Comment Where's Civilization? (Score 1) 183
Chu-Chu Rocket makes it in but not a single entry in the Civilization series?
I don't understand.
-Isaac
Chu-Chu Rocket makes it in but not a single entry in the Civilization series?
I don't understand.
-Isaac
Yeah, same guy. Made his nut as CTO of Microsoft in the 90's, but has had a pretty solid career in numerous fields over the years.
-Isaac
Herve This is indeed the pioneer of this style - he actually coined the term Molecular Gastronomy.
He's an engaging speaker, even in English, and clearly talented.
Unfortunately, his books (or at least the English translations of them) are pretty poor. Clunky translation, marginal editing, downright lousy typesetting. Mostly anecdotes about food science, precious little of use in the kitchen.
Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is a far better book than any of This' three volumes that have made it into English translation.
-Isaac
This is terrible. 3 tabs are enough to spin the fans up on my MacBook Pro. Where's light mode gone?!
-Isaac
One fiber pair is enough to serve IPTV to 1000 homes, easily. 10 gig ethernet is commodity, that's 10 Mbits per subscriber. Move to wavelength-division multiplexing and you can get 40-320gbits over that single pair. What needs upgrades is not the fiber plant but the neighborhood and head end equipment.
Being a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at one of the big name Ivy League schools, I am yet to see all these "amazing" students. Yes, practically every student get the basics (something that doesn't happen at less selective schools), but give them a problem that requires creativity and you'll see that a handful of students in the class are able to solve it. They might work hard and they are motivated, but it's not like every student is terribly smart.
Motivation to work hard is far more valuable to a future employer than genius. Past a certain size, any enterprise (for proft or otherwise) needs regular hard workers more than it needs hard-working geniuses. This is even true in specialized fields like engineering.
To understand this is to understand the appeal of an Ivy pedigree to employers.
-Isaac
this goes back years. Microsoft used to do the same thing. they would visit a company, see a product, decline to buy it and then it would come up in the next version of WIndows. lately i see that Windows has a lot of third party licensed software.
Two reasons why you see a lot of licensed code in Microsoft products:
1. Other companies got wise and treated Microsoft with the appropriate degree of paranoia.
2. Microsoft realized it was often cheaper to write a check than get burned See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
Of course, Microsoft was often just as sharp at negotiating those licensing deals. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars which goes back to the importance of point 1.
I'm not sure I follow. Sufferage didn't necessarily mean more or less government. Nor did the civil rights movement. Nor gay rights. Creation vs evolution did not, as there wasn't even a Department of Education until the 70's. Vis-a-vi Brown.
Don't be obtuse. Forbidding private business owners from discriminating based on race, color, religion, or national origin (and enforcing this prohibition) was an expansion of government powers. A valid one, in my view.
-I
When I last went to the National Cryptologic Museum (2002?) they had at least a half-dozen Enigma machines on display, including the rarer 4-rotor Kriegsmarine version. But the really cool thing was that besides the ones behind glass, they had one in the open that you could actually use.
They even had some scratch paper and golf pencils nearby for writing out and passing encrypted messages.
I've seen a number of Enigmas behind glass but had never laid hands on one until visiting this museum. I hope it's still set up this way and they haven't removed the hands-on enigma.
-Isaac
Titanium, per the article and summary.
Titanium is over twice as dense - about 4.5g/cm^3 - so either the material spec is wrong or the dimensions are wrong.
Probably the latter, I guess.
Per the measurements given (18kg/(1m^2 * 1cm)) the vault's density is 1.8 grams per cubic centimeter. This is much less dense than aluminum (or steel or lead obviously) - anyone know what the vault is made from?
-Isaac
The franchise is dead. Lucas killed it. Not worth the emotional investment to lament or analyze.
Move on, people.
We need to fix the social problems that cause terrorism before that happens. In real terms, that involves raising the level of education and the quality of life in all parts of the globe to the point where there are no large groups of people who are still so poor that they have nothing to lose, or so ignorant that they have nothing to believe in beyond what their local preacher tells them.
Osama Bin Laden wasn't poor or uneducated; neither were the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, or the recently arrested Americans in Pakistan. While there are recent examples of impoverished masses whipped into a genocidal fury (see Rwanda) I don't see a strong causal link between poverty/lack of education and terrorism. Indeed, access to means and anomic detachment from society seem to be common among perpetrators of mass terrorism.
(Drawing parallels to the organizers of the Iraq ware is left as an exercise for the reader.)
-Isaac
And just you watch the US shoot down a Canadian passenger jet. That's one way to make enemies of lots of countries, very quickly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
*cough*
I like e-Ink, I don't like Amazon's proprietary lock-in, so I got a Sony eReader, which handles ePub, PDFs, LRF, and everything else I want to read, Calibre converts for me.
Avoiding proprietary lock-in by buying Sony = laff riot.
Kindle reads unencrypted
-Isaac
Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!
