane resulting in a fairly dangerous situation. As you can see in the video, the oncoming car eventually swerves around the Google car.
Later on, at 12:00 he jokes about how a car nearly sideswipes him while merging onto the freeway. The speaker doesn't acknowledge the Google car's role in that dangerous situation. It's a simple lack of defensive driving on google's part. Yeah, they are not at fault for driving down the freeway, but it's not hard for a human to anticipate the fact that a car in a merge lane tail-gating behind a big semi-truck is going to change lanes at any moment. The Google car had an empty lane to the other side that it could have changed into at no cost.
I think these driverless cars are an insanely great innovation for our society, and I was really impressed with their TED talk too. But I just wish that now that they have the nerdy computer technical issues resolved, they can work on higher level algorithms, perhaps consulting with defensive driving professionals. I think defensive driving algorithms would be pretty interesting too, involving game theory and optimization. They seem to get it right with their four-way stop video, where they say they had to drive forward a bit to show their intention to proceed.
Wired had a nice article about the motivating power of statistics, and the positive sociological pressure that motives members from feeling they are part of a group. There's five excellent reasons to keep track of your workouts in this article.
Kde's Step is a good basic physics simulator. It is part of kde's education project.
From their description:
Step is an interactive physics simulator. It works like this: you place some bodies on the scene, add some forces such as gravity or springs, then click "Simulate" and Step shows you how your scene will evolve according to the laws of physics. You can change every property of bodies/forces in your experiment (even during simulation) and see how this will change the outcome of the experiment. With Step you can not only learn but feel how physics works !
There's a similar project out there called "Seventeen or Bust" whose goal is to find primes that will eventually prove a conjecture. To date they have eliminated 11 of the 17, leaving only 6 candidates left. I prefer to donate my cycles to them since there's bound to be a big party when the last candidate is eliminated and the goal is completed.
I'm surprised this is modded as 5 for funny.
I'm going to a wedding tonight and looking forward to the celebration. Having a bunch of drinks is part of the celebration.
Taxis will be $30 each way, and the bus and trains will be 50 minutes and stop running way before we plan on leaving. Biking would be about equal time as the city transit, but it's a wedding we're going to.
While my non-driving friends are going to be celebrating to the max tonight, part of the back of my brain will be designing car-driving algorithms.
Makes sense, doesn't it?
Challenge your friends to build this self supporting structure. Hofstadter would call it a strange loop. Think of how this loop in concept is similar to other concepts involving loops, such as logic or consciousness.
Work out the Birthday problem for your group. Calculate the probability that some pair of the guests will have the same birthday, then determine if it's true.
I'm surprised there is no discussion about the other problems linked in the article.
I don't want to ruin the solutions for anyone but I'll make a comment that while scanning through the "solutions" from other commenters on that page, the ones who used the word "obviously" were far more likely to be wrong (the more times they used that word, the more wrong they became). Ones who worked through the combinations were more likely to get it right. An exhaustive search rarely deceives you, these problems were designed to deceive your intuition.
"Hotter than the surface of the sun" describes an inequality of temperatures. The surface does not require a precise description for the inequality to hold. Temperature as a function of distance from the sun's centre is what's important, and even that does not need to be all that precise.
"Morocco is south of the southern coast of Spain" does not break down under the difficulty of defining a coastline.
Frankenstein's creature, is that you?
That's because the iPhone is a piece of shit according to this unbiased review.
In 1876, James A. Garfield discovered a novel proof of the Pythagorean Theorem using a trapezoid while serving as a member of the House of Representatives.
Except the double-slit experiment.
Everything that light does is described by Maxwell's equations. The future of FPS graphics is FDTD.And lastly, the Internet is lousy for browsing. Browsing is about finding out what's available within a very broad class of stuff. Search engines can tell you that documents share keywords; they can't tell you for certain that the documents are actually about similar things. And within the search results, they're organized according to (roughly) how popular they are, as measured by how many sites link to them. They're not organized based on their similarities to or differences from one another.... There've been efforts to classify the web, but so far nothing really good has popped up....
StumbleUpon does a great job, in my opinion, of allowing you to browse a topic on the internet. Webpages are tagged by the collective, so it allows for fairly accurate browsing of topics like "history".
I'm in the process of getting acquainted with Cinelerra and am reminded about how frustrating the gimp was to learn. I found that "scrubbing" a video would cause it to lock up, so I spent my first day trying to edit video clips together without using the viewer. My frustration was somewhat mitigated that I never lost a single change due to its near perfect and extremely fast "load backup" function.
Loading backups every 10 seconds is no way to live, so I sought out other alternatives, including Kdenlive (which instantly crashes on every click), and Avidemux and Kino which don't seem suitable for working with multiple clips. I even used Blender of video editing and it worked awesomely, but I couldn't help shake the feeling that I was using the wrong tool for the job. I also had my worries that the video editor in Blender would have the same steep learning curve as the rest of the interface.
Google helped me determine the cause and solution for Cinelerra's freezing. A "preference" check box called "stop playback locks up" was unchecked. What the hell does that even mean? Do they mean "prevent the playing-back of video from locking-up the program"? If so, why is that option in "Preferences"? Even the Gimp wouldn't classify such an cruel option as a preference... oh wait, judging by its name, it probably would.
... just look at their name.
Are they a fire hazard?
Some light bulbs have design flaws that cause them to be a fire hazard. As a matter of economics, if a light bulb will save me $100 in electricity over its lifetime, but has a 0.1% chance of burning down my $400,000 house, it's not going to save me any money.