Myth: The astronauts didn't float away because they had heavy boots - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sciencegeekgirl.com/2009/11/09/myth-because-the-astronauts-had-heavy-boots/ <comment><USER3> I think the people who answered wrongly aren't thinking in a first principles, physics-based mindset, but just instead just recalling previous memories and reasoning in an intuitive, fuzzy kind of pattern-matching.

We've all seen images of pens floating weightless in _space_ on films and TV, and we probably haven't ever seen pens falling on the moon. But the moon is in space right? so... yeah, why not, it floats.

And for the guys on the moon, well I haven't got any memories of astronauts _without_ boots on, and those boots sure look big and heavy, they're special _gravity boots_ , I'm sure I heard that on TV once, yeah, that's probably it.

The first principles approach of applying the concept of universal gravitational attraction probably isn't even entering their heads, _even if they 've been taught it_.

This used to get on my nerves, how can people be so stupid? Why won't they just _think_ for a moment!? But recently I've been focussing some effort on learning a language (Spanish) and realise that in that this case the first- principles style of learning that works so well for physics and maths is largely useless, and it's better to turn off the analytical side of your brain and not think too much, just keep exposing yourself, trying to communicate, and let your subconscious do it's stupid fuzzy pattern-matching, and it does a remarkably good job!

<comment><USER4> I grew up as a space junky, with NASA still running manned missions when I was a kid. It didn't take me very long to understand the concepts of gravity on the moon vs. earth. I trust that if I asked grade-school me, I'd get the right answer.

While it didn't take long to get the physics of the problem, it took a lot longer for me to grasp the social side of things. Specifically, if your grade six teacher says something stupid like this, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from correcting her. I wish I could go back in time and clue me in.

OTOH, if it's a university lab at a science and engineering school, then give 'em hell.

<comment><USER5> You may not gain anything correcting your sixth grade teacher, but by not correcting her, something can be lost. A world where teachers can spout bullshit without any opposition is not one I want to live in. And given we only have one world...

Perhaps it was irrelevant in your case. Or perhaps your skepticism inspired a fellow student to become an engineer. Who knows?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At my daughter's school, they had an assembly for parents to attend that celebrated, amongst other things, the first landing on the moon.

The children boldy proclaimed that the reason the hammer and the feather hit the ground at the same time in the famous experiment was because there was less gravity on the moon.

It still rankles with me a year later.

<comment><USER7> That's a shame. Was there any opportunity to assess the material before it was presented? Was there any method to correct mistakes after?

Your daughter presumably understands that it's not about gravity but air resistance. Has she told all her pals? Because that kind of subversive teaching could be really powerful. TEACHERS HATE HER; THE GRAVITY SECRET _THEY_ DON'T WANT _YOU_ TO KNOW!!! etc.

May I ask, hold old was your daughter? What kind of science teaching should she be getting? (Obviously, not anything that wrong).

<comment><USER6> She was 6 at the time. I told her afterwards it was wrong but I regret not telling the teachers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the key is this sentence: "Many students thought the pen would float away. One year, she asked them instead about a crescent wrench instead of the "apocryphal pen." They all answered that question correctly!"

People just DO NOT think.

Everybody has SEEN (on TV, where they spend more time in front of, than in school or reading books) astronauts in orbit demonstrate they're weighless, by showing a pen float in front of them.

So space = floating pens, in their visual memory.

Moon is in space, therefore pens float.

What about a wrench? Oops, no visual memory to answer, bummer, they'll have to think! And of course, some of the little teaching they had pegged, and they can answer correctly.

That's all. People DO NO think.

Why do you think, IBM had to put up "THINK!" panels in its offices?

<comment><USER9> > People just DO NOT think.

People think. They just generally do not think about Physics.

<comment><USER10> I think he's referring to cached thoughts. Thinking critically takes more effort than retrieving cached thoughts. So why think critically in lieu of a ready made meme?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Site seems to be down. Cached version is here: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uWHPLrG...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uWHPLrGJYW4J:blog.sciencegeekgirl.com/2009/11/09/myth- because-the-astronauts-had-heavy-boots/)

A significant part of the article is a reposting of [http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~det/phy2060/heavyboots.html](http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~det/phy2060/heavyboots.html)

Edit: Changed wording re how much of article is repost

<comment><USER12> >Article is mainly just a reposting of [http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~det/phy2060/heavyboots.html](http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~det/phy2060/heavyboots.html) though...

That is an unfair characterisation, I think. The article does indeed reproduce heavyboots in its 725 words entirety (according to pages's word count for what that one's worth), but tacks a further 930 words afterwards. And these 930 are interesting indeed as they're further explorations of the phenomenon and discussion on its underlying reasons.

<comment><USER11> Fair enough - I've changed the wording a bit. Personally, though, I thought that the follow-on discussion didn't add much beyond what was mentioned in the original heavyboots article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the comments:

> I answered gravity on a physics test in high school for the question "What > force works at a distance" and got it wrong because the professor wanted > electromagnetism. When I took the paper up to him to contest it, he told me > that gravity doesn't count because it only exists between planets. I got the > physics book and ..."

I was sure at that point he was going to say "dropped it on the floor" but no such luck.

> "...read to him out of it but he cut me off and claimed that what I had read > proved his point."

</comment><comment><USER7> See also this website. They ask the question to students, and we know the courses the students are taking.

[http://www.falstad.com/gravity.html](http://www.falstad.com/gravity.html)

> Physics 324 - Modern Physics for Engineers

> "A body is at rest tends to stay at rest, plus there's no gravity"

> "The gravity of the moon can be said to be negligible, and also the moon's a > vacuum, there is no external force on the pen. Therefore it will float where > it is."

> "The pen will float away because the gravitational pull of the moon, being > approximately 1/6 that of the earth, will not be enough to cause the pen to > fall nor remain stationary where it is. The gravatational pull of other > objects would influence the pen"

It's a bit scary seeing what the answers are.

I guess we need to remember just how long ago it was that anyone was on the moon, or any distance into space.

An ASCII diagram.

           e   g                          m

           earth geosynchronous           moon

Since 1980 we've sent people maybe a pixel from e.

<comment><USER14> >> "The gravity of the moon can be said to be negligible, and also the moon's a vacuum, there is no external force on the pen. Therefore it will float where it is."

That one's almost correct; it's just an issue of scale; they don't realize how big/heavy the moon actually is.

<comment><USER15> The issue is that they presumably understand that the moons gravity _isn 't_ negligible, since damn near everybody on earth has seen the Apollo 11 moon landing videos. They are not merely missing information needed to answer the question and making the wrong assumption. They have all of the necessary information, but get it wrong anyway because for whatever reason, they aren't _using_ all of the information they have.

<comment><USER7> > since damn near everybody on earth has seen the Apollo 11 moon landing > videos.

Is that true? I suspect it's true for people over 30 or who have special interest in STEM, but not so true for anyone else.

<comment><USER15> I would say that the footage has been used enough in various forms of media to have just about everyone covered. Stuff like this at least: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=182oUgBfoLE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=182oUgBfoLE)

One way or another, I think everyone but very small children or reclusive hermits have seen at least _some_ footage of an Apollo astronaut bouncing around on the moon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would add another answer choice to the question 25:

25\. When the Apollo astronauts were on the Moon, they did not fall off because: (f) They were on Earth

</comment><comment><USER17> I think a lot of people who are skeptical of this story just don't realize that they appended to be surrounded by people who have developed unusually accurate physical models.

I recommend browsing Amazon reviews of (non heat pump) electric heaters for statements about which ones are more efficient. (The less efficient one produce more waste heat?)

Because there are few consumer products that exercise people's understanding of gravity, basic thermodynamics might be a good proxy. However the real point of the article isn't all the misconceptions that must be "plucked out" one by one, but the struggle of trying to figure out how to encourage students to form more comprehensive models.

I'd also add that an important goal in teaching is students' facility in applying principles, and confidence to question intuition and consensus.

<comment><USER18> Well, in case of electric heaters used to heat a home the efficiency should really be measured in terms of "how much electricity is consumed if the heated room is kept at constant 20C measured at e.g. center of room". This is somewhat dependent on the quality of the thermostat controlling the heater.

Then, I think that there are some real differences found in the efficiency of the heaters.

<comment><USER19> If you're still talking about electrical heaters here, there's literally no where for the energy used to go other than into heat for the room.

If you have two 1000w heaters, one made from a potato and ten clothes hangers and the other made from the highest quality materials known to man, they will still both heat a room the same amount.

Granted, one might have a better fan or more airflow and might therefore provide a more even heat distribution in the room, but they will both be providing the same amount of heat to the interior of the room. That's just how energy balances work. If 1000w is flowing from the plug into the heater and it's not being stored anywhere in the heater itself there's nowhere for it to go but into heat for the room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This _must_ be nonsense. Or an April Fools joke. Or something. I don't want it to be true. It can't be.

 _sobs quietly_

<comment><USER21> Go forth and ask random people whether (a) the earth revolves around the sun, or (b) the sun revolves around the earth.

The proportion giving answer (b) will cause you to sob even more.

(Yes, I have done this. Afterwards, I hid under my bed bewailing the ignorance of my fellow hominids.)

<comment><USER22> Both a and b are true (after you fill in the missing information). With two objects it's only a matter of chosen frame (or point) of reference. I'd argue that since you're on Earth, b makes more sense.

The importance of the heliocentric model comes from the fact that there are more objects in the solar system. With multiple objects you could also hold any one of them still but it makes the model much more complicated and the attraction between the objects less intuitive.

<comment><USER23> b is ruled out to a "reasonable" person because the Earth is not an inertial reference frame, but is clearly the 'rotating' frame, while the Sun is (approximately) stationary.

This is confirmed through the phenomena of stellar parallax and stellar aberration, which are only visible from Earth because of its motion. Even back in the 1573, Thomas Digges and many successors realized they could prove the Earth was in motion using parallax (though had trouble detecting it), and in 1729 James Bradley gave the first proof of heliocentrism using aberration. Both of these observations were taken as proof by the scientific world that the Earth orbits the Sun, and not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The heavy-boots answer seems pretty justifiable in the case where you have a correct intuition about how gravity itself works but simply underestimate how strong the Moon's gravity happens to be. Set the parameters just-so and there _would_ be a threshold effect, as on an asteroid massive enough to walk on but not-massive enough to jump off.

<comment><USER25> Exactly! This reminded me of the Little Planet what if [http://what- if.xkcd.com/68/](http://what-if.xkcd.com/68/) Munroe claims on a small, super massive planet, you could overcome escape velocity with a sprint. It doesn't work the same on the moon obviously, but only because the moon has significant gravity.

>Which, pointed out a discussant, suggests that students are using buoyancy as an analogy — if you're heavy enough you sink, if you're light enough you float.

Why is this such a stupid assumption? That's how it works on Earth.

I don't believe that these kids are failing to think; they're using reasonable analogies, but lacking specific knowledge about the environment on the moon.

>"All science is either physics or stamp collecting." \- Ernest Rutherford

Basically the authors are complaining that the students haven't collected a specific stamp.

<comment><USER24> Well, the lack of an atmosphere on the Moon should rule out buoyancy. Myself I don't doubt that many of the wrong answers really were the result of faulty intuitions or dodgy reasoning.

<comment><USER25> Of course, but that's another environmental variable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When I took physics in high school, Gravity was introduced to me with an equation. After 5 minutes discussion, everyone in the room would have known how to answer the question about "Dropping a rock on the moon."

I find it hard to believe that a high school physics student, just fresh from studying gravity module, wouldn't realize that a rock dropped on the moon would fall down. Doesn't pass the smell test.

<comment><USER27> Being introduced to gravity with an equation is not nearly enough to figure out how things will behave. It takes calculus to describe the motion of falling things even without air resistance. Even if someone straight-up tells the students that gravity accelerates things at the same rate regardless of mass, they're probably not going to believe it without some experiments.

Edit: a quiz to maybe prove my point :) On the moon, if you throw a rock, what shape would its arc describe?

Edit2: not a straight line when you drop it, silly!

<comment><USER28> > tells the students that gravity accelerates things at the same rate > regardless of mass

Please get your wording right, there is a big difference between force and acceleration. It is trivial to prove, that things are not accelerated by gravity at equal rate.

PS: I am not usually wording-nazi but since you started with calculus...

<comment><USER27> You have it backwards, qwerta. If the feather and the hammer fall to the ground in the same time they must have accelerated at the same rate. Of course the hammer has more force applied by gravity and the feather has less; that is why the hammer is heavier!

<comment><USER28> Yes, but in atmosphere it would be accelerated at a different rate. Stationary objects are not accelerated at all, because gravitational force is compensated.

As I was saying, there is difference between force and acceleration.

<comment><USER29> Interesting.

I read sp332's original comment as having an implicit "in the absence of other external forces" (gravity accelerates things at the same rate regardless of mass) as that's often implied when generally discussing forces and acceleration.

After all, it becomes hard to talk about the relationship between force and acceleration, if you can't even say that the acceleration of an object is proportional to a force acting upon it - because there might be other forces you've not taken into consideration! Yes, I won't accelerate an object if I try to push it into a barrier, because the barrier will exert an opposing force that resists my effort. Yes, an object might fall up if I "drop" it, because it's in an updraft that combined with it's drag coefficient causes more force up than gravity exerts.

But springing those sorts of situations on people as "gotchas" isn't useful in a general discussion about the essence of a concept. Unless otherwise specified, assume ideal point masses in a vacuum (or whatever). If you want to add opposing forces of some kind to complicate^W make the situation more realistic later on as a more advanced topic, that's fine, so long as that's specified up-front.

If complicating factors are not specified up-front, it's assumed that they're absent, because there are an infinte possible set of complicating factors which could be present but have not been mentioned yet.

After all, in an atmosphere it _could_ be accelerated at the same rate, as there's a (previously unmentioned) anemometer and computer-controlled rocket attached to the object which are set up to produce a thrust which exactly compensates for the wind resistence! So ner! :-)

(And, in fact, sp332 specifically stated "even without air resistance" to explicitly constrain the conditions under which their example was valid)

<comment><USER28> This is not about edge conditions, but about two different concepts. Saying "gravity accelerates" does not make sense by definition, at least we should say "gravitational force accelerates".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> On a few sites, a commenter known as "Russ Brown" claims he posted the original on usenet, referring to a class he took in 1981. He claims that the quiz results were added to his version of events.

[http://www.openeducation.net/2009/05/07/how-were-apollo- astr...](http://www.openeducation.net/2009/05/07/how-were-apollo-astronauts- able-to-walk-on-the-moon-why-heavy-boots-of-course/)

[http://worldofweirdthings.com/2009/04/27/a-gravity-fail- goes...](http://worldofweirdthings.com/2009/04/27/a-gravity-fail-goes-viral- but-is-it-real/)

I believe this is the original: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/"heavy$20boots"$20a...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/"heavy$20boots"$20after$3A1988$2F01$2F01$20before$3A1990$2F12$2F31/sci.astro/nooS8qezfRE/80FcCjnIvDwJ)

</comment><comment><USER31> I call it bullshit. I just asked that question to a seminar of paedagogic students, without a single person with physics background. 2 Choose answer the first answer, 3 the sencond one, the other 20 choose the correct answer. I expect much better results for students with physics background.

/edit, well bullshit is a bit strong, but replication failed

<comment><USER32> Only counts if you forbade them to communicate with each-other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm more stunned by this than when people go around and ask college students who the VP is or where is France. Those are facts and you either studied and memorized them or not.

That many people suck at "reasoning" about problems boggles my mind. Most these students knew the facts of Newtonian mechanics but could not apply them (in my opinion) to a very simple problem.

Not bragging. I must be good enough at reasoning that I am cognitively unable to comprehend that other people have trouble with it. Everyone knows how to breath or think about future. I assumed everyone can take things they know, combine/apply them to new situations. What I would call reason about things.

Maybe they can. And the results are an artifact of college environment (study/memorize/pass test vs actually learn/challenge/grow).

See, I so can't comprehend it that I'm trying to come up with rationalizations.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does a lack of knowledge of physics really matter in the real world for most people?

I was recently wondering if our terrible road safety problem in South Africa can partly be explained due to a lack of understanding of physics. After all, intuitively Newton's First Law explains why seatbelts are necessary. Concepts like momentum and kinetic energy explain why heavy trucks, speeding down steep inclines are dangerous - authorities don't seem to grasp that very often, and tragedies involving runaway trucks on poorly engineered roads are not infrequent.

But I then realised that two of the most reckless drivers I know are my uncle, an Engineering dropout, and my friend who is a practicing engineer. Being good at physics hasn't saved them from being in multiple car crashes.

Are there any cases where an understanding of physics helps the average person in everyday life?

<comment><USER35> This reminds me of my reaction to the evolution/creationism debate- Does it really matter which one people believe? It has pretty much zero practical impact on their lives, and there aren't a lot of decisions they can make for others that depend on the information.

Now, I'm not in favor of teaching creationism in schools. Schools should teach what we as a civilization understand to be true. But as far as what individuals choose to believe? I don't really much care. I think it's an odd thing to get emotional over, but both sides certainly do (this is me preempting emotional replies :-) )

Of course, even when evolution is taught, it's almost always taught wrong. Even a large percentage of graduate biology students have deep misconceptions about what evolution is and how it works.

It just occurred to me that machine learning students would probably have the best understanding of evolution of any group of students. Ha!

<comment><USER36> If you choose creationism, you also choose the existence of a creator. A great many people who hold this belief seem to base many decisions in their lives on what this creator would want them to do (or at least, say they do). This can be a very, very long way from "zero practical impact on their lives".

<comment><USER9> Could you give an example of practical impact on life of person who chose to believe in creationism?

<comment><USER36> A literal belief in fairy tales leading to them making major life decisions based on the collected, millennia-old edited ramblings of a desert tribe. Start with lynching witches and go from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I can't find the reference now, but in the 1980's, there was a study done on honors physics students -- undergraduates IIRC -- at Johns Hopkins. They were asked questions that they had the physics training to answer, but that were not problem set or exam questions. For instance: Coil a garden hose in a spiral, then force a ping pong ball out through the hose from the center to the periphery with a blast of air; how does it move once it leaves the hose: (a) continues in spiral (b) straight out - the tangent of the spiral where the hose ends (c) bending outward, away from the spiral.

Some large percentage of the students got it wrong. Explanations: (i) students limited their "physics know-how" to the textbook context, and this was something different; (ii) textbook problem sets are, over time, edited to weed out confusing problems, even if they're valid.

I've encountered something similar in teaching basic financial present value analysis to engineers - even the students who do well in the class go back to "folk" thinking when we discuss their mortgages and credit cards.

To me, it says that the cue of the classroom, or the awareness that "this is part of Physics 101" is critical to getting some people to apply a particular frame, and without that cue, they go back to "common sense". That does explain what happened (in the blog post) in the Philosophy class, and in the phone poll, but not as well what happened when the blog author tested her physics students.

<comment><USER38> Well shit, now I want to know the answer. It's "straight out" right?

<comment><USER19> From a simple F=m*a standpoint maybe, but I'm thinking that the hose would probably put a spin on the ball so it would likely curve outwards?

A ball with no spin on it would travel straight outwards because there would be no force acting on it to make it curve in any other direction.

I think a ball with spin on it would curve outwards because the ball would rotate the air around itself, which would provide the force needed to accelerate it outwards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> One explanation for the wrong answers is how people use the phrase 'pen floats', and how people are imprecise about using words.

The gravitational constant is 1/6 of the Earth's. This means that I can jump on the Moon 6 times higher than here and the pen will tale 6 times longer to fall down.

It will take 6 times longer for gravity to 'kick-in' and cause the perceivable movement, as we got used to here on Earth - where on Earth the pen moved already 6 cm on the Moon the movement is still 1 cm.

It looks as if the things are moving slower. I can catch a falling egg before it reaches the ground, my reactions are like of a fly on Earth.

So I can say that the things are floating on Moon, because they are not accelerating and falling fast enough, in common terms. In interstellar space the pen will fall onto the neighbor galaxy, but will do this so slow, that I will perceive as if it is floating. If the pen will move alongside with an object much smaller than the Moon (a rock), the pen will fall onto the rock with much slower acceleration. For time perception of humans it will float in space.

Another explanation for wrong answers is that if you feed people with stupid questions, you will get stupid answers. Have you asked me to answer these questions I will surely answer wrongly 'pen floats' and 'heavy boots' on purpose only to prove the point. These answers seem to be serious enough to mislead you.

<comment><USER40> No, it does not take the pen 6 times longer to fall down on the Moon compared to Earth. Not even close. That's not how acceleration works. [I can give the equation, but I think it's more instructive if people think about it themselves :-) ]

Also, actually try dropping a pen, like right now. Gravity "kicks in" immediately - there's no perceptible delay. (Unless your perception is way different from mine.)

<comment><USER9> I suspected that time difference between falls would be not linear, but I was not sure about actual ratio.

Playing with freefall distance equations showed that time to fall difference is square root of 6. Here we are:

      Height = gEarth*timeOnEarth^2/2 = gMoon*timeOnMoon^2/2
      gEarth = gMoon * 6
      6 * gMoon * timeOnEarth^2/2 = gMoon * timeOnMoon^2/2
      6 * timeOnEarth^2 = timeOnMoon^2
      timeOnMoon = sqrt(6 * timeOnEarth^2)
      timeOnMoon = sqrt(6) * timeOnEarth = 2.45 * timeOnEarth

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> There's a similarity between teachers and journalists in that they're supposed to double-check their informations before transmitting them. Not doing it plagues society.

</comment><comment><USER30> Towards the end, there are some guesses as to what theory of gravity the students hold, if it's a buoyancy analogy, or a threshold theory... A lot of people don't really subscribe to any coherent system of the world at all.

When you press someone, it's not uncommon for them to just pile on another fact about the subject matter and reassert the claim.

It's like brute force puzzle solving, kind of like I used to do in adventure games - you know the result you want, juggle all the stuff in your inventory or mind until it works.

And for a lot of subjects, for a lot of education, that approach works really well. You're told three facts about some historical event. You're asked a question on a test about the event. List one of those facts to win.

I'm guessing they jump to "boots" because the bootprint on the moon is a pretty widely seen and memorable image, and boots in our normal life are sometimes heavy. Heavy things make it harder to float, that's what heaviness sort of means. Having arrived at "floating's hard," they then call it a day without really understanding anything about how they got there.

There's no underlying theory, they kick away the scaffolding as soon as they get to any answer.

People don't have a list of facts in their heads that are constantly checked for mutual consistency, and people can stubbornly hang on to any premise they want.

In other words, the students (+ phil TA) aren't just stupid on this point, they are so stupid, the physics teachers don't even understand how stupid they are.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think the false association in this context is the following:

        space -->  weightlessness

Thinking this makes people look for "alternate" explanations, like the weight of the boots, etc.

People who have not been trained in physics often have a different "intuition" about the laws of physics. An interesting effort to qualify these "physics misconceptions" is the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) questionnaire[1], which which asks students to answer some basic qualitative problems from Newtonian mechanics. You should try it and see how you fare...

Interestingly, researchers have found that even after taking a Newtonian mechanics class, many students still hold on to their misconceptions---their score on the FCI is only slightly improved...

[1] [http://prst- per.aps.org/multimedia/PRSTPER/v3/i1/e010102/e01...](http://prst- per.aps.org/multimedia/PRSTPER/v3/i1/e010102/e010102_app.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER43> And that's my basic problem with talking with other people: It's hard for me to understand how one can not know or comprehend what I know and classify as "basic knowledge"...

Of course I understand that and can for instance explain it to them, but it often still remains surprising for me.

</comment><comment><USER32> My wife posited that perhaps their gravity suits kept them on the ground (which i found charming, at least she was thinking of gravity, and/or science fiction). My 8 year old daughter thought for a second and said the rock would fall, then on her way out of the room said it would float (no doubt taking some time to catalogue everything she's ever seen or read about space). I'm fairly sure if the question were posed as multiple choice, they both would have answered correctly.

No indictment of either (or anyone else who would answer incorrectly). After all, not many people think of physics very often on a day to day basis, particularly physics of extraterrestrial bodies.

</comment><comment><USER44> I could have benefited from an unhurried, contemplative learning about science in elementary school. The primary concern approach with example and counter example even seems fun. The "heavy boots" problem of focusing on what is not the primary concern is a problem in understanding other issues like in politics. In politics though people have a self interested agenda and will warp reality to make it fit like having the earth the center of the galaxy. People should strive in political learning to use the first principle approach of the article, like eliminate oppression, and unbiasedly apply it universally.

</comment><comment><USER45> A long while back, I read a scifi book (really a kids scifi book) about a kid that finds a red pebble which cancels gravity for anything it's in contact with (except kids, obviously), causing those objects to be pulled strongly up into the sky. Why? Because they were attracted by the moon's gravity. They even got it to spin round and suggested using that for free energy. Can't for the life of me remember the title or author, but I remember it really grated against my sensibilities, and I never read anything by the same author again.

<comment><USER46> Pretty sure it was Antigrav by Nicholas Fisk. It was a cool story - if you were a kid. I never did find any red pebbles though.

<comment><USER45> That sounds about right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> When I read the title I thought this would be about space walks. Having heavy boots would help create a greater gravitational attraction to the space station, making it harder to float away.

It's interesting to consider the forces involved. At 10m, with a 100kg astronaut and a 15 ton space station the gravitational force is about 1e-7 Newtons. At that acceleration, if the astronaut kicked off at the speed of 1cm/s--or 36 meters per hour--and assuming the force doesn't change, it would take about 24 days to get back.

</comment><comment><USER48> Here is a related question that has bothered me for some time: in Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865), he writes the travelers as only achieving weightlessness for a small moment, at just the point where the moon's gravity exactly cancels out the earths gravity.

This makes an intuitive kind of sense: you would gradually lose weight as you get farther from earth, then after a moment of weightlessness gradually 'gain' weight as you approach the moon.

Obviously this is wrong, but why?

<comment><USER49> (I'm not a physicist, so take the following with a grain of salt!)

It's not wrong, but it would never happen.

Let's say we've built a moon elevator. Like a space elevator, but tethered to the moon. You travel from the earth; there is a brief period of acceleration, then you settle down to a steady speed for your journey.

After you reach the steady state, you are going to experience normal Earth gravity. As you move further from the earth, however, you will experience less of it. As you approach the moon, its gravity will eventually be stronger - with this transition occurring at the Lagrange point L1 between the earth and the moon, where the gravitational pull from each is equal.

In practice, until we build a moon elevator, this isn't going to happen. Instead, we have to throw you at the moon using a rocket. Most of the energy we use for this is actually spent making you go sideways, instead of directly up. It's kind of cool actually - if you are orbiting the earth in, say, the ISS, you are actually experiencing nearly the same gravitational pull as if you were on the surface. You are just moving so ridiculously quickly in a circle around the earth that the centripetal force cancels out gravity - <USER2> someone is swinging you around on an invisible rope. Since this is happening to both you and the spaceship you are in, there is no relative acceleration - so you appear to be weightless.

If we fire some more rockets to accelerate you towards a lunar orbit, nothing else changes - you are still not accelerating relative to your spacecraft (assuming you are strapped in!) and so you continue to appear weightless. You transfer into orbit around the moon - and you are in the same situation you were in when orbiting earth. But if you drop a lunar lander, which slows itself down - it'll fall!

Orbital mechanics and gravity can certainly be counterintuitive, but it's thoroughly fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If 47% of students fail that "pen on the Moon" question -- that means that about half of professionals are clueless about physics.

On the other hand, most professionals are quite functional in their role (if it wasn't the case, why would employers pay them?).

These two observations mean that understanding of physics is not mandatory for being functional professional.

<comment><USER8> No, it means they're not functional, and that employers pay them to heat their chairs. Why else would employers insist on having people come to the office, instead of working at home, as we almost all could, in this day and age?

Further: [http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report- suggests-...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests- nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> That entire article made me angry like when I hear about creationism and evolution being taught as equal theoretical concepts.

</comment><comment><USER51> Great video of Apollo 15 astronaut dropping feather and hammer on the moon:

[http://youtu.be/03SPBXALJZI](http://youtu.be/03SPBXALJZI)

Too bad this isn't part of current events any more.

</comment><comment><USER52> Fascinating, I was so confused at first because I first misunderstood the fact who was right and who was wrong in this philosophy class.

I will ask this question on parties, this will be funny :D

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder what the poll percentages would be like in other countries? I suspect that fewer people would be this ignorant in industrialized countries other than the US.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is why Super Mario Galaxy is a great educational tool!

</comment><comment><USER55> it blows my mind that half got the first question wrong... :(

</comment><comment><USER56> Myth: This story

Truth: There are dumbasses in this world... those who believe this story, because it gives them a superiority over (mythical) others.

Lol, those stupid uni students who don't even know there's gravity on the moon. Lucky I didn't get a degree and become dumber/Lucky my Uni was better.

It's even a friend of a friend of a friend.

Seriously, why is this on the front page?</comment>


NYC's tech boom will turn it into a ghost town - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2019/11/02/why-new-york-citys-tech-boom-will-turn-it-into-a-ghost-town/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, that's just the Post doing it's usual scaremongering. Yes, what it says about the character of the city is true. No, it has nothing to do with the startup scene taking root here.

The difference between NY and SF is that — while, yes, NY isn't building enough housing — not only could NY absorb the entire startup-employed population of SF without it making a visible change to our population numbers or housing pressure, we actually have vaguely sane zoning laws and have a whole lot of housing (tho not nearly enough) being added every year.</comment>


Microsoft software engineer – stuck in old salary - <AUTHOR> Hello, I'm a L64 software engineer in Microsoft (Redmond), with a tenure of about 10 years in Microsoft (windows org). Below is my compensation: Base: 160K Stocks: 22K Bonus: 20K
Questions: I know that my salary is on the lower side as compared to my friends in my level. But, I like the work life balance I can get in Microsoft, therefore hoping that I can spend more of my career here..
What are the strategies to increase my pay in Microsoft? Some ideas in my mind are: 1) Go find a job in a different tech company around Seattle. Come back to Microsoft after a year, to get a better compensation package. Does this actually work? Will the Microsoft recruiters tie me down to my old salary? 2) Slog it hard in Microsoft to get a promotion and thereby get a better pay, but my old salary saddles me with a lower salary range even in the next level. 3) I've spoken to the manager, but they suggest that there is no way that they can adjust the salary, unless a promotion. <comment><USER2> Don't know anything about MS but I did exactly what you said on your 1st option and it worked for me.</comment>


"Great Algorithms" course taught by Richard Karp - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~karp/greatalgo/

<comment><USER2> I find it quite sad how many supposedly CS colleges fail to educate "the next generation" on these classics.

The situation is really funny here in Croatia, where there is basically only one "CS college" which does little to teach kids anything about actually great programming stuff.

It seems we are all breeding a generation of C#/Java/blub tool-users whose top limit is using form generators :-(</comment>


AmigaOS 3.1.4 - <AUTHOR> http://hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php/where-to-buy/direct-downloads/188-amigaos-314 <comment><USER2> Previously on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109930)

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great to see updates! I wonder how Hyperion stays afloat financially though?

<comment><USER5> AmigaOS vs. ArcaOS: battle of the legacy projects of classic closed-source OS's propped up by lingering companies

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How are these people still in business? I mean how can this make enough money to stay afloat?

<comment><USER7> The code base for the OS is tiny, compared to OS's nowadays. How much time do they have to invest to make improvements?

<comment><USER4> Even if this is true, the amount of features they added in this update must have taken a while to implement and test. The question on how they get enough funding is still valid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always wonder "why?". Like Haiku and other old tech projects I just can't see the sense of spending time and effort on dead tech.

Also, wow that is intensely ugly (but maybe that's just me).

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing)

Why do auto enthusiasts work on classic cars?</comment></comment>


Self-reported Happiness by State - <AUTHOR> http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/the-happiest-states-of-america/

<comment><USER2> Utah is happiest. Or is it?: [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/06/03/eveningnews/main51...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/06/03/eveningnews/main510918.shtml)

<comment><USER3> _"You'll discover, for example, that California's 14th district, located between San Francisco to San Jose, has the highest well-being index level. That district [is] considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley..."_

Presumably, like most maps, this would be more interesting on a county-by- county basis.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you consider yourself intellectual? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> what constitutes as an "intellectual"?

<comment><USER3> I think the question was asking about "intellectual" not "an intellectual", which seem rather different things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No.</comment>


Method Arguments In Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://www.skorks.com/2009/08/method-arguments-in-ruby/ <comment><USER2> I wonder why such a simple topic is in the top ten of HN? Is that stuff not more or less obvious? I mean for people working with Ruby?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been finding more and more that things which are obvious to some are not necessarily obvious to others. Not everyone is a guru in every skill and everyone has to start as a newbie with all new skill you learn.

What about for people who are not working with Ruby but are curious about how it compares? How about those who have just started working with Ruby and are just learning? Think back to the first time you started reading about Ruby, was all the info you ever wanted freely available and clearly laid out? I am betting no.

This is why these days whenever I learn anything new (or think of something I know really well), as soon as i get it straight in my own head I go and write it up. It helps me clarify it even further for myself plus, since the information is out there it may end up helping others who are learning about the same topics.

Anyway, that's how I feel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Perl6 has a very rich set in its spec: <http://perlcabal.org/syn/S06.html#Parameters_and_arguments>

There are a few Perl5 ports of which MooseX::Method::Signatures is probably the best implementation: [http://search.cpan.org/dist/MooseX-Method- Signatures/lib/Moo...](http://search.cpan.org/dist/MooseX-Method- Signatures/lib/MooseX/Method/Signatures.pm)

</comment><comment><USER4> Java has the same types of method arguments.

C# (.NET 3.5) misses one type of method argument: the default parameter (it will be shipped with .NET 4.0). I have to admit, it happened only once that I missed default parameters in C#. however, there's a workaround to solve this _problem_ : <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa287762(VS.71).aspx>

<comment><USER5> > _it happened only once that I missed default parameters in C#_

I actually missed it lots of times. You can work around it by overloading the method, but that's boilerplate for a simple concept.

I also miss named arguments (in both Ruby and C#). When reading the code, when a method has more arguments than one I often forget what the arguments are or their positioning, and it is a lot more readable to specify the arguments by their names ...

       lockfile( path = '/var/run/script', timeout = 60, on_timeout = handler)

Ruby doesn't support that. It only has syntactic sugar for the case in which the argument of the method is a hash, but then the method definition becomes less clear.

<comment><USER4> I totally agree with you! the code is definitely more readable. I think the object initalizer (e.g. var o = new MyObject(){ID=123};) was a step in the direction of named parameters.

however, it looks like named parameters will be shipped with .NET 4.0: [http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2009/01/22/c-4....](http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2009/01/22/c-4.0-named- parameters-for-better-code-quality.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be good to say what version of Ruby this is about.

I'm guessing it's 1.8.7, but 1.9, the current version of Ruby (though likely not the most used) offers additional (and in some cases, different) ways to manage arguments.</comment>


Our startup is live, thanks for your support - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,<p>Our startup http://www.powerlancer.com (business management tool for freelancers) went live a few weeks ago. Months ago, when we were just a sign up page and a video you guys gave us some advices, some of you even signed up and gave us feedback. Just wanted to thank you all for your support: Thank you :) <comment><USER2> The video is very nice. What tool did you use to create it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We used Adobe After Effects.</comment></comment>


Mueller Wins Indictment of 12 Russian Spies for Hacking in 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-13/mueller-indicts-12-russian-spies-for-hacking-in-2016-campaign <comment><USER2> Active discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17524575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17524575)</comment>


Show HN: Air Code - <AUTHOR> http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/AirCode/

<comment><USER2> Okay, I'm not being negative, I'm just confused about something...

I purchased Codea on the first day it was announced. I thought it was a cool sounding app and wanted to see what it was about. The idea was to have fun and play around and learn how to code using an iPad. The whole point was "Hey, you can learn to code on your iPad". But, now the message is "Hey, learn to code on your computer but run it on your iPad"? I'm not sure I'm gettin' it. Why not just have the code execute on the computer too? I'm just curious.

Also, I'm am a bit surprised Apple allowed it (due to the App Store rules). Though, with all the Air Drop support coming to iOS anyway, how can they justify rejecting this stuff. I mean, a browser runs javascript. You can build a browser and cache all the new code you want.

Edit:

I was just thinking and was wondering if Codea was attempting to become an "app platform". Like Squeak or Emacs. Perhaps that is what is happening? If it were branded like that I am pretty sure that it would be pulled from The App Store (I don't like that thought, btw). That could start making things interesting... Hmmm. But, again, that is what the overloads have wanted to avoid.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are reading too much into it. The message was never "learn to code on your iPad". The message was always "make cool prototypes and ideas quickly"

Over time I have added features that I personally use into Codea. Sometimes I like to use Codea at my desk next to my desktop computer, so I added a way to do that with Air Code. I still prefer coding on the iPad directly, but I use both depending on location.

Codea will always be about making your ideas come to life. It attempts to reduce the friction in creating things.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply. Cool, you are right then, I dug into it too much. Sorry for the confusion. It's still a cool product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you find this intriguing but don't want to code in a browser, Diet Coda and Coda 2 are for you.

[http://panic.com/coda/](http://panic.com/coda/) [http://panic.com/dietcoda/](http://panic.com/dietcoda/)

(oddly similar name)

<comment><USER4> Apples and Oranges JacksonGariety. Diet Coda allows you to code external projects that are stored in a server. This is for allowing you to write Codea applications on your computer rather than right on the iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice! I'll have to give Codea another try (never really had the patience to code on the iPad)

How did you manage to get around the appstore rules on downloading interpreted code? Does it not count if the code originates from a local network?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was very upfront in the review notes about how the feature worked, its limitations and the fact that it was designed for live editing over a local network.

Though I developed it under the expectation that it would not be approved — purely so I could use it. Because I find myself using Codea more and more these days, and using an iPad to code at my desk next to a 30 inch monitor felt a bit redundant.

<comment><USER6> Hey Sim - Paul here (n0p). You using Codea to code games or other things?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been using it to make games and game effects/animation tools. I really enjoy experimenting with touch interactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be nice to know if it's limited to iOS development or would also work for webdev, I can't that mentioned anywhere (though it might be obvious to those familiar with Codea.)

</comment><comment><USER8> You need a viewport meta tag to make your site work on mobile. Just get a zoomed in version!

</comment><comment><USER9> What's Codea?

<comment><AUTHOR> A coding app for iPad [http://twolivesleft.com/Codea](http://twolivesleft.com/Codea)</comment></comment>


Email is our "thermal exhaust port" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tygertec/email-is-our-thermal-exhaust-port-c809597fc959 <comment><USER2> > The ultimate "solution" would be a separate email address for every account.

This is not hard if you use a service like Fastmail. email@example.com can alternatively be expressed as firstname.lastname@example.com.

I also understand it's also pretty easy to setup wildcard forwarding with other providers, if you control the domain, so firstname.lastname@example.com will deliver to email@example.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Version w/o Medium's paywall: [https://www.tygertec.com/email-thermal-exhaust- port/](https://www.tygertec.com/email-thermal-exhaust-port/)</comment>


Code Golf: Write the Shortest Program to Shutdown the Computer - <AUTHOR> https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/107874/shut-down-the-computer/ <comment><USER2> There are a couple of "stop the computer working" solutions there, so if you have a Pentium or Pentium MMX, I submit a 4 byte x86 solution ;-) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug)</comment>


Poor design sends $19,000 in tickets to unlucky driver - <AUTHOR> http://blog.villainousmind.com/2009/10/poor-design-sends-19k-in-tickets-to.html

<comment><USER2> Just curious, how old is the ticket processing database? Is it possible that 7 X's was an invalid licesnse plate at some point in the past? If so is it bad design still? What is the bad design in that case, the system or the improper requirements gathering when updating some parts of the system to allow for the 7x license plate? Is the actual problem not in the software, but in a failure to notify and properly train the police officers one the 7x problem?

</comment><comment><USER3> It sounds more like state policy on valid license plates changed, and the software that handles this -- somewhere -- hasn't been updated to reflect this. This sort of things happens at work too, depending on how hacked together your software is for each department.</comment>


Announcing Adafruit Gemma – Miniature wearable electronic platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/01/21/announcing-adafruit-gemma-miniature-wearable-electronic-platform/

<comment><USER2> Do you mean the lilypad?

<http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/LilyPad/index.html>

<comment><USER3> Lilypads are quite a bit larger and more capable.

This little guy is only about 1" (25mm) in diameter with an 8k processor and 3 usable pins.

On the other hand, it is programmable straight from microUSB which is very cool and makes it more accessible. (Looks like she did a software USB implementation, I don't think that MCU has USB support.)

<comment><USER4> wouldn't surprise me about a software USB. The usbtinyisp also does That. That does mean a decent amount of space though is going to be on the bootloader (2k or so) for USB and programming. Not horrible but still significant if its like the usbtinyisp's implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a lot of potential in this, could help Quantified self people track a bunch of stuff.</comment>


J-Schools Play Catchup - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/journ-t.html

<comment><USER2> I went to Medill (Northwestern's Grad J-school). Graduated a year ago.

J-schools are struggling because their costs are rising while their obvious value is diminishing.

Going to j-school seems to have always been controversial among journalists. The successful people who didn't go snicker when students ask them if they should go. The people who went and are still in journalism say it was worth it. The people who went and who are no longer in journalism say it was a waste of time.

J-schools have never been great at "placing" students with media companies due to the volatile nature of the industry and the frankly hit or miss nature of the students they take. Getting into an "elite" j-school is not so hard as you'd think. The admission staff refused to tell me their acceptance rate at Medill, but I suspect it's around 40%.

But now they're doing even worse at "placing" students, especially grad students. At Medill, there's an undergrad program and a grad student program. The undergrads I met and worked with were almost all bright go-getters. They'd never failed at anything in their life and really went after things. Because NU has them for 4 years, they intern at media companies every summer throughout college. These folks get jobs because they have killer experience and a few connections from the program.

The grad program....different story. There were working journalists who wanted a degree to cement their status as a professional. There were people who were there just to rack up another degree. There were people who had no clue why they were there. There were people looking to break into journalism (my case). And when these folks get out of grad school...there's nothing for them. They're usually too old to rack up 3-4 unpaid internships like the undergrads so solid jobs at major papers and broadcast companies are out of the question. This leaves B2B publications, niche newsletters run out of basements in Skokie (I wasn't sure if I was going to be hired or murdered during the job interview), and......marketing and P.R. which have a place, but certainly isn't what people were signing up for when they went off to j-school.

These are fine options. The point is that the best undergrad j-schoolers are getting entry-level jobs at ABC and the Wall Street Journal while the best grad schoolers are landing at places a few rungs further down and/or struggling to find a gig at all.

They're not finding work. There are many, many reasons for why they're not finding work, but they aren't.

Meanwhile the cost of running these grad programs, retaining and recruiting faculty, marketing the school etc are only going up, up, up.

So J-school's getting more expensive as it's power diminishes. That's a problem.

This program in Arizona is very interesting. Tim McGuire wrote some nice things about me, so I'm a fan of his. I wish them the best of luck. I wish they weren't telling the students to read Mashable, but that's just me. :)

A year ago, when I finished up J-school, I had a handful of job offers that I turned down to dive into a bootstrapped, solo startup that's still got a ways to go. Going it alone was a tough decision, but it was made tougher by the fact that I didn't meet hardly anyone who was thinking "startup." Largely due to worries about paying back their crushing loans, healthcare etc, all thing that require creative solutions when working on a startup.

The lack of entrepreneurial thinking is a big problem for journalism students. If more of them saw themselves as independent companies that need to create unique value in the world in order to make a living, they'd be a bit better off.

Entrepreneurial thinking will lead to j-schoolers being smarter about how they package themselves. It's assumed that you're a solid writer and reporter. What else do you have? Being good at flash doesn't count. Being able to make a slideshow doesn't count. You need to have a hook, something you can do better than anyone else in the business, to have a chance.</comment>


The Lost Art of Manually Calculating Square Roots - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-math/how-to-find-square-roots-by-hand-f3f7cadf94bb <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the story of Feynman beating the abacist

[http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html](http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html)

However, the correct Portuguese for "cube roots" is "raízes cúbicas", not "raios cubicos"(—edited with thanks to JetSpiegel for the correction!). I've thought that Feynman may have been better at speaking Portuguese than at spelling it, or that most of _Surely You 're Joking_ may have been transcribed from tapes by Ralph Leighton, who probably didn't speak Portuguese.)

Edit: Also, I was partly inspired to learn Portuguese by Richard Feynman. I didn't imagine that that would lead to complaining about his spelling. :-)

<comment><USER3> It's actually "raízes cúbicas", "raiz" is female. I'm impressed to see "multiplicação" correctly written in an English language page, usually everyone ignores tildes and ç, but they are important.

<comment><USER2> Oh gosh, thanks for the correction. I searched for what I thought it was and found lots of native speakers using the form that matched my intuition—but that didn't make it correct. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like a really hard way to calculate square roots. Why not just use bracketing?

        1. Pick a number HI whose square is obviously higher than N.
        2. Pick a number LO whose square is obviously lower than N.
        3. Choose a number MED which is roughly (HI+LO)/2.
        4. If MED * MED > N, replace HI with MED, else replace LO with MED.
        5. Go to 3.
        6. MED converges to your answer.

Doesn't converge quite as fast maybe, but a million times easier to grok. I got to where the author got, ~87.8, in 8 iterations even with terrible initial HI and LO guesses (100 and 50 respectively).

<comment><USER5> > Doesn't converge quite as fast maybe, but a million times easier to grok.

What didn't you understand about _manually_ calculating square roots? Because your method requires tons of troublesome multiplication of numbers that get longer with each step.

<comment><USER6> > What didn't you understand about manually calculating square roots?

Why would you be both insulting and wrong in the same post?

Or did you think that multiplication somehow isn't _manual_?

Next time work on phrasing your comment a bit better. It makes the world a better place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's lost about it? When I first came to the US aged 12 I was confronted with an entrance exam for the school we had chosen.

The math part had this weird American division symbol I had never seen before, and the closest thing I _had_ seen was square root. Which I found a bit ambitious, but I went ahead and did the square roots.

They accepted me despite the fact that I couldn't do division, but put me in the "remedial math" class. Got out of it when I did the in-class "calculator exercises" (weird concept, that) in my head, faster than anyone with the calculator.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are many methods for calculating square roots [1]. The article explain the Digit-by-Digit with Decimal (base 10) method, I believe, and explains it quite well.

[1] [ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_computing_square_ro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_computing_square_roots) ]

<comment><USER8> The babylonian method is, imo, easier to remember and perform than the "lost art" presented here:

Start with a ball park estimate of the root of x, then take an average of (estimate + x / the estimate). That's your new estimate. Rinse and repeat until convergence to an acceptable degree.

The biggest drawback if doing this by hand is the division problem can be a pain.

I see the attraction and "purity" of the proposed lost art.

<comment><USER9> Fascinating, I didn't know the babylonian method -- it sounds equivalent to Newton's.

<comment> mark-r I had always thought of this as Newton's Method too, but that's because I was simply misremembering the fullness of Newton's Method [1]. I'm grateful for the education.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_method)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> fwiw, I learned to compute square roots in school in the 80s (I think it was the estimation method, which I was extremely bad at).

Calculators of any kind were forbidden at school, which sucked, if you had one of those cool Casio watch calculators. Shorts were also forbidden, because suffering is good for you, apparently.

I've never had to do it since, of course. Though I do now wear shorts on occasion.

<comment><USER11> > fwiw, I learned to compute square roots in school in the 80s

FWIW, I did too in the 90s/00s, though I confess I don't remember the method now. I think it was Newton-Rhaphson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. I was always taught to simply reduce the square roots as much as possible (ie sqrt(8) = 2*sqrt(2)) and leave the square roots, as it's often more precise than an arbitrary number of decimals.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for that, it's an interesting approach, never heard of it before. I will have a closer look at the precision.

</comment></comment><comment> nils-m-holm Nice! But even Newton's method works fine on a sheet of paper!

<comment><USER14> Even rough interpolation converges pretty fast for plain vanilla square roots, especially if you don't need an answer accurate to more than a few decimals. Newton-Raphson or more sophisticated methods can be a big win for more complicated functions, of course.

Estimate sqrt(17):

Clearly it has to be between 4 and 5.

Try 4.5. Result: 20.25 Try 4.2. Result: 17.64 Try 4.1. Result: 16.81 Try 4.15. Result: 17.01. Probably good enough for most practical purposes.

<comment><USER15> An engineer friend memorized the first 4 digits of all square roots from 1 to 100 which you can quickly turn into a great approximation. AKA sqrt(1730) is between 4.123 * 10 and 4.242 * 10. Even better 30 is low so it's between 41.23 and (4.242+4.123) / 2 * 10 = 41.825.

In this case the value is sanity checking a calculator / program.

<comment><USER16> Why would he do that, though? I do think it's neat, but I think most people would just memorize an algorithm instead.

Were any memory tricks involved (e.g. pegs, palaces) or did he just go through a table of square roots every morning?

<comment><USER15> I assume because he regularly worked with formulas involving squares and square roots. This is a guy who did long division in his head on long car rides to stay awake. He also memorized the square and cube of every number from 1 to 100.

His justification for starting was trying to keep track of the order of magnitude of everything he calculated to catch fat finger mistakes. And a sanity check. However, you need a few digits on the front of a number before you can really safely keep track of exponents that way.

<comment><USER17> Memorizing a log table is a heck of a lot better bang for the buck than memorizing square roots, cube roots, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's strange that it never occured to me that the square root also can be used to calculate the sides of a square.

That's because in Dutch we just call it 'root' (wortel).

I really wish teachers used more graphic forms in math because it helps to understand what kind of problems it can solve.

<comment><USER13> Isn't _wortel_ a short form ? (I do not speak Dutch).

I am asking because in France we have the official term _racine carrée_ (square root), abbreviated to _racine_ (root) when the "square" is implied.

<comment><USER19> In English, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Been a long time since I saw this. Reminds of School math. Nowadays sqrt is just a calculator button press away and so I have all but forgotten how to do this. This refreshed my memory.

</comment><comment><USER21> Those who interested in how to go from there to computer algorithm may have a look at [http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/insidespacewar- pt6-gr...](http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/insidespacewar- pt6-gravity.html#square_roots)

This is part of an excursus trying to explain, how basic math was implemented on the DEC PDP-1, namely in Spacewar!, the first digital video game (1961/62). The excursus starts at [http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/insidespacewar- pt6-gr...](http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/insidespacewar- pt6-gravity.html#excursus) (there's a tab on the bottom right for an instruction list of the PDP-1, mind that the PDP-1 uses 1's-complement for negative numbers).

</comment><comment><USER22> I must be missing something silly. What is the purpose of the original rectangle?

This describes how to find the side length of the square, who's area is smaller than the rectangle.

<comment><USER23> I was wondering that too, the best I could come up with is that the unused part of the rectangle represents the remainder we haven't "pulled down" yet, so in the first iteration, 0.17

I don't think its important to the calculation though

</comment></comment><comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL I actually studied how to resolve square roots by hand in school. It looked like solving a division with some different rules. I honestly don't remember the process but can definitely get my math homeworks and find them (yes I still have them!). I'm 28 years old, so it's not that far come on :P

</comment><comment><USER24> In my college professor offered passing grade immediately to someone who could manually calculate root.Nobody knew,although everyone learned it in high school.It's amazing how much people today depend on computer.In some sense all that automation makes us stupid.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just because we don't do something anymore that doesn't make it a "lost art".

<comment><USER26> Definition of lost art

        :  something usually requiring some skill that not many people do any more

ex: Writing letters has become something of a lost art.

"[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lost%20art"](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/lost%20art")

<comment><USER25> I cant help but chuckle at the exact definition being thrown at me. I guess that by definition this is a lost art. I still think it's a bit over the top though.

<comment><USER26> I hear what your saying, taken individually you'd think a "lost art" would literally be an art no one remembers how to do. But like a lot of compound words and phrases in English, its actual meaning as used is different. In my experience, its pretty much always used in the sense of the article.

(SNL had a whole bit on this back in the 90's: "a chickpea is neither a chick nor a pea, discuss")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How is this a 'lost art'? I had to do this in college. Didn't we all?

<comment><USER28> I graduated college a year ago and I'm not sure if I've ever in my life been asked to manually compute a square root (except for a perfect square integer).

<comment><USER29> Same here. And I distinctly remember asking a math teacher in middle school if a number was a perfect square and we manually ended up checking and incrementing numbers until we decided that the number was not. It makes me think that this was possibly not such a common task to assign in school?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My mother taught it me when I was 12. Normally it is presented like a division. At 17, I have coded it in turbo pascal with arrays of digits. If I remember well, I had found a way to apply the same method for cubic roots.

</comment><comment><USER31> just to add to the conversation ... once one learns algebra and expresses a number as polynomial of 10, one can just derive the usual manual algorithm for any integer root ... though it gets tedious very quickly with hisgher roots ... in addition to methods using Taylor expansion and such ... maybe this is a reason why there is no need to teach it ... apart from the practical reason of a calculator can do it much quicker ...

</comment><comment><USER32> Huh, I thought this was going to be about Taylor Series.

</comment><comment><USER33> the most un-Medium article I've read on Medium in a long time. great execution!</comment>


Scalability! But at what COST? (2015) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos15-paper-mcsherry.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> > We offer a new metric for big data platforms, COST, or the Configuration > that Outperforms a Single Thread.

> In this paper we take several recent graph processing papers from the > systems literature and compare their reported performance against simple, > single-threaded implementations on the same datasets using a high-end 2014 > laptop. Perhaps surprisingly, many published systems have _unbounded_ > COST—i.e., no configuration outperforms the best single-threaded > implementation—forall of the problems to which they have been applied.</comment>


A Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire - <AUTHOR> http://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting how empty northern Italy is compared to the center. If you look at where I am in "Patavium", there are just a few towns around, and not much else, but even off in the Marche, it's dotted with quite a few places. It does seem to be missing the 'graticolato Romano' to the east of Padova, though, which is still quite visible on maps today:

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+email@example.com,1...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+firstname.lastname@example.com,12.0850511,12z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x477eda5841ab30cf:0xc18236edaa1a2e2c) \- it's the very regularly spaced grid in the middle of the map. The land was divided up to be given to ex-soldiers to colonize.

<comment><USER3> The process of creating the grid was called Centuriation: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuriation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuriation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's great, but it would be even better with Roman-era terrain instead of modern terrain.

In my place a 1000-km² or so area was at the time a sea dotted with islands, so seeing it as sea on the map would make it more obvious why the place is devoid of roman roads.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, and Roma was a port and the sea was way closer to the city at the time, as far as I recall.

<comment><USER6> Ostia Antica [1], was ancient Rome's harbor 19 miles southwest of the city

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostia_Antica](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostia_Antica)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another fantastic historical interactive map:

[http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/russianempire](http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/russianempire)

These must take a fair amount of time to put together.

<comment><USER8> I found one posted on HN a few years ago of Middle Earth:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681505)

EDIT: and another [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972756)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For navigation and other uses there is also this geospatial model of the Roman Empire:

[http://orbis.stanford.edu/](http://orbis.stanford.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this using/sharing data with [http://pleiades.stoa.org/](http://pleiades.stoa.org/)?

Edit: found a diagram that shows Pleiades supplying data to the Pelagios API used by this atlas: [http://bsa.biblio.univ- lille3.fr/doc/gawd/gawd.html](http://bsa.biblio.univ- lille3.fr/doc/gawd/gawd.html)

<comment><USER10> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113410) there was a Google Maps mashup of Wikipedia people/event dates & locations. You can filter by date, location, entity type: [https://retred.org](https://retred.org) (time slider at top of page, filters at the bottom).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why the web was made. Full fulling the promise of knowledge for all.

</comment><comment><USER12> So cool. If anyone is interested, I've spent the summer going through "The History of Rome" podcast from Mike Duncan ([http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/](http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/)), and even as someone who thought he knew a little bit about Roman history, its been fascinating - ie, we're just getting to the end of Caesar's reign, and we spent as much time on the Tarquins' as we did on Ceasar. I've heard great things about Dan Carlin, but I wanted to start from the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER13> 500 Internal Server Error ? Is there any cached version out there?

</comment><comment><USER14> Something I've noticed, there doesn't appear to be any roads in Greece. Is this because the Romans didn't build any roads there and just used the Greek roads? If that's the case, then why aren't those roads on the map? I sincerely doubt all transport in Greece was done by ship.

<comment><USER15> Well, there are some relevant "stylized facts" about Greece...

\- Greece has lots and lots of coastline

\- The interior of Greece is largely mountains

So you'd be crazy to transport anything over land in Greece if you had the option of using water. That said, I'm sure there were _some_ roads.

<comment><USER16> Transporting goods inland was hard because no way had yet been found to use horses to provide motive power without strangling them, hence

"It remained cheaper to transport heavy goods in bulk from one end of the Mediterranean to the other than to haul them without a river-way for seventy miles inland."

Source: The Classical World, by Robin Lane Fox [http://books.google.com/books?id=nqKpSKq0v6oC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22...](http://books.google.com/books?id=nqKpSKq0v6oC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22the%20classical%20world%22&pg=PT172#v=onepage&q&f=false)

<comment><USER17> Ancient "Greeks" seemed to have pretty good horse collars by about 1000BC, [http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/chariots.htm](http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/chariots.htm), suitable for pulling double chariots. It seems they could provide some motive power without strangulation at least, via what is now termed a breast-collar harness.

However this [http://www.machine- history.com/sites/default/files/images/ho...](http://www.machine- history.com/sites/default/files/images/horseTraction.jpg) shows the issue, some of the artwork from Greek times seems to match with part 2. of that image, some not far from part 5. So it was, it seems, seen that the burden needed to be pulled from the horses chest and not from the neck _per se_.

www1.hollins.edu/faculty/saloweyca/horse/h_tack.htm describes the issue in detail and makes the same claim for the Greeks; again stating that the Chinese developed the horse shoulder harness in about 300 BCE.

An interesting subject, thanks for your citation.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps they lost that technology during the "dark age" between collapse of the Mycenaean culture (i.e. "Homeric" times, although Homer lived much later) and the rise of Classical Greece?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How I wish I'd had this while studying Latin, or while traveling in Tunisia! Anyone traveling Europe with an interest in history could probably benefit from this.

</comment><comment><USER20> It would be nice to narrow the timescale down a bit from just Roman era. Or, better still, to be able to look at how it changes over time.

</comment><comment><USER21> where is the small village of indomitable Gauls

</comment><comment><USER22> This is awesome</comment>


Kids can now learn to code with Pocky, the delicious Japanese snack - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/5/12387456/glicode-pocky-coding-game-japan <comment><USER2> It's like mit scratch. Except the underlying purpose is to sell junk food, the only sprite you can control is a corporate mascot, and you do so alone instead of in a social platform.

The focus on problem solving may be good for helping kids learn and practice solving problems procedurally. The free form nature of scratch gives a lot of freedom for goofing off, which can be a good thing.

[http://scratch.mit.edu](http://scratch.mit.edu)

<comment><USER3> While you didn't say so explicitly, you sound disparaging of this initiative in favour of Scratch being better in every way.

Scratch is great and noble and better in every way as an isolated programming learning tool, but it's worth noting the reach and marketability of Pocky to get kids interested in the whole scene.

You (parents, kids, non-CS-oriented teachers and mentors) aren't going to find and use Scratch without the prime directive of "I want a kid-friendly programming learning tool".

But now you can get the kids Pocky, which you may have gotten anyway since no kid is going to complain about that, _and_ they can learn something meaningful and cool with a character that has context they know and appreciate, unlike scratch's characters that exist in their bubble. Actually being able to impact a much larger audience even with a less ideal experience, is net worth much more than a stellar tool that cannot break past a high activation barrier and caters to a very tiny audience. Like Settlers of Catan for introducing people to board games outside Monopoly, and IFLS (I Fucking Love Science) for getting people interested in space, biology, etc. These seem like perverted contractions of beautiful things, but at the end of the day they get more people interested and that's a good thing.

I for one remember countless mornings reading and learning the backs of the cereal boxes as I had breakfast getting ready for school, and those mornings would have been so much more productive building Pocky programs, but there was no way I was going to fire up Scratch and create programs there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pocky has been expanding into the US. It used to only be available in Nijiya Markets, at a big markup over the price in Japan. Now it's in US movie theaters.

Maybe we'll get Calorie Mate food blocks next. Programming with Calorie Mate could become a thing.

The "lay out a pattern with physical objects, take a picture, analyze, and build program" approach is interesting. Like most forms of visual programming, it won't scale, but it's cute.

Now someone into Minecraft should build something where you build with Legos, take a picture, and import into Minecraft.

<comment><USER5> > It used to only be available in Nijiya Markets

I'm going to anal-retentively nitpick you and proclaim that Pocky was available in places like Yaohan (now defunct) [1] before Nijiya [2] even existed. ;)

[1] First US store in 1979 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaohan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaohan)

[2] First store in 1986 [http://www.nijiya.com/about- us](http://www.nijiya.com/about-us)

<comment><USER6> In California, it's been sold by the big grocery store chains for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just went to the supermarket here in Japan to hunt down some of these Pocky. At least the ones they had did not promote this, so they are using the candy programming app as a promotion to get people to buy the candies, but the candies in store are not promoting programming.

<comment><USER8> as popular Pocky is in Japan, Japan isn't going to go through inventory everywhere as fast as a lot of countries eat sweet snacks. They actually eat sensibly there. Expect the stock to replenish at slower pace.

<comment><USER9> Not sure why you are being down voted, I see a lot lower amount of people eating food like that here compared to Australia.

I am going to look for one of these packs though :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Japanese are raising a generation of kids who will dominate the international code eating competitions.

</comment><comment><USER11> It looks like a bad idea to bind the concept of having fun programming with eating sweets.

</comment><comment><USER12> Pocky is available in most supermarkets in the UAE. It's an amazing snack food to be frank. Great to see it on HN!

</comment><comment><USER13> I just bought four special imported flavors the other day and I don't feel guilty at all for it.

Pocky is great.

This sounds pretty cool though.

</comment><comment><USER14> Kids should be outside playing and interacting with other kids, not coding and gobbling candy.

<comment><USER15> I was one of those kids who stayed glued to a computer indoors and had all my friends online. Now I have a career and friends across the globe to thank for it. Not every person should follow a prescribed path.

<comment><USER16> How often do you socially interact with those global friends, in person? I'm all for learning awesome computer skills, but there is a time to be a child, and a time to be an adult. I wouldn't exchange growing up in the woods with BMX bikes, skateboards, and vine swings with the neighborhood kids. For sitting behind a computer all summer vacation, messaging people on the internet. I now have a career, and friends all over the world as well.

<comment><USER15> In person? That's difficult for me since I'm not often able to travel to Finland, the UK, Egypt, etc. I interact with my online friends nearly daily, online. My point was that I would of never have met such diverse people early on had I not grown up around a computer + Internet. Nor would I have necessarily been able to get a job programming right out of high school that helped pay for my college education. I'm not claiming my path was superior in any way, only that there's more than one way through life.

<comment><USER16> Of course you would have, just like the rest of us have friends all over the world now. I respect your decisions, and I'm glad you're doing well however I'm not going to agree spending your youth indoors was a good choice. There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and dating.

<comment><USER15> > There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this > current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and > dating.

I'm not downvoting you, but it seems this comes off as a sweeping generalization without any support. If you could at least back up your point with some basis for your statement (ie a reference to something), it would probably help to clarify what you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> But then they'll eat the snacks and be unable to play. What if you use similarly shaped objects like pens and erasers?

<comment><USER18> They'll just have to buy more Pockys!

Reminds me of Calvin eating boxes and boxes of "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs" to get the flying beanie: [https://chrisstich.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ca4.gif](https://chrisstich.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ca4.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kids learning to code will save the world.

</comment><comment><USER20> It looks like this translates Pocky in different positions to lines of code and then executes that code. This is too many levels of abstraction even for me to make sense of as a professional programmer... I like where their heart is but I think this would be a terrible introduction to coding.

<comment><USER21> Looks to me like an opportunity for a TV show spinoff - "Are you smarter than a 5th grader eating snacks with a smartphone?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> damnit [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12234079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12234079)

</comment><comment><USER23> But does it compile to Javscript?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure that a brand of chocolate-covered carbohydrates sponsoring sedentary behavior like coding is something that should be celebrated.

Hours spent coding should be followed or broken up by physical activity, not sugary treats.

<comment><USER25> Well, you need to fuel your brain somehow. Salad ain't gonna cut it. ;).

> _Hours spent coding should be (...) broken up by physical activity_

Please don't. It's hard enough to find two or three hours of uninterrupted time as an adult. Kids and teenagers can pull off impressive feats of quick learning and skill acquisition in big part because they have long stretches of uninterrupted time. Don't take away the opportunity they have.

<comment><USER26> It's more important to be healthy than to be a great programmer, we should be encouraging physical activity

<comment><USER25> For you, maybe. I understand that fitness is growing to become a new mainstream religion in the West, but not everyone wants to participate in this.

That said, I'm not saying one should not have a healthy lifestyle. Sure, encourage more physical activity. But for the love of Great Maker, do not _break up_ the time kids spend on intellectual tasks or hobbies into small chunks. You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can't do anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time.

<comment><USER27> _You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can 't do anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time._

I do my programming in chunk of twenty minutes at a time.

Complete focus, no distraction.

<comment><USER18> What do you do in between?

<comment><USER28> I do the same thing, 30 minute stints, 3-5 minute breaks. Occasionally if I'm really rolling I'll just keep going but I generally make sure to stop for breaks. The key is to do things that won't get you mentally distracted, has a good stopping point, and lets you mentally rest.

Good breaks:

\- I walk around the building

\- Watch a short comedy youtube video

\- Scroll through memes/comics

\- Read blog posts, usually ones that aren't too detail-oriented and with good stopping points (Coding Horror is a good example)

\- Listen to an instrumental music song (no lyrics), close my eyes, maybe get some fresh air.

Bad breaks:

\- Start a long email

\- Other projects.

\- Anything mentally taxing or stressful (don't pay bills on break, don't try to figure out what you'll have for dinner)

\- Read an exciting book that you don't want to put down

Doing this helps me stay focused all day. Over an 8 hour shift I take breaks for approx 48-80 minutes (plus lunch), so at most a little over an hour is wasted--versus burning out after just a few hours, writing bad code that I then spend the next day cleaning up.

This further translates into me being able to work some more on some side projects when I get home without getting burnt out--and not always programming, but other mental work like writing, art, meal planning, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe Snapple or Dove Chocolates could add some programming related knowledge under their labels / caps. That'd be kind of fun and apparently you get an easy press release out of it.

<comment><USER29> From reading the article it sounds like Pocky did something much more interesting than that. They are doing object recognition to use the candy as symbols in a programming language. Sounds a bit different from what you suggest.

<comment><USER10> An edible programming language would be a great promotion for the international roll-out of the new Unicode version of Post Alpha-Bits Cereal.

They could base it on PostScript, so it had nice graphics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just please don't call it paw-key. It's poe-key (rhymes with low-key) although in truth there's a gap between poe & key

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gIrqQhwkM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gIrqQhwkM)

And yes I know someone is going to complain it's not English. So what. Neither is the pronounciation of pizza. If you can bother to say pee-tsa instead of piz-ah you can bother to say poe-key instead of paw-key

<comment><USER31> Do you correctly pronounce "Nikon" as "Nee con", then explain to your English- speaking friends that that's how it's pronounced in Japan even though Nikon marketing doesn't even use that pronunciation in English-speaking countries?

Do you correctly pronounce "champagne" the French way around your English- speaking friends, even though the French pronunciation sounds almost nothing like "sham pain" so of course you have to explain yourself every single time you say the word?

Does actual phlegm emerge from your throat whenever you correctly pronounce the Greek letter chi at the end of TeX and LaTeX, or do you just say "lay tech" or (god forbid) "lay techs"?

Most importantly, do you say "guh noo slash lin ucks" and go around correcting everyone who doesn't? Because if you do any of these things, please, please, please stop. Please. Please. Seriously, it is so not worth it.

<comment><USER30> I would love to say all of those words correctly if someone taught me the correct way.

Example: Recently visited France. Learned "framboise" ends with 'z' where as lots of English speaking people some how think the correct French pronunciation is fram-buwa. It's not it's fram-buawz

[http://forvo.com/word/framboise/](http://forvo.com/word/framboise/)

If someone says Bay-Nay-Nay for Banana or Hey-Ker Neh-wass for Hacker News I'd expect people would correct them. There's a reason we correct people's pronunciations. If we didn't they'd eventually stop being able to communicate. You might have been able to excuse it when it was harder to communicate world wide. now you can talk to at least 1/2 the world from your pocket. No more excuses.</comment></comment></comment>


Want a Spotify US Invite? Here is how you get it. - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/07/16/want-a-spotify-us-invite-here-is-how-you-get-it/

<comment><USER2> I got mine, but spotify wants me to download client software. Nope, no thank you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or you can just, y'know, pay them $5 or $10 a month.</comment>


What you should know about green IT - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/2009/02/25_random_green.html

<comment><USER2> 1) no contest, but then again it is pretty obvious.

2) that may be true, but how many of those fall in the 'hot spare' or backup server category ? I would guess quite a few of them, I only run 19 servers, but 3 of those are stand-by with databases replicated in real time and 1 is a backup server. Conceivably I could power cycle the backup server and only have it powered up when it is doing a backup but past experience has led me to believe that frequently power cycling machines is an excellent way to shorten their life spans.

3) Fair enough, virtualization can reduce your power consumption. A 65% reduction in server count through virtualization is mentioned, I've seen numbers between 20% and 90% in other articles on virtualization, it only is relevant if you are currently not using your servers to full capacity, and some things can not be virtualized effectively. You'll have to do some measuring before you can compute the impact this will have in your particular situation.

4) true, an even better way is to use a heatpump instead of regular AC.

6) DC supplies are more efficient, but in an existing datacenter the cost of running a complete new supply grid to save some energy is usually not worth it. If you're going to create a new datacenter from scratch and you have some control over the equipment that will be housed there then you should definitely look at this as an option. Beware though, you'll need two powergrids because not all gear is available with a DC supply option. I don't know what 'active current' is, where I'm from we call it 'alternating current'.

8 nice fact, it would be neat to get more information on this and on what sets google datacenters apart from the standard. We have google datacenter less than 10 kilometers from where I'm sitting, maybe I'll apply for a tour :)

11) I'm expecting the coming flash revolution to completely reverse that trend, and to end up with the CPUs as the biggest consumers, not the storage devices.

14) that may be true, but the trend is towards 'always on' technology. We'll have to find some median between being online 24/7 and power usage, a machine that throttles itself down aggressively when not in use would be ideal for the home.

15) depends very much on your price per KWh, where I live it would actually be more (assuming 100 watts of continuous consumption for your PC and screen it would cost you several 100 dollars per year to keep such a machine running all the time).

19 & 20) simply don't print stuff!! I've stopped printing stuff 10 years ago and if it wasn't for some of my customers still demanding printed invoices even our bookkeeping would no longer have a printer.

21) this is mostly an issue for the employers, and a matter of trust. The 'office' is still reckoned to be the most effective way to employ people, and until there is a giant change of attitude this will remain a problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmmm...

A numbered list!

Buzzword green!

Buzzword IT!

Actual article offer items of common sense, and items far from sense but close to a sales pitch.

</comment><comment><USER4> Its amazing how many of these occur just because of the defaults that we set up in our technology.

I mean, the default activity with Windows is to go to screensaver mode. If it just slept as default, it would save millions of dollars in power consumption.

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't find I should've known much of this but there was the odd tidbit that was interesting; Such as the ~30% of servers in a study which were running at less than 3% load.

</comment><comment><USER6> ccraigIW is a sockpuppet account for IDG.

<comment><USER2> absolutely...</comment></comment>


Why YouOS et al Are Screwed - <AUTHOR> http://designedexperience.blogspot.com/2007/04/why-webos-companies-are-screwed.html <comment><USER2> I kind of agree with what I think rms is saying:

YouOS (in particular) seems to be barking up the wrong tree by simply emulating a desktop-style environment in a web browser. The web has shown us that there are much more sophisticated and intuitive ways of organizing the display of (and interaction with) several applications at the same time. All of the crufty GUI just makes the experience worse...

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, and YouOS isn't alone in this. Emulation of the desktop style environment practically defines the WebOS space. In my opinion, it adds no value at all.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The best of the Web OS's is Goowy because they're trying something different. Glide is trying something different too but I don't like their GUI.

Going back to blader's post, a Web OS has to help organize information. Ajax start pages are better web operating systems already than YouOS and the like because they function like a better version of bookmarks.

The trick is going to be combining Netvibes with Meebo and making a full screen web browser function effectively as the entire desktop environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> YouOS et al miss that a complete Web Desktop Environment can make computing fundamentally easier for people uncomfortable using Windows computers by eliminating all the useless futures of modern OS's that interfere with performing useful tasks.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a perfect example of the Inner-platform effect: <http://www.answers.com/topic/inner-platform-effect>

<comment><AUTHOR> Now I know what to call it. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Excuse the tone, I was cranky when writing.

<comment><USER5> Not at all; I didn't find it amiss. The tone was similar to jwz on Groupware: <http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> chrome://browser/content/browser.xul (Firefox Only) ^ This is funny if you've read the post ...</comment>


Thank you, Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.ericjgruber.com/blog/2011/10/thank-you-steve-jobs/

<comment><USER2> Great man and great ideas which changed to world better!</comment>