Love it!

I spent a term at Cambridge in Electrical Engineering. Our tutorial sessions were very similar to recitations in America and classes still had traditional lectures. I'm not sure if this is different for other fields.

I would imagine permanent punishments would just cause companies to dissolve and reform through some paperwork acrobatics (similar to bankruptcy processes like New GM).

Then the government should blacklist the corporate officers by name if there is a pattern of certain individuals using this tactic.

Grad students are cheaper than a robot.

How are the results sorted? When I search "Spider-man", the first result is Boomerang, and none of the results on the first page are for the Peter Parker Spider-man (result #2 is Ben Reilly Spider-man).

Yeah, I searched for "Nimrod" and got nothing but a few other characters who reference encounters with him. He's in Marvel Universe, so clearly they're just picking and choosing who gets in here. This database is sorely lacking, and the search function is meh... Not a knock on the Node.js code, more of a knock on the Marvel API.

I know we're not supposed to be negative on here, but this is a cut and dry Comic Book Guy situation....

clears throat

"Worst..... database..... ever...."

This was a little project I did when Marvel's API first came out. I scraped all the data and put it in a database that allowed better searching/browsing. I probably need to periodically scrape the API again to pull in changes and additions as they add them. Hopefully Marvel will update the data and make it more complete.

How in the world is this repo compatible with their TOS - http://developer.marvel.com/terms ?

That explains it!

I really do like the presentation and the whole site. I just couldn't resist the comic book guy opportunity.

I got to Challenge #5 by just having the elevators go to every floor like in the first example. It'd be nice to have an earlier challenge with only a single elevator force you to have a more complex controller. With 4 elevators going at a time, it's harder for me to "debug" and figure out how to use the API.

> I got to Challenge #5 by just having the elevators go to every floor like in the first example.

Strange, that strategy doesn't allow me to get past challenge 2 (just going to every floor one after the other).

Guess, I got lucky, haha. I should probably go back to challenge 2 and learn how to program these then.

On six it takes you back to 4 floors with 2 elevators and the challenge is 40 people in under 60 elevator moves.

The first 5 are easy to "brute force" but six is making me think a bit more.

I cheated with #6. My elevators wait on the ground floor until they fill up, then they deliver the patrons to their floors. Everyone not on the ground floor... is stuck forever.

Does it speed up or end eventually? I stored up 150 seconds left before I decided to quit (score of 2529).

For a moment I had the idea it was speeding up, but later on I felt like it was just an illusion. Got to 5661 before stopping.

yeah... it never ends if you're too fast.. lame...

Presumably this would be 11 pounds on top of the existing load out, in which case 11 extra pounds wouldn't be a trivial amount. Probably subjective though.

Not if the rest of the loadout is on a fully powered weight bearing exoskeleton.

In that case this system would have to be much more than 11 pounds to have enough fuel and thrust for the added weight.

If it's self-supporting, it can weigh more because you're not limited by what the soldier can carry.

I thought that the original study was just showing a correlation. That is, that experts typically had 10,000 hours of practice into their field of expertise. People have claimed causation since then (i.e., 10,000 hours guarantees expertise). The weaker claim that 10,000 hours of practice is necessary (but not sufficient) in order to become an expert seems reasonable to me.

Thanks, yes, that's the other important point: you can't turn it around and expect a guarantee of success. I believe the original study didn't even claim any magical threshold of hours either - Gladwell probably just introduced that as a literary device: "10000 hours", and the added suggestion of some mystical threshold, make for much better storytelling than "oh you know, on the order of tens of thousands of hours" :)

And then if you add the other caveat too, it becomes too underwhelming to make for inspiring bedtime reading: "on the order of tens of thousands of hours, provided that you were quite great to begin with"!

Yes, too underwhelming to catch on as much as Gladwell's interpretation has. However, it actually makes an important point: even if you're talented, it requires practice to really become an expert.

I did relatively little reading when I was playing WoW hardcore. Although quests had a load of flavor text, I would just key in on the how many and what I had to kill.