frugalfirbolg

Here are details regarding how the ghost towns are funded and why China keeps building them so far from present city centers.

"It is hoped that these new towns will, in addition to alleviate urban congestion, spark further in-fill development in the expanse of farmland that sets the new town apart from the city center – a kind of pre-planned suburban sprawl. Funding for these new towns comes from the difference paid to compensate farmers to relocate (a calculation based on potential agricultural yields) and the substantially higher revenue generated from leasing the same land to developers." http://blogs.worldbank.org/transport/rise-of-the-chinese-gho...

In the comments the author also mentions that many of these buildings are offered at below cost to government employees.

According to TIME, the largest Chinese ghost town, Ordos, is still unoccupied 5 years later: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1975397,00.htm...

The fact that your friend can ask you for a favor in return is Guanxi, and is certainly a characteristic of Chinese culture that provides accountability and also is factor in whom one befriends.

The fact that a favor was required to get a visa that presumably you qualified for (or if it was used to get one that you didn't qualify for as well) is borderline corruption, even if no currency or goods were exchanged, since Guanxi dictates that at very least a favor is now owed. I have friends from China that talk about situations like this that include obtaining marriage licenses and dealing with fees associated with second and third children.

I appreciate the caution against infatuation with new toys at the end of this article. Too many times these stories are written in a way that implies technology was a magical solution, often misleading people that should know better.

Hmm, I use a Lenovo X220 convertible as a tablet for extended periods with little fatigue. It weighs 3.88 lbs. I've also used the IBM T60 tablet.

I'll admit that the iPad's lightness is a nice feature, but not a necessity. Also, I am not a power lifter, and for comparison my little sister has also used these form factors and carries a 17" MacBook Pro at 6.66 lbs.

My point is that for some people this is a viable form factor.

My primary concern about the Surface Pro is cooling since it doesn't appear to have fans and the last batch of Ivy Bridge CPUs were using some questionable heat compound between the die and outer casing. I also wonder if it will be capable of delivering reasonable performance with applications such as Photoshop or run a WAMP server and IDE at the same time.

I found the About page very useful for understanding the use case. I recommend putting the search feature that's on the About page on your home page as well.

Also, why is the ability to Add a role on the home page in the list of example roles? Perhaps if it was called Request it would make more sense.

The Browse section is for individual skills versus roles. It seems that having it centered on Roles makes more sense. At least have the option to browse Roles without following them.

Finally, I found a link to Vimeo for Product Launch Promotion wherein the Learning Jar panel initially appears but then disappears: "How to Earn Customers Without P..." http://vimeo.com/39473593

It will be interesting to see more details on how these bridges or threads (I'll avoid calling them portals) affect the magnetosphere, particularly if they are hidden. Are they responsible for previously unexpected behavior in the magnetosphere? Are they a navigation hazard for high orbiting craft?

On the other hand, the video and article seem to be reaching for views and the narration is terrible.

Heheh, a quick look at the page source reminds me of a web based testing tool I saw in high school. The teacher never figured out why we all aced that course.

Thanks, but I usually wait until Wednesday to have my faith in humanity crushed.

Still, that's a nice bit of social engineering to auto-filter for people that are either naive or have too much time on their hands.

As an example of too much time on their hands, it's funny watching some of the spam girl accounts post cards with a totally different person's name and sex on them.

"Write me" is an example of a shortened phrase, probably derived from "Write me a letter", versus "Write to me".

Honestly I thought "How to pitch a journalist" might mean how to endorse a journalist if it didn't happen to be a typo.

Interestingly enough, none of my friends from Georgia or Alabama use "Y'all" when writing/typing. I did a cursory search on Google, filtering to personal, and only found the slang used when joking about Southern accents.

I was going to mention it if you didn't. I keep seeing signs of the population returning to a "Ready, Fire, Aim, er wait" mentality, but hopefully I'm just hypersensitive to those signs.

As Wyatt Earp said, "Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything".

Sadly not a web service, but very well organized: http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/index.htm

Tons of different benchmarks with source code and very comprehensive data for legacy and contemporary hardware. They're free for personal use only. I'm sure you can contact him if you have something commercial in mind.

In general, this article is in defense of Perl programmers. Although I don't look forward to doing any blessing or hexing again, I'll agree that Perl has merits and can even scale with the right mindset (a masochistic one, jk).

These types of articles remind me of old martial arts films where rival schools try to prove which forms are the best. Rarely does anyone in the movie realize or mention that the road is far less important than the traveler walking upon it. (Insert actual Jeet Kwun Do / Bruce Lee quote)

Nitpicking, but does the writer change audiences two thirds of the way down? At first chromatic is addressing programmers and then apparently flips over to hiring managers or entrepreneurs. Or maybe the audience is just anyone who thinks Perl is only for quick hacks.

Finally, I checked out chromatic's projects page[1]. There are some contributions to larger projects, but I had to chuckle when I looked at the source code for Class::Roles and saw it was a few monolithic lines. Yea, Perl lets you do that, but who wants to read that, especially if you are stuck on a UNIX terminal and for some reason don't have syntax highlighting?

[1] http://www.wgz.org/chromatic/perl/index.html

What if playtime is essential to creativity and developing models? Aren't children encouraged to play in different ways for this very reason?

Honestly, I've been Charles before, and no one cared because the work was done well and on time. I was still responsive to my coworkers, but there were definitely periods where people understood I was recharging my "psychic energy" or whatever they thought made the magic happen.

"A lazy man, Dad believed, always makes the best use of his Therbligs because he is too indolent to waste motions." Cheaper By The Dozen, 1948, Frank B Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

I believe that there is precedent for this connotation, which granted is different than the denotation. This is the best example I have on hand since I remember this book from grade school. I could imagine Larry Wall had a similar encounter with this usage of "lazy".

The terms lazy and hard-working are used loosely here. I definitely would hire a smart programmer that's not afraid of doing things the 'hard' way when the constraints of the project demand it, but a programmer that too easily falls into doing it the hard-way may not be considering alternatives that are more maintainable long-term, and I've seen enough people get burned out by marathons of working the hard way that some surveys of the technology and pilot projects before jumping in (or just having an experienced specialist on-board) would have saved lives and careers.

The point of this article is that some people are lazy in a different way. They aren't lazy because they aren't challenged. They just appear to be lazy because their hands aren't at the keyboard. They're actually the opposite of lazy because they are tackling the additional challenges of evaluating all of the possibilities and trying to find the most expressive and easiest maintained implementation.

Don't get me wrong, there's a time and place for a quick and dirty hack session, and sometimes you just need to hard-code the stuff to get the first version out the door, but if you have the luxury of making it right the first time, go for it. Just don't forget to counter-point, "Perfect is the enemy of good".

lol I have to ask, were you just using mouse-clicks, or did you have it pop open the inspector and pull the images from there? Since you're on Windows, you might want to check out the System.Net.WebClient object in Powershell.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw

Hopefully your physics teacher also made a point similar to this: Even if it takes the inventor 10 years to automate something that takes a worker one day to do, it can benefit everyone in the long run if that task is done often and on a large scale.

I'm meaning to check out Haxe, which is a metalanguage that includes PHP[1] as a compile target. Strict typing and object oriented approach, plus using the same language to target client-side web and native code.

[1] http://haxe.org/doc/targets/php

The code looks substantially different and technically the names are different. HeX is pronounced "Hek", and Hex is probably pronounced "Heks".

Still a nice bonus for taking the time write some original content. Thanks for sharing the info.

That's pretty impressive. If you don't mind me prying, how long did it to take to rack up those earnings (guessing 2 months since it was posted) and where did most of your traffic for that post come from (rss subscribers vs search engine referrals)?

In passing it looks like a nice reading list. What motivated you to study this topic and are there any achievements resulting from this regimen that you could share?

I can still see uses for it only cooling down to ambient air temperature.

I'm thinking of high-frequency transistors / ICs with heatsinks and a bank of these lights being attached.

It wouldn't be a primary cooling method, but if you needed a light on your device anyways then you could make use of this mechanism as well. Imagine backlights for LCDs in mobile devices. An iPad or Android tablet can easily reach 100 F when playing games, and for most cases that's warmer than ambient air temperature.

I don't have access to the original paper (haven't checked arxiv yet). Do the lights need to be at a certain temperature for this to work at all? I know that in similar experiments (condensates) the lattice vibrations only propagate at temperatures much lower than 70 F. At room temperature there is too much chaotic motion in the structure. I'd see that as a major limitation on scale and real-world application.

Probably entanglement and other optics experiments if the light produced has the right properties.

Not from a teaching standpoint, but from within an IT department as a peer and later a manager I've seen plenty of both men and women 'play dumb' to get help, even to the point of trying to slide by without learning the material themselves and always expecting someone else who knows how it works to be around.

The most extreme examples did not last long. Less extreme cases were treated by starting off any request for help with a review of the process and available resources that led the colleague to ask for help from a co-worker. This was done to develop the ability to perform research and empower them to make decisions on their own as long as they had a good basis for it.

Obviously a short training seminar is different, and the expectation is not for the participant to have found the answer on their own, but I believe a short review of their thought process is in order so the instructor can catch any systemic faults in the student's development. That is, don't just tell them what to type, but figure out if they are missing a core competency and perhaps recommend an independent course of study to supplement the seminar.

Google search plus good memory returned an older article with a bit more information about Taylor: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played...

He has built a Farnsworth fusor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

It is an example of inertial electrostatic confinement fusion. It's CoP is not above 1.0, but it does produce neutrons that can be used to create the short lived isotopes that normally need to be express delivered to hospitals because they cannot be built on site.

When the media originally broke the story I was slightly annoyed with how they focused on Taylor's ingenuity and obsession, but only briefly mentioned contributions made by his family and the associates that they helped him network with. Yes, give the young man his due credit, but for the sake of others with his potential spend some time on how important it was for him to have the opportunity to play with a crane, store radioactive isotopes in the garage, and basically think about and investigate whatever he wanted.

The Popular Science article I linked was least offensive in this way.

Sorry, quick p.s. after playing with it a little more. I found my new list under my user profile page. So, I need to create a new list with the link up top, then figure out that RePost at the bottom right really means Add To A List. Then, if I go to my own profile I can see my list, and can remove videos within it, but I haven't figured out how to remove the list itself yet. Now that I know all of this I can remember it, but I mostly figured it out by clicking random buttons. The user should be able to grok it from the labels and relative positions.

Critical feedback up front:

Before signing up, please note that the demo video (which looked pretty, and I should have paid more attention to) when played in Chrome never successfully exited for me, i.e. the sign up elements continued to be hidden (yea, made sure it wasn't full-screen). I tried zooming in and out, pausing and playing the video. I did not investigate the DOM. A refresh restored the initial state and after signing-up I haven't revisited to play with it more.

Signing up felt a little like "hunt for the link that leads to the behavior I want". After clicking "Sign up with Facebook" at the bottom left and then telling Facebook I didn't want to give your app all of the requested permissions it aborted, but when I initiated Sign Up from the Login link at the top right, chose to use Facebook, and denied the app requested permissions, it rolled along.

I went through several of the videos and didn't see any with comments yet. I noticed that you're not linking back to the comments on the original site, and can understand there being several reasons for that, but I do wonder if there will be any integration with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ for the comments that originate in mixy.tv? Do they get re-posted to those other services, with hashtags for Twitter, so that followers from those services are tempted to join mixy.tv and become part of the fun?

Besides crowd-sourced tagging and filtering, are there any plans to create recommendations?

Since I am not following anyone else that is using mixy.tv yet, is the "People I Follow" link supposed to show people I follow on other social networks, and will I also be able to follow people just through mixy.tv in case we're coming from different walled gardens?

One feature request would be to enable bookmarks within videos, with their own urls, so users can comment on specific points in the video, and link directly to the frame they're talking about.

Finally answering your questions:

Overall the site looks clean, the layout after signing in makes sense.

I'd like to thank your service for revealing this video to me: http://mixy.tv/posts/ea5c3e/this-dude-loves-his-job-best-cot...

However, I need some help seeing the added value in general over my current means of finding videos. It appears the primary means to find videos is either manually searching or from the people I already follow.

By the way, is the List functionality enabled? The dialog says I created one, but then I can't find the list I created.