Pissed because p3d0 made a valid point? Fine, forget the inflammatory wording and concentrate on the content: there might be some traumas that aren't constructive or character building. Sometimes, bad shit just happens, without any sort of silver lining. Would you look down on someone for needing help coping and finding it in a treatment like this?
As much as I appreciate Pandora's ambitions, their recommendation system is far from ideal. I can only tolerate Pandora radio when I'm in a real funk where I don't want to listen to anything in my collection, and even then, it never takes long for the database to actually offend me with its poor recommendations. The flaws come up more in some genres than others; one of my biggest gripes is that a lot of the harder music doesn't seem to be labelled and categorized by anyone who actually is a fan of hard rock. Rather, it seems like after a certain threshold, whoever's categorizing it throws their hands up and says,"It's all just noise to me!" and just throws the crap and the good together willy nilly.
Also, the "Add Music to This Station" functionality is really poorly implemented. It seems to treat each seed seperately and just rotate through which seed's recommendations it's pulling recommendations from, rather than doing anything sensible like finding common themes and traits among your favorite artists all together and then basing recommendations off the pooled knowledge. I can understand some people liking the current system (particularly fans who stick to one genre), but I'd been hoping for a way to tell the system,"All your recommendations for [band] suck, pay more attention to the aspects [band] shares with [other band]".
...which isn't to say that last.fm's popularity-based system doesn't also hold annoyances. If you like a single band that's part of a larger scene, but don't like the rest of the scene, you just get flooded with crap from that scene no matter where you turn (for values of "scene" spanning everything from cliquish sub-genre to country of origin to decade of origin).
Basically all automated recommendation systems suck at this point and I'll never find good new music ever. DX
I'm afraid I didn't have a working camera at the time I spotted it, though I've been kicking myself since for not trying to borrow someone else's. I'd not seen anything like it before, and haven't seen any since, so it could have been a one-off mutation that didn't survive or a stowaway from another region (seems likelier since there are various blue-legged grasshoppers in the midwest, though the rest of the coloring, size, and markings were still strange). Still, I'll be sure to make some sort of documentation if I ever see an odd critter again.
A few years ago, when I was babysitting the neighbor's kid, I spotted an odd grashopper in the street. It was larger than any of the species I've seen up here before (Pacific Northwest), nearly four inches long, and mottled grey in a way that matched the asphalt pretty closely, with bright blue on its hind legs. It stayed very still for the most part, but occasionally walked a few inches before stopping again (I'm talking over a span of a few hours). Getting closer revealed that it looked like it was sucking on the road itself (or maybe some of the lichens within? I dunno). Now I spent much of my childhood chasing and catching grasshoppers in this same area, so this quite fascinated me and I wondered if there wasn't some urban offshoot of Orthoptera I hadn't previously known about. I let the bug be, but resolved to scour the web for information on it. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be found. No matching descriptions, and certainly no pictures. It didn't occur to me until much later that it may have been an as yet undocumented species.
This is all to say, it is about damn time we had something like the Encyclopedia of Life. Wikis are great to a certain point, but an organized project with funding, set on being as comprehensive as possible? Sign. me. up.
I haven't seen anyone here advocating that people deny themselves any and all sexual release (unless I'm misinterpreting your parent), just suggestions that partnered sex and all the entanglements it involves can be avoided without great health consequence for at least a few years. If you have studies that prove otherwise, I would be fascinated to see them.
You've stated the point far better than I ever could (every attempt I've made to write an argument has come out as preachy dreck and been deleted immediately). I'm still trying to figure out the logic behind the suggestions to send prostitutes up (because increased life support requirements and sending up civilians and that would make things less complicated...?)
True that. "American cheese" == bland crappy cheddar. I don't know what people were thinking.
As for fantastic cheeses made in America, though, I'm a few hours' drive from the place that makes the best bleu cheese in the world. I remember when they first got that distinction a few years back. Oh, the French competitors were pissed. Unfortunately, it's also so sought after that I still haven't tasted it, regardless of how close I am.
Except that we slid back to a little worse than we are now in the era of McCarthyism, and then bounced back to something more reasonable in later generations. I'm not saying that there's not danger or that we shouldn't be ever-vigilant, but I can't help carrying a (probably silly) hope that the system our forefathers built might actually help prevent the slide into complete fascism you speak of.
Ah, I wish I had mod points for you. Unfortunately, most posts regarding discrimination I've seen on/. get more knee-jerk defensiveness than honest consideration, but maybe you'll get different?
Sometimes I wonder if the focus on keeping womens' numbers in tech equal isn't a misguided attempt at attacking a symptom of a larger problem in education. I can understand a desire to get different sorts of minds and thinking styles tackling the same problem in any science, and that a large cross-section of brain types would probably involve more balanced gender statistics, but wouldn't it be better to cater to different learning styles instead of enforcing aid programs and quotas with the hope that the simple presence of more women will magically alter things? Most tech education is currently heavily geared toward independent kinesthetic learners. Tinkerers. And while it's true that they may have a natural strength in these fields, I don't think we should underestimate the ways a more "right-brained" individual could bring in different perspectives, ideas, and innovation. And I think an easy solution to test would be to teach to different learnign styles. Social learners, visual lingual learners, aural learners. They're all pretty much left out to dry by all the current common methods. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to present this to a school board without it getting spun as some new way of making school easier for girls and harder for boys. Oh well, maybe we'll evolve enough to figure it all out someday.
I'd also like to point out that he said "A single volcano can have higher carbon dioxide (among other pollutants) output than all of human society on a yearly basis" (emphasis mine). Bringing up average yearly emissions in no way negates the possibility of a single instance he's talking about, particularly when the timespan accounted for in that average aren't even mentioned.
I don't see that any of these "alternative" search engines offer fixes to Google's current shortcomings (or at least the ones I run into). Personally, I can't wait til there's the Wayback Machine's archives are searchable by text rather than just domain. Hell, I'd even be appreciative if you could search for parts of domains. I can't overstate how often I'm driven crazy by remembering something from a site I saw long ago and not being able to refresh my memory because the site either went down or fell out of Google's listings.
Don't know what area your girlfriend's from, but there is... weirdness cocerning the Chinese satellite imagery. I'm finishing up a term of school at a university in Shanghai now, and since there's still no streetmap info in Google maps, I decided to find my school by satellite so I could show my family in America where I'm staying. The images of Shanghai are high quality because it's such a big city, but it's weird because some of the school's buildings are just missing. If you look at the area I've zoomed to here, and you look at that big flat looking lot of space south of the swimming pool? There are two big buildings there. One about as wide as the pool and parrallel to the street, running the length of the lot, and another of about the same size just above that row of little buildings at the bottom. To my knowledge, these aren't sensitive areas at all; the one directly south of the pool is the international student center, primarily housing a small internet lab, some ping pong tables, and some exercise equipment. I'll grant the possibility that the satellite image was taken just before construction started (and we were told this student center was new), but that doesn't leave a whole bunch of time between when the trees got good and green last spring (as they are in these pictures copyrighted 2006) and the beginning of September when the buildings were fully set up for us. I'm not saying anything shady's going on, it's just... strange.
Since when does chocolate have a significant amount of caffeiene? Maybe you're confusing it with Theobromine? There are some conflicting accounts regarding caffeine in chocolate, but I'm inclined to believe the info on that page mostly because trying to drink coffee (even when it's been diluted to hell and back with milk and syrups from the local barista) starts to give me a headache after just a couple of ounces, whereas eating a large amount of dark chocolate at once makes me feel relaxed and kind of floaty (probably more due to the subsequent buildup of Anandamide than the Theobromine itself.)
Pfft, you don't chew willowbark, you make it into a tea.
And the only reason eating moldy bread won't necessarily cure your infection is because mold != penicillin, but you probably know that and were just being facetious.
I'll concede that sometimes the inactive ingredients of a pill affect how it's delivered to the system, most often in terms of longer time-release dosages, but I'm not sure why you're taking such snark with the concept of people self-medicating (and with substances that aren't in their blister-packaged mass manufactured forms!). It happens all the time, and with the exception of a handful of idiots, most people manage to not kill themselves.
In some nursing positions, men simply wouldn't be welcome. My mother is currently a self-employed RN (though paid through the state) doing in-home care for a now 5-year-old boy. There are three other nurses working on this case, all female. Male applicants would be turned away; the parents wouldn't trust a strange man in their house with their boys while they were asleep. Most of the more private (and therefore abuse-prone) positions are staffed exclusively and selectively by women because that is how the employers and clients like it. There are still plenty of opportunities for male nurses in hospitals (and indeed, those positions tend to pay better as well), but a lot of nursing work takes places in circumstances that employers must be more sensitive and careful about staffing, which tends to == no men. It's sexist and unfair, surely, but it's the truth of how it works.
Rather late reply here, but I always thought the W stood for "waist" and the L for "leg". Which still doesn't account for ass height, as you put it, but makes a bit more sense of what's measured.
Danica McKellar does indeed rock, and while I think she's generally a very cool role-model in terms of women in math, the inclusion of that false "0.9999... = 1" proof in her tutoring section always annoys the ever-living snot out of me. I'm not even particularly into math, but even I can spot the slip in 10x -x = 9x. I've seen the proof around enough that I figure maybe I'm just out of the loop on some old math professors' joke, or something, but it still seems a particularly stupid/cruel thing to subject one's students to.
Depends entirely on which kind you get. From my own experience, I hate the ones labelled 'full spectrum' or 'daylight', but then I also hate conventional bulbs over about 80 watts and anything else that tries to play off overly bright yellow-white light as 'natural'. Some of my favorite bulbs ever are the lower-watt compact fluorescents with a soft blue-white light, the same ones I always hear other people complaining about getting headaches from. But then, I'm kind of a Morlock when it comes to these things and have been highly confused by posts about keeping a light on next to the computer at all times. Don't... don't your monitors give off light?
As an Oregonian, I can vouch for the efficacy of the system and personally think it's great. We even have those fancy new ballots where you have to draw a line connecting the ends of an arrow to make a selection. However, there are some people who have brought up the very valid concern that this removes our right for a truly anonymous vote, which is one of the most basic and important protections of voting in the first place. Indeed, both my printed name and signature has been right there on the outside of the envelopes containing my ballots for the past four years I've been old enough to vote. This obviously hasn't deterred me so far, but the question remains, is this concession practical in the long run? The numbers speak well for the system's good points, but sometimes I wonder if failing to stand firm on this founding principle will bite us in the ass someday.
I think that's a very good point to make against concerns of some sudden horrible epidemic, but I think there/is/ some potential for concern when it comes to people trying to live somewhere alien long-term. While it's likely we would kill all manner of alien life on contact to start with, sticking around would provide all sorts of opportunities for lifeforms to adapt. Rather than just having a stark difference between our conditions and theirs, there would be border areas, say, between our living space and their natural habitat, where the disparity between conditions would be less stark and microscopic life forms would be better able to survive and mutate, and be progressively more able to survie in conditions like our own. Now there's no reason to think this would occur much differently than it does here, where some lifeforms become harmful diseases and others take on a more subdued, symbiotic role, but the fact of the matter is that we've never encountered it and really don't know what would happen. One way or another, though, it's obvious that encountering alien lifeforms will be a tremendous learning experience. Hope I'm still around when it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Pissed because p3d0 made a valid point? Fine, forget the inflammatory wording and concentrate on the content: there might be some traumas that aren't constructive or character building. Sometimes, bad shit just happens, without any sort of silver lining. Would you look down on someone for needing help coping and finding it in a treatment like this?
Drinking coffee tastes a bit like drinking unknowned charcoaled stuff (similar to that Korean tea made from roasted barley IMO)...
Correction: Korean barley tea tastes like Cheerios. Hot liquid Cheerios.
As much as I appreciate Pandora's ambitions, their recommendation system is far from ideal. I can only tolerate Pandora radio when I'm in a real funk where I don't want to listen to anything in my collection, and even then, it never takes long for the database to actually offend me with its poor recommendations. The flaws come up more in some genres than others; one of my biggest gripes is that a lot of the harder music doesn't seem to be labelled and categorized by anyone who actually is a fan of hard rock. Rather, it seems like after a certain threshold, whoever's categorizing it throws their hands up and says,"It's all just noise to me!" and just throws the crap and the good together willy nilly.
Also, the "Add Music to This Station" functionality is really poorly implemented. It seems to treat each seed seperately and just rotate through which seed's recommendations it's pulling recommendations from, rather than doing anything sensible like finding common themes and traits among your favorite artists all together and then basing recommendations off the pooled knowledge. I can understand some people liking the current system (particularly fans who stick to one genre), but I'd been hoping for a way to tell the system,"All your recommendations for [band] suck, pay more attention to the aspects [band] shares with [other band]".
...which isn't to say that last.fm's popularity-based system doesn't also hold annoyances. If you like a single band that's part of a larger scene, but don't like the rest of the scene, you just get flooded with crap from that scene no matter where you turn (for values of "scene" spanning everything from cliquish sub-genre to country of origin to decade of origin).
Basically all automated recommendation systems suck at this point and I'll never find good new music ever. DX
I'm afraid I didn't have a working camera at the time I spotted it, though I've been kicking myself since for not trying to borrow someone else's. I'd not seen anything like it before, and haven't seen any since, so it could have been a one-off mutation that didn't survive or a stowaway from another region (seems likelier since there are various blue-legged grasshoppers in the midwest, though the rest of the coloring, size, and markings were still strange). Still, I'll be sure to make some sort of documentation if I ever see an odd critter again.
A few years ago, when I was babysitting the neighbor's kid, I spotted an odd grashopper in the street. It was larger than any of the species I've seen up here before (Pacific Northwest), nearly four inches long, and mottled grey in a way that matched the asphalt pretty closely, with bright blue on its hind legs. It stayed very still for the most part, but occasionally walked a few inches before stopping again (I'm talking over a span of a few hours). Getting closer revealed that it looked like it was sucking on the road itself (or maybe some of the lichens within? I dunno). Now I spent much of my childhood chasing and catching grasshoppers in this same area, so this quite fascinated me and I wondered if there wasn't some urban offshoot of Orthoptera I hadn't previously known about. I let the bug be, but resolved to scour the web for information on it. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be found. No matching descriptions, and certainly no pictures. It didn't occur to me until much later that it may have been an as yet undocumented species.
This is all to say, it is about damn time we had something like the Encyclopedia of Life. Wikis are great to a certain point, but an organized project with funding, set on being as comprehensive as possible? Sign. me. up.
[...]Anthropomorphic Global Warming[...]
That is easily the best typo/Freudian slip I've seen in months. Good show.
I haven't seen anyone here advocating that people deny themselves any and all sexual release (unless I'm misinterpreting your parent), just suggestions that partnered sex and all the entanglements it involves can be avoided without great health consequence for at least a few years. If you have studies that prove otherwise, I would be fascinated to see them.
You've stated the point far better than I ever could (every attempt I've made to write an argument has come out as preachy dreck and been deleted immediately). I'm still trying to figure out the logic behind the suggestions to send prostitutes up (because increased life support requirements and sending up civilians and that would make things less complicated...?)
But Edison Hate Future.
True that. "American cheese" == bland crappy cheddar. I don't know what people were thinking.
As for fantastic cheeses made in America, though, I'm a few hours' drive from the place that makes the best bleu cheese in the world . I remember when they first got that distinction a few years back. Oh, the French competitors were pissed. Unfortunately, it's also so sought after that I still haven't tasted it, regardless of how close I am.
Except that we slid back to a little worse than we are now in the era of McCarthyism, and then bounced back to something more reasonable in later generations. I'm not saying that there's not danger or that we shouldn't be ever-vigilant, but I can't help carrying a (probably silly) hope that the system our forefathers built might actually help prevent the slide into complete fascism you speak of.
Ah, I wish I had mod points for you. Unfortunately, most posts regarding discrimination I've seen on /. get more knee-jerk defensiveness than honest consideration, but maybe you'll get different?
Sometimes I wonder if the focus on keeping womens' numbers in tech equal isn't a misguided attempt at attacking a symptom of a larger problem in education. I can understand a desire to get different sorts of minds and thinking styles tackling the same problem in any science, and that a large cross-section of brain types would probably involve more balanced gender statistics, but wouldn't it be better to cater to different learning styles instead of enforcing aid programs and quotas with the hope that the simple presence of more women will magically alter things? Most tech education is currently heavily geared toward independent kinesthetic learners. Tinkerers. And while it's true that they may have a natural strength in these fields, I don't think we should underestimate the ways a more "right-brained" individual could bring in different perspectives, ideas, and innovation. And I think an easy solution to test would be to teach to different learnign styles. Social learners, visual lingual learners, aural learners. They're all pretty much left out to dry by all the current common methods. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to present this to a school board without it getting spun as some new way of making school easier for girls and harder for boys. Oh well, maybe we'll evolve enough to figure it all out someday.
I'd also like to point out that he said "A single volcano can have higher carbon dioxide (among other pollutants) output than all of human society on a yearly basis" (emphasis mine). Bringing up average yearly emissions in no way negates the possibility of a single instance he's talking about, particularly when the timespan accounted for in that average aren't even mentioned.
It has been used for hundreds of years by women because they thought dilated pupils make them look "sexy".
:P
Probably made their dates look nicer, too.
...OR, maybe she could be in low light and looking into the distance? Geez, Occam's razor goes right out the window with you folks sometimes.
I don't see that any of these "alternative" search engines offer fixes to Google's current shortcomings (or at least the ones I run into). Personally, I can't wait til there's the Wayback Machine's archives are searchable by text rather than just domain. Hell, I'd even be appreciative if you could search for parts of domains. I can't overstate how often I'm driven crazy by remembering something from a site I saw long ago and not being able to refresh my memory because the site either went down or fell out of Google's listings.
Don't know what area your girlfriend's from, but there is... weirdness cocerning the Chinese satellite imagery. I'm finishing up a term of school at a university in Shanghai now, and since there's still no streetmap info in Google maps, I decided to find my school by satellite so I could show my family in America where I'm staying. The images of Shanghai are high quality because it's such a big city, but it's weird because some of the school's buildings are just missing. If you look at the area I've zoomed to here, and you look at that big flat looking lot of space south of the swimming pool? There are two big buildings there. One about as wide as the pool and parrallel to the street, running the length of the lot, and another of about the same size just above that row of little buildings at the bottom. To my knowledge, these aren't sensitive areas at all; the one directly south of the pool is the international student center, primarily housing a small internet lab, some ping pong tables, and some exercise equipment. I'll grant the possibility that the satellite image was taken just before construction started (and we were told this student center was new), but that doesn't leave a whole bunch of time between when the trees got good and green last spring (as they are in these pictures copyrighted 2006) and the beginning of September when the buildings were fully set up for us. I'm not saying anything shady's going on, it's just... strange.
Since when does chocolate have a significant amount of caffeiene? Maybe you're confusing it with Theobromine? There are some conflicting accounts regarding caffeine in chocolate, but I'm inclined to believe the info on that page mostly because trying to drink coffee (even when it's been diluted to hell and back with milk and syrups from the local barista) starts to give me a headache after just a couple of ounces, whereas eating a large amount of dark chocolate at once makes me feel relaxed and kind of floaty (probably more due to the subsequent buildup of Anandamide than the Theobromine itself.)
Pfft, you don't chew willowbark, you make it into a tea. And the only reason eating moldy bread won't necessarily cure your infection is because mold != penicillin, but you probably know that and were just being facetious. I'll concede that sometimes the inactive ingredients of a pill affect how it's delivered to the system, most often in terms of longer time-release dosages, but I'm not sure why you're taking such snark with the concept of people self-medicating (and with substances that aren't in their blister-packaged mass manufactured forms!). It happens all the time, and with the exception of a handful of idiots, most people manage to not kill themselves.
In some nursing positions, men simply wouldn't be welcome. My mother is currently a self-employed RN (though paid through the state) doing in-home care for a now 5-year-old boy. There are three other nurses working on this case, all female. Male applicants would be turned away; the parents wouldn't trust a strange man in their house with their boys while they were asleep. Most of the more private (and therefore abuse-prone) positions are staffed exclusively and selectively by women because that is how the employers and clients like it. There are still plenty of opportunities for male nurses in hospitals (and indeed, those positions tend to pay better as well), but a lot of nursing work takes places in circumstances that employers must be more sensitive and careful about staffing, which tends to == no men. It's sexist and unfair, surely, but it's the truth of how it works.
Rather late reply here, but I always thought the W stood for "waist" and the L for "leg". Which still doesn't account for ass height, as you put it, but makes a bit more sense of what's measured.
Danica McKellar does indeed rock, and while I think she's generally a very cool role-model in terms of women in math, the inclusion of that false "0.9999... = 1" proof in her tutoring section always annoys the ever-living snot out of me. I'm not even particularly into math, but even I can spot the slip in 10x -x = 9x. I've seen the proof around enough that I figure maybe I'm just out of the loop on some old math professors' joke, or something, but it still seems a particularly stupid/cruel thing to subject one's students to.
Depends entirely on which kind you get. From my own experience, I hate the ones labelled 'full spectrum' or 'daylight', but then I also hate conventional bulbs over about 80 watts and anything else that tries to play off overly bright yellow-white light as 'natural'. Some of my favorite bulbs ever are the lower-watt compact fluorescents with a soft blue-white light, the same ones I always hear other people complaining about getting headaches from. But then, I'm kind of a Morlock when it comes to these things and have been highly confused by posts about keeping a light on next to the computer at all times. Don't... don't your monitors give off light?
As an Oregonian, I can vouch for the efficacy of the system and personally think it's great. We even have those fancy new ballots where you have to draw a line connecting the ends of an arrow to make a selection. However, there are some people who have brought up the very valid concern that this removes our right for a truly anonymous vote, which is one of the most basic and important protections of voting in the first place. Indeed, both my printed name and signature has been right there on the outside of the envelopes containing my ballots for the past four years I've been old enough to vote. This obviously hasn't deterred me so far, but the question remains, is this concession practical in the long run? The numbers speak well for the system's good points, but sometimes I wonder if failing to stand firm on this founding principle will bite us in the ass someday.
I think that's a very good point to make against concerns of some sudden horrible epidemic, but I think there /is/ some potential for concern when it comes to people trying to live somewhere alien long-term. While it's likely we would kill all manner of alien life on contact to start with, sticking around would provide all sorts of opportunities for lifeforms to adapt. Rather than just having a stark difference between our conditions and theirs, there would be border areas, say, between our living space and their natural habitat, where the disparity between conditions would be less stark and microscopic life forms would be better able to survive and mutate, and be progressively more able to survie in conditions like our own. Now there's no reason to think this would occur much differently than it does here, where some lifeforms become harmful diseases and others take on a more subdued, symbiotic role, but the fact of the matter is that we've never encountered it and really don't know what would happen. One way or another, though, it's obvious that encountering alien lifeforms will be a tremendous learning experience. Hope I'm still around when it happens.