I know I'll get modded down for posting an offtopic reply, but my message is very, very important to all/. users (except the 1% who are female): guys, stop this "girls hate me because I'm a geek" nonsense!
I agree. Just look at yourself, and take off the geekness. What is left? For me, if you take off the geekness, what you have left is a pretty normal guy with pretty normal interests and certain qualities. Being a geek is just a plus. If you're nothing when you take off the geekness, you've got a big problem, and you can't blame it on being a geek.
And that plus can be great when it comes to women, because a number of them loves someone with an expertise in arcane matters. That doesn't mean they care that compiling OpenOffice.org on your Gentoo box is taking forever, or that you should convince them to switch to Ubuntu, but next time a girl asks you what you're doing, just put your geek activity into the most obscure and mysterious terms possible.
Girl : Hey what's up? You : Not much, just trying to implement a fixed-point bi-derectional (yeah, chicks dig subliminal shit like that) reflectance distribution function-based shader in ARM assembly. Girl : Whoa, sounds hot! Do you want a blowjob?
Seriously. Geeks are not just geeks. They're something + geeks. If you really are just a geek, that means you're a nothing + a geek. And that's not much.
It is not mathematically sound to do statistics with a random number generator.
Why do people like you get modded up, as you sound like you never even heard the word "Chi-square" before. People don't get modded up for being correct but for *sounding* knowledgeable.
Accelerometers in laptops will register 0 when a seismic event occurs
If you *do* know that then fine (do you actually know that?) but if you don't I'd think twice before assuming it.
Noise averaging does *not* work the way you describe, because white-noise signals averaged do not produce lower noise, they produce more white noise.
Hahahahahahahahaha. That's funny because you seem to be serious. lol, seriosuly man, pick up a book on signal processing basics or something.
Given that you completely missed my point, I'm going to assume that your strength is not reading comprehension, and guess that it is math. Thus, I leave it to you to work out what the average is of one thousand 0 values. Your math skill will need to be marginally better than your reading comprehension skills to work that out.
Oh fear not, I got your assumption that accelerometers give 0 readings when idle. I just question it, because I doubt it does (and I wouldn't know how to verify this, and if you really do know that I'd like to know how).
I think people who post comment like yours missed something about the article. It's not just "men vs. women, who's to blame?" because women according to the study are better than men at understanding what other women are trying to convey.
That really means that men really do suck at interpreting their non-verbal language, which they understand much better than we do.
While we're on the topic, someone with a clue should point us to literature about interpreting there clues, I for one could use that, as I'm trying to determine whether the cute Irish cashier in the deli I go to makes such large smiles because she's on Prozac or because she thinks I'm cute.
Well thanks for the history lesson. We do spend much more time at school learning about ancient Greece or the 5th republic than about our conquests outside of Europe I must say. I just concede all points to someone who knows better about the topic than I do, or if you prefer, I surrender;-).
You can't take 1,000 sensors, add the data together, and say it is 1,000 times more effective than a single device. If the sensor granularity is not sufficient to detect what you are trying to detect, then one or one million will not be able to detect your subject.
Well, actually that's quite wrong, to a certain extent. If we assume that these sensors always detect something (be it noise or parasite vibrations which you can consider noise), then by averaging their signals all together you can actually reduce the noise and get a much better signal, and detect what couldn't be detected with a single of these same sensors. Now I don't know how noise averaging scales up, that is whether it's linear or not and thus whether or not 1,000 sensors will be 1,000 times more sensitive than 1, but one thing is for sure, it takes a certain amount of laptop accelerometers to do what a single seismic sensor can do, it would only be hard to tell whether or not it would be more or less than 1,000.
It'd be like using one cheap VGA webam to try to photograph surface topography on Pluto, and when that didn't work, trying the same thing by using 1,000 cheap VGA webcams together.
Horrible analogy! You're comparing noise reduction by averaging with capturing high frequency image components by using a bunch of low-resolution cameras. Entirely different and unrelated problem. The first one can simply done by averaging data, the second one is impossible unless you rely on aliasing.
Stupid.
You find it stupid because you don't understand the basic underlying principles. Ironic.
There are techniques for extracting higher quality data from overlapping low-resolution data sets.
Yes and no. If your low-resolution images are properly acquired, that with with no aliasing, you're fucked. Aliasing means frequency components higher than half the sampling rate/camera resolution are not being filtered out prior to quantization by, in our example, the camera's CCD. When your image is anti-aliased, it looks good, but also these higher frequency components have been filtered out. Whatever they were, they're gone, they have no impact on what you see, no matter what they possibly could be.
Now if the images are aliased. The thing with these higher frequency components is that they're like a sheet of paper you fold into a Z to fit into an envelope, that is, they fold back under the Nyquist frequency (the upper frequency limit you can have in a discrete signal), so they are still there, blended with the rest of the data. With only one aliased image however, you cannot tell which layers of the folded letter some feature belongs to, so you can't unfold it. But if you get many aliased images of the same thing, then every time the letter is folded a bit different, and from that you can deduce what feature belongs where, thus using my analogy unfold then letter and get a higher resolution image.
If you have ENOUGH difference sets, you can cancel out the noise.
It seems you're talking about something else, which is reducing the Signal/Noise Ratio by averaging many (noisy) images of the same thing. The images mustn't be different, just have a different noise. I don't think it has anything to do with the other thing you were talking about.
Well you seem to know better about history than myself, but despite being French my knowledge of France prior to WWI is relatively limited. However I seem to sense that France's decline is somehow similar to the USA's current decline. I mean what is causing America's current decline? The rise of other regions (Europe, India, Japan, China..), relative economic hardship, bad education policies? Seems to me just like the bunch of factors that made something what it is (for example leadership and domination in certain key domains) are not there any more, like simply losing an advantage, or an advantage to being that big anymore, or not simply enough to guarantee success.
Basically that's as if you were the first one to sell radio sets in the 1900's-1910's. You would have the advantage of being ahead of anyone else, so your success would be guaranteed for a while, but you would have a tough time maintaining that lead with new players joining the game, plus the landscape evolving in such a way that you'd find yourself having to move on quickly to new things like TV sets and other type of consumer electronics if you want to maintain a lead. My point being, being the leader involves always being on top of everything. Having a single few advantages that help you at some point in time don't guarantee you'll be the boss for centuries.
But not really comparable to those others you cited, because France wasn't the dominant empire in its territory before it suddenly declined.
Well, when you look at it, France was the dominant empire in the early 19th century. The ensuing political instabilities and civil unrest certainly didn't help, also I'm not sure France became quite a leader regarding industrialisation in the mid 19th century. Maybe France's apogee was circa 1812, with a decline really starting by the 1840-50s, to get even worse with the war of 1870, WWI, the economic crisis of the 1930s, WWII and the decolonisation wars. That's how I'd answer to your question.
What's left of the Roman empire? The Byzantine empire? The bright civilisation started by prophet Muhammad? Dominations in any domain don't last forever. You guys (in the USA) are just about to find out.
To answer your question more directly, WWI, WWII, the economic crisis of the early 1930's (which the USA went through perhaps better than Europe thanks to a cunning strategy partially based on the abandon of the gold standard), colonial wars and the subsequent loss of these colonies didn't help either the British or the French, while the USA were rising to the top.
he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves.
I think you're missing the point of his invention. Back in 1857, scientists had no other means to visualise sound waves. Therefore a tool that allows you to see sound waves can be of great use, and not only can you use it to better understand sounds but also to study it mathematically (because such an instrument allows you to quantify sounds acoustic phenomenons) and also do some practical things out of it, like for example timing with precision certain sounds (like an echo for example), or even estimating the frequency of certain sounds (you'll need such an instrument if you want to count how many times a second a fly beats its wings).
So yes, it had little practical interest for the general public before playback was possible, just like radioactivity had little interest in the time of Pierre and Marie Curie. Such inventions often find a scientific use a long time before they become interesting to the general public.
This French phonautogram is analagous to visualizations in WinAmp where Edison's recordings would be analagous to the MP3 file.
Bad analogy. More as if de Martinville invented a sound spectrograph (which actually exists since the late 1930s) and Edison invented something to play back spectrographs (which only has been really done since the 1990s it seems). It doesn't diminish Edison's merit though.
500 million users of iTunes, really? 12% of the world population that has access to electricity, are you sure?? How many computer users are there even really out there anyways? And how the hell would you know how many single users for a program you have out there any bloody way? And why on Earth am I seemingly the only one out here this figure made cringe?
I wholeheartedly agree, and this is what I find amazing about our culturally-induced "but I'm not insane" reactions when pondering whether or not to seek help from a professional mental health specialist. I hope that in the future we would culturally accept mental health troubles as equivalent to other health troubles and requiring the same kind of responses.
"We believe that about 100 kilometers (62 miles) beneath the ice and organic-rich surface is an internal ocean of liquid water mixed with ammonia,"
Liquid water mixed with ammonia? Sounds like pee to me! An ocean of pee, with an organic icy crust floating on top of it, the whole surrounded by an atmosphere of methane... This place sounds awfully much like the toilets of the solar system.
I don't think I want to know what the core is made of..
I use Linux because I don't want to pay MS for anything. ever. again.
That's what I love about people like you. You hate Microsoft's guts, you wish its death, but you think you're to good to get their products for free just like anyone else and their momma. So you go around with your false "pay for MS or switch to Linux" dichotomy, and "forget" that you can download a perfectly well working cracked ISO of Windows as fast as an ISO of your favourite distribution and the fact that these won't ever show you any activation or advantage check bullcrap.
You know you're a nerd when you make 7 year olds use Debian and make them worry about security. Here are a few things that anyone normal with some common sense would be able to tell:
- She doesn't actually care about security, you made her care.
- She doesn't actually need any passwords for anything (really, not a single thing), besides to "protect her" from her parents, which is an absolutely awful and irresponsible thing to do anyways.
- It's maybe not necessary to ask her to actually decide whether she wants to use KDE or GNOME, or any other such choices, I mean it's not necessary to ask her to chose anything when she'd be better off having you chose what's the best for her.
- Debian, really? Why not NetBSD or Gentoo while you're at it? I'm sure you can't wait for the day you show her how to get package updates from the command line using aptitude. What about you put Windows on it and install whatever child friendly environment thing there is out there?
Oh no wait, she's not just any 7-year old, she's a Slashdot nerd's sister, which means she just has to log herself in with a 8 characters long password that looks like kP6$jh@i and that her files must be encrypted and her e-mail encoded with a 2048 bit PGP key. By all means explain her everything about asymmetrical keys before she turns 8! Just excuse my bias, my first computer had Mac OS 7.5 on it, not Slackware.
The problem will be fixed when the p0rn sites can't get new IP addresses.
I get your point but you know that's bullshit. The web won't be so much affected as ISPs and their users. You can put a thousand of different websites on one IP, but Internet users like you and me need their own IP address.
By the way, if we did nothing to fix the problem, what would really happen, I mean besides everyone getting behind their ISP's NAT and thus buying us at least another decade? This being said, I would hate to live in a world in which I can't run a home server without paying a premium (here in France ISPs don't NAT people).
First off, dark matter isn't dark but transparent. Then, how could say methane and oxygen which are transparent create light when burning together? Oh I know! Maybe that's because it's not the matter that releases light/energy but its transformation.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'll get modded down for posting an offtopic reply, but my message is very, very important to all /. users (except the 1% who are female): guys, stop this "girls hate me because I'm a geek" nonsense!
I agree. Just look at yourself, and take off the geekness. What is left? For me, if you take off the geekness, what you have left is a pretty normal guy with pretty normal interests and certain qualities. Being a geek is just a plus. If you're nothing when you take off the geekness, you've got a big problem, and you can't blame it on being a geek.
And that plus can be great when it comes to women, because a number of them loves someone with an expertise in arcane matters. That doesn't mean they care that compiling OpenOffice.org on your Gentoo box is taking forever, or that you should convince them to switch to Ubuntu, but next time a girl asks you what you're doing, just put your geek activity into the most obscure and mysterious terms possible.
Girl : Hey what's up?
You : Not much, just trying to implement a fixed-point bi-derectional (yeah, chicks dig subliminal shit like that) reflectance distribution function-based shader in ARM assembly.
Girl : Whoa, sounds hot! Do you want a blowjob?
Seriously. Geeks are not just geeks. They're something + geeks. If you really are just a geek, that means you're a nothing + a geek. And that's not much.
It is not mathematically sound to do statistics with a random number generator.
Why do people like you get modded up, as you sound like you never even heard the word "Chi-square" before. People don't get modded up for being correct but for *sounding* knowledgeable.
Accelerometers in laptops will register 0 when a seismic event occurs
If you *do* know that then fine (do you actually know that?) but if you don't I'd think twice before assuming it.
Noise averaging does *not* work the way you describe, because white-noise signals averaged do not produce lower noise, they produce more white noise.
Hahahahahahahahaha. That's funny because you seem to be serious. lol, seriosuly man, pick up a book on signal processing basics or something.
Given that you completely missed my point, I'm going to assume that your strength is not reading comprehension, and guess that it is math. Thus, I leave it to you to work out what the average is of one thousand 0 values. Your math skill will need to be marginally better than your reading comprehension skills to work that out.
Oh fear not, I got your assumption that accelerometers give 0 readings when idle. I just question it, because I doubt it does (and I wouldn't know how to verify this, and if you really do know that I'd like to know how).
I think people who post comment like yours missed something about the article. It's not just "men vs. women, who's to blame?" because women according to the study are better than men at understanding what other women are trying to convey.
That really means that men really do suck at interpreting their non-verbal language, which they understand much better than we do.
While we're on the topic, someone with a clue should point us to literature about interpreting there clues, I for one could use that, as I'm trying to determine whether the cute Irish cashier in the deli I go to makes such large smiles because she's on Prozac or because she thinks I'm cute.
Well thanks for the history lesson. We do spend much more time at school learning about ancient Greece or the 5th republic than about our conquests outside of Europe I must say. I just concede all points to someone who knows better about the topic than I do, or if you prefer, I surrender ;-).
You can't take 1,000 sensors, add the data together, and say it is 1,000 times more effective than a single device. If the sensor granularity is not sufficient to detect what you are trying to detect, then one or one million will not be able to detect your subject.
Well, actually that's quite wrong, to a certain extent. If we assume that these sensors always detect something (be it noise or parasite vibrations which you can consider noise), then by averaging their signals all together you can actually reduce the noise and get a much better signal, and detect what couldn't be detected with a single of these same sensors. Now I don't know how noise averaging scales up, that is whether it's linear or not and thus whether or not 1,000 sensors will be 1,000 times more sensitive than 1, but one thing is for sure, it takes a certain amount of laptop accelerometers to do what a single seismic sensor can do, it would only be hard to tell whether or not it would be more or less than 1,000.
It'd be like using one cheap VGA webam to try to photograph surface topography on Pluto, and when that didn't work, trying the same thing by using 1,000 cheap VGA webcams together.
Horrible analogy! You're comparing noise reduction by averaging with capturing high frequency image components by using a bunch of low-resolution cameras. Entirely different and unrelated problem. The first one can simply done by averaging data, the second one is impossible unless you rely on aliasing.
Stupid.
You find it stupid because you don't understand the basic underlying principles. Ironic.
There are techniques for extracting higher quality data from overlapping low-resolution data sets.
Yes and no. If your low-resolution images are properly acquired, that with with no aliasing, you're fucked. Aliasing means frequency components higher than half the sampling rate/camera resolution are not being filtered out prior to quantization by, in our example, the camera's CCD. When your image is anti-aliased, it looks good, but also these higher frequency components have been filtered out. Whatever they were, they're gone, they have no impact on what you see, no matter what they possibly could be.
Now if the images are aliased. The thing with these higher frequency components is that they're like a sheet of paper you fold into a Z to fit into an envelope, that is, they fold back under the Nyquist frequency (the upper frequency limit you can have in a discrete signal), so they are still there, blended with the rest of the data. With only one aliased image however, you cannot tell which layers of the folded letter some feature belongs to, so you can't unfold it. But if you get many aliased images of the same thing, then every time the letter is folded a bit different, and from that you can deduce what feature belongs where, thus using my analogy unfold then letter and get a higher resolution image.
If you have ENOUGH difference sets, you can cancel out the noise.
It seems you're talking about something else, which is reducing the Signal/Noise Ratio by averaging many (noisy) images of the same thing. The images mustn't be different, just have a different noise. I don't think it has anything to do with the other thing you were talking about.
Something happened. What?
Well you seem to know better about history than myself, but despite being French my knowledge of France prior to WWI is relatively limited. However I seem to sense that France's decline is somehow similar to the USA's current decline. I mean what is causing America's current decline? The rise of other regions (Europe, India, Japan, China..), relative economic hardship, bad education policies? Seems to me just like the bunch of factors that made something what it is (for example leadership and domination in certain key domains) are not there any more, like simply losing an advantage, or an advantage to being that big anymore, or not simply enough to guarantee success.
Basically that's as if you were the first one to sell radio sets in the 1900's-1910's. You would have the advantage of being ahead of anyone else, so your success would be guaranteed for a while, but you would have a tough time maintaining that lead with new players joining the game, plus the landscape evolving in such a way that you'd find yourself having to move on quickly to new things like TV sets and other type of consumer electronics if you want to maintain a lead. My point being, being the leader involves always being on top of everything. Having a single few advantages that help you at some point in time don't guarantee you'll be the boss for centuries.
But not really comparable to those others you cited, because France wasn't the dominant empire in its territory before it suddenly declined.
Well, when you look at it, France was the dominant empire in the early 19th century. The ensuing political instabilities and civil unrest certainly didn't help, also I'm not sure France became quite a leader regarding industrialisation in the mid 19th century. Maybe France's apogee was circa 1812, with a decline really starting by the 1840-50s, to get even worse with the war of 1870, WWI, the economic crisis of the 1930s, WWII and the decolonisation wars. That's how I'd answer to your question.
What's left of the Roman empire? The Byzantine empire? The bright civilisation started by prophet Muhammad? Dominations in any domain don't last forever. You guys (in the USA) are just about to find out.
To answer your question more directly, WWI, WWII, the economic crisis of the early 1930's (which the USA went through perhaps better than Europe thanks to a cunning strategy partially based on the abandon of the gold standard), colonial wars and the subsequent loss of these colonies didn't help either the British or the French, while the USA were rising to the top.
he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves.
I think you're missing the point of his invention. Back in 1857, scientists had no other means to visualise sound waves. Therefore a tool that allows you to see sound waves can be of great use, and not only can you use it to better understand sounds but also to study it mathematically (because such an instrument allows you to quantify sounds acoustic phenomenons) and also do some practical things out of it, like for example timing with precision certain sounds (like an echo for example), or even estimating the frequency of certain sounds (you'll need such an instrument if you want to count how many times a second a fly beats its wings).
So yes, it had little practical interest for the general public before playback was possible, just like radioactivity had little interest in the time of Pierre and Marie Curie. Such inventions often find a scientific use a long time before they become interesting to the general public.
This French phonautogram is analagous to visualizations in WinAmp where Edison's recordings would be analagous to the MP3 file.
Bad analogy. More as if de Martinville invented a sound spectrograph (which actually exists since the late 1930s) and Edison invented something to play back spectrographs (which only has been really done since the 1990s it seems). It doesn't diminish Edison's merit though.
500 million users of iTunes, really? 12% of the world population that has access to electricity, are you sure?? How many computer users are there even really out there anyways? And how the hell would you know how many single users for a program you have out there any bloody way? And why on Earth am I seemingly the only one out here this figure made cringe?
Shooting rockets for clouds before they reach the stadium? Sounds like an exciting video game pitch.
Oh my God, this cloud is coming right for us! Quick, return it to its maker with that ground-air missile! Blast, I missed it, it's going too fast!
I wholeheartedly agree, and this is what I find amazing about our culturally-induced "but I'm not insane" reactions when pondering whether or not to seek help from a professional mental health specialist. I hope that in the future we would culturally accept mental health troubles as equivalent to other health troubles and requiring the same kind of responses.
"We believe that about 100 kilometers (62 miles) beneath the ice and organic-rich surface is an internal ocean of liquid water mixed with ammonia,"
Liquid water mixed with ammonia? Sounds like pee to me! An ocean of pee, with an organic icy crust floating on top of it, the whole surrounded by an atmosphere of methane... This place sounds awfully much like the toilets of the solar system.
I don't think I want to know what the core is made of..
Can someone tell me what one *cannot* get addicted to?
I couldn't get any from the girl I managed to talk into coming back to the room
You will find at the end of this message the list of people you're fooling :
I use Linux because I don't want to pay MS for anything. ever. again.
That's what I love about people like you. You hate Microsoft's guts, you wish its death, but you think you're to good to get their products for free just like anyone else and their momma. So you go around with your false "pay for MS or switch to Linux" dichotomy, and "forget" that you can download a perfectly well working cracked ISO of Windows as fast as an ISO of your favourite distribution and the fact that these won't ever show you any activation or advantage check bullcrap.
You know you're a nerd when you make 7 year olds use Debian and make them worry about security. Here are a few things that anyone normal with some common sense would be able to tell :
- She doesn't actually care about security, you made her care.
- She doesn't actually need any passwords for anything (really, not a single thing), besides to "protect her" from her parents, which is an absolutely awful and irresponsible thing to do anyways.
- It's maybe not necessary to ask her to actually decide whether she wants to use KDE or GNOME, or any other such choices, I mean it's not necessary to ask her to chose anything when she'd be better off having you chose what's the best for her.
- Debian, really? Why not NetBSD or Gentoo while you're at it? I'm sure you can't wait for the day you show her how to get package updates from the command line using aptitude. What about you put Windows on it and install whatever child friendly environment thing there is out there?
Oh no wait, she's not just any 7-year old, she's a Slashdot nerd's sister, which means she just has to log herself in with a 8 characters long password that looks like kP6$jh@i and that her files must be encrypted and her e-mail encoded with a 2048 bit PGP key. By all means explain her everything about asymmetrical keys before she turns 8! Just excuse my bias, my first computer had Mac OS 7.5 on it, not Slackware.
The problem will be fixed when the p0rn sites can't get new IP addresses.
I get your point but you know that's bullshit. The web won't be so much affected as ISPs and their users. You can put a thousand of different websites on one IP, but Internet users like you and me need their own IP address.
By the way, if we did nothing to fix the problem, what would really happen, I mean besides everyone getting behind their ISP's NAT and thus buying us at least another decade? This being said, I would hate to live in a world in which I can't run a home server without paying a premium (here in France ISPs don't NAT people).
Do you know what happens when you fire a gun inside a pressurized cabin? Disaster!
Please hand over your geek card for not having watched the relevant Mythbusters episode.
And thats assuming the bullet doesnt hit any of the oxygen lines criss-crossing the top of the cabin, then you get firey disaster!
Yeah, everybody knows that oxygen + air = disaster!
How can something so dark create so much light...
First off, dark matter isn't dark but transparent. Then, how could say methane and oxygen which are transparent create light when burning together? Oh I know! Maybe that's because it's not the matter that releases light/energy but its transformation.
Sorry. The laser made me do it!
I for one bid farewell to our communist Cuban dictator overlord.
Wake me up when the anchor of a ship accidentally cuts every cable around the WikiLeaks server buildings..