Humodour

Hah! It mentions Fionna was an IRA operative and that's all you hear about it, if it really worries you.

Yeah, I was contemplating making (another?) thread for Burn Notice considering the previous episode. It was bloody fantastic. I also liked the episode where he pretended to be a chemistry nerd with bad asthma. Looks like we'll, have to wait a few months for the second half of the season. Also, good to see Tricia Helfer (Carla) in something other than Battlestar: Galactics. Oh, and I was happy to see Michael Shanks in an earlier episode, too! I hope he comes back.

Oh, you mean hungry hungry hippos?

Don't let taks or Guard Dog hear you say that or you'll be labelled a 'dirty socialist'. #

Yeah, I think we are clear: you love C++ so much that you think it is a good starting language regardless of (or because of) the information overload, steep learning curve, and unsafe typing. Well, I guess there's nothing wrong with holding those views if you're just a game designer, but I personally hope you stay away from being a CS instructor because such an elitist 'weeding out' approach does computer science and its students a disservice. http://mcsp.wartburg.edu/zelle/python/python-first.html

I take it didn't occur to you that the voters who are racist predominantly preside in electorates typically held by Republicans? Hilarious. I know you'll never support things like social welfare and healthcare, so I'll skip on your little paranoid gem of "the Democrats will plunge America into abject socialism".

Yeah, I like Python. It's a fairly commonly used languages and its reputation as a scripting languages is beginning to surpass even Perl as more programmers discover it. It's used in many computer games for scripting, but that's superfluous in terms of Python's utility. I'm fairly dubious of your claim that you don't need it (almost every programmer does something where it would be wiser to use a scripting language, game design aside). Anyway, we are talking of what constitutes a good starting language, not what is the gaming industry standard. Even then, I've never been one for the "it's the industry standard" argument - kills innovation. Would you have us all learning COBOL for scientific and business computing? Au contraire, the jump from nothing to C++ is a (significantly) larger learning curve than the jump from nothing to Python to C++. From a didactic perspective, this is a grave problem due to information overload. You understand, yes? I won't try and extol the virtues of Python to you but do note that you do not only expound C++ but simultaneously seek to deride other languages. This later part I take issue with. So you'd find it difficult to adapt to a semantic style that is in many ways identical, with the main deviation being extraneous elements are removed for clarity and ease of understanding? Python syntax is almost identical to pseudcode, which was designed for portability and ease of understanding. I'm fairly certain you understand pseudocode. Please stop back pedaling. Besides what you just said making C/C++ poor choices from a pedagogical perspective, you were initially trying to claim Python being unsafely typed and C/C++ were safely typed, as a reason for C being a better starting language than Python:

I don't know, the spice smell isn't a good one; it's very off-putting. Like, back when I was tutoring in Canberra, every time one of my Indian students came in, his 'spice' odour was so powerful I kept getting distracted from my work. I kept trying to figure out how it was that such an odour consistently lingered with him over months without dispersing. I reasoned it had to be with him, because if it was in his books I wouldn't be able to smell it from a table across. It must be due to the epithelial cells picking up some substances more strongly than others. For us its something 'milky', for them it's likely something in their curries. Compounding this, their lactose intolerance means they don't have any 'milky' odour of their own to dilute it a bit, and likewise, we rarely eat curries, so the juxtaposition is all the greater. In conclusion, he smelt distracting.

Are we talking about racism? Of course it plays a part in this election, but compared to what it would have in the past, it's far less than you'd think (for whites). We're not just talking whites less likely to vote for blacks, but also blacks and Hispanics more likely to vote for blacks. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108040/Candidat...pport-Race.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_op...008#Other_polls Edit: In fact, people seem (slightly) more willing to vote for a black candidate than a female one. Hilariously, only 5% of blacks, on average, are willing to vote for the Republicans this election. That level of homogeneity is something to be proud of (from a sociological point of view), but it's not hard to see why it is the case: you've got a personally significant historical precedent combined with a downright awesome Democrat candidate. According to Gallup, only 45% of Republicans recognise there's a problem with the American economy.

Did you even read what I wrote? Mostly. I skimmed over bits because it was a passionate tirade in response to a (most likely facetious) off the cuff comment. Why are we talking about evil, again? You're doing it again with the implying "anecdotal evidence is valid primary proof". We're talking probabilistic facts here, not mathematical ones, so please dump the proof by contradiction. Fair enough.

So does that make 2010 the year when Bob Page unleashes Icarus in the confusion of IP exhaustion? From the wikipedia article on the SSC: It's funny because that's exactly what happened. Although that's likely more due to a multitude of factors including stagnation after the Cold War rather than the cancellation of a single atom smasher.

Well, for the Tiananmen Square Massacre, I actually get proper results. The Communist Party of China must have only made Google block it for identifiable Chinese citizens (i.e. IPs from China). http://www.google.cn/search?q=tiananmen+square+massacre You are RIGHT.You can see something,but I can't.Because this is Politics I...we are the victim. *sigh* And that's the crux of the matter, Finger of Death: nobody has a problem with the Chinese people, just your government. Although at least the CPC has admitted its legal system is unacceptably incomplete and inconsistent... ironically that probably just means their solution will be to hand out more death sentences.

So I installed GHC on my Ubuntu box today and fiddled in Haskell a bit. I figured I'd post this, since it's rather poignant and basically underlines some of the main reasons I like Python and Haskell so much. Read it, and then tell me you think people should be taught C first. Quicksort Haskell quickSort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] quickSort [] = [] quickSort (pivot:xs) = quickSort lesser ++ equal ++ quickSort greater where (lesser, equal, greater) = part pivot xs ([], [pivot], []) part :: Ord a => a -> [a] -> ([a],[a],[a]) -> ([a],[a],[a]) part _ [] (le, eq, gr) = (le, eq, gr) part pivot (y:ys) (le, eq, gr) | y > pivot = part pivot ys (le, eq, y:gr) | y < pivot = part pivot ys (y:le, eq, gr) | otherwise = part pivot ys (le, y:eq, gr) Python def quickSort(data): if data == []: return [] else: pivot = data[0] lesser, equal, greater = part(data[1:], [], [pivot], []) return quickSort(lesser) + equal + quickSort(greater) def part(data, le, eq, gr): while data != []: head = data[0] data = data[1:] if head < eq[0]: le = [head] + le elif head > eq[0]: gr = [head] + gr else: eq = [head] + eq return (le, eq, gr) Gotta love list comprehensions and recursion. I was so happy when I was first learning Python and discovered that it had borrowed them from Haskell (along with a few other cool things, including indentation-based syntax instead of parentheses). It evens removes the outdated C/Java conflation of reduce/fold, filter and map into for loops (although still offers for loops for obvious reasons). Unfortunately, Python doesn't support tail call optimisation for recursion as Haskell does, so it's more efficient to use a procedural partition method instead of a recursive one for Python (lack of tail optimisation is a completely arbitrary decision). Contrariwise, however, likely because of this, in Python a quicksort without partition is faster! Quicksorts without partition are at the bottom in Haskell and Python as a reference. You'll need to dig through this obnoxiously complex C quicksort to get there: C (similarly long in C++) taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort //Quicksort the array void quicksort(int* array, int left, int right) { if(left >= right) return; int index = partition(array, left, right); quicksort(array, left, index - 1); quicksort(array, index + 1, right); } //Partition the array into two halves and return the //index about which the array is partitioned int partition(int* array, int left, int right) { //Makes the leftmost element a good pivot, //specifically the median of medians findMedianOfMedians(array, left, right); int pivotIndex = left, pivotValue = array[pivotIndex], index = left, i; swap(&array[pivotIndex], &array[right]); for(i = left; i < right; i++) { if(array[i] < pivotValue) { swap(&array[i], &array[index]); index += 1; } } swap(&array[right], &array[index]); return index; } //Computes the median of each group of 5 elements and stores //it as the first element of the group. Recursively does this //till there is only one group and hence only one Median int findMedianOfMedians(int* array, int left, int right) { if(left == right) return array[left]; int i, shift = 1; while(shift <= (right - left)) { for(i = left; i <= right; i+=shift*5) { int endIndex = (i + shift*5 - 1 < right) ? i + shift*5 - 1 : right; int medianIndex = findMedianIndex(array, i, endIndex, shift); swap(&array[i], &array[medianIndex]); } shift *= 5; } return array[left]; } //Find the index of the Median of the elements //of array that occur at every "shift" positions. int findMedianIndex(int* array, int left, int right, int shift) { int i, groups = (right - left)/shift + 1, k = left + groups/2*shift; for(i = left; i <= k; i+= shift) { int minIndex = i, minValue = array[minIndex], j; for(j = i; j <= right; j+=shift) if(array[j] < minValue) { minIndex = j; minValue = array[minIndex]; } swap(&array[i], &array[minIndex]); } return k; } //Swap two integers void swap(int* a, int* b) { int temp; temp = *a; *a = *b; *b = temp; } Quicksorts without partition in Python and Haskell below. Unlike Python, Haskell does provide at least a nominal speed increase for partitioning, as one expects. That is: quicksort in Python isn't much slower than C or anything, but paradoxically, the expectedly 'slower' version of quicksort is faster in Python (by quite a bit). Haskell quickSort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] quickSort [] = [] quickSort (pivot:xs) = quickSort lesser ++ [pivot] ++ quickSort greater where lesser = [y | y <- xs, y < pivot] greater = [y | y <- xs, y >= pivot] Python def quickSort(data): if data == []: return [] else: pivot = data[0] lesser = quickSort([x for x in data[1:] if x < pivot]) greater = quickSort([x for x in data[1:] if x >= pivot]) return lesser + [pivot] + greater Python's Haskell heritage is fairly obvious here. Here's a great explanation of why Haskell is such a good language Haskell. Oh well, enough proselytising for today. I think my verbosity has probably turned 95% of readers off anyway.

Two cases, both unfortunately indistinguishable: 1) The Y2K hype was based on specious reasoning (this is what most people now suspect) 2) The Y2K hype was accurate, but nobody noticed, because the hype successfully motivated people to fix the bug Unfortunately, both suffer the same problem: nothing bad happened, leading to an anticlimax for the general populace, leading to distrust of the original predictions. This is likely a compounding problem for IPv4 exhaustion because, regardless of the fact that its predictions are far more concrete and quantifiable, it now has to contend with a populace which bears a "boy who cried wolf" suspicion of anything resembling "technological doomsday" scenarios. Homer: Well, there's not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol is sure doing its job. Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, sweetie. Lisa: Dad, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers. Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. It's just a stupid rock. Homer: I see. Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around, do you? Homer: Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.

I don't see where you get the conclusion that failure to produce Higgs bosons at LHC means they don't exist? You could take that probabalistic line with the RHIC not producing a Higgs, but as far as I am aware, the LHC should be producing them all the time at those energy densities. Oh, I didn't mean it that way. I just think it's a pretty expensive way of proving a point, is all. I'm all for taxes money being spent in all sorts of huge ass scientific gimmicks. Oh, I get that. I just felt it was a poignant time to chime in about how a lot of people use that highly fallacious "Billions of dollars on science? What a waste!" line of thinking. I didn't know about that. But since you brought up the Y2K thing, perhaps IPv4 running out won't be the end of the world either... I'm a bit skeptical about doomsdays, these days. Well I personally wouldn't even consider asteroids hitting Earth, supervolcanoes erupting, or a global ice age due to underestimated localised nuclear war, as the end of the world. As song as a few thousand humans survive, life goes on. I do, however, find it bemusing that people were willing to run around like headless chickens because the Y2K bug occurred at the changeover of the millennium (but realistically had fairly limited damage potential) while 10 years later (desensitisation?) they absolutely ignore something that's far more pervasive in our lives (especially 2 years from now), crucial to almost all forms of government, business, education and leisure, and has a far more feasible (but no less disastrous) mode of damage: massive communications disruption because IPv6 isn't backwards compatible with IPv4 (an infrastructure problem).

Well, since you think 160 kbps is "slightly above Youtube quality", would you mind doing a quick test? I'll link you to ten 320 kbps MP3's, where some have been downsampled to 160 kbps, then upsampled back to 320 kbps. This means they all look like they are 320 kbps, but some of them sounds like 160 kbps. Give it a try here: 320-160 kbps Test.rar I'm curious to see if you actually can hear a difference. I can not. You just won the thread.

Yes. Shepard - "Tell me about whatever" the other person - "wall of awkward text" Yeah, I hate that about Bioware's games. Unfortunately, it is also what Bethesda does, isn't it? It's mostly of antithetical to how all the best RPGs (IMO) in history did it: Deus Ex 1, Fallout 1/2, Planescape: Torment, I can't remember Bloodlines's writing and dialogue interactivity standing out, but I thoroughly enjoyed that game and would consider it one of the best RPGs, so it obviously did something right. I think it had just good overall atmosphere, adventure, and actual role-playing (in the sense of tonnes of options). And on that note, obviously you can get by with an awesome game without stellar dialogue: IWD, HL1, SS2, JA2, D1/2, KOTOR1, NOLF1, JK2, BG1.. thing is, in my experience Bethesda doesn't make stellar games even without good dialogue, and Bioware is struggling at it lately, too. I guess ME and FO3 will tell. Assuming I can be bothered playing FO3 - critical response to FO3 similar to Oblivion would quickly deter me (i.e. mediocre game sites praising it as the best thing since sliced bread, with more independent and informed reviewers critical of it).

As someone who has nursed three babies, I'm going to take some exception to this statement. Nursing is one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life. It was painful, hard to get right and just plain frustrating. You don't know how much your child is getting and if for some reason you're not making enough milk, it's very hard to know it. All you know is that you have a fussy, unhappy baby and you can't fix it. Add that on top of the many, many sleepless nights and the highly derranged mental state post pardom hormones + that lack of sleep put you in and it can be flat out devastating to any woman when she's been fed this "formula is evil!" line. While breast feeding is always best, supplementing with formula is a godsend. I still remember the day I finally decided to try to give my youngest a bottle of formula after days of pulling my hair out because of his fussiness. Do you realize just how horrible I felt when the 2 month old baby sucked down that bottle and I realized that all that frustration was because he was *hungry*?? Ok... sorry.... just needed to rant. Parenting is hard enough without subjecting sleep deprived, inexperienced moms to more guilt. Not to rain on your parade, but he's correct. Kids who weren't breast-fed are more likely to suffer things like asthma, etc. Tangentially, owning a cat (probably pets in general) as a kid seems to decrease the probabilities of allergies later in life. Again, antibody training. Tangentially again, replacing parental nurturing with daycare also places your kids at risk for various things, although this is more in the mental rather than physiological arena. Not saying your kids have or will have problems (probability, remember), but nullification of a probabilistic finding through anecdotal evidence is still a logical fallacy, however heartfelt and well-meaning such a defence, or how much better off we might be if the finding weren't true.

Wow, Asimov vibes? Not everyone in the particle physics community is so fond of the SM as it would appear. There's still a chance that it may be debunked by evidence - prof. Hawking would seem to agree. The luminiferous aether analogy is fitting... only they didn't spend billions to find out. It's funny because when people see the hugely wasteful wars in the Middle East costing way over $400 billion for the US alone in less than 10 years, they just shrug and say "What can you do?" yet when it comes to a ground-breaking atom smasher that provides timeless insight into our universe in a peaceful, collaborative manner, they're affronted by the notion that we might spend about $10 billion on it spread over several collaborating countries, spread again over 20 years. You want my opinion? The LHC has probably already paid for itself. Just like CERN created the World Wide Web to advance science of the day, the upgrades to the Internet required by the LHC at CERN spurred groundbreaking networks research and installation - an investment that will far out-live the LHC and add to the overall vitality of the Internet (and it needs it considering its growth rate - the IPv4 exhaustion problem will be bigger than anything the Y2K could have mustered and while it starts to hurt in about 1 year, and we've passed the point of fixing it without interruption, still nobody is paying any attention to it). Kudos for linking Physorg. Great science news aggregator, that.

Bull****. If all they find is the Higgs particle it'll have been worth it for that alone. In fact, if all they find is nothing new, then that'd also make it worth it, since it implies no Higgs exists! Heck dude, I need only to quote the very article you just linked to which says the same thing:

I'm a bit curious... do you think that would in any way justify the existence of such restrictive DRM methods? Because, y'know, that seems to be what you and HKD are about: "If you don't like it, go somewhere else." or "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need to worry." Heaven forbid we make any noise about moves that limit our rights on a game we bought.

Since you've already taken the opportunity to tenuously link BSG to the 2008 election, I feel no shame in posting this link: http://www.tighroslin.com/ As a corollary: the scenario you suggests sounds plausible.

Not only that, but the human brain has an enormous propensity for pattern matching and noise cancellation. Within mere minutes of listening to lower quality kbps music, your brain has adjusted to the point you can't tell the difference. Indignation over bitrates above 128kbps is somewhat like a French noble sniffing their nose up at a $30 bottle of wine.

I don't really understand why that's news. It's like reporting "Dolly accidentally cuts her leg" a year after she's cloned or something.

Arg, I knew somebody would pull me up for that, so I edited it to say 'aspects of OO'. I mean data structures and design that resembles OO like parallel arrays, structs, and modularisation. I should have changed C to C/C++. Pfah! The issue of 'what is the best starting language?' is one with a myriad of stances and equally a myriad of proponents of each stance. I understand yours, and it carries merit; I found Python simple, elegant and powerful (like Haskell) in part because I'd been dealing with its orangutan cousins (Java, C) previously. But if I had started out with Python, I imagine I'd feel some indignation at the notion of having to code in C... like typing on a keyboard while wearing boxing gloves. Although even that analogy is misleading because it ignores the control one gains with low-level languages (desired or not).