CodeCon, Placebos, Fear, Yoyo-hacking, Dune, etc.

doom writes "Annalee Newitz rambles about CodeCon, placebos, random numbers, fear, yoyo-hacking, Dune and more. This is what it means to be a geek: Techsploitation."

is that it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

i know /.'ers have a short attention span but 200 words of thin rambling doesnt really make an article

if i wanted articles of this level of intelectual calibre i would get my lowdown from "TechTV" or "the Screensavers"

Since when is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it such a slow day at Slashdot? Why is this dump of mental diarrhea "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"? Someone is at some geek conference, throws a bunch of sci-fi references with a couple of buzzwords and some piece about a software that doesn't work but "will do soon" and suddenly we have a truly wondrous article about how good it is to be a geek.

Erm

[cca93014]

What the fuck is this? News for 12 year olds?

Sorry to be a troll, but really.

Next on Slashdot...K1nd3rg4rt0n hax0r5!!!

This article is a splendid example of...

[purduephotog]

... what is not journalism. It's mostly a rambling trend of thought that, unfortunately, is very publishable on the internet.

"Hacking YoYos" ??? Hardly. That's not new, and it certainly wasn't invented at this conference. People (and self) have always 'modified' a yoyo when it wasn't performing well.

I won't even go into the logic the writer espouses while complaining that doctors are allowed to cause pain in the name of science. Anyone remember the 'call for volunteers' that NASA wanted to lay on their back at a negative incline for months to simulate weightlessness? That's a hell of allot more intrusive and damaging than being poked or heated.

Enough New-Age crap.

What the hell was that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what that article was about. What is CodeCon? Nevermind the shiny LED's and the yo-yo's, someone find that writer an editor. In fact, speaking of editors, how the hell did this get posted in the first place?

Oh, and for some reason, the Shmoo site is down. *goes in search of a mirror*

Re:is that it ?

[kmonsen]

There is another article on slashdot about how 50% or something of americans with net access publish their own stuff. This is an example of why this does not need to be a good thing.

I mean how many blogs with personal info do we really need?

Re:What do these have in common?

[kmonsen]

The use of placebo was a bit qute though. Like that new winXP disc is just one big shiny placebo pill. Which is kind of true.

Re:This is not good...

[AnomalyConcept]

I liked it too. When has a reporter/journalist gone to one of these conventions, and moreover, written about it? This article was a nice way to relax for a bit between classes (having a 7:30 English class), and was amusing to read. Maybe I'm not a 'true geek', but Slashdot doesn't have to just be 'news'. Sometimes I read the comments just for the 'Funny' ones to lighten up my day.

Re:$1 for a random number??? WTF?

[Eagle5596]

You should read up on chaos theory and probability before you call someone an idiot jaz. Random numbers don't exist period, even taking them from external sources is still pseudo-random generation, it just adds the further complication that you cannot control or predict how the noise will interact, and so can't guarentee that it will be uniform, the most useful sort of random number, as it can be translated into any other random number.

Furthermore, my point was not to use a pseudo-random number generator (and by the way, using a Lehmer Congruential Generator will produce better results than sampling a lava lamp for sure, never use rand(), it has horrible properties), my point was this:

Given a source of noise, translating that noise to a number between 1 and 10 is amazingly easy. You are controling your input device's range, and you know what possible values it produces, so it's a simple matter of finding where the generated number lies within that range.

And while pseudo-random numbers which seem more random than others (truly random numbers do not exist period) are valuable, one of them is not. Why the hell would I want to pay $1 to a bunch of wannabe's for a number between 1 and 10? Or any other single random number.

Next time you call someone an idiot, make sure you know what you are talking about first.

The real hackers?

[KludgeGrrl]

Somehow "hacking a yo-yo" seems much more in the spirit of what hacking (as opposed to cracking) is all about -- playfully seeking to improve the way things work.

But then I suppose that I'm just grasping after an earlier halcyon age, when everything was somehow better (including spelling) ;)

This comment is an example of...

[D-Fly]

...humorless literalism.

It's foolish and ill-informed when people accuse columnists (or anyone else who isn't a journalist) of being poor journalists. Columnists aren't journalists in the same way that a reporter is: they have a much wider ambit--commentary, opinion, whatever.

Annalee Newitz's job isn't to go to a conference and report the facts: it's to ramble, amuse and, yeah, maybe inform a little.

And it's not merely "publishable on the internet," purdue. As far as I'm concerned, she's one of the few reasons to pick up the Bay Guardian, a very much dead-trees-and-ink city weekly.

Placebos: The ultimate drug

[RadarMan]

The placebo effect is an amazingly powerful tool that western science is just starting to open up to.

Think about it -- a sugar pill can help alleviate pain (and help heal a wide range of disease) with ZERO side effects. Isn't that the ultimate goal of any pharmacologist? This is an area of research we should all embrace, though it requires an open mind to do so. The mind has far more control over our body than medical science has been willing to admit.

More on Integrative Medicine [arizona.edu]