Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Five stars for.. (Score 2) 246

There was of course a lot of cgi in the movie but ...

the cgi was there to tell a story- not to render action scenes.

An action movie with rendered action doesn't connect emotionally.

When those guys swinging around on poles showed up- i had a gut reaction.

Making an action film and then using cgi for the action scenes usually lacks just enough realism that I don't have an emotional reaction to the action. That emotion is why I'm willing to put down good money to see a movie.

MM:FR was decent. As everyone else says- so little acting and so few words- but combined with incredible action scenes and a lot of genuine stunts. I probably won't ever see it again but I don't feel like I wasted my money.

Comment Re:Go for it (Score 1) 43

I agree he doesn't belong on that list. I do think on the list of America's worst presidents, he'd be at the top of the list.

Ignored warnings from the previous administration, top FBI officials ignored field agents who were warning of something bad, and got our country attacked.

Then he started an incredibly stupid war in Iraq, which led to the rise of ISIS.

Presided over the building of mass surveillance of the American people.

Took office during a boom, left office under the worst economy since the great depression. It's my theory that what caused the ruined economy was fuel prices more than quadrupling during his reign. Buy gas to get to work, or pay the mortgage? Tough choice!

Took office with a balanced budget, left it with the largest deficit in American history. Meanwhile, infrastructure was crumbling and he did nothing.

Now, if the list was of people who did the most harm to our country, he should be on that list. Mao and Pol Pot were very evil men who killed millions of people, but they didn't harm America.

Comment Re:Ancillary titles to TFA (Score 1) 327

I have to disagree with the Challenger commission and the Army on their allocation of blame. If you're the kind of person who sits through a PowerPoint presentation and thinks you've understood something, you really shouldn't be building spaceships or waging war. You should be quietly led off to some marketing department somewhere, or a nice quiet retail job.

General McMaster seems like he has a good grasp of complexity though.

Comment Re:Ancillary titles to TFA (Score 1) 327

Simple solution: juse get rid of the text tool. That projector thing is supposed to be for visual aids, not conveying a bunch of language, either over simplified or unreadably complex. The latter is why you're standing up there sweating and unconsciously blinding people in the audience with the laser pointer. Also, if your slides have no words on them, if you send out notes they're actually notes!

Comment Re:In other news (Score 1) 75

We have a "human construct" called "green" that most of the human construct "us" pretty much agree upon. The human construct "grass" sometimes meets this criteria, and sometimes doesn't. If you truly believe that, in an absolute sense, there's no difference between water, air and dirt, I can suggest some experiments you might wish to conduct that are likely to convince you of the folly of that statement. You're right, they are made up of the same stuff, but arrangement of that stuff is rather important.

PS - you do realize we can actually turn lead into gold, right?

Comment Re:Publicly Funded Research (Score 1) 39

OMG, I can't leave my basement! Everything MUST come to me in a form I consider most convenient!

If you go to an appropriate library they have computers on which you download academic journals (funded by your tax dollars even!). If you go to the wrong library, they might have to order a paper copy for you, but paper does have a long and glorious history. Embrace it!

Or you can read the open access journals. Just don't, uh, believe everything you read. Or you can wait the six months until the authors have the right to release their paper freely. Or you can vote to actually fund scientists, so they can afford the $5200 to publish their paper in Nature as an open access article.

The OP seemed to be expressing a genuine interest in reading the paper. The option I suggested first (library) is by far the easiest, but I'd certainly recommend the last one (vote for proper funding).

Comment Re:Amateurs (Score 1) 444

Pharmacists are trained to know about medications: that's the major reason why physicians can't usually dispense drugs directly.

Physicians are (or should be) well trained to practice medicine. They're good at diagnosing individual patients, choosing treatments, and monitoring progress. They're invaluable collaborators in medical research because they have direct contact with the patients, and they're the ones who you hope are ultimately going to be applying any advances. But an MD doesn't involve the necessary training to do science. Unfortunately society has confused the two.

I'm a medical scientist. It would be ridiculous, not to mention illegal, for me to diagnose and treat patients. I simply don't have the training. But it's equally ridiculous, though unfortunately not illegal, for an MD (absent specific scientific training like an earned PhD) to design, conduct and analyze a proper experiment. Yet major research grants today tend to go to MDs and it's getting extremely difficult to get a faculty job in medical research without an MD.

Comment Amateurs (Score 1) 444

In medical research, the problem is that most of it is run by amateurs. Medical doctors receive somewhere between no and very little scientific education, and conduct research in their spare time while not treating patients, yet in North America an MD is considered not only sufficient, but actually desirable for a "clinician scientist." There are some excellent scientists who also hold MDs, but it's secondary to their scientific training. Clinicians have very creative ideas about how to do science.

Comment Re:Grant money and politics are the problems (Score 4, Informative) 444

Half? In many fields (like medical research) it's essentially all, and there's no "at some point." Many places offer one or two year starting faculty appointments, at the end of which you're expected to have a major grant (success rate is somewhere around 10% on those). So you better get busy writing applications. Once you're established, you better keep writing them, because now you've got a lab full of people depending on you for their livelihood.

Slashdot Top Deals

The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.

Working...