This is why Slashdot should have +6 awesome

This looks really great. But for me, a mistake is that the touchpad is in front of the keyboard. You have to move your arms forward and back when you want to switch; using one hand on each is tricky if the touchpad registers your dangling sleeve or your wrist.

I think it would be much better if the total area of the touchpad was split between the two side of the keyboard. Then you could have both hands on the touchpad or one on the touchpad and one on the keyboard, and you wouldn't have to do the forward-back thing with your arms.

Take one meter. Make a cube of that side, a cubic meter. Fill that with water near the sea level and you get a volume of 1 Liter of water.

Um. Negative on that, Command. Our cubic metre seems to be holding not 1 but 1000 litres of water at sea level.

Regardless, the elegance of your system cannot be denied.

By the way, while you Americans are converting from F to C, please also convert from liters to litres, from center to centre, etc. Cos it's prettier our way.

250-Foot Hybrid Airship In Which To Spy Over Afghanistan

if you please

Heheh. Okay re the humility thing.

We disagree, then. But I think your attitude is an act of faith.

I would agree that Qi is not physical, but that doesn't mean it's not real. That it can't be detected by any known scientific instruments should not surprise us, as scientific instruments are designed to detect only physical things. So for instance, scientific instruments detect the physical correlates of consciousness but not consciousness itself -- and, thus influenced, some schools posited that mental states (e.g. emotions) aren't real.

But, like nonphysical but nevertheless real mental states, Qi can be detected and affirmed by your own experience. You can conduct scientific experiments into this sort of thing. You can do the practice as the experiment, and you can experience the results. You can retain your rationality and your skepticism throughout, and have experiences that are most accurately and comprehensively explained by a "Qi" model.

No worries. Keep it surreal.

Interesting, thank you tygerstripes -- I'm now a lot less ignorant :)

Nonexistent in your humble opinion, nomadic. If you were inclined to spend a few months doing Qi Gong or some other practice, you might have experiences that would change your opinion.

And just for interest's sake, people confuse the real with the fictional all the time. For instance, many people think there is a real, unitary, unchanging self behind all of their experiences, like a little homonculus just behind the eyes. That's about as real as it gets for most people, but that kind of self doesn't exist at all.

Since the word Qi is already used to describe something rather different, it is a pretty idiotic name for this idea. It merely accords with the co-opting of all sorts of Eastern concepts for marketing Western stuffs, in the footsteps of 'Zen' which nowadays stands for just about anything you'd want in a product.

This is only due to the wording of the poll, not Slashdotters' representations. If we're short of "astoundingly good" but still pretty good, we have the words "above average" put in our mouths.