cfgauss

Every day I get the feeling something's not quite right. Can you fix that?

Yeah, thinking about all of those scales certainly is odd, which is why I used only the nearest-neighbor scales in my post . But you missed a whole half of the size spectrum! The barely-microscopic, microscopic, molecular, atomic, sub-atomic, and string scales! Those are the really fun, and just as hard to imagine, scales! Although calling the epicycles a model, in a modern sense, is a bit of a stretch. It's really more of a very careful observation than a model, since there was no theoretical backing behind it, and strictly speaking, since the orbits of everything is periodic, it wasn't really predictive either. The biggest benefit of the sun-centered system was that it allowed the Newtonian description to come around and easily provide both a theoretical description and to genuinely predict new things--like the existence of new plants through their gravitational effects! That's the real reason this viewpoint is "correct." If Ptolemy could've predicted the existence of Neptune by looking at Uranus's epicycles.... well, I'd be impressed! And dark energy hides everywhere.

LIES! Distance from Sun to nearest star, d0 ~ 4 ly Distance from earth to sun, a ~ 1.6x10^-5 ly Distance from galaxy to andromeda, x ~ 2.5x10^6 ly d0 = 2.5x10^5 a x = 6.3x10^5 d0 So the nearest star is 10^5 "natural solar system units" away, and the nearest galaxy is 10^5 "natural galaxy distance units" away!

Psh! You and your curvilinear coordinate systems! General relativistic epicycles! Bah!

Having taught intro college classes, I can say that, while true, that is totally orthogonal to this claim.

Originally Posted By: Neptúnus Hirt Playing Exile III as a child, I would always make sure my party members all had pants on before braving the surface world. I was kind of disappointed when I later realized I wouldn't get run out of town if I took them off. Only in the surface world? What did you think was going on in the underworld? Were they all banished for streaking?

Originally Posted By: Triumph Originally Posted By: Taslim At least the forums aren't going to tip over and capsize. Is that for REAL? He said he worried the ISLAND would tip over and capsize??? I mean, someone didn't make this up for April 1st??? *cough server-move cough* WOW. This...I don't know, it's just too hilariously weird. This kind of thought is not actually uncommon at all... I recall in the past seeing those surveys that ask basic science questions being given to random people, and this was one of the things an alarming number of people thought was true. I don't recall the exact percentage offhand, but bigger than 1/4 or 1/3 or something. An alarming number of people also think the Sun moves around the Earth, the Sun us small, and the stars are near the sun. Every few years you hear about this in the news, actually, as the media rediscovers this via some university's press release that mentions it. Admittedly, these things aren't necessarily totally obvious, and I remember as a very young kid wondering about all of them, and they were never things discussed in any class or in any of our terrible textbooks. But still, I figured them all out!

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Just finished Small Gods which was read in infrequent bursts on bus rides and between homework assignments. Didn't expect this to be my reaction, but meh. I really liked small gods when I read it a year or two ago. I think it was the first of his books I read. I've got a few other of Pratchett's books but haven't had too much time to read anything other than textbooks for a while.

I've always wished reputable science journals would release April fool's editions... Although one or two physicists are known to occasionally write amusing fake papers. But a whole journal full would be more fun.

Originally Posted By: Sarachim This idea might not be wrong in principle, but your numbers are absurd. 120 hours a week is a 17-hour day, 7 days a week. There has never been a point in human history when ordinary people worked this much. Someone's never been to grad school! There's a reason grad students have a very high going totally crazy rate. (~100%)

Jeeze, I leave for a couple of days and this happens! Well, Crono is much more subdued now, are you happy?

Originally Posted By: wz. As On the flip side: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-but-what-else/ That's not really the flip side, it was pretty much exactly what I was claiming . Using computer skills helps "cognitive abilities" and computer skills, but not much else. Originally Posted By: Ephesos Meh. I'm highly skeptical of macro-level events triggering genes. Well these fields do tend to be rather, erm, "speculative" about the possible mechanisms for things... But regardless of the proposed mechanisms, there's still the correlation. Quote: ...no detrimental effects isn't the same as having positive effects. Right, it's the same as "no detrimental effects" . But cell phones were never argued to improve anyone's anything. Quote: And if it takes time away from the activities that students are actually at school for, then again, it's reasonable to want to limit that. Well, no, it's the case that if the costs of missing out on school things caused by this outweigh the benefits gained by spending more time on computer activities. It may or may not, depending on exactly who and how much time, and what things they're doing, etc. Quote: The third link is probably one of the worst-designed websites I've ever seen. [...] The intro video[/url] is hilariously dated.[...]Fourth link is also video games, not really relevant to the discussion at hand.[...] Fifth link is for strategy games like Rise of Nations, which tend to require more time than can be scrounged from a day of school. At least, most schools I'm aware of. The variety of sources (cell phones, games, rts games, etc) was really to demonstrate that this is generally believed to be a fairly robust thing, and not dependent on a single particular effect. There're lots more, you can see some of the articles were from 6 or 7 years ago. So this is a reasonably well-studies (i.e., new-and-trendy) effect. Quote: Sample size of 2 != data. It is data, it's just two data points . And I've taught hundreds of kids over ~10 years, in various places, as well as tutored people independently. And of the other professors / grad students / TAs I've talked to, from lots of different places, many have independently made the same kinds of comments to me. Quote: ...yeah, my main beef here is that there seem to be two different arguments going on here: 1) Do video games and games in general show promise for educational purposes? 2) Should schools allow unrestricted internet access to students? Ditto for businesses and their employees. They aren't independent arguments, though. My point is, though, that there shouldn't be censorship because learning computer skills and associated problem solving skills is important for school-aged people to do, and people are more likely to learn these things if they can do fun stuff on the computer. Obviously excessive use is not good, but that doesn't even need to be said since it goes along with excessively doing anything.

Originally Posted By: Ephesos citation plz kthxbai http://www.news.utoronto.ca/science-and-...ial-skills.html http://news.msu.edu/story/6096/ https://www.msu.edu/user/jackso67/CT/children/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yp379XK4iHgJ:www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_93397.html http://www.physorg.com/news148193174.html etc... Quote: Also, your point would carry more weight if you had taught/TA-ed at institutions in different areas. I did. The community college and university were in different places. No difference among people of the same age. Especially unexpected, since many of the people at the community college were there because they didn't get into the universities they applied to! Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel How is it discrimination if it treats everyone equally? Indiscriminate discrimination?

Originally Posted By: Ephesos ...I am highly suspect of this. Playing Farmville and poking people is not valuable. Directly, no, but indirectly they're learning how to use computers, how user interfaces work, planning skills, etc. There's actually recently been some research on these things that've found there are significant changes in the way young people think and solve problems when they spend a lot of time using computers or playing video games due to these indirect influences. (Doing the usual kind of tests in psychology--picking groups of people who do and don't play games and testing their visual, problem solving, etc, skills.) I don't know what statistical confidence level these things were demonstrated to offhand, but I've heard enough of these reports that it seems to be generally accepted by the psychologists as a real effect. And, having recently seen nieces and nephews grow up around computers, and seeing how those skills spill over into other things, I'm not surprised by those findings. It's amusing to note that entertainment based video games have apparently succeeded in some areas carefully designed educational games have failed to touch for decades! This is particularly important considering many grade/middle/high schools don't have any classes in computer skills at all (or if they do, they will be taught by the 90 year old guy who's never actually used a computer to do anything, or are about ridiculous things, like spending 6 months learning basic Word and Excel). Not to mention that the skills people learn by themselves are often totally orthogonal from those learned in even a good class in a subject. Quote: And if school is the only time/place they have to use computers, why would they be on Facespace at all? Because all the cool kids are doing it. Seriously. That may not seem important, but participating in stupid activities like that with friends is gigantically disproportionately important to teenagers. The alternative is to have all the teenage girls not pay any attention in class because they're fantasizing about using facebook . There've actually been other studies that've showed there's an optimal amount of time an employee spends screwing around on the internet per day that's around an hour or something. Happy, entertained workers are more productive! I don't see why it should be any different in school (aside from the massive irrationality of teenagers). Quote: And "how most schools go" varies from place to place, and it varies rather a lot. It does, but, having taught/TAd/tutored people at a large university with tons of undergrads from all over (and also teaching/TAing/tutoring older and high school aged students at a small community college when I was in high school) I can tell you that, in a quantitative sense, in terms of technical skills (math, computers, and science) there's very little difference between students based on where they're from. Quote: The few that are really that intent on self-teaching will probably be doing that at home anyway. Not if they don't have computers at home. And most of the skills aren't deliberately self-taught. They're just picked up trying to do something that's fun--and that's the most reliable way to learn! I certainty know it's the case in my learning, that the things I've learned have almost exclusively been incidentally learned in trying to figure out something interesting. Naturally, finding lots of things interesting is a big help here, but still. Quote: It's not a binary choice. Nobody is saying "either we help the kids learn or we block their Myfacetubes access". They can do both. Particularly for smaller districts--but also for larger ones, the filtering software license and IT staff required can be the difference between hiring a real science teacher and having the gym teacher teach physics. So for some places, it is a binary choice. Quote: And there are far bigger money-wasters out there, truthfully. Many schools will "waste" vast amounts of money on sports programs whose only purpose is to impress alumni (when they win, of course). And at least they're not spying on their students. Yeah, that's definitely true. It would actually make a lot more sense to dissociate the sports from schools by making separate athletic entities, which are self-funding, but schools seem to actively refuse to do anything like this. And I'd heard about the spying thing--that's just totally nuts. I'd actually thought it was one of those stories that the sensationalist "computer privacy media" had overblown, and it was pretty horrifying to realize it was true!

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity And schools are paid for by taxpayers, to educate kids. I'm willing to pay taxes for that. I'm not going to be thrilled to be paying for some kid to stalk EBay auctions or yack to their friends on Facebook. It's fine for them to do that, but they can do it on their own dime. If people have paid for their own gear and access, they can do what they want on their own time. I would agree, but there are still lots of people out there without computers at home, and that could be their only chance to use them. Not to mention that, given how most schools go, the computer skills they learn screwing around on facebook may well be more valuable than what they learn in some of their classes. Also, if what they're doing is not during class time, but at lunch, before/after school, or whatever, then I wouldn't have a problem with it. Since that's not really costing anyone anything. I really think it'd be better for the schools to focus on individual students actually doing well in classes, rather than paying (sometimes very large) amounts of money to a questionable service that randomly blocks pages, since I think it's debatable if there's any positive effect on students at all by doing this. And when I was in high school, it wasn't much better than random blocking, and from what I've heard, over the past almost 10 or so years since then, things haven't gotten much better. But yeah, in an ideal world where everyone had as much access to computers as they wanted at home, and schools were good enough to learn from, I'd agree with you.

Originally Posted By: Other Also, I found that stealing their stuff that they let me steal and letting them restock seems more worthwhile in my opinion. That's true, but not as much fun as killing the occasional merchant. Quote: The few guns I got were all horrible damage doers, and also quite good at wasting ammo. However, I was able to get another shotgun and a hunting rifle soon after entering vault city. Hmm, I don't recall this, but it's been a while since I've played it and I may've been more patient then. All I remember is the crotch shots and randomly exploding people, actually...

Originally Posted By: Other For fallout 2- The beginning sucks. No doubt about that. All your skills suck beyond belief for a long time (especially if you play on higher levels), and just about all the weapons and armour and healing in the begining also suck. But, if you stick through that, it gets much better. For me, that is around after I help Gecko and return to Vault city. Then, I get my first, actually slightly good weapon, and I start traveling around. I agree that, especially around the beggining, the encounters are way too tough, but they do depend on your level and how many partners you have. You can get good weapons early on if you realize you can kill the merchants and take their stuff instead of buying it . Hmm I'm gonna have to play that again if people keep talking about it... I have too much stuff to do! Talk about some less good games!

But that's really odd, why would that be save file corruption? Shouldn't it just be checking the location against your actual location of something? Even if the save file had a corrupted location, moving to a new location should fix that? Seems like this could be at least partly contributed to by a bug in the code that checks if you're registered? Alternatively, I would imagine registering would fix this bug, but that doesn't seem like a great general solution .

Ooh, I forgot about Dungeon Siege. I really liked the first one, although the graphics are a little dated now. But it's a lot of fun. The second wasn't so great since they tried to simplify some of the mechanics and screwed it up a little, but it's still fun.

Yeah, that's true, but that doesn't mean he can't learn between one game and another! I mean, like I've mentioned before, the reason no one I've tried to get to play these games have bought them is that there are so many weird problems in his games. I really think putting just a little more work into it, by finding these people who don't think his games are good enough and addressing their issues, could significantly increase sales (not to mention advertising, I have never once seen an ad for any of his games anywhere!). And it's the reason I basically don't buy his games anymore; there's almost nothing qualitatively new in them! Not to mention that having a unified scheme (e.g., bayesian) instead of manually adjusting formulas would easily prevent things like forgetting to have magical efficiency effect everything...

I thought Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 were awesome. And playing ME2 right after ME1 was really great, because there are tons of little details about the specific choices you made in the first one. ME2 is the best though, because of all the background details they added. Some of the conversations you overhear are hilarious.

The formulas for figuring all these things out seem needlessly complex... Has Jeff expressed any reasons for doing this like this, as opposed to something simple, e.g., Bayseian calculations, or something? Or at least, you know, document things? It just seems if you're going to make things complicated, you might as well do it in a reasonable way!

Err, this doesn't have anything to do with running as administrator... it sounds like some kind of hardware problem or possibly driver problem... Usually this is what happens when your CPU shuts down due to overheating. Do you play other CPU intensive games for long periods of time? It could also be due to overclocking or misconfigured memory timings or a couple other things. Alternatively this could be a video driver problem? Maybe try uninstalling your current video drivers and reinstalling? It's possible avernum's engine could be doing something totally insane that causes this to happen, but without looking at some kind of log or debugging information that would be hard to figure out.

Yeah, I don't really think it makes sense to make SP a limited resource anymore than it would to make melee attacks limited. At least, in the kind of system where magic is meant to be constantly used, as opposed to something rare, powerful, and to be used more strategically. Although I personally haven't had too many problems running out of SP due to this bug (you all know I'd tell you if I did ).

I like X. He reminds me of several crazy scientists I know in real life. Doing the real-life equivalent to dedicating their life to making anvils fall from the sky .