Darwinbots Forum
General => Off Topic => Topic started by: Numsgil on October 20, 2005, 09:51:28 PM
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Found this masters program in artificial life (http://frt.fy.chalmers.se/cs/cas/main.html). (Okay, techncially it's in adaptive complex systems).
It's a swedish school I think. I can't really navigate alot of the site, especially the school homepage, for obvious reasons.
It talks about stuff I'm not sure I understand, or that may mean different stuff to me than it does to them.
For instance, "points". I'm used to classes and courses being measured in "hours", which represents the number of hours of lecture a week. I am most unfamiliar with "points".
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im swedish. a course have a certain amount of points. And when you go in school you have to do a certain amount of points. So the sum of all courses you take have to be that amount. Like in my school we have "free choice" for 100 points. you could either take 2*50 pointers or one 100 pointer. But the amount of houres is still the same.
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ah, I see.
Hey Zelos, are you anywhere near any of those schools or otherwise have heard of them? (Chanders and Goteborg I think are their names).
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I'm from Sweden and I can tell you that the Swedish schools are one big experiment for the gouvernment. They change the rules for what is needed to graduate. It's a mess right now. And not only that. A lot of things in Sweden is getting more and more crazy.
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Sounds like my kind of place :wacko:
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its not such a mess, but yeah there is changes happening, its often like that when goverments try for something new and want to find something that is better. testlund where do you live?
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Mjölby :)
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wow, I might have a geography class but I have no idea where that is:S
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Just a small town in Östergötland, a few miles from Linköping.
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since when did we swedish use *beep*ing imperial uunits? dont you mean kilometers?
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Oh, you didn't get the memo?
Last night the entire world switched to miles.
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since when did we swedish use *beep*ing imperial uunits? dont you mean kilometers?
Yeah, whatever, but how do you translate 'mil' to english?
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I HATE Kilometers :angry:
Just one of the many reasons I left England
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???
why?
it isn't anything real ...
just a unit of measure.
metricphobic? ;) lol
doesn't the metric system make much more sense ...
esp seeing we are so based on a decimal system ...
and is so much easier to work with in the scientific fields?
ime, I have found our system of measurements here to be such a
hassle to work with, this conversion factor and that one ...
I just covert to metric, do the math in my head, and then convert
back to the 'english' system for those needing it in that form.
we always did our calculations that way.
I mean, off the top of your head ...
how much does a quart of water weigh? huh? ;)
otoh ... how much does a liter of water weigh?
simple ... do it in your head ... it's intuitive.
or is it just clicks ... err ... I mean ... kilometers ...
that you hate? ;)
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Actualy Griz I am biggining to like miles too , It is a unit more based on how much energy you spend travaling. A good aproximation will be a intermidiate wimp gets tierd after walking one mile, kinda puts distance into prespective.
If we are lunching rockets or somthing mesuring everything metric makes much more sense...
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I like my temperature in Ferenhiet for weather. Everything else I prefer metric.
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Actualy Griz I am biggining to like miles too , It is a unit more based on how much energy you spend travaling. A good aproximation will be a intermidiate wimp gets tierd after walking one mile, kinda puts distance into prespective.
well ...
it takes a real wimp to get tired after walking just one click (km) ;)
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I like my temperature in Ferenhiet for weather. Everything else I prefer metric.
yeah, me too ...
but only because I grew up with it and no matter how much time I have
spent up in canada in the winter ... I just can't get a 'feel' for it ...
although it makes much more sense to think of water existing as a liquid
from 0 to 100.
the only way I can get out of my own way seems to be by thinking about
the negative values as degrees of frost.
then my 'body' knows.
of course when it's -40 ... who cares if it's F or C? ;)
and then there's that pesky british billion! lol
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I know when it's -44 degrees outside, the equivelance of F and C is going to be the furthest thing from my mind.
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I know when it's -44 degrees outside, the equivelance of F and C is going to be the furthest thing from my mind.
well ... at -40 you don't have to think about it ... -40C is -40F ;)
coldest I've ever seen was -44F ...
stepped out of the dorm at 7am to go to class ...
and noticed my breath freezing in midair and falling on my shoes!
cut that class and went back inside. ;)
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Thought is was -44, checked it out, and I'm wrong.
Lol, it's been too long since I studied the conversion stuff.
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miles/foot/inch/pound/psi are all lame units who are doomed to die and when ever they die out its to late.
testlund, a mil=10 kilometers, you just say 10 kilometers
and PY how can you hate such lovly units? its so much better than *beep*ing imperial units
and celcius is also gonna win mohahaha, ferenheit is doomed, mohahaha
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Great idea! Let's have a passionate fight over which system to use! <_<
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testlund, a mil=10 kilometers, you just say 10 kilometers....
I just thought that the swedish word 'mil' must be translated to 'mile', just that a mile is considered to be of different length depending on what country you live in. I whould like to say that a swedish mile is 10 kilometres. If you think about where the words originate they are from the north-german language, so maybe once a 'mil' and a 'mile' was the same thing. :)
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just that a mile is considered to be of different length depending on what country you live in
Hadn't heard of that. :blink:
I always considered a mile to be precisely 5280 feet no matter where you live.
My views on Metric vs. imperial are kind of mixed. In everyday life I think in miles, feet, inches and degrees F but when I switch to scientific mode I work in SI units (metric)
I just can't visualize a kilometer without converting it to miles first and a summer day with a temperature of 35 celcius means about as much to me as a distance of 235 gloobles. It is an utterly alien concept.
Scientific usage of metric measurements is all about calculations, laws and stuff. It obviously works best that way for those things but from the point of actually visualizing what it means in the real world, I always have to convert back to imperial first, at least with larger units anyway. Milimeters make perfect sense to me.
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why is it so hard? PY? a mile is 1,6km. man I hate imperial units so much, I hate them almost as bad as I hate roy, hes a classmate and his hated by everyone in the class.
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Did I say I couldn't convert them?
All I said was I can' visualize kms or celcius unless I convert them first.
If I were to tell you that a point A is 375,000 Sqibblies from point B Could you visualize the distance?
What if I tell you that the temperature here yesterday was 6197 degrees on the Spufendicular scale?
What if I tell you that a Squibbly is equal to 3.0475 miles. Does that help? or do you need to convert to km first before it means anything to you?
How about if one degree on the Spufendicular scale is equal to 320 degrees Farenheit and that zero on the Spufendicular scale is the equivalent of 62.63438 degrees F
If you had grown up thinking in Squibblies and Spufendiculars then these units would make sense to you. They are perfectly valid units. Do you think such a person would have an instinctive feel for the distance represented by some unit called a kilometer or a temperature of 35 degrees C.
To me a kilometer means absolutely nothing and celcius is just something I use to calculate stuff in a lab, just like I use Angstrom units to calculate the size of an atom or Barns units to measure the thermal cross section of a nuclear reaction. (I can't visualize them either. can you?)
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didnt you say you were from england?
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Yup.
England where nothing even remotely looking like metric had ever been heard of till the mid 70's
I grew up with Pounds, shillings and pennies as the local currency.
12 pennies to a shilling and 12 shillings to a pound.
Decimal? What the F*&^% is decimal supposed to mean? That's what most of the population thought when they converted to the new monetary system. (somewhere around 1970. Can't remember the exact year as I was about 6)
Overnight, prices trippled, quadrupled in some cases.
A chocolate bar that used to cost Threpence (3 pennies) in the old system suddenly cost 5p in the new system.
5p is the equivalent of a shilling in the old system and as a shilling = 12 pennies, this is a four fold increase.
It was way too complicated for many people to convert easily so the unscrupulous ones who could simply ripped everybody off.
This process severely f*&^ed up my childhood and the economy of England took years to recover.
Incidentally, England still uses miles and although the official unit of weight is the kilogram, you would be hard pushed to find a single marhet trader who doesn't sell meat, fish and veg by the pound. I don't believe this will ever change because the English are stubborn bastards.
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yeah then it might be a problem, england where for a long time one of the stupidiest countries in europe untile they changed to SI units. But still its superior, if it werent why would science else use it? much much better
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In actual fact England became a lot stupider by allowing the dumb ass European Economic Comunity to get involved in its internal affairs.
I mean who the fuck cares about the precise agle of a frigging banana. The EEC made English merchants throw away millions of sub standard banannas that had too much bend.
IMO England should have told the EEC to go screw themselves :flip:
If they wanted to be part of something bigger tehn they should have joined the USA rather than a bunch of stupid retards who couldn't even manage to run frigging Euro-Disney without having to ship in English staff.
Northern European countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the netherlands and a few others) don't fall into this catagory but the world would be a much better place if most of Europe just sank into the mediteranean. Specially France and italy <_<
Also kind of strange that this supposedly stupid country ran about half of the world for a couple hundred years or more. Also more than a little peculiar that its language is now the most widespread one in the world and is the official international language of business.
Hmm! also occurs to me that the world famous Oxford and Cambridge Universities were around a long old time before the SI unit was ever even heard of.
Yeah pretty stupid really weren't they? <_<
As I said, the real stupidity started AFTER Europe got involved. That was why I left the place.
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Hehe, America rocks B)
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Wouldn't quite go that far Num.
In my experience, the US seems to be split between the haves and have nots. (I am refering to brain cells here not money)
A good number of Americans are right up there with the brainiest and nicest in the world but on the other hand there seems to be an enormous undercurrent of complete pillocks who, if brains were gun powder, wouldn't have enough to blow their own noses. (No offence intended as even most of these are kind of nice)
All in all though I would much rather live here than in the EU Brussels puppet state that England is rapidly becoming :angry:
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if it werent cause the things I want is in USA I would never move there. Of course each country have its good and bads and under a transection from one system to another ppl complain. But I belive EU can become great and good. It just take some time, but still SI units kicks ass.
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EU has potential. Just kick out the frogs and it might work. :angry:
(not that I am bigotted or anything. It's just that any race of people who eat snails and parts of amphibians, cover up their mad cow desease by burrying whole herds before the inspectors arrive, blockade English imports every time they get a bit pissed off about the least little thing, build Charles De-Gaul airport, sell weapons to Sadam and obsess about fucking straight bananas, shouldn't be allowed to even have a say in the EU let alone run it.)
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I'll have you know that straight bananas are a know terrorist agenda.
Yup:
- Make all bananas perfectly straight.
If you are against the straigt bananas, you are with the terrorists.
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I'll have you know that straight bananas are a know terrorist agenda.
Yup:- Make all bananas perfectly straight.
If you are against the straigt bananas, you are with the terrorists.
You have your logic hat on back to front. :blink:
If straightening bananas is on the terrorist agenda then keeping them as bent as possible is directly opposing the terrorists.
Down with straight banannas!
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Oh, right, that logic train got derailed at the station didn't it... :(
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I expect the terrorists bombed the rails.
(see point 2)
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Hehe, black humor is fun.