Kind of off topic, but just a few days ago I reasoned exactly the same way you did, and bought the 2.4 GHz macbook. Will probably upgrade the RAM from crucial one of these days.
I was contemplating the black macbook, but after seeing how badly fingerprint and oily-hand smudges showed up against it on the store model, I decided to stick with the white model.
Hear hear, I wrote almost the exact same post as you elsewhere in this thread.
Back in high school I worked as a mechanic, only doing tires and oil changes, as per not being ASE certified. We were a general Goodyear-associated garage, worked on all makes/models of vehicles. I remember mechanics sometimes knowing obscure pieces of information about various subtle failures of specific make/model/years. But not all mechanics knew all those things.
I agree 100% regarding using a Honda specialist if I'm replacing my Honda transmission (which I did back in 2000). I learned the hard way by having a local garage change my timing belt, when I went to the Honda garage, the Honda people immediately knew that it was installed too tight by how it sounded. I was amazed because I didn't even tell them it had been recently replaced. Right then and there I realized the value of a brand specialist.
But even having performed several hundred oil changes, I don't change my own oil now. For awhile when I worked on an Air Force base, we had an accessible auto shop where you could rent a lift fo $3/hour, so that was handy. But now, it's way too much a pain to slide under the car without a lift, and also dispose of the oil. When I add the price of oil+filter, the minor savings of doing it myself is not worth my time or the hassle.
but in the end, I find it hard to see how an oil change could break anything else, so I do it myself now that it is out of warranty.
You'd be surprised what can go wrong from a simple oil change. Back in high school I worked as a mechanic. I wasn't ASE trained, so all I was able to do were oil changes and tires.
Check out the following things one of the mechanics did at the garage (it wasn't me):
The first thing is to set it up on the lift, and you have to know where to do it, on the pinch weld or on a support part of the frame, etc. A minivan came in for a simple oil change. So this guy set it up totally wrong on the lift, it wasn't supported by the frame, but by the outer chassis, which got totally warped as he lifted the car by that. He got fired for that move, but only because that was his third royal screw up in 3 days.
The screw up this guy made before that was also from an oil change. The guy drained the transmission fluid, put in 4 quarts of oil, never checked the dipstick. (This is ridiculous because you never just assume it's 4 quarts, you always check the dipstick for the proper fill level). The owner drove the car a little ways down the road, then called from a pay phone to say his car stopped working. Brilliant. I have no idea if the transmission was damaged from running empty.
The screw-up prior to that, a car hood's hydraulic prop rod wasn't holding the hood up, so he wedged his hammer in there to hold it. When he was done, he just slammed the hood shut without removing the hammer, causing major hood damage.
I myself went to change the oil on a car where the drain pan threads for the plug were totally stripped, and the previous garage that did the oil change used sealant to keep the oil from leaking out. Luckily we were able to retap the threaded hole and put in a new drainpan plug, which worked nicely.
I've also seen cars where the previous oil change mechanic put installed an entirely-wrong oil filter, possibly damaging the threaded stud that it screws into. Putting in the wrong filter can mess up oil pressure levels and other problems.
So yes, anything can go wrong from simple oil changes.
Another point is regarding going to a general garage versus a specialist that works only one one make. If a garage is just working on Hondas or Fords, they're much less likely to screw up setting it up on the lift, or they'll know that when you replace a Honda's timing belt you always replace the water pump that is right there. Or they'll know that an obscure gasket on 2003 Ford Taurus fails quite easily (I'm making this example entirely up), so they don't need to waste time tracking down the problem, etc.
I disagree. Maybe not dealers themselves, but IMHO it's much better to go to an XXXX specialist for your XXXX-make car, because they know the minute ins and outs of them.
Here's an example,. I used to use a small local auto garage many years ago up in Boston, the guy was obviously pretty skilled with cars, and knew alot (I used to work as a mechanic back in high school, and this guy impressed me). He routinely had high-end luxury cars in his small shop. I had a measly Honda Accord.
Anyway, I was about to go on a two-month road trip and brought it to him for an overall checkout. He took a look at it, then told me the engine was making a knocking sound, from what he thought was a piston rod or similar hitting the block, and the engine would most likely fail in a few weeks. He didn't even charge me for the time to put the car on the lift, check it out, etc.
I wanted a second opinion, and went to a Honda specialist garage. The guy checked out the car, said he couldn't hear anything unusual, but that the engine had the typical Honda "valve knock". He then told me to hold on, listened a bit more, and said that he could hear the timing belt was too tight. Meanwhile, the first shop had replaced the timing belt a few months ago.
This guy then immediately pointed out on my where the auto-body shop screwed up putting on a T-fitting for the windshield-washer fluid arms (he instantly recognized the non-Honda generic hood replacement), and also noticed a problem with the distributor cap that was put on by a different shop several years ago.
At that point, I realized immediately that you're trusting a mechanic to have enough experience with all cars to know the fine details of your specific car, and that itself can be worth a premium.
Reminds me of a story about my father when he was back in school.
He had a French test on verb conjugation coming up, so instead of studing he spent much time making a clever crib sheet mechanism into his watch, so that he could scroll through the crib sheet.
Anyway, while 'preparing', he kept rewriting the crib sheet smaller and smaller to fit more stuff on it. Ironically, when he went to take the test, he already knew the material from all his recopying that he didn't even need to cheat.
I find it amazing that this relationship (sun spots vs agricultural output) is dismissed so easily by the current anti-CO2 crowd.
Are you kidding? It is this very observation (solar activity vs earth temperature) that has led scientists to conclude that global warming is caused by another factor beyond solar output.
Scientists haven't used wheat prices per se, but there exist hundreds of years of sunspot data from astronomers around the world.
Increased solar activity leads directly to increased terrestrial temperatures, and the correlation is quite good for all the sunspot and temperature data for the past few hundred years. Except the recent few decades, where terrestrial temperature is increasing at a far greater rate than what it should be for the solar output.
What happens when an asteroid hits the sun? Does it splash? Or does it vaporize before it hits the sun?
The consequences of the asteroid hitting the sun depend strongly on whether there is attached to that asteroid a miniature embryo created from a clipping of Superman's hair.
Regarding the sun's magnetic field, it can be measured by observing the Zeeman splitting of the appropriate spectral lines. I don't know how accurately solar physicists can measure internal magnetic fields, but I assume they can look at lines of heavier elements within the core, versus the predominantly hydrogen/helium in the corona, to make a depth-dependent magnetogram.
Well, the interesting thing is that in no primary in the US history has the outcome ever been so close. Obama has certainly won the primary, but just barely.
The party is truly split between the two candidates, and for the Obama team to take a small winning margin and run all the way to the general election while ignoring Hillary and keeping her out of the team, it will majorly turn off roughly half of the Democratic Party. The Obama team just wants Hillary to go away, but when she has the support of half the party, how can she just give up and disappear? That would be irresponsible to her supporters.
Another argument that the Obama team has been making for the past few months is that Clinton is ruining Obama's chances in the general election by keeping the election going, and that she's been mean to him with her campaign. The sad thing is that what Hillary has thrown at Obama is nothing compared to what the Republicans will throw at him starting now. If they cannot stand Hillary's attacks, they're going to crumple under McCain and the whole Republican propaganda machine.
It certainly is an interesting time in politics, seeing such a split in the Democratic party. Hopefully it can come together, but it won't happen if Obama just runs fully with it, leaving HIllary in the dust. Or, as you put it, to "make this woman go away".
I believe all NASA (and I believe US govt funded) astronomical research data that isn't classified is eventually put into the public domain. Eg, all HST data.
But every mission and every observation has a PI and a team of researchers that have proposed that project, have done a huge amount of homework on why they chose the targets they did, what they hope to observe, and how they will do analysis. The PI's of the project are thereby given exclusive access to their data for a period of time. IIRC, for Hubble it's one year.
This period of exclusivity is to allow them to get the credit for their hard work in choosing the observation, and to prevent being scooped by fellow academics. It's like a very short-lived patent of sorts.
IMHO, a period of one year for astro data is a perfectly valid way to satisfy all parties involved. It also puts pressure on the researchers to get their asses in gear and publish, before someone can get at their data. But it lets everybody else use the data for their own purposes after the expiry date.
Of course there is the question of the data storage and retrieval service, and all the calibrations that need to be done on the raw data, and the effective HOWTO procedures for such calibration. Much of this is available, and for active projects there are help desks. Eg, for each of the sensors on the HST there is a specific help desk to provide assistance explaining how to get and process the data. But for older missions, there are no funds to provide these services. But the data should be there, somewhere. But you're probably on your own to calibrate it properly (or at least find older users of said data that can help you).
Back in 1999, a guy at my old workplace still used a TRS-80 Model 100 for field testing portable RS-232 devices he was building. And they had a huge budget, yet the TRS-80 was the best and easiest thing to enable rapid field testing.
What are you talking about? Even OpenBSD has security-related documents and manuals. While OpenBSD is super safe for the out-of-the-box install, any time you open a port or enable a daemon, you are exposing yourself to some kind of vulnerability if you don't know exactly what you're doing.
Mac OS X is the same way. If you're enabling advanced services and whatnot, as per the experts this manual is aimed at, you need to know what you're doing. This manual addresses that.
Avebury's circle is larger in area, but Stonehenge has a much denser organization of sarsen stones, and just looks much more majestic IMHO. Additionally, Stonehenge has actual henge stones (ie, the top crosspieces), which originally circled the whole structure but only a few still remain intact.
Also, the Stonehenge sarsens were transported from their quarries several hundred miles away, which is pretty amazing and makes you seriously wonder what the hell was so special about this site to justify such a long haul.
But maybe I'm biased, as my wife and I just visited Stonehenge about two months ago on our honeymoon.
It's primarily the boundary conditions that are leading to the 3-torus idea.
A torus gives periodic boundary conditions in two dimensions. Periodic boundarty conditions for one axis can be thought of as curling a piece of paper around to make a cylinder. For someone on this paper, picture running on a soccer field, and if you run out of bounds on the left side you pop back in in the right side, aka pacman's tunnel. To make a torus, you'd need to wrap the top exposed circular edge to the bottom circular edge, in a donut way. You'd need to bend the paper to do this, so you'd really need something like a rubber membrane. But once you connect this, then you have a soccer field where when you kick a ball behind your opponent's goal, it comes out from behind your goal. That is 2-D boundary conditions. The simplest shape that can manifest these boundary conditions of a two-dimensional system is a torus, which exists in 3-D.
Now extend this one step further. Take a 3-D space, and add periodic boundary conditions for left/right, back/front, and also top/down. This is the 3-torus that is discussed in the article. Someone confined to this 3-D surface has a full three independent degrees of freedom for movement, but the manifestation of this shape would look more complicated in four or five dimensions. But that is what is being talked about here.
Of course in quantum cosmology there are other dimensions, such as the warped 5th dimension of the Randall-Sundrum model , which may or may not be periodic, and add to very peculiar topologies of the universe.
That would depend on how much one's improved sight actually helps them shoot. Ie, what is the limiting factor in sharpshooting, is it sight, or the plethora of other factors that requires steadily aiming and firing a gun. Does going beyond 20/20 actually help out significantly beyond the other factors?
Right, and since Larry Leadfoot tends to drive faster than the legal speed limit, he may as well just steal his next automobile instead of purchasing it, seeing as he already broke the law regarding speed limit.
Wished I could mod you up strictly for your mention of the late Billy Preston, one of the greatest, and IMHO underestimated, keyboardists. Here's a cool clip of him in a live performance playing one of the funkiest songs ever : Outa Space. Sound quality not so great, but damn, that's some pure raw energetic soul funk straight from the source. (And just to tie this way off-topic comment back to something remotely related to 'news for nerds', you might recognize this tune from the Intel bunny-suit cleanroom-dancing commercial about a decade ago).
You mean, like the degassing event of Lake Nyos , where approximately one cubic kilometer of CO2 gas stored in the lake bottom was suddenly released, triggered possibly by a seismic event? The gas suffocated and killed 1700 people, along with numerous cattle and trees.
Besides, carbon sequestering doesn't solve any problems, it just postpones it for a future generation to deal with. We could exert ourselves now and work at carbon-neutral energy generation, but we'll have to fight against fossil-fuel powers thatwill fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo.
For analog electronics, get the Lab Manual that accompanies AoE, then invest in a breadboard, a variety pack of resistors, capacitors, some transistors and diodes, and some op-amps. The expensive part, though, would be a multimeter and oscilloscope, but you can find cheapy ones on ebay. Digital electronics you can do the same, but probably need to buy a bunch more glue logic components.
The Lab Manual is basically what they use in Physics 123 at Harvard, the course originally taught by Horowitz and Hill, where their course notes eventually evolved into AoE.
I took Physics 123 back in 1999 or so, Paul Horowitz was still there at the time, But Hill had left and was replaced by Thomas Hayes (the other author of the Lab Manual). It was an amazing class. There were non-science majors in there who had zero electronics or engineering knowledge, but were doing great.
After something like 4 weeks, the whole class had to build a device that took audio from a radio, encoded it into PWM digital pulses, transmitted it via an IR transmitter across the room, receive w/ an IR receiver, decode the PWM back into audio, and play it through a speaker. No schematics for the subsections were provided, and we were able to do it successfully in 3 hours. Again, this coming from a group of people most of whom had little prior electronics knowledge.
The second half of the course is super cool too, it's digital electrons, and you start w/ simple glue logic, but then work your way up and at the end of the course you wire together a whole 68k computer (using the 68008 CPU) from individual components. That was the coolest part, IMHO. You program w/ a little keypad, use hex-LED displays for address and data bus, and write little programs. Some people even went further with their computer and hooked up two digital-analog converters to connect to an oscilloscope in XY mode, and made a Pac-Man game (that happened before the year I took the class).
So in a few months people with zero electronics knowledge make a wireless audio transmitter/receiver, and an entire digital computer, all using essentially the AoE student manual. Amazing course of study.
I can't help you out with the MDI thing, but here are two ideas that may help you become more productive with launching the apps you want (ie, less fumbling with the Dock and Finder).
First - check out Quicksilver . It's kind of a dynamic shortcut to your useful applications, files, music, webpages, etc. Many techie OS X gurus can't live without it. There are even youtube tutorials for it.
Second - if you want something akin to Windows-style start menu try this. Open the Applications window in Finder. At the top of the window there's a small icon next to the Applications window title. Drag that icon into the dock, to the right of the separator. With one click you now have instant access to your Applications directory.
However, if that's not good enough, by right-clicking this icon instead it will show you all your Applications in a textual menu form, much like the Windows start button.
If that still isn't good enough, you can make another Useful folder with links to all your commonly-used Applications, then put this Useful folder in the dock.
There is a slow but undeniable exodus underway. To Ubuntu and Fedora go the more technically focused, to MacOS go the more user-focused.
Not necessarily. I left Windows for Linux a decade ago, but switched from Linux to OS X a few years ago. I am not alone, I know many scientists and even whole science departments switching from Linux (or SunOS) to OS X. It has nothing to do with the presence or lack of technical skills, but IMHO it's just a better OS to get shit done on. And obviously many other technically-skilled scientists agree.
Good thing they had the wisdom not to go with their original album title "Sheer Thinning and Other Delights". I think it was Zorba the Geek that gave them that advice.
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Kind of off topic, but just a few days ago I reasoned exactly the same way you did, and bought the 2.4 GHz macbook. Will probably upgrade the RAM from crucial one of these days.
I was contemplating the black macbook, but after seeing how badly fingerprint and oily-hand smudges showed up against it on the store model, I decided to stick with the white model.
Hear hear, I wrote almost the exact same post as you elsewhere in this thread.
Back in high school I worked as a mechanic, only doing tires and oil changes, as per not being ASE certified. We were a general Goodyear-associated garage, worked on all makes/models of vehicles. I remember mechanics sometimes knowing obscure pieces of information about various subtle failures of specific make/model/years. But not all mechanics knew all those things.
I agree 100% regarding using a Honda specialist if I'm replacing my Honda transmission (which I did back in 2000). I learned the hard way by having a local garage change my timing belt, when I went to the Honda garage, the Honda people immediately knew that it was installed too tight by how it sounded. I was amazed because I didn't even tell them it had been recently replaced. Right then and there I realized the value of a brand specialist.
But even having performed several hundred oil changes, I don't change my own oil now. For awhile when I worked on an Air Force base, we had an accessible auto shop where you could rent a lift fo $3/hour, so that was handy. But now, it's way too much a pain to slide under the car without a lift, and also dispose of the oil. When I add the price of oil+filter, the minor savings of doing it myself is not worth my time or the hassle.
but in the end, I find it hard to see how an oil change could break anything else, so I do it myself now that it is out of warranty.
You'd be surprised what can go wrong from a simple oil change. Back in high school I worked as a mechanic. I wasn't ASE trained, so all I was able to do were oil changes and tires.
Check out the following things one of the mechanics did at the garage (it wasn't me):
The first thing is to set it up on the lift, and you have to know where to do it, on the pinch weld or on a support part of the frame, etc. A minivan came in for a simple oil change. So this guy set it up totally wrong on the lift, it wasn't supported by the frame, but by the outer chassis, which got totally warped as he lifted the car by that. He got fired for that move, but only because that was his third royal screw up in 3 days.
The screw up this guy made before that was also from an oil change. The guy drained the transmission fluid, put in 4 quarts of oil, never checked the dipstick. (This is ridiculous because you never just assume it's 4 quarts, you always check the dipstick for the proper fill level). The owner drove the car a little ways down the road, then called from a pay phone to say his car stopped working. Brilliant. I have no idea if the transmission was damaged from running empty.
The screw-up prior to that, a car hood's hydraulic prop rod wasn't holding the hood up, so he wedged his hammer in there to hold it. When he was done, he just slammed the hood shut without removing the hammer, causing major hood damage.
I myself went to change the oil on a car where the drain pan threads for the plug were totally stripped, and the previous garage that did the oil change used sealant to keep the oil from leaking out. Luckily we were able to retap the threaded hole and put in a new drainpan plug, which worked nicely.
I've also seen cars where the previous oil change mechanic put installed an entirely-wrong oil filter, possibly damaging the threaded stud that it screws into. Putting in the wrong filter can mess up oil pressure levels and other problems.
So yes, anything can go wrong from simple oil changes.
Another point is regarding going to a general garage versus a specialist that works only one one make. If a garage is just working on Hondas or Fords, they're much less likely to screw up setting it up on the lift, or they'll know that when you replace a Honda's timing belt you always replace the water pump that is right there. Or they'll know that an obscure gasket on 2003 Ford Taurus fails quite easily (I'm making this example entirely up), so they don't need to waste time tracking down the problem, etc.
only fools get work or upgrades at the dealer.
I disagree. Maybe not dealers themselves, but IMHO it's much better to go to an XXXX specialist for your XXXX-make car, because they know the minute ins and outs of them.
Here's an example,. I used to use a small local auto garage many years ago up in Boston, the guy was obviously pretty skilled with cars, and knew alot (I used to work as a mechanic back in high school, and this guy impressed me). He routinely had high-end luxury cars in his small shop. I had a measly Honda Accord.
Anyway, I was about to go on a two-month road trip and brought it to him for an overall checkout. He took a look at it, then told me the engine was making a knocking sound, from what he thought was a piston rod or similar hitting the block, and the engine would most likely fail in a few weeks. He didn't even charge me for the time to put the car on the lift, check it out, etc.
I wanted a second opinion, and went to a Honda specialist garage. The guy checked out the car, said he couldn't hear anything unusual, but that the engine had the typical Honda "valve knock". He then told me to hold on, listened a bit more, and said that he could hear the timing belt was too tight. Meanwhile, the first shop had replaced the timing belt a few months ago.
This guy then immediately pointed out on my where the auto-body shop screwed up putting on a T-fitting for the windshield-washer fluid arms (he instantly recognized the non-Honda generic hood replacement), and also noticed a problem with the distributor cap that was put on by a different shop several years ago.
At that point, I realized immediately that you're trusting a mechanic to have enough experience with all cars to know the fine details of your specific car, and that itself can be worth a premium.
Hey, how do you know parent isn't the guy that invented it in the first place?
Reminds me of a story about my father when he was back in school.
He had a French test on verb conjugation coming up, so instead of studing he spent much time making a clever crib sheet mechanism into his watch, so that he could scroll through the crib sheet.
Anyway, while 'preparing', he kept rewriting the crib sheet smaller and smaller to fit more stuff on it. Ironically, when he went to take the test, he already knew the material from all his recopying that he didn't even need to cheat.
I find it amazing that this relationship (sun spots vs agricultural output) is dismissed so easily by the current anti-CO2 crowd.
Are you kidding? It is this very observation (solar activity vs earth temperature) that has led scientists to conclude that global warming is caused by another factor beyond solar output.
Scientists haven't used wheat prices per se, but there exist hundreds of years of sunspot data from astronomers around the world.
Increased solar activity leads directly to increased terrestrial temperatures, and the correlation is quite good for all the sunspot and temperature data for the past few hundred years. Except the recent few decades, where terrestrial temperature is increasing at a far greater rate than what it should be for the solar output.
What happens when an asteroid hits the sun? Does it splash? Or does it vaporize before it hits the sun?
The consequences of the asteroid hitting the sun depend strongly on whether there is attached to that asteroid a miniature embryo created from a clipping of Superman's hair.
Regarding the sun's magnetic field, it can be measured by observing the Zeeman splitting of the appropriate spectral lines. I don't know how accurately solar physicists can measure internal magnetic fields, but I assume they can look at lines of heavier elements within the core, versus the predominantly hydrogen/helium in the corona, to make a depth-dependent magnetogram.
It kept things interesting, and made it difficult to play a character at times.
Eg, trying to be lawful when you need to bend the rules, or trying to balance things when true neutral.
But then again, within my group as we progressed from junior high to high school, we did less mindless hacking and slashing, and more role-playing.
Well, the interesting thing is that in no primary in the US history has the outcome ever been so close. Obama has certainly won the primary, but just barely.
The party is truly split between the two candidates, and for the Obama team to take a small winning margin and run all the way to the general election while ignoring Hillary and keeping her out of the team, it will majorly turn off roughly half of the Democratic Party. The Obama team just wants Hillary to go away, but when she has the support of half the party, how can she just give up and disappear? That would be irresponsible to her supporters.
Another argument that the Obama team has been making for the past few months is that Clinton is ruining Obama's chances in the general election by keeping the election going, and that she's been mean to him with her campaign. The sad thing is that what Hillary has thrown at Obama is nothing compared to what the Republicans will throw at him starting now. If they cannot stand Hillary's attacks, they're going to crumple under McCain and the whole Republican propaganda machine.
It certainly is an interesting time in politics, seeing such a split in the Democratic party. Hopefully it can come together, but it won't happen if Obama just runs fully with it, leaving HIllary in the dust. Or, as you put it, to "make this woman go away".
I believe all NASA (and I believe US govt funded) astronomical research data that isn't classified is eventually put into the public domain. Eg, all HST data.
But every mission and every observation has a PI and a team of researchers that have proposed that project, have done a huge amount of homework on why they chose the targets they did, what they hope to observe, and how they will do analysis. The PI's of the project are thereby given exclusive access to their data for a period of time. IIRC, for Hubble it's one year.
This period of exclusivity is to allow them to get the credit for their hard work in choosing the observation, and to prevent being scooped by fellow academics. It's like a very short-lived patent of sorts.
IMHO, a period of one year for astro data is a perfectly valid way to satisfy all parties involved. It also puts pressure on the researchers to get their asses in gear and publish, before someone can get at their data. But it lets everybody else use the data for their own purposes after the expiry date.
Of course there is the question of the data storage and retrieval service, and all the calibrations that need to be done on the raw data, and the effective HOWTO procedures for such calibration. Much of this is available, and for active projects there are help desks. Eg, for each of the sensors on the HST there is a specific help desk to provide assistance explaining how to get and process the data. But for older missions, there are no funds to provide these services. But the data should be there, somewhere. But you're probably on your own to calibrate it properly (or at least find older users of said data that can help you).
Back in 1999, a guy at my old workplace still used a TRS-80 Model 100 for field testing portable RS-232 devices he was building. And they had a huge budget, yet the TRS-80 was the best and easiest thing to enable rapid field testing.
What are you talking about? Even OpenBSD has security-related documents and manuals. While OpenBSD is super safe for the out-of-the-box install, any time you open a port or enable a daemon, you are exposing yourself to some kind of vulnerability if you don't know exactly what you're doing.
Mac OS X is the same way. If you're enabling advanced services and whatnot, as per the experts this manual is aimed at, you need to know what you're doing. This manual addresses that.
But let's not call something realtime that isn't, even if it's free.
Tell me about it. I'm still miffed that my "realtime" quotes suffer latency due to the finite speed of light.
Avebury's circle is larger in area, but Stonehenge has a much denser organization of sarsen stones, and just looks much more majestic IMHO. Additionally, Stonehenge has actual henge stones (ie, the top crosspieces), which originally circled the whole structure but only a few still remain intact.
Also, the Stonehenge sarsens were transported from their quarries several hundred miles away, which is pretty amazing and makes you seriously wonder what the hell was so special about this site to justify such a long haul.
But maybe I'm biased, as my wife and I just visited Stonehenge about two months ago on our honeymoon.
It's primarily the boundary conditions that are leading to the 3-torus idea.
A torus gives periodic boundary conditions in two dimensions. Periodic boundarty conditions for one axis can be thought of as curling a piece of paper around to make a cylinder. For someone on this paper, picture running on a soccer field, and if you run out of bounds on the left side you pop back in in the right side, aka pacman's tunnel. To make a torus, you'd need to wrap the top exposed circular edge to the bottom circular edge, in a donut way. You'd need to bend the paper to do this, so you'd really need something like a rubber membrane. But once you connect this, then you have a soccer field where when you kick a ball behind your opponent's goal, it comes out from behind your goal. That is 2-D boundary conditions. The simplest shape that can manifest these boundary conditions of a two-dimensional system is a torus, which exists in 3-D.
Now extend this one step further. Take a 3-D space, and add periodic boundary conditions for left/right, back/front, and also top/down. This is the 3-torus that is discussed in the article. Someone confined to this 3-D surface has a full three independent degrees of freedom for movement, but the manifestation of this shape would look more complicated in four or five dimensions. But that is what is being talked about here.
Of course in quantum cosmology there are other dimensions, such as the warped 5th dimension of the Randall-Sundrum model , which may or may not be periodic, and add to very peculiar topologies of the universe.
That would depend on how much one's improved sight actually helps them shoot. Ie, what is the limiting factor in sharpshooting, is it sight, or the plethora of other factors that requires steadily aiming and firing a gun. Does going beyond 20/20 actually help out significantly beyond the other factors?
Right, and since Larry Leadfoot tends to drive faster than the legal speed limit, he may as well just steal his next automobile instead of purchasing it, seeing as he already broke the law regarding speed limit.
Wished I could mod you up strictly for your mention of the late Billy Preston, one of the greatest, and IMHO underestimated, keyboardists. Here's a cool clip of him in a live performance playing one of the funkiest songs ever : Outa Space. Sound quality not so great, but damn, that's some pure raw energetic soul funk straight from the source. (And just to tie this way off-topic comment back to something remotely related to 'news for nerds', you might recognize this tune from the Intel bunny-suit cleanroom-dancing commercial about a decade ago).
Look at the bright side, the iEra ended the period where everything ended in Tron.
You mean, like the degassing event of Lake Nyos , where approximately one cubic kilometer of CO2 gas stored in the lake bottom was suddenly released, triggered possibly by a seismic event? The gas suffocated and killed 1700 people, along with numerous cattle and trees.
Besides, carbon sequestering doesn't solve any problems, it just postpones it for a future generation to deal with. We could exert ourselves now and work at carbon-neutral energy generation, but we'll have to fight against fossil-fuel powers thatwill fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo.
For analog electronics, get the Lab Manual that accompanies AoE, then invest in a breadboard, a variety pack of resistors, capacitors, some transistors and diodes, and some op-amps. The expensive part, though, would be a multimeter and oscilloscope, but you can find cheapy ones on ebay. Digital electronics you can do the same, but probably need to buy a bunch more glue logic components.
The Lab Manual is basically what they use in Physics 123 at Harvard, the course originally taught by Horowitz and Hill, where their course notes eventually evolved into AoE.
I took Physics 123 back in 1999 or so, Paul Horowitz was still there at the time, But Hill had left and was replaced by Thomas Hayes (the other author of the Lab Manual). It was an amazing class. There were non-science majors in there who had zero electronics or engineering knowledge, but were doing great.
After something like 4 weeks, the whole class had to build a device that took audio from a radio, encoded it into PWM digital pulses, transmitted it via an IR transmitter across the room, receive w/ an IR receiver, decode the PWM back into audio, and play it through a speaker. No schematics for the subsections were provided, and we were able to do it successfully in 3 hours. Again, this coming from a group of people most of whom had little prior electronics knowledge.
The second half of the course is super cool too, it's digital electrons, and you start w/ simple glue logic, but then work your way up and at the end of the course you wire together a whole 68k computer (using the 68008 CPU) from individual components. That was the coolest part, IMHO. You program w/ a little keypad, use hex-LED displays for address and data bus, and write little programs. Some people even went further with their computer and hooked up two digital-analog converters to connect to an oscilloscope in XY mode, and made a Pac-Man game (that happened before the year I took the class).
So in a few months people with zero electronics knowledge make a wireless audio transmitter/receiver, and an entire digital computer, all using essentially the AoE student manual. Amazing course of study.
I can't help you out with the MDI thing, but here are two ideas that may help you become more productive with launching the apps you want (ie, less fumbling with the Dock and Finder).
First - check out Quicksilver . It's kind of a dynamic shortcut to your useful applications, files, music, webpages, etc. Many techie OS X gurus can't live without it. There are even youtube tutorials for it.
Second - if you want something akin to Windows-style start menu try this. Open the Applications window in Finder. At the top of the window there's a small icon next to the Applications window title. Drag that icon into the dock, to the right of the separator. With one click you now have instant access to your Applications directory.
However, if that's not good enough, by right-clicking this icon instead it will show you all your Applications in a textual menu form, much like the Windows start button.
If that still isn't good enough, you can make another Useful folder with links to all your commonly-used Applications, then put this Useful folder in the dock.
There is a slow but undeniable exodus underway. To Ubuntu and Fedora go the more technically focused, to MacOS go the more user-focused.
Not necessarily. I left Windows for Linux a decade ago, but switched from Linux to OS X a few years ago. I am not alone, I know many scientists and even whole science departments switching from Linux (or SunOS) to OS X. It has nothing to do with the presence or lack of technical skills, but IMHO it's just a better OS to get shit done on. And obviously many other technically-skilled scientists agree.
Good thing they had the wisdom not to go with their original album title "Sheer Thinning and Other Delights". I think it was Zorba the Geek that gave them that advice.