Re: Not medieval

And anyway, as Pratchett and Gaiman (1990) have stated, bishop Ussher was off by at least 15 minutes

Don't you just

plug the iron into the shirt

Mine is the one with "Danger, High Voltage" on the back

Not if you have ever memorized

"O, Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me Right Now Sweety"

for a stellar evolution exam.

Mine is the one with the sky atlas in the pocket.

Ah, so the blancmanges were really jellyfish in disguise?

Mine is the one with "Angus Podgorny Fan Club" on the back

Not yet.

But I am building them a mini-Dobsonian telescope (and they are helping me build it). I somehow do not think keeping them interested is going to be that hard, because they are showing promising signs of nerdiness already. Nerds are interested in things for their own sake, not just because other people think it is cool.

multi-tasking anti-ageing moisturiser?

But was it preemptive multi-tasking, cooperative multitasking, or did tasks genuinely run in parallel on 10 cores?

Making CMOS and CCD chips for digital cameras still does

Chemical magic is still needed, but not the way Arthur C. Clarke knew it.

I will still raise a pint to him. He has more imagination than most of us.

Wind?

Wasn't that the sneeze of the Great Green Arkleseizure?

Mine is the one with the H2G2 radio plays in the pocket

Precisely. I have no problems with people playing proper R&B (Ray Charles and the like)

It's "one, two, many, lots"

Sgt. Detritus

Troll, because, well, this is Sgt. Detritus

Love thissh kind of reshearsh. Love it. Bessht kind of shtuff. Really nishe. Really.

The term is "injellititis" (C. Northcote parkinson)

A dangerous combination of a high degree of incompetence and a high degree of jealousy, which react to form injellitance. Injellitant individuals in an organization prefer "sound" character over true ability. Creativity is anathema to such people. An organization infected with such people in management has contracted injellititis. A reverse competition results, in which everybody in management tries to hide his or her ability in order to secure promotion. Third rate people are promoted because they are no threat to the second rate management.

See "Parkinson's Law" byt C. Northcote Parkinson. He said it all.

Simple

If you want to publish in practically any traditional journal, you have to sign a copyright transfer. The main concern for the publisher is that they cover their backsides by having you sign a declaration that you own the copyright initially, and that you transfer it to them. This means that they can show that they acted in good faith should you have committed plagiary.

The conditions vary, but many publishers do allow you to reproduce part or the whole of your work for non-commercial purposes. If you want to reproduce your own or other peoples' graphs in a scientific work (with due reference) it is unheard of that this is refused. IEEE allows you to put entire preprints online, provided it is accompanied by a copyright statement. Springer allows the same for their Lecture Notes in Computer Science, but ask (not demand) that you wait for a year after publication. As they ask nicely, I tend to comply.

What is most peculiar is not copyright transfer, but the pricing. At one stage Elseviers raised subscription prices by 33% in a single year, to compensate for higher printing and e-publishing costs. This is patently nonsense, as the printing costs have been going down, year by year (we know this from the printing costs of PhD theses), and e-publishing is way cheaper than hardcopy publishing.

The journal publishers get all the content for free: authors, reviewers, and editors get nothing (either that or I am editor in the wrong journal). By raising prices they are driving scientists to an alternative publishing model (like PLoS), where the author pays to publish, and subscription is free.

The problem is that as a scientist you do want to publish in good journals, and not just for reasons of prestige. Good journals are read by more people. This means my ideas get a bigger audience. Just like many performer would like to play for a big crowd at some time, I would like my ideas to be read by people. Otherwise articles become my write-only memory.

Good journals generally (not always) give me a better (stricter) class of review. When reviewing, I myself tend to be stricter about a submission to a lower ranking journal than to say IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, in particular in terms of novelty (real errors get flagged anyway!). Stricter reviews are a sterner test of my ideas. If they pass that kind of scrutiny, they may be worthwhile. PLoS and similar journals will take time to gain acceptance. A quicker change would be for existing journals to adopt the new publishing format. IEEE is looking at that.

Not at all!

Lord Sutch made good sense (occasionally). And he had a better dress sense

Think bigger

What about the Bismarck, HMS Hood, or Yamato.

Full scale might mean refilling printer cartridges from time to time, of course.

I thought that involved chaotic computing involved students making arbitrary changes to code to see if it works now,

or is that chaotic programming?

Maybe they wanted to play dice at 2 million K

Man that game is hot

X-ray does not penetrate many metal surfaces well (which is why old amalgam fillings wreak havoc with older CT reconstruction algorithms). Tank armor could absorb a hell of a lot before melting. A picosecond blast might be a tad short to do damage.

Neat, because every cosmetic has only temporary effects

because most people die well before the sun becomes a red giant.

the speed limit may be 0.0003 mph

(how much is that in furlongs per fortnight?)

As a guest to planet, it should stick to the local traffic rules

Again, there may be something important in there, I have yet to study the paper in detail. However, there is a ton of literature on removing low energy components (we have a few papers on other compression techniques, so I have been keeping up with much of it), so that in itself is not new. I also question whether the global sine/cosine basis used by Fourier is ideal for this work. More localized basis functions (local DCT/ wavelets/curvelets/insert your favourite over-complete dictionary of functions here) are often used. This is why the MIT paper uses a local transform, rather than global, as I understand it from the Reg report.

So again, it is not really an FFT, but it may be another kind of lossy compression technique. If they compress or analyse better than others kudos to them!

OMG, internet is addictive??!!

It should be banned!!!

Won't somebody think of the children????!!!!

A will e-mail my MP at once......

Oh, wait.

That's inflation for you

I am amazed $695 worth of clay fits in a box that size. Last time I checked prices they brought a truckload of the stuff for that kind of money.

Re: Yes but philosophy, is really about beer

Or other alcohol. Plato's Symposion is a get together to drink (literally the meaning of Greek symposion). This is why I always point out to my PhD students that having a drinks together with other scientists is what an international symposium is about (despite the Latinised ending).