just in the process of returning from korea (sitting at a free public terminal at the incheon airport. god bless korean ubiquious broadband). it seems to be all the rage with the korean kids too. if you happen to watch a semiprofessional player, watching the music score scroll by and listening to the drummer is actually quite entertaining. how long until they port these even more popular dancing games from the arcades to playstation?
money IS something even in the academic world. e.g. money pays grad students and post-docs; buys computing hardware (and pays a good system administrator, which many uni departments notoriously lack). the ivory tower is very expensive to maintain. which is exactly why universities should run linux, of course. give them a few years and even the m$-addicted stop bitching.
IANATE (i am not a telphony expert) and hardly use voice telecommunication myself, but i have heard of the usage of calling cards, which can be really cheap. or their net-brokered equivalents, like bigzoo.com and probably many more.
> You assume that a rise in global temperatures is bad. We have no proof of that. It may cause more rainfall in Africa and allow that continent to actually feed itself. That'd be a good thing. Those that automatically believe that global warming would be bad are certainly over-estimating their own ability to know what is good and bad for this planet
no, we have no proof that global warming is bad. furthermore, we have not proof that global warming is good. so, let's try and see. brilliant idea!
> To suggest that "we're all dead if you're wrong" is extremist propaganda. If there was ever proof of what you're saying, believe me, countries and individuals would both be willing to make sacrifices. But neither countries nor persons, in general, are going to make that sacrifice to solve an unproven problem.
its naive to believe that a president how is paid by the oil industry (apart from others) would want to make people make these sacrifices. instead, lets drill more oil in alaska.
just a small comment: Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) are not new. ever since helium has been cooled below 2.2 kelvin (early in the 20th century), we have BECs, since around 8% of helium
are in the condensate if it's really cold liquid helium. problem is, it has been hard to detect in helium. furthermore those Nobel laureates and others not only detected it very convincingly, but managed to play really interesting, beautiful experiments with their condensates. (i say 'play', cause real science is about playing i think [ok, and beauty]). congratulations to the 3 fellows!!
retaliation against the rest of the world? what a typical US-american BS! thats exactly what seeds the next terrorist assaults against the US.
remember the US embassy bombing in Sudan and the subsequent revenge attack of US forces against
a pharmaceutical factory? wow very clever reaction, perfect to help terrorist organisations help recruit further suicidal cannonfodder personnel. i dont know myself what is best to do know, but certainly not random act of counterviolence in/against small countries inhabited by non-white people.
maybe offtopic: what about wavelet transformation for audio compression? anybody who knows about signal processing?
an audio codec does not only consist of a psychoacoustic model, but also a mathematical description of the data, in case of MP3 its basically the fouriertransformation.
for image compression, they now start to use the more modern wavelet transformation (really, fouriertransformation is nice, but its literally last century mathematics). would wavelets improve MP3 on the mathematical side? anybody?
> But the big problem today is that you need more than just a piece of chalk, a
> Blackboard and a teacher for a good education,
> you need to have computers and all sorts of High Tech devices
what else than a good teacher and maybe a few books does it take to provide good education?
It never hurts to have a computer for a little bit of programming lessons, but by far the most important things we learn in school is writing,
reading, and math. without these you can't even start to learn something new (apart from self-thaught geniuses).
I don't get it: why all this postings that recommend to get a life? that's 10^6 times cooler than to watch TV, do braindead small talk in a bar, drive around with your car, program yet another window manager/desktop env,...hell, this
is the best i have seen for weeks on the net!
I remember my own LEGO adventures like this 8mm films we shot in our LEGO town....
To understand the german position better: CoS has
sent private dicks after german politicians. the
CoS (at least in Germany) seems to be more like
a mafia organisation trying to influence politics
on their behalf. in the US the CoS has already succeeded: Germany was pressed by US politicians to revise their CoS policy.
advise to you, AC: get outta there!
why is an all-mighty broadcasting company, which is solely responsible to the shareholders, just editing a little bit? effectively, thats much worse censorship than when the elected representatives of the people would pass a constitutional law which bans overdone display of violence in kids computer games. maybe you are right technically: i may still get the full version of a film in the stores. but in reality, AOL/Time-kind of companies have more power to decide what we see, and less restraints to do that, than elected governments. editing is effective censorship.
Dr. Lederman: Can you estimate how much of recent research in High Energy Physics you can oversee? (not to speak about research in the other fields of physics). My impression is that at the current rate of producing scientific knowledge the human mind will soon hit a brickwall, lots of similar research will be done over and over again due to impossibility of communication. Sometimes I feel the apparent fragmentation of the scientific community might be caused by bad presentation: at closer inspection concepts in many fields are similar, but it costs time to find out and is often not taught in courses. Or will we need new representations on a grand scale (sorry for being so fuzzy), just as Feynman's diagrams represent lengthy integrals in a supposedly more human-readable manner? Or are computer agents the solution to browse and edit the vast knowledge databases, and to find out what has already been found out? Of course this would not solve the problem of the restriction of the human mind to actually hold and understand and use the information thus obtained. As a physicist, one feels obliged to try to understand a wide range of phenomena (additionally to a hopefully deeper understanding of one's own field of work), but this may become difficult. Thank you, Robert
yep, i read it and i know what you mean. the analogy between the modularity of LEGO and programming is very true IMO, it really struck me when i came across that paragraph. what i would like to know: where did Coupland get this idea from? how old is this idea anyway? Considering that MIT people and LEGO people have been cooperating for some time now according to the NYT article, the LEGO-programming analogy might be old indeed. __hnc
i just looked up the article in App. Opt.: amazing! they assembled some custom parts such as screws for precise adjustment. and lots and lots of picture for your viewing pleasure, unfortunately in bw: i wonder how they address the age-old LCP (LEGO Color Problem) issue. does matching color matter in LEGO contruction? hm, i somehow regret now that i went for theoretical physics instead of applied. __hnc
i was just about to mention "23" when i finally found it posted. 23 is the only movie that comes to my mind when i think hacker movie. would be too bad if it is not released in the US. for the majority that does not know 23: it's about those chaos computer club guys. 64, atari, modems,...
"bullshit" is a bit harsh, but the article is very blurry (the book might be perfectly scientific and deep). whenever i read something about "socially inept","shyness" etc., i oscillate between "yes! that's me!" and "hm. does not quite fit." So although the article seems to make sense superficially, and might even get the phenomenology right (plus i did enjoy the reading), it reminds me of astrology (read: useful as a dead rotting crab). you collect a bunch of features and put a name tag on it (shadow autism or sagittarius). then write a book in a popular, easily comprehensible style. the many psychology-obsessed people will buy the book and therein find trivialities they can match to their own (often unfulfilled) lives and they will feel happy that they are not alone.
Slashdot Mirror
just in the process of returning from korea (sitting at a free public terminal at the incheon airport. god bless korean ubiquious broadband). it seems to be all the rage with the korean kids too. if you happen to watch a semiprofessional player, watching the music score scroll by and listening to the drummer is actually quite entertaining. how long until they port these even more popular dancing games from the arcades to playstation?
money IS something even in the academic world. e.g. money pays grad students and post-docs; buys computing hardware (and pays a good system administrator, which many uni departments notoriously lack). the ivory tower is very expensive to maintain. which is exactly why universities should run linux, of course. give them a few years and even the m$-addicted stop bitching.
IANATE (i am not a telphony expert) and hardly use voice telecommunication myself, but i have heard of the usage of calling cards, which can be really cheap.
or their net-brokered equivalents, like bigzoo.com and probably many more.
> You assume that a rise in global temperatures is bad. We have no proof of that. It may cause more rainfall in Africa and allow that continent to actually feed itself. That'd be a good thing. Those that automatically believe that global warming would be bad are certainly over-estimating their own ability to know what is good and bad for this planet
no, we have no proof that global warming is bad. furthermore, we have not proof that global warming is good. so, let's try and see. brilliant idea!
> To suggest that "we're all dead if you're wrong" is extremist propaganda. If there was ever proof of what you're saying, believe me, countries and individuals would both be willing to make sacrifices. But neither countries nor persons, in general, are going to make that sacrifice to solve an unproven problem.
its naive to believe that a president how is paid by the oil industry (apart from others) would want to make people make these sacrifices. instead, lets drill more oil in alaska.
> I'm 100% opposed to making anything but minor adjustments to our policies, societies, and ecomomies until such study is finished conclusively.
yeah, it would be the end of the world if we americans would have to stop going shopping with a SUV and running our air conditions full throttle!
hnc
just a small comment: Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) are not new. ever since helium has been cooled below 2.2 kelvin (early in the 20th century), we have BECs, since around 8% of helium
are in the condensate if it's really cold liquid helium. problem is, it has been hard to detect in helium. furthermore those Nobel laureates and others not only detected it very convincingly, but managed to play really interesting, beautiful experiments with their condensates. (i say 'play', cause real science is about playing i think [ok, and beauty]). congratulations to the 3 fellows!!
retaliation against the rest of the world? what a typical US-american BS! thats exactly what seeds the next terrorist assaults against the US.
remember the US embassy bombing in Sudan and the subsequent revenge attack of US forces against
a pharmaceutical factory? wow very clever reaction, perfect to help terrorist organisations help recruit further suicidal cannonfodder personnel. i dont know myself what is best to do know, but certainly not random act of counterviolence in/against small countries inhabited by non-white people.
maybe offtopic: what about wavelet transformation for audio compression? anybody who knows about signal processing?
an audio codec does not only consist of a psychoacoustic model, but also a mathematical description of the data, in case of MP3 its basically the fouriertransformation.
for image compression, they now start to use the more modern wavelet transformation (really, fouriertransformation is nice, but its literally last century mathematics). would wavelets improve MP3 on the mathematical side? anybody?
> But the big problem today is that you need more than just a piece of chalk, a
> Blackboard and a teacher for a good education,
> you need to have computers and all sorts of High Tech devices
what else than a good teacher and maybe a few books does it take to provide good education? It never hurts to have a computer for a little bit of programming lessons, but by far the most important things we learn in school is writing, reading, and math. without these you can't even start to learn something new (apart from self-thaught geniuses).
I don't get it: why all this postings that recommend to get a life? that's 10^6 times cooler than to watch TV, do braindead small talk in a bar, drive around with your car, program yet another window manager/desktop env,...hell, this is the best i have seen for weeks on the net! I remember my own LEGO adventures like this 8mm films we shot in our LEGO town....
To understand the german position better: CoS has sent private dicks after german politicians. the CoS (at least in Germany) seems to be more like a mafia organisation trying to influence politics on their behalf. in the US the CoS has already succeeded: Germany was pressed by US politicians to revise their CoS policy.
advise to you, AC: get outta there!
why is an all-mighty broadcasting company, which is solely responsible to the shareholders, just editing a little bit? effectively, thats much worse censorship than when the elected representatives of the people would pass a constitutional law which bans overdone display of violence in kids computer games. maybe you are right technically: i may still get the full version of a film in the stores. but in reality, AOL/Time-kind of companies have more power to decide what we see, and less restraints to do that, than elected governments. editing is effective censorship.
Dr. Lederman:
Can you estimate how much of recent research in High Energy Physics you can oversee? (not to speak about research in the other fields of physics). My impression is that at the current rate of producing scientific knowledge the human mind will soon hit a brickwall, lots of similar research will be done over and over again due to impossibility of communication. Sometimes I feel the apparent fragmentation of the scientific community might be caused by bad presentation: at closer inspection concepts in many fields are similar, but it costs time to find out and is often not taught in courses. Or will we need new representations on a grand scale (sorry for being so fuzzy), just as Feynman's diagrams represent lengthy integrals in a supposedly more human-readable manner? Or are computer agents the solution to browse and edit the vast knowledge databases, and to find out what has already been found out? Of course this would not solve the problem of the restriction of the human mind to actually hold and understand and use the information thus obtained.
As a physicist, one feels obliged to try to understand a wide range of phenomena (additionally to a hopefully deeper understanding of one's own field of work), but this may become difficult.
Thank you,
Robert
yep, i read it and i know what you mean. the analogy between the modularity of LEGO and programming is very true IMO, it really struck me when i came across that paragraph. what i would like to know: where did Coupland get this idea from? how old is this idea anyway? Considering that MIT people and LEGO people have been cooperating for some time now according to the NYT article, the LEGO-programming analogy might be old indeed. __hnc
i just looked up the article in App. Opt.: amazing! they assembled some custom parts such as screws for precise adjustment. and lots and lots of picture for your viewing pleasure, unfortunately in bw: i wonder how they address the age-old LCP (LEGO Color Problem) issue. does matching color matter in LEGO contruction? hm, i somehow regret now that i went for theoretical physics instead of applied. __hnc
i was just about to mention "23" when i finally found it posted. 23 is the only movie that comes to my mind when i think hacker movie. would be too bad if it is not released in the US. for the majority that does not know 23: it's about those chaos computer club guys. 64, atari, modems,...
"bullshit" is a bit harsh, but the article is very blurry (the book might be perfectly scientific and deep). whenever i read something about "socially inept","shyness" etc., i oscillate between "yes! that's me!" and "hm. does not quite fit." So although the article seems to make sense superficially, and might even get the phenomenology right (plus i did enjoy the reading), it reminds me of astrology (read: useful as a dead rotting crab).
you collect a bunch of features and put a name tag on it (shadow autism or sagittarius). then write a book in a popular, easily comprehensible style. the many psychology-obsessed people will buy the book and therein find trivialities they can match to their own (often unfulfilled) lives and they will feel happy that they are not alone.
or maybe i am wrong. hnc.