Ok elsewhere it seems he may have meant the body temperature to be 96, but got it wrong and it was recalibrated later after his death. I guess its just messed up then, with lots of conflicting histories that disagree. Perhaps its time to switch to Celcius:)
Later advances showed that the actual average internal temperature to be 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's somewhat of an urban legend. 100F is the temperature of blood in the cenral body, while 98.6 is the temperature in your mouth under your tongue. Your mouth is not as hot as the core of your body, though obviously the difference is not that large.
As a scientist in the US, I can too. I'll take two measurement systems any day over the 11 official spoken languages of the EU. For a scientist, multiplying by 2.54 is a lot easier than translating something to a different language. Now if only we could convert all the US engineers...
I went to school in the 80s and 90s, and we spent a fair amount of time on it in high school. It probably was much less the furter back you were in school. That was in New York State too; I guess it may be different depending on the state.
The US officially switched (again) in the 1970s. There was a public backlash to a quick switch, so they backpeddled. As a result we're mixed now, but another result is that school students were taught both. High school Physics, Chemistry, and Biology classes are entirely in metric for example. Thus I can use either, and I think metric will eventually gain enough in popularity to take over. There's just a lot of inertia with factories, parts, designs, signage, what people are used to, and so on. Therefore I don't expect it to be overnight.
Sadly, that road sign is probably just an old one from the 1970s push.
Why is it stupid? It doesn't matter what the units mean, only that everyone agrees on what they mean. A fixed multiplier guarantees that. To know what a cm is, you need to know what a meter is. 100 is certainly a nicer multiplier, but 2.54 struck a balance between agreement and backward compatibility.
How many metric people out there run x86 machines, an obviously inferior machine language compared to the much more consistent (like metric) RISC. x86 just had a lot of compatibility, and nobody wanted to throw that out. Internally, modern x86 chips have RISC-like cores. American imperial units are much the same, they make less sense, but were kept around for compatibility, and are defined off of the more consistent metric "core".
I use both units regularly, and I'm glad as hell I can convert between them easily. The vast majority of American scientists use metric in their calculations and publications. Engineers are coming around, albeit more slowly in the older disciplines with more inertia.
What's even more impressive is that the Democrats have done the same thing, and also gotten away with it. Contributors such as Unocal Oil nowadays just cover their bases by contributing to both parties. They don't exactly look like "average Joes" to me.
Of course, that's why I vote my conscience, and willingly vote for third parties. In the last election, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party actually agreed on something, which is that Bush and Gore were rich corporate elitists. I agree with them. Those two minor parties disagree on pretty much everything else.
A huge part of those $90B... directly into the coffers of Halliburton
How much, or are you just talking out of your ass? Most of that money goes to mundane things like moving all that equipment halfway around the world. If most of it is kickbacks etc, it will come to light, and if you read my whole post you'd see I mention kickbacks and cronyism as a far more serious problem. But you probably didn't get to that part, as it required reading a whole paragraph.
And hopefully the oil friends of Bush will have easy access
Like any other Middle-Eastern country, they can contract with whoever they want. If they aren't allowed to, I'm sure holy hell will be (rightfully) raised about it. In other words, that won't happen; As you say all the oil companies have is hope. With oil-for-food they had a nice guaranteed contract however.
Um, the grandparent post I responded to claimed the war was "obviously about natural resources". Money and taxes, the only things you mention, are not natural resources.
$90B is not much skin off the backs of Bush/Cheney/Halliburton/etc., especially not after the tax cuts; that's covered by the tax-payers. The profit goes to Bush's buddies.
Which I alluded in my post, which you didn't bother to read, did you? I'll repeat it here: "If you want to talk about economic impropriety in the war, kickbacks and cronyism is a far stronger argument." So what are you arguing with? You agree with me on that point. But to get that far you'd have to have read one paragraph, but apparently didn't have the attention span to do it.
Oil has little or nothing to do with it; At most its a medium for kickback contracts, and any commodity would do for that. You don't even debate that point. Contracts and kickbacks do have something to do with it; That is the root issue. "No War for Kickbacks" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but its much more accurate.
A current estimate of the circumference of the earth is 40,075.16km. While it wouldn't have been arbitrary if they had gotten it right, but they didn't. This is perhaps a good lesson on why you shouldn't base measurement systems on something you can't measure too directly. The end result is that they decided to stop changing it and just fix it at one of the values they had come up with. The grades thing certainly didn't take off much, which makes 40000 kind of arbitrary now. Guess we're all still backwards for using degrees. FWIW 100F is the average temperature of human blood.
...clearly and obviously for the natural resources...
There are many good arguments against the war, but this is not one of them. There has never been one ounce of proof to it, people just repeat it hoping that if they say it enough it will somehow become true. $90B would have bought a whole lot more oil than the US would ever save on oil from post-war Iraq. "No war for oil" is kind of like the pro-war's WMD; Both are a joke. If you want to talk about economic impropriety in the war, kickbacks and cronyism is a far stronger argument.
On Earth at least, picking bits off of radio links usually involves an adaptive threshold and a clock that syncs to the clock of the sender. Sending too many 1's or 0's in a row can interfere with that because there aren't any "bit edges" on the signal. Sending random data ensures all patterns are equally likely and your adaptive filter stays happy for when you have real data to send. Otherwise you'll miss the first part while you re-establish the threshold and sync to the signal.
My guess is the NASA rover's link follows a similar principle, though its probably using some pretty damn fancy techniques to get the data from that far. Oh and missing the first part of the data would really suck for them since a retransmit would take 20 minutes.
This isn't the same thing as decidability. It's not possible to make an automatic verification program, but that does not mean we cannot verify certain classes of programs. In a sense, all mathematical formulas are a kind of program, and people prove properties about them all the time (we cannot however, prove properties about *every* formula). At top CS universities you prove algoritm correctness in undergraduate functional programming classes, so its not *that* hard for simple algoritms. Scaling it up to large, useful programs is difficult however, as the grandparent pointed out. Especially those that depend on input from sensors.
First, you'd have to save it to your hard drive, clicking on it wouldn't work (email attachments are data files, not executables). Then you'd need to "chmod +x" it, and then you could run it as your user, in which case it can infect only things associated with that user. Assuming these unlikely things happened, the superuser can simply disable your account and clean things up, while everyone else on the system can chug along happily.
In other words, its not the same. Unix made the right decision from the beginning to separate data and executables, and to keep most users at a non-Administrator/non-root capability level.
I guess this means Beaglehas made contact with Earth after all. Perhaps it has to do with Martian hackers who don't like Linux? They can't spell too well though.
My guess is that the point of the "insane" specs is so they don't have to make a new version of the spec any time soon. This should cover anything we need for the forseeable future, even though implementations will not be up the full resolution of the spec for a long time (if ever). For a comparison, we don't need 64bits worth of addressable memory now, as 40bits would be fine for several years. If you're going to change however, might as well make a big change (from 32 to 64) so we won't need to change again any time soon.
I think the problem is people mix up information coding theory with human perceptual theory. A 40KHz signal *can* encode a 20KHz wave. It will have some pretty wicked aliasing however (as the parent points out), since the volume will be random depending on where you start your sampling (you'll get something randing from 0 to a full amplitude saw wave). The thing about information theory is that it is talking about BITS, i.e. you can construct a sender and receiver that detect the binary presence of a 20KHz signal. The volume will not be detectable with any kind of reasonable accuracy however; you get *only* 1 bit of resolution.
Human perception however, is not even based on evenly spaced intermittent sampling. Instead we have a coiled tube in our ear where different frequencies resonate at different locations (warning, massive oversimplification). Because it is so different, a fixed bandwidth range from 20Hz-20KHz is just a coarse approximation. The best way to test things like that is to do double-blind comparison testing with listeners to see if they can tell the difference between quality levels (blind in that you don't tell the subjects and experimenters which signal is which during testing). Coding theory can guide how we generate the signal, but you still have to test it to see if people can notice the difference.
At least this doesn't bug me as much as people claiming that humans have a 10fps-30fps vision system...
The first one is the most common, and most likely because it fits. She does pilot Unit 00 after all, talks nearly 0% of the time, and is generally weak and dark (zero seems like a pretty demeaning name however). The second one is intriguing given the theme of the anime. But all in all, rei is almost certainly meant to be a Japanese word.
Also, after asking a native Japanese speaker they are guessing its supposed to mean zero.
You must not be a developer. They do two very different things. One is a memory analyzer/checker, the other is a tool for *locating* a known bug. They are quite complementary really. Valgrind errors and segfaults tell you what to look for in GDB. Kind of like how a error spit out by gcc makes you look things up in your text editor to fix the problem.
True, but listen more carefully to a native and notice that they really do manage to mix in an L-sound into it too. We just tend to map it to R because it sounds more like that to us. Psychologists have studied this in the past, and after you learn a language you tend to map ambiguous things one way or the other, even if they are ambiguous (there are some pretty amazing demos of this, pitty I don't know if they are on the web). They have a computer range between two sounds linearly (say L and R), and the listener will just hear a flip part way through, and you barely notice the mixing on the interpolated versions.
If you want to play with it, notice the L is a flattening of your tongue on the roof of your mouth, while the Spanish R is the tip of your tongue on the roof. If you flatten it just a bit, you can get an excellent reproduction of the japanese R/L sound. Of course, since they don't make a distinction, they'll never notice anyway...
Now if only kanji were as easy to learn as pronunciation...
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The Mayans used base 36.
Ok elsewhere it seems he may have meant the body temperature to be 96, but got it wrong and it was recalibrated later after his death. I guess its just messed up then, with lots of conflicting histories that disagree. Perhaps its time to switch to Celcius :)
Later advances showed that the actual average internal temperature to be 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's somewhat of an urban legend. 100F is the temperature of blood in the cenral body, while 98.6 is the temperature in your mouth under your tongue. Your mouth is not as hot as the core of your body, though obviously the difference is not that large.
As a scientist in the US, I can too. I'll take two measurement systems any day over the 11 official spoken languages of the EU. For a scientist, multiplying by 2.54 is a lot easier than translating something to a different language. Now if only we could convert all the US engineers...
I went to school in the 80s and 90s, and we spent a fair amount of time on it in high school. It probably was much less the furter back you were in school. That was in New York State too; I guess it may be different depending on the state.
The US officially switched (again) in the 1970s. There was a public backlash to a quick switch, so they backpeddled. As a result we're mixed now, but another result is that school students were taught both. High school Physics, Chemistry, and Biology classes are entirely in metric for example. Thus I can use either, and I think metric will eventually gain enough in popularity to take over. There's just a lot of inertia with factories, parts, designs, signage, what people are used to, and so on. Therefore I don't expect it to be overnight.
Sadly, that road sign is probably just an old one from the 1970s push.
Why is it stupid? It doesn't matter what the units mean, only that everyone agrees on what they mean. A fixed multiplier guarantees that. To know what a cm is, you need to know what a meter is. 100 is certainly a nicer multiplier, but 2.54 struck a balance between agreement and backward compatibility.
How many metric people out there run x86 machines, an obviously inferior machine language compared to the much more consistent (like metric) RISC. x86 just had a lot of compatibility, and nobody wanted to throw that out. Internally, modern x86 chips have RISC-like cores. American imperial units are much the same, they make less sense, but were kept around for compatibility, and are defined off of the more consistent metric "core".
I use both units regularly, and I'm glad as hell I can convert between them easily. The vast majority of American scientists use metric in their calculations and publications. Engineers are coming around, albeit more slowly in the older disciplines with more inertia.
What's even more impressive is that the Democrats have done the same thing, and also gotten away with it. Contributors such as Unocal Oil nowadays just cover their bases by contributing to both parties. They don't exactly look like "average Joes" to me.
Of course, that's why I vote my conscience, and willingly vote for third parties. In the last election, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party actually agreed on something, which is that Bush and Gore were rich corporate elitists. I agree with them. Those two minor parties disagree on pretty much everything else.
A huge part of those $90B... directly into the coffers of Halliburton
How much, or are you just talking out of your ass? Most of that money goes to mundane things like moving all that equipment halfway around the world. If most of it is kickbacks etc, it will come to light, and if you read my whole post you'd see I mention kickbacks and cronyism as a far more serious problem. But you probably didn't get to that part, as it required reading a whole paragraph.
And hopefully the oil friends of Bush will have easy access
Like any other Middle-Eastern country, they can contract with whoever they want. If they aren't allowed to, I'm sure holy hell will be (rightfully) raised about it. In other words, that won't happen; As you say all the oil companies have is hope. With oil-for-food they had a nice guaranteed contract however.
biggest oil reserves in the world
They have the second largest, not the largest.
Um, the grandparent post I responded to claimed the war was "obviously about natural resources". Money and taxes, the only things you mention, are not natural resources.
$90B is not much skin off the backs of Bush/Cheney/Halliburton/etc., especially not after the tax cuts; that's covered by the tax-payers. The profit goes to Bush's buddies.
Which I alluded in my post, which you didn't bother to read, did you? I'll repeat it here: "If you want to talk about economic impropriety in the war, kickbacks and cronyism is a far stronger argument." So what are you arguing with? You agree with me on that point. But to get that far you'd have to have read one paragraph, but apparently didn't have the attention span to do it.
Oil has little or nothing to do with it; At most its a medium for kickback contracts, and any commodity would do for that. You don't even debate that point. Contracts and kickbacks do have something to do with it; That is the root issue. "No War for Kickbacks" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but its much more accurate.
A current estimate of the circumference of the earth is 40,075.16km. While it wouldn't have been arbitrary if they had gotten it right, but they didn't. This is perhaps a good lesson on why you shouldn't base measurement systems on something you can't measure too directly. The end result is that they decided to stop changing it and just fix it at one of the values they had come up with. The grades thing certainly didn't take off much, which makes 40000 kind of arbitrary now. Guess we're all still backwards for using degrees. FWIW 100F is the average temperature of human blood.
...clearly and obviously for the natural resources...
There are many good arguments against the war, but this is not one of them. There has never been one ounce of proof to it, people just repeat it hoping that if they say it enough it will somehow become true. $90B would have bought a whole lot more oil than the US would ever save on oil from post-war Iraq. "No war for oil" is kind of like the pro-war's WMD; Both are a joke. If you want to talk about economic impropriety in the war, kickbacks and cronyism is a far stronger argument.
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On Earth at least, picking bits off of radio links usually involves an adaptive threshold and a clock that syncs to the clock of the sender. Sending too many 1's or 0's in a row can interfere with that because there aren't any "bit edges" on the signal. Sending random data ensures all patterns are equally likely and your adaptive filter stays happy for when you have real data to send. Otherwise you'll miss the first part while you re-establish the threshold and sync to the signal.
My guess is the NASA rover's link follows a similar principle, though its probably using some pretty damn fancy techniques to get the data from that far. Oh and missing the first part of the data would really suck for them since a retransmit would take 20 minutes.
This isn't the same thing as decidability. It's not possible to make an automatic verification program, but that does not mean we cannot verify certain classes of programs. In a sense, all mathematical formulas are a kind of program, and people prove properties about them all the time (we cannot however, prove properties about *every* formula). At top CS universities you prove algoritm correctness in undergraduate functional programming classes, so its not *that* hard for simple algoritms. Scaling it up to large, useful programs is difficult however, as the grandparent pointed out. Especially those that depend on input from sensors.
Of course there is a chance, albeit small, that a rock from Earth will hit the rovers and contaminate them. Good thing we sent two.
Though I should add: Windows has made some good progress recently, but it has been a long time coming.
First, you'd have to save it to your hard drive, clicking on it wouldn't work (email attachments are data files, not executables). Then you'd need to "chmod +x" it, and then you could run it as your user, in which case it can infect only things associated with that user. Assuming these unlikely things happened, the superuser can simply disable your account and clean things up, while everyone else on the system can chug along happily.
In other words, its not the same. Unix made the right decision from the beginning to separate data and executables, and to keep most users at a non-Administrator/non-root capability level.
I guess this means Beagle has made contact with Earth after all. Perhaps it has to do with Martian hackers who don't like Linux? They can't spell too well though.
My guess is that the point of the "insane" specs is so they don't have to make a new version of the spec any time soon. This should cover anything we need for the forseeable future, even though implementations will not be up the full resolution of the spec for a long time (if ever). For a comparison, we don't need 64bits worth of addressable memory now, as 40bits would be fine for several years. If you're going to change however, might as well make a big change (from 32 to 64) so we won't need to change again any time soon.
I think the problem is people mix up information coding theory with human perceptual theory. A 40KHz signal *can* encode a 20KHz wave. It will have some pretty wicked aliasing however (as the parent points out), since the volume will be random depending on where you start your sampling (you'll get something randing from 0 to a full amplitude saw wave). The thing about information theory is that it is talking about BITS, i.e. you can construct a sender and receiver that detect the binary presence of a 20KHz signal. The volume will not be detectable with any kind of reasonable accuracy however; you get *only* 1 bit of resolution.
Human perception however, is not even based on evenly spaced intermittent sampling. Instead we have a coiled tube in our ear where different frequencies resonate at different locations (warning, massive oversimplification). Because it is so different, a fixed bandwidth range from 20Hz-20KHz is just a coarse approximation. The best way to test things like that is to do double-blind comparison testing with listeners to see if they can tell the difference between quality levels (blind in that you don't tell the subjects and experimenters which signal is which during testing). Coding theory can guide how we generate the signal, but you still have to test it to see if people can notice the difference.
At least this doesn't bug me as much as people claiming that humans have a 10fps-30fps vision system...
"Rei" could be any of five words (that I know of) in Japanese and has the following meanings:
(n) zero; nought; (P)
(n) soul; spirit; departed soul; ghost; (P)
(n) expression of gratitude; (P)
(n) instance; example; case; precedent; experience; custom; usage; parallel; il>
(n,n-suf,vs) command; order; dictation; (P)
The first one is the most common, and most likely because it fits. She does pilot Unit 00 after all, talks nearly 0% of the time, and is generally weak and dark (zero seems like a pretty demeaning name however). The second one is intriguing given the theme of the anime. But all in all, rei is almost certainly meant to be a Japanese word.
Also, after asking a native Japanese speaker they are guessing its supposed to mean zero.
You must not be a developer. They do two very different things. One is a memory analyzer/checker, the other is a tool for *locating* a known bug. They are quite complementary really. Valgrind errors and segfaults tell you what to look for in GDB. Kind of like how a error spit out by gcc makes you look things up in your text editor to fix the problem.
If you've ever used KDE or Mozilla, then you've used something that has been improved by valgrind. I'm sure there a lot of others too.
True, but listen more carefully to a native and notice that they really do manage to mix in an L-sound into it too. We just tend to map it to R because it sounds more like that to us. Psychologists have studied this in the past, and after you learn a language you tend to map ambiguous things one way or the other, even if they are ambiguous (there are some pretty amazing demos of this, pitty I don't know if they are on the web). They have a computer range between two sounds linearly (say L and R), and the listener will just hear a flip part way through, and you barely notice the mixing on the interpolated versions.
If you want to play with it, notice the L is a flattening of your tongue on the roof of your mouth, while the Spanish R is the tip of your tongue on the roof. If you flatten it just a bit, you can get an excellent reproduction of the japanese R/L sound. Of course, since they don't make a distinction, they'll never notice anyway...
Now if only kanji were as easy to learn as pronunciation...