hughprime
Joined 17 years ago
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Comment · 17 years ago
Comment · 17 years ago
Which textbook are you talking about?
I have a moderate hatred for most entry-level physics textbooks, which manage to pad about 100 pages' worth of information into a thousand-page tome full of glossy photographs in order to justify the $100+ price tag. So if there are any good free texts that would be great.
Comment · 17 years ago
The first four are good general advice. The fifth and sixth are good ideas some of the time, the seventh is a bit platitudinous but possibly good advice some of the time, and the eighth is more like "a guide to writing like Kurt Vonnegut".
Comment · 17 years ago
I assume "it looks AMAZING" is perfectly within the usual editorial standards of "omgbuntu", but wouldn't mind seeing a different headline here.
How about "it looks REASONABLY GOOD" or "it looks ABOUT LIKE YOU MIGHT EXPECT"?
Comment · 17 years ago
That's great, but I wonder how heavy the nuclear reactor would need to be that provides the 2 MW to power this thing. Is this something we could practically loft into orbit with present-day rockets? (Ignoring the not-entirely-unreasonable-in-this-particular-case environmental objections to flying nuclear reactors through our atmosphere on failure-prone chemical rockets...)
I suppose, on the upside, that once you had this thing in space it could stay there -- a nuclear reactor plus plasma rocket which could just shuffle back and forth between Earth orbit and Mars/Jupiter/wherever, refuelling at every Earth stop.
Comment · 17 years ago
Works great for me, but only if the music in question has no lyrics. Baroque, bebop or pretentious Philip Glass-y stuff seems to work best.
Comment · 17 years ago
It obviously can't do very much to a truck, but I wonder what it would do to a human. Nothing very good, obviously, but how long would you need to keep it focused on someone before they dropped down, brain cooked? (I can't help but notice that the beam is approximately head-sized).
I wonder if a reflective helmet would be a decent countermeasure (or, dare I say it, a tinfoil hat?)
Comment · 17 years ago
Is the single word really necessary? I mean, it already says "google.com" up in the URL bar, so you know what you're looking at.
Comment · 17 years ago
You're probably taking it too seriously then.
Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity, it's just that there's a certain part of my brain which takes delight in pointing out all the potential flaws in everything I read. It's much harder to concentrate on the test when half my brain is busy visualizing what four hundred Captain Picards would look like marching down my street.
Comment · 17 years ago
The best thing about posting bills online for six months is that it doesn't matter that legislators don't read them. Instead you'd have an army of partisan bloggers etc trying to point out the flaws, ensuring that all the bill's flaws would get brought to the surface eventually, and at least some of those should get amended away.
Comment · 17 years ago
The second sentence is a straw man.
Is there some kind of competition I don't know about to mention the words "straw man" in as many threads as possible? It seems to pop up in just about every thread, along with the words "correlation does not equal causation".
Comment · 17 years ago
Those sorts of questions always bothered me in IQ tests too. I was also always bothered by questions like:
"What comes next in this sequence? 1,4,9,16,25,"
Sure, the answer might be 36, but then again maybe we're looking at some subtler sequence of numbers than that. Maybe it's "the number of bald men who walked past my house every hour since 5am". Maybe the next number is 345 due to the annual Patrick Stewart Lookalike Parade. Who knows?
Comment · 17 years ago
Probably. Hell, we could all just start using Euros (or whatever) for cash, and then exchange our Euros for plastic-only US dollars at changing booths (which would suddenly become a lot more common).
This, of course, doesn't make life any easier for anyone, except the jerks who already use cards for everything (aka the jerks I always get stuck behind in line while I wait for their little receipt to print and get signed).
Comment · 17 years ago
Because, while it doesn't provide particularly useful advice, it is at least a good starting point for discussion on an interesting subject?
Also, because people upvoted it before taking time to read it carefully and think about whether the advice was really valuable?
"Introduction to Proofs and the Mathematical Vernacular" -- this is actually pretty good, and I kinda wish I'd had a copy of it at the start of my university mathematical education, if only to teach me what the hell a "Lemma" was, exactly. It's also fun to read.
"21st Century Physics Flexbook" -- very odd. Admittedly intended as a K-12 textbook rather than a university-level textbook, but not much of a way to learn physics even for the kids. Virtually no mathematics whatsoever, let alone calculus. A random grab-bag of topics from "gravitation" (with an attempt to explain relativity which would be more confusing than enlightening) to "nanoscience" and "biomedical imaging". Basic mechanics finally comes in at the end as an afterthought. Not recommended to anyone.