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English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language 323

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the grunt-grunt-statistics-grunt dept.
sciencehabit writes "If you've ever cringed when your parents said 'groovy,' you'll know that spoken language can have a brief shelf life. But frequently used words can persist for generations, even millennia, and similar sounds and meanings often turn up in very different languages. Now, a new statistical approach suggests that peoples from Alaska to Europe may share a linguistic forebear dating as far back as the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago. Indeed, some of the words we use today may not be so different than those spoken around campfires and receding glaciers."

Comment: Re:Any Oculus Rift developers in the house? (Score 1) 88

by CSMoran (#43538679) Attached to: Play <em>Tetris</em> To Fix Your Lazy Eye

The eye doesn't see, the brain does. The eye simply collects light and other signals (like the aforementioned focus thing) and transmits them to the brain, where the image is actually formed -- the image landing on the retina, for instance, is upside down and backwards. But you see things right side up and not backwards; the brain does that.

I agree with the gist of your argument; however, I think you've got the specifics wrong. Fun fact: human retina is actually considered part of the brain.

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Google Forbids Advertising On Glass 274

Posted by timothy
from the ban-those-stupid-foam-markers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Contrary to widespread thought, Google Glass will not be an advertising platform: 'Google Inc has lately told app developers that they are not allowed to present ads to Google Glass users and they are also not permitted to sell users' personal and private information for the fulfillment of advertising needs. The internet company has explicitly and openly said that the Glass platform should and must be clean and clear of any ads whatsoever, because the technology is designed to facilitate internet browsing and other related activities, therefore, the featured podium cannot be used to advertise products as it will cause the user experience to diminish.' Seems like Google is going for hardware-only revenue on this one." You're not supposed to resell the Glass hardware, either.
Security

Ask Slashdot: Protecting Home Computers From Guests? 572

Posted by timothy
from the quick-name-an-os-that's-never-been-compromised dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We frequently have guests in our home who ask to use our computer for various reasons such as checking their email or showing us websites. We are happy to oblige, but the problem is many of these guests have high risk computing habits and have more than once infested one of our computers with malware, despite having antivirus and the usual computer security precautions. We have tried using a Linux boot CD but usually get funny looks or confused users. We've thought about buying an iPad for guests to use, but decided it wasn't right to knowingly let others use a computing platform that may have been compromised. What tips do you have to overcome this problem, technologically or otherwise?"

Comment: Re:reductio ad absurdum (Score 1) 1121

Now how could one of my simulated subjects prove or disprove that they weren't living in my intelligently designed simulated universe, with me as their god, and that the simulation hadn't only started 6 seconds ago? I can't see a way.

Easily. They would only have to start observing so many individual events at once that you'd run of out computing power trying to simulate them all in all their detail.

Comment: Re:128 bit floats: when? (Score 1) 176

by CSMoran (#43217901) Attached to: Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps

What is the use for them? for "personal" use, floats are all you will ever need. Many physics computation stays in single precision to avoid doubling the memory usage. I guess fluid mecanic computation use double, but is there really a use for quad. Who needs that kind of precisions?

Not all uses are personal and the fact that some physics calculations trade precision for memory doesn't mean that all of them do.

One example could be matrix inversions with somewhat ill-conditioned matrices. When you know you're going to lose 14 digits of precision inverting the matrix, you'd better have a lot of headroom. Cue quad floats.

The car analogy that comes to mind is people often do sound mixing with 32-bit audio even though you 16-bit audio is perfectly fine for listening to the product.

My pants just went to high school in the Carlsbad Caverns!!!

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