Horowitz-Hill: Serious scholarly query

Shouldn't be too hard. It doens't change very often and you'll get reminders here when something interesting changes. (Probably flame wars too.)

I wonder if you could merge the maintaince of a list like that into a purchasing system or CAD system. Maybe a 1 to 10 rating and a comment about anything special when the part number is assigned or an order is placed.

Years ago, Motorola used to have a tag for their parts that were high volume and easy to get and ... "Recommended" or something like that.

You might be able to convince manufacturers to put up their own versions of that sort of list and link to their pages.

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I dunno. I've done basic scanning of books using a camera on a tripod. (well, camera duct-taped to a shelf)

5 seconds per page and 1000 pages is 'only' 90 mins or so. (this is hardly a perfect scan)

I have occasionally done the same with expensive references in libraries. (expensive as in several thousand pounds per, something I'm never ever going to be able to justify purchasing in the near term.)

I also have a large collection (3000+) second hand paperback SF books. I don't consider there is anything morally wrong in downloading copies of works I already own.

I still usually prefer a paper book, unless I'm doing something like searching for a quote, in which case the electronic one comes out.

Ah, so you've got a similar paranoid view of the medical establishment too.

Well I wasn't thinking of anything so drastic.

Just pop down your local doc, explain that other people on the net have suggested your reactions to seemingly innocuous posts seem rather extreme (to say the least). Maybe take a few transcripts. Ask him if he thinks they have a point.

Your doc may say you're being perfectly reasonable and that everyone knows that McCarthy was right and there are loonie lefties infesting academia and the medical profession just to annoy you in particular.

On the other hand the doc may say that yes you were right to pop in and nip this thing in the bud before it got beyond verbal aggression to strangers. It may be that your bosses are so bullying that they are driving you nuts, and prescribe immediate paid sick leave and a lawyer to sue your employer.

Nobody suggests you should conform, in fact there are plenty of things worth non-conforming to.

I'm not a qualified doctor, but my suggested therapy would be to take a break. Get away from the computer for a bit. The web is full of truly disturbing left wing / right wing / religious nutters.

Enjoy some of the good things of America. Go to a ball game. Plan and go on a hike. See some funny shows. Have a decaf and a Danish. Pop into a newsagent/library and look through the job ads for a job that might improve your life. Do some volunteer work. Have a few beers with a few well-balanced friends.

Have one gin and tonic in the evening. As W.C.Fields said: "Better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy". Get a good night's sleep. Don't try to tackle the whole world, just your bit of the world.

Best wishes, K.

But this possible definition doesn't have any real physical meaning. The laws of physics still don't care a toss what the velocity of something is with respect to this background. So, relativity still stands.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Indeed. I wanted to have a decent scan good enough for me to read and my PC to OCR (eventually).

Maybe your method is okay for pictures.

Did they notice you doing it?

I've noticed that many people have a tendency to hoard SF books. Well-stocked bookshelves can make a home look more homely, but my landlord has so many they fill many cardboard boxes as well, making the place look like a charity shop stock room.

Perhaps you could start a web-site were 3000+ similar hoarders could get together and scan/OCR one book each. You'd all then be able to replace 3000+ personal paper hoards with a few DVD ROMs each. Just think of all the paper that could be recycled! And extra living space freed!

I'm reminded of the Futurama episode where it shows Mars University's library which has a copy of every know book in the universe. Inside a huge stately building, there is one CD sized disk on a table. :-)

I doubt the publishers would lose much, most book collections are just for hoarding.

If I were an author I wouldn't mind, since you've paid for the right to read it.

Oh yes, paper is nice. And if you lose it on the subway, it is less than losing an expensive PDA.

I hope that they get those 'electric ink' books cheap as paperbacks, and that someone comes up with a way to sell books electronically without them being pirated.

"Ian Stirling" wrote

so.

That's moving at quite a clip.

I have a data point to offer in case anyone is contemplating a mass-scan. I scanned a bound illustrated manuscript recently and it worked out to

12 seconds/page: h/p scanjet 6200, h/p software, no preview. The occasional minute or two was required for pages that differed from the norm. Produced ~10mb/page in WinZipped 300dpi color .bmp files.

I had to do it in sessions of 15 minutes each - very tedious work.

-- Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio Consulting Engineer: Electronics; Informatics; Photonics. Remove spaces etc. to reply: n o lindan at net com dot com psst.. want to buy an f-stop timer? nolindan.com/da/fstop/

The time to scan is dwarfed by the time to OCR and proof-read.

I wouldn't mind an OCR package taking ages to OCR, so long as it was more accurate.

The OCR with my HP scanner is poor. Cuneiform is much better but still makes mistakes.

Anyone recommed a package that values accuracy over speed?

With the possible exception of George Tenet, who AFAIK at least so far hasn't been engraved in stone. Nor is he likely to be now :-).

Actually, it's OK for text, and all but the most detailed pictures with tiny printing.

It's very iffy for OCR. But then, I've not really bothered with OCR, I find that JPEG compressed files at 1024*768 pixels or so works for most books. And 800*600 is fine for most. It's nice to have better resolution for difficult figures.

But this only leads to about 2-300K pages, which even my old P300 laptop can flip at an acceptable rate.

In the attic, in carrier bags (organised by letter)

:)

It's coming closer. I noticed a while back a Palm OS 2Mb device available at about the price of a hardback book, or 3 softbacks.

This would store 99.9% of books just fine. I find it impossible to read books on a 160*160 screen, but higher resolutions are getting cheaper all the time. DVD players with screens about the right size (for paperbacks) cost maybe

15 times the cost of a paperback. Say 10 times if you lost the DVD drive, stuck 64M of flash in, and a USB port.

However, to be ideal, I'd like a PDA that I can stand on without it losing functionality. Current glass-based screens are a real problem in this area, they need large gap spaces between substantial protective elements to be able to take this sort of abuse.

================================

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PS.1. Sorry, I tried hard, but couldn't resist the invitation. PS.2 I sincerely wish all USA Citizens a very happy, contented, peaceful Christmas.

That's a rather broad claim. Can you suggest evidence that might falsify it?

-- Joe Legris

Many doctors are also socialist leeches, bitter over being enslaved by the despots of the collective, to provide everyone with their UN sanctioned "right" to health-care.

Why don't I ask an engineer, a butcher or baker if I have a "right" to their time, talent and treasure?

I don't need not stinking opinoin, I don't give a rip whether you or any one else thinks I'm extreme or not.

Years of derision and indiference have given me a confidence in myself I could attain no other way, so just buzz-off. I don't care what a million Frenchmen say (I learned that one in church!).

I only care what I think, about me and for me. I learned that from Ayn Rand.

Kind of late for that. I'm like a person that was employed at several different mining companies, and now has silicosis, and can't sue any one particular entity for insult. All are responsible, yet none can be held responsible.

If there is a God, the odds will get even. A wait with patient faith on justice.

I am. Freedom to speek my mind, and say this looks like dogshit, smells like dogshit, feels like dogshit and tastes like dogshit.

Therefore, it must be dogshit. Wisdom I learned in my teen years in a public education institution.

I have! Let others now volunteer and serve me! Let them lick the puss from my oozing wounds! Am I not sick and pathetic?

I pray the serenity prayer often.

And Europe is less offensive and brutal? Are Americans not Europeans first?

But art, such as painting, is a rendering of the artists world-view. Artists that have similar philosophical outlooks may present diverse content in diverse media similarly.

Art has style, pattern and method, as does science. Art is a subconscious science. Nature invented it first. Haven't you heard birds singing? Wolves barking at the moon? What does it mean?

Can you be sure life in the universe may not affect the ultimate energy-content and geometry of it? If life organizes and accelerates the conversion of entropy and minimization of geometry in a universe, life is a high-order emergent property which is an energeticaly necessary feature of geometry. Life has an objective purpose relative to the universe - maximize entropy and order matter and energy at a high level the way it is organized at a low level. It's in the cards, and the odds are going to get even.

The algorithm is a fuzzy one based on the path one has learned throughout life. Calling the expression of life expereince and "algorithm" is a stretch.

Yes.

Yes. That is, a calculation that we are not consciously aware of.

At the *deepest* level art and science are the same, i.e. all science. At the simple level I take art to be that which we don't *currently* have the ability or knowledge to be objective about, although, in principle it must be possible.

Essentially, all of engineering can be objectified today. Most waffle ideas used in engineering can usually be methodically understood if given enough thought. I certainly know how I come up with "original" circuit design ideas.

Well, we assume that mass-energy is conserved, so life can't do much about that. As far as the geometry, well, I dont know what you mean by "life".

One can define a "Darwinian purpose", and I do:-). Its simply an algorithm that has evolved that takes some specific action, however, if by purpose, one means conscious direction, well no, imo. Consciousness is just a passive observer. e.g. my usual reference is to my papers

Not at all. Its exactly what it is.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

It does, but one is usually not aware of it. However, there is quite a bit of research going on with Darwinian methods to design circuit topologies.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Jim,

Try Amazon.com ... here's the link

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I read in sci.electronics.design that Scott Stephens wrote (in ) about 'Horowitz-Hill: Serious scholarly query', on Fri, 24 Dec 2004:

Life locally *minimizes* entropy.

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Jim,

or you can get a used copy at

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