$10B / 8.7M is $1,149 per life saved which seems inefficient for vaccines. I would think that $3 per person for personal mosquito nets and $9 per person for standard childhood vaccines would save more than 8.7M lives. Clean drinking water would help a lot. How much would that cost per person?
1960 percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a Bachelor’s Degree or More: 7.7% 2000 percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a Bachelor’s Degree or More: 24.4%
I did something similar with 8th graders. Use short physical projects to keep them engaged. Have each student build a tower out of a single sheet of copier paper and tape. The tallest free standing tower wins. Build boats out of measured amounts of aluminum foil. The boat that holds the most marbles before sinking wins. Build water rockets out if 1L plastic bottles. Build bridges out of tooth picks, paper, and glue. The bridge that holds the most weight before failing wins.
Each of the projects can be completed in 2-3 half hour sessions with almost no material cost. These projects teach basic physics and engineering in a fun and competitive way. You can even repeat the same projects later in the term so that the second rounds of towers are designed with knowledge gained in the first round, etc.
The Indianapolis Children's museum is weak for both children and adults compared to either St. Louis or Toronto. Indianapolis is comparable to CoSci in Columbus OH.
My family and I love zoos and museums. Our annual family vacations have included museums/zoos all over North America and the U.K. over 20+ years.
The St. Louis Science Center is free and very good. The Ontario Science Centre in Toronto is the best science museum in the world; it takes 3 days to see everything. I particularly like the perpetual motion machines. They have exhibits of machines that inventors claim exhibit perpetual motion - it's a puzzle for you to figure out the trick to each one... where it gets its energy. I love to listen to the school kids on tours theorize how each machine works and debate with each other. It is great to hear 14 year olds talk about laws of thermodynamics or the Venturi effect. IIRC, one really tricky one works based on the surface tension of soap bubbles, but you eventually have to blow more bubbles;)
The Air Force museum in Dayton Ohio is bigger and better than the Smithsonian Air & Space museum. At the Smithsonian, the exhibits hang from the ceiling out of reach. At The AF museum, you can touch the airplane that bombed Nagasaki, stick your head in a Gemini capsule that orbited Earth, climb into the bomb bay of a B-29, hand turn a Nazi jet engine prototype, view the Red Baron's medals, kick the tiers of fighter jets, etc.
The Field Museum in Chicago is fairly good, but the Natural History Museum in London U.K. is the best in the world. The London Transport Museum is also great.
St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. paul, and San Diego have the best zoos, but Indianapolis has a nice zoo too. I have recently been to zoos in Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Cincinnati, Toronto, Wheeling, and Des Moines. All were nice in their special ways but not great.
I have never seen a planetarium that impressed me, but I'll keep looking.
I agree. The Mac OS X Finder is the worst of NeXT's browser combined with the worst of OS 9's Finder with neither working quite right in OS X. I hope it will be better in Snow Leopard.
More to the point, look what Apple acquired when they bought NeXT's GUI for BSD. It is sad that GUI technologies and design that shipped commercially in 1988 were largely ignored in favor of X11/Motif and GDI/Windows "Classic". It is astonishing that Windows 3.0 shipped years AFTER NeXTstep and Microsoft wasn't too embarrassed to release it. There is no excuse for the multitude of lame X11 GUIs that have proliferated.
Apple's Mac OS X finally popularized a lobotomized version of NeXT's GUI with aqua glossy candy colors.
Neither the school district nor Cynthia Moreno or her attorney were available for an interview. The newspaper, The Coalinga Record also declined to comment, but the paper's former editor tells me she was fired for printing Moreno's myspace entry in the paper last year. http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/local&id=4850386
When the Mac came out, every software user's manual had to explain how to use a mouse. I witnessed early Mac users would couldn't grasp the idea that the pointer on screen was controlled by their hand on the mouse. People would watch their hand moving instead of watching the mouse pointer on screen. A single button was the right choice in 1984. Nothing stops you from connecting a multi-button mouse to your Mac, and all of the buttons and scroll wheel work swimmingly.
People still don't understand double-click vs. single click. My father is brilliant, but he double clicks everything out of habit.
And what is "maximize" good for. Isn't it ironic for someone who derides a one button mouse to want a one window GUI ?
Let's have zero corporate tax. No more depreciation schedules. No more 200 page tax returns that take all year to prepare. The income that is passed on to shareholders can be taxed at regular personal rates. Money that is reinvested is reinvested. Yah!
Let's end double taxation and make the U.S.A. the most popular place to incorporate. European companies will buy or build even more facilities in the U.S.A. and employ more people.
I have crossed paths with Schwartz a few times, and my impression was that he is a technologist's technologist. He's one of the nerds. He fits in well when programmers get together for a beer. He can debate which Enterprise captan was best. I think he has had the pony tail for at least 15 years. He certainly recognizes great technology when he sees it. Did you know the MS Visio is a sad copy of Schwartz's Diagram!
I have no idea what Schwartz'b business skills may be, but I don't think you can claim he is pretending to be a tech/hippie. I think it's more likely he pretended to be a CEO.
I interview 30+ people every year for programming positions. The number one attribute we desire is "smart." If you are smart, we can teach you, and you will learn. We find that completion of an engineering, physics, math, or computer science degree usually implies "smart." We have hired smart fine arts majors, smart psychology majors, and even a former priest. Second, we want "motivated." We like people who attack every challenge with creativity and resourcefulness. We shy away from negativity and reluctance to try new approaches. When a stupid new process is forced on us from above, we want employees who say, if we change this or that it will be so much easier to follow and provide better results. Then we can push changes back up as "process improvements." We don't like it when people just complain without suggesting a better way. Third, we like nice people who will get along with the current employees and be fun at lunch and the holiday party. As a distant fourth, we look for directly relevant experience. Sometimes that experience is FPGA programming or power supply engineering or signal processing expertise or C++ programming for embedded systems or Java GUI applications. However, we routinely solve problems that have never been solved before. As an indication of company culture, there are more patent award plaques than pictures on our walls. For us, relevant experience for a senior position could be "what have you invented lately?"
And yes, we are currently advertising 22 open positions, but I am not alowed to tell you where I work in this forum.
Protectionism deepened and worsened the Great Depression.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/id/17606.htm "...beggar-thy-neighbor" policies of the 1930s.... For example, U.S. imports from Europe declined from a 1929 high of $1,334 million to just $390 million in 1932, while U.S. exports to Europe fell from $2,341 million in 1929 to $784 million in 1932. Overall, world trade declined by some 66% between 1929 and 1934."
What about the poem I composed in the margins of my notes ? What about the bank account numbers I wrote down because I was thinking about economics ? What about the pictures I doodled because I was bored ?
The teacher shouldn't be sued. She should be arrested for petty theft. Students have a right to be secure in the papers and affects.
Mac OS X used to be called NeXTstep, and NeXTstep had a dock which Windows 95 copied to create the task bar. The Windows 95 look which came to be called the Windows classic look which was in fact a shameless but inferior copy of the NeXTstep look from 1988.
Think Windows 95 copied from NextStep, starting with the "Recycle bin" and the recycle logo, the use of a square and a X in the title bar, bezeled window borders, etc.
There are many resources available for iPhone/Cocoa programmers. The earliest versions of Cocoa shipped commercially in 1988, and the most used features and patterns haven't changed much. Here is a good place to start: http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?CocoaPrerequisites
Why does Objective-C use BOOl and YES,NO instead of bool and true/false? One reason is that Objective-C predates the addition of the bool type to standard C by 11 years.
If you don't like dynamic languages, you won't like Objective-C. Bruce Eckel makes an interesting argument for dynamic languages at http://www.mindview.net/WebLog/log-0025.
I think the ability to seamlessly use and intermix the world of C and C++ software with Objective-C outweighs and criticism that Objective-C includes C.
You must keep an open mind - There are an infinite number of different ways to solve every programming problem. Many programming languages and reusable software libraries use different approaches to solve common problems. There is a good chance that Objective-C and Cocoa use a substantially different approach from other languages and frameworks you may have used. That doesn't make either approach better or worse automatically. Every commercial software development technology has advantages in at least some cases or the technology would not exist. Cocoa is renowned for enabling very high programmer productivity without constraining the set of problems that can be solved, but programmer's opinions will always vary and software development environments are subject to aesthetic judgments irrespective of abstract technical merit. Many programmers are enthralled by Objective-C and Cocoa. You might be enthralled too. Or, you may never like Objective-C and Cocoa from an aesthetic standpoint, and there isn't really anything anyone can do to change that without affecting the aesthetics for others.
My employer offers optional 9/80 schedules. I estimate that 90% of the employees voluntarily choose 9/80. It is great to have at lest 26 three day weekends every year. When holidays fall on Monday, you may get a 4 day weekend.
The off-Friday is well respected by management. The managers generally don't come in either.
An off-Friday is a great time for banking, appointments, the start of vacation, volunteering in your kids' school, etc.
Most people who choose the 5/40 schedule do so because they need to be home early to meet kids at the school bus or because the spouse works a regular schedule and they want to match schedules.
Flexibility is always good. We have core hours from 10:00 to 3:00. Some people come in very early and leave at 3:00 to minimize the time kids are home alone. It can save a lot of child care costs. Others like me regularly come in at 10:00 and leave at 7:00.
Read James Carville's book: "We're Right, They're Wrong : A Progressive Program for the Millennium"
He agrees with you. He is also wrong on every point.
The U.S. Federal Highway System is an abomination. It destroyed inner cities. It damaged our culture. It destroyed rail roads which had to develop and maintain infrastructure on their own under the burden of oppressive regulation at the same time the federal government subsidized the competition (busses, trucks, highways). The government is constantly building roads to nowhere. Look up Robert Byrd sometime. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=Robert+Byrd+highway&ns0=1
The key it to preserve the heat energy of compression. Most air compressors have multiple stages and cool the air in-between stages. This throws away a lot of useful energy, but they do it because otherwise the compressed air would be hot enough to melt iron.
There is a simple solution. Use wet air. The heat energy of compression is used to change the sate of water from liquid to steam. The resulting temperature of the steam/air mix is low enough for safe and easy storage in insulated pressure vessels. Whether air expands in the engine (or because of a leak in the pressure vessel), the steam returns to harmless water.
A combines steam air engine is vastly more efficient than air alone! Steam Punk indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
$10B / 8.7M is $1,149 per life saved which seems inefficient for vaccines. I would think that $3 per person for personal mosquito nets and $9 per person for standard childhood vaccines would save more than 8.7M lives. Clean drinking water would help a lot. How much would that cost per person?
Picking arbitrary dates around 1962:
1962 Life expectancy at birth: 66.9 years
2005 Life expectancy at birth: 74.89
source http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_lif_exp_at_bir_mal_yea-life-expectancy-birth-male-years&date=1962
1970 cost of food as percentage of income: 14%
2005 cost of food as percentage of income: 9.3%
source http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=429074
1960 home ownership rate: 61.9%
2000 home ownership rate: 66.2%
source http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html
1960 Percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a High School Diploma or More: 41.1%
2000 Percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a High School Diploma or More: 80.4%
source http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/phct41/US.pdf
1960 percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a Bachelor’s Degree or More: 7.7%
2000 percent of the Population 25 Years and Over with a Bachelor’s Degree or More: 24.4%
source http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/phct41/US.pdf
I did something similar with 8th graders. Use short physical projects to keep them engaged. Have each student build a tower out of a single sheet of copier paper and tape. The tallest free standing tower wins. Build boats out of measured amounts of aluminum foil. The boat that holds the most marbles before sinking wins. Build water rockets out if 1L plastic bottles. Build bridges out of tooth picks, paper, and glue. The bridge that holds the most weight before failing wins.
Each of the projects can be completed in 2-3 half hour sessions with almost no material cost. These projects teach basic physics and engineering in a fun and competitive way. You can even repeat the same projects later in the term so that the second rounds of towers are designed with knowledge gained in the first round, etc.
The Indianapolis Children's museum is weak for both children and adults compared to either St. Louis or Toronto. Indianapolis is comparable to CoSci in Columbus OH.
My family and I love zoos and museums. Our annual family vacations have included museums/zoos all over North America and the U.K. over 20+ years.
The St. Louis Science Center is free and very good. The Ontario Science Centre in Toronto is the best science museum in the world; it takes 3 days to see everything. I particularly like the perpetual motion machines. They have exhibits of machines that inventors claim exhibit perpetual motion - it's a puzzle for you to figure out the trick to each one... where it gets its energy. I love to listen to the school kids on tours theorize how each machine works and debate with each other. It is great to hear 14 year olds talk about laws of thermodynamics or the Venturi effect. IIRC, one really tricky one works based on the surface tension of soap bubbles, but you eventually have to blow more bubbles ;)
The Air Force museum in Dayton Ohio is bigger and better than the Smithsonian Air & Space museum. At the Smithsonian, the exhibits hang from the ceiling out of reach. At The AF museum, you can touch the airplane that bombed Nagasaki, stick your head in a Gemini capsule that orbited Earth, climb into the bomb bay of a B-29, hand turn a Nazi jet engine prototype, view the Red Baron's medals, kick the tiers of fighter jets, etc.
The Field Museum in Chicago is fairly good, but the Natural History Museum in London U.K. is the best in the world. The London Transport Museum is also great.
St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. paul, and San Diego have the best zoos, but Indianapolis has a nice zoo too. I have recently been to zoos in Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Cincinnati, Toronto, Wheeling, and Des Moines. All were nice in their special ways but not great.
I have never seen a planetarium that impressed me, but I'll keep looking.
I agree. The Mac OS X Finder is the worst of NeXT's browser combined with the worst of OS 9's Finder with neither working quite right in OS X. I hope it will be better in Snow Leopard.
More to the point, look what Apple acquired when they bought NeXT's GUI for BSD. It is sad that GUI technologies and design that shipped commercially in 1988 were largely ignored in favor of X11/Motif and GDI/Windows "Classic". It is astonishing that Windows 3.0 shipped years AFTER NeXTstep and Microsoft wasn't too embarrassed to release it. There is no excuse for the multitude of lame X11 GUIs that have proliferated.
Apple's Mac OS X finally popularized a lobotomized version of NeXT's GUI with aqua glossy candy colors.
Neither the school district nor Cynthia Moreno or her attorney were available for an interview. The newspaper, The Coalinga Record also declined to comment, but the paper's former editor tells me she was fired for printing Moreno's myspace entry in the paper last year. http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/local&id=4850386
When the Mac came out, every software user's manual had to explain how to use a mouse. I witnessed early Mac users would couldn't grasp the idea that the pointer on screen was controlled by their hand on the mouse. People would watch their hand moving instead of watching the mouse pointer on screen. A single button was the right choice in 1984. Nothing stops you from connecting a multi-button mouse to your Mac, and all of the buttons and scroll wheel work swimmingly.
People still don't understand double-click vs. single click. My father is brilliant, but he double clicks everything out of habit.
And what is "maximize" good for. Isn't it ironic for someone who derides a one button mouse to want a one window GUI ?
Smaller screen than an iPod Touch, Windows CE, Microsoft App Store - Lame.
Forgetting that both iPhone and Mac can be programmed with C/C++ and OpenGL for games...
Oh, you mean like id games:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/25/carmack-quake-live-on-mac-linux-high-on-my-priority-list/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine "Originally developed on NeXT computers"
Or maybe you meant http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Business/NuclearStrike.html
There doesn't seem to be a shortage iPhone games...
Plus, Objective-C and Cocoa are Awesome(tm)
Let's have zero corporate tax. No more depreciation schedules. No more 200 page tax returns that take all year to prepare. The income that is passed on to shareholders can be taxed at regular personal rates. Money that is reinvested is reinvested. Yah!
Let's end double taxation and make the U.S.A. the most popular place to incorporate. European companies will buy or build even more facilities in the U.S.A. and employ more people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_I._Schwartz
I have crossed paths with Schwartz a few times, and my impression was that he is a technologist's technologist. He's one of the nerds. He fits in well when programmers get together for a beer. He can debate which Enterprise captan was best. I think he has had the pony tail for at least 15 years. He certainly recognizes great technology when he sees it. Did you know the MS Visio is a sad copy of Schwartz's Diagram!
I have no idea what Schwartz'b business skills may be, but I don't think you can claim he is pretending to be a tech/hippie. I think it's more likely he pretended to be a CEO.
You mean "an already established low-power design house like" PAsemi http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/23/apple-buys-pasemi-tech-ebiz-cz_eb_0422apple.html
I interview 30+ people every year for programming positions. The number one attribute we desire is "smart." If you are smart, we can teach you, and you will learn. We find that completion of an engineering, physics, math, or computer science degree usually implies "smart." We have hired smart fine arts majors, smart psychology majors, and even a former priest. Second, we want "motivated." We like people who attack every challenge with creativity and resourcefulness. We shy away from negativity and reluctance to try new approaches. When a stupid new process is forced on us from above, we want employees who say, if we change this or that it will be so much easier to follow and provide better results. Then we can push changes back up as "process improvements." We don't like it when people just complain without suggesting a better way. Third, we like nice people who will get along with the current employees and be fun at lunch and the holiday party. As a distant fourth, we look for directly relevant experience. Sometimes that experience is FPGA programming or power supply engineering or signal processing expertise or C++ programming for embedded systems or Java GUI applications. However, we routinely solve problems that have never been solved before. As an indication of company culture, there are more patent award plaques than pictures on our walls. For us, relevant experience for a senior position could be "what have you invented lately?"
And yes, we are currently advertising 22 open positions, but I am not alowed to tell you where I work in this forum.
Protectionism deepened and worsened the Great Depression.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/id/17606.htm ... For example, U.S. imports from Europe declined from a 1929 high of $1,334 million to just $390 million in 1932, while U.S. exports to Europe fell from $2,341 million in 1929 to $784 million in 1932. Overall, world trade declined by some 66% between 1929 and 1934."
"...beggar-thy-neighbor" policies of the 1930s.
Is it April Fool's day already ?
What about the poem I composed in the margins of my notes ?
What about the bank account numbers I wrote down because I was thinking about economics ? What about the pictures I doodled because I was bored ?
The teacher shouldn't be sued. She should be arrested for petty theft. Students have a right to be secure in the papers and affects.
Microsoft copied the recycle icon from NeXTstep which of course became Mac OS X.
http://www.andrewnotarian.com/blog/images/win95nextStep.gif
See a visual comparison of Windows 95 and NeXTstep which preceded it.
http://www.andrewnotarian.com/blog/images/win95nextStep.gif
Mac OS X used to be called NeXTstep, and NeXTstep had a dock which Windows 95 copied to create the task bar. The Windows 95 look which came to be called the Windows classic look which was in fact a shameless but inferior copy of the NeXTstep look from 1988.
Think Windows 95 copied from NextStep, starting with the "Recycle bin" and the recycle logo, the use of a square and a X in the title bar, bezeled window borders, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Dock
http://homepage.mac.com/troy_stephens/OpenStep/screenShots/
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/applicationmanager
There are many resources available for iPhone/Cocoa programmers. The earliest versions of Cocoa shipped commercially in 1988, and the most used features and patterns haven't changed much. Here is a good place to start: http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?CocoaPrerequisites
Why does Objective-C use BOOl and YES,NO instead of bool and true/false? One reason is that Objective-C predates the addition of the bool type to standard C by 11 years.
If you don't like dynamic languages, you won't like Objective-C. Bruce Eckel makes an interesting argument for dynamic languages at http://www.mindview.net/WebLog/log-0025.
I think the ability to seamlessly use and intermix the world of C and C++ software with Objective-C outweighs and criticism that Objective-C includes C.
You must keep an open mind - There are an infinite number of different ways to solve every programming problem. Many programming languages and reusable software libraries use different approaches to solve common problems. There is a good chance that Objective-C and Cocoa use a substantially different approach from other languages and frameworks you may have used. That doesn't make either approach better or worse automatically. Every commercial software development technology has advantages in at least some cases or the technology would not exist. Cocoa is renowned for enabling very high programmer productivity without constraining the set of problems that can be solved, but programmer's opinions will always vary and software development environments are subject to aesthetic judgments irrespective of abstract technical merit. Many programmers are enthralled by Objective-C and Cocoa. You might be enthralled too. Or, you may never like Objective-C and Cocoa from an aesthetic standpoint, and there isn't really anything anyone can do to change that without affecting the aesthetics for others.
My employer offers optional 9/80 schedules. I estimate that 90% of the employees voluntarily choose 9/80. It is great to have at lest 26 three day weekends every year. When holidays fall on Monday, you may get a 4 day weekend.
The off-Friday is well respected by management. The managers generally don't come in either.
An off-Friday is a great time for banking, appointments, the start of vacation, volunteering in your kids' school, etc.
Most people who choose the 5/40 schedule do so because they need to be home early to meet kids at the school bus or because the spouse works a regular schedule and they want to match schedules.
Flexibility is always good. We have core hours from 10:00 to 3:00. Some people come in very early and leave at 3:00 to minimize the time kids are home alone. It can save a lot of child care costs. Others like me regularly come in at 10:00 and leave at 7:00.
Read James Carville's book: "We're Right, They're Wrong : A Progressive Program for the Millennium"
He agrees with you. He is also wrong on every point.
The U.S. Federal Highway System is an abomination. It destroyed inner cities. It damaged our culture. It destroyed rail roads which had to develop and maintain infrastructure on their own under the burden of oppressive regulation at the same time the federal government subsidized the competition (busses, trucks, highways). The government is constantly building roads to nowhere. Look up Robert Byrd sometime. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=Robert+Byrd+highway&ns0=1
Look-up Tennessee Valley Authority and its role in the New Orleans levies.
http://www.nashvilleistalking.com/node/90474
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=Tennessee+Valley+Authority&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&redirs=0
Do you want to see what national health care will look like? Look at the Veterans Administration Hospital system.
How about the War on Poverty? Answer more people impoverished after it in 1980 than before it in 1964.
Who do you sue when the government screws you over ?
By definition, the bigger the government, the less free you are.
Name one government program ever that was an unmitigated success.
There is a patent that explains how to radically increase the efficiency of compressed air energy storage.
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5832728/description.html
The key it to preserve the heat energy of compression. Most air compressors have multiple stages and cool the air in-between stages. This throws away a lot of useful energy, but they do it because otherwise the compressed air would be hot enough to melt iron.
There is a simple solution. Use wet air. The heat energy of compression is used to change the sate of water from liquid to steam. The resulting temperature of the steam/air mix is low enough for safe and easy storage in insulated pressure vessels. Whether air expands in the engine (or because of a leak in the pressure vessel), the steam returns to harmless water.
A combines steam air engine is vastly more efficient than air alone! Steam Punk indeed.