FreedomFirstThenPeac - Slashdot User

Submission + - Droning for sharks

Submitted by FreedomFirstThenPeac on Friday June 12, 2015 @10:58AM

FreedomFirstThenPeac writes: Apparently Orange County (specifically, Seal Beach area) has found that drones are useful for finding hazards at the beach, the story has a nice drone-shot overhead of a small shark (scale is hard to tell). They also report that it is easy to spot rip tides. The question of the day, how long till someone links imaging processing software with the guidance system so they can get the drones to hover over, and follow along, as sharks patrol off shore? Just another day at the beach, see the shoal of nerds schooling along with their drone controls? They are the ones who are missing all the swimsuit-enhanced normals in the area.

Submission + - Outlaw Puns? What pun is that? 1

Submitted by FreedomFirstThenPeac on Friday December 05, 2014 @05:48PM

FreedomFirstThenPeac writes: A story in The Guardian tells us that in an Orwellian-like move to legislate language, the Chinese are attempting to stop the use of puns because they are disruptive and may lead to chaos (not the mathematical kind) and as such are unsuitable for use. However, Chinese is rife with puns, with this example quoted in the story

When couples marry, people will give them dates and peanuts – a reference to the wish Zaosheng guizi or “May you soon give birth to a son”. The word for dates is also zao and peanuts are huasheng

The powerful date and peanut lobbies are up in arms, claiming that such a ban will cost them more than peanuts. Their claim? "If you outlaw puns. Only criminals will have puns."

Submission + - Back the Future in Nuclear Armageddon

Submitted by FreedomFirstThenPeac on Monday September 22, 2014 @12:16PM

FreedomFirstThenPeac writes: As a former Cold Warrior (both launch officer side and staff analytical mathematician side) I now appreciate more than ever the bitterness I saw in former WW2 warriors when they would see a Japanese car. One even commented that he was pretty unhappy that he had served in submarines to beat the Japanese, only to see their products rolling down the streets. Now I see that the President who was elected partially on a "no new nukes" plank is presiding over a major ramping up of US nuclear power.
This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy.
Mind you, Mutual Assured Destruction is a dangerous path, and one we managed to negotiate only because we were lucky (and we were) and because we were careful (and we were). As a strategy, it only works with rational people (e.g., world powers with lots to lose) who might have irrational expectations that they will win in the long run, the rapid fall of imperialist Russia was helpful (I have seen blackboard talks on this as a mathematical result in game theory). This speed minimized the time we spent in the high-risk regions while transiting from MAD to where we were in the 1990's, but the political world has changed, and this President is finding it hard to toe a pedagogical line in the face of neo-realpolitiks.

Refs:

NY Times: U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms

Cuban Missile Crisis

20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War

Submission + - Detecting depression from your internet mechanics (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by FreedomFirstThenPeac on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @04:42PM

FreedomFirstThenPeac writes: Apparently we could diagnose you as depressed if the mechanics of your internet use fit certain patterns. By using a cleverly embedded questionnaire that classifies the subject as depressed, and by using existing net usage data collection to collect features (variables), researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology were able to correctly predict the diagnoses of the questionnaire using the net usage data. I wonder if this could be a new Firefox plug-in, designed to help parents detect depression in their adolescents by tracking the mechanics (not the sites) and automatically emailing them if their ward is showing increasing signs of depression.

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