no offence intended ... but are you white/caucasian/member of the majority race?

i am a sri lankan living in sri lanka, and i am (officially) sinhalese .. the majority race .. i know that my being part of the majority has got me out of a lot of grief ... and because of that i go out of my way to help people that are getting grief because they are the minority ..

i am not blaming you, far from it. but saying that a white person running with a laptop would probably be treated far FAR differently from a POC doing the same thing

Telsa did this in response to i) dubious driving by end users and ii) dubious journalism by commentators. Would it be better put then not as 'solving a [pr] problem' but rather sliding along a scale with trade offs between weight and strength / safety.

Hmm. I am the person who created that Tumblr. I'm not trying to "debunk" anything. Just showing what it really is: sometimes it's nonsense, sometimes it's there's an amusing juxtaposition, sometimes it's a fun Easter Egg.

on thunderbird:

edit > account settings > [account in question] > copies & folders > tick "place replies in the folder of the message being replied to"

admittedly a few more steps than "click on 'conversation view'" .. but it is there .. and i love it so much

suchetha

(Note that fecundity declines with higher IQ. [E.g. http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/762/1102/1600/chartiqbirth.1.jpg ] So human IQ is not limited by "the best evolution can do" and thus by chance mutations, but rather is, like height and other quantitative attributes, where it is due to a balance of evolutionary pressures.)

Why are either one of them focusing on mutations as if that's the route of evolutionary response to quantitative pressures?

Any quantitative attribute like IQ or height or emotional stability or whatever is the aggregate result of many (often hundreds of) genes, permutations of which already exist in our population gene pool in varying quantities. Individuals get these roughly at random and so fall on a bell curve. The mean of that bell curve (which is what people are concerned with when talking about population drift) can be highly responsive (big drift in a small number of generations) to environmental pressures with no mutations whatsoever just via reproductive enhancement of individuals who happen to fall to the preferred side of the bellcurve, thus increasing the relative proportion of pro- or anti- attribute genes. Mutation-based evolution is glacial by comparison. (I think maybe they like to focus on mutations because they're easier to track historically than population-wide shifts in proportions of existing variations... But that doesn't make them more relevant...)

Tim Robinson, the man behind the Meccano construction you link to, is a trustee of the Plan 28 charity mentioned above.

You are quite correct that we have not built a single demo part. In the two years since I started talking about this project the following has happened:

1. Persuaded the Science Museum to digitize all of Babbage's plans and notebooks (this in itself was a non-trivial task involving a great deal of effort at all levels and they should be thanked for taking on the task).
2. Got the leading Babbage experts to join and work with me (Doron Swade who built the Difference Engine No. 2 and Tim Robinson)
3. Started a UK-based charity (again these things take time as there are legal requirements and the recruitment of a board of trustees)
4. Started research on the Babbage archive itself
5. Begun fund-raising.

No. 4 is non-trivial because there are literally thousands of pages of notes and > 230 large scale plans to decipher. Plus there's a hardware description language to work with. And the archive is not well documented. There are a number of different cross references that conflict with each other. I realize that all this stuff is boring and people would like to see an immediate result, but that's not going to happen. It's years of work to properly study this stuff and build a historically accurate machine.

Note that we have not proposed building the 1,000 memory location machine. That's far too much to demonstrate that it would work and would add to the cost and size. As for the number of parts, until we've deciphered all the plans and come up with a definitive plan that it's hard to answer but we believe there will be roughly 40,000 to 50,000 components to be made.

You are correct that I care about the PR side of things. I need to because I need to raise a substantial amount of money.

But it's far from all PR. There's now a registered British charity with a board of trustees and the pre-eminent Babbage expert, Doron Swade, who built the Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum is running the technical side of the project.

Study of the digitized plans has been underway since February and some first results will be announced this summer. We actively want to build a 3D working model in a tool like Autodesk.

Supposedly this patent is from 2010..

but according to this article "[Search by sketch] was mentioned in years 2007, 2010 and sometime in the late 90s"

if that is the case then there should be enough prior art to invalidate the patent for this concept

... according to google is

terrorism/terrizm/
Noun:
The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.

*The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.*

how many governments does that definition cover?

how many politicians?

as someone who was born, (mostly) grew up in, and currently lives in, a country where the term "terrorism/terrorist" is used in SO many contexts - .lk for those who want to know (not .us like many would think) - the word "terrorism" is more accurately defined as "that guy over there that we don't agree with"..

unfortunately, "terrorist" has become a new witch-hunt word - equal in power (or a VERY close second to "pedo")

i think it is time that we ALL start identifying ourselves as terrorists.. because close to every political statement we make - including "seriously.. can you imagine life with THAT guy in office" while standing at the water cooler - can be construed as terrorism..

this is one of the reasons that the UN has yet to define terrorism.. because if they were to do so, many - in fact, most - governments would fall under the "terrorist" definition.

my advice; call, email, write a letter, send a pigeon to senator leiberman (and any others supporting this bill and tell them "you are not with us. you are not with the terrorists. you ARE a terrorist".. maybe they will get the clue

Suchetha "why yes, i am a terrorist" Wijenayake

from what i have been reading (please don't ask me to cite sources, it was a long time ago, i think the ./ article linked in TFS may have been one of them), TX is the biggest buyer of textbooks in the US. if they could have swung TX, the publishers would have to either go along with the creationists, or publish a texas-only version of the books. considering that the publishers would (probably) not publish a TX only book, and would just add creationism to the books, then getting creationism into the curricula of the other states would be a fait accompli.

in that case, throwing all their effort into TX would make sense for creationists (kind of like the US electoral system). and with that kind of marketing directed at them, it makes it even more laudable that TX DIDN'T pass it.