Slashdot Mirror

That's simply wrong. QWERTY was designed to speed typing up by spacing out the most used keys to different sides of the keyboard.

That is quite untrue. There have been many studies of touch typing over the years, and they have lead to a few simple guidelines for fast typing, such as:

• Place the most common characters on the home row, so your fingers rest on top of them for quick access.
• Your hands should alternate heavily, so one can position itself while the other is typing.

QWERTY does not follow either of these rules. Most keypresses are on the UPPER row, and a lot of words can be typed with only one hand (eg. minimum). Dvorak's layout ensures your hands stay on the home row, and its grouping of vowels makes it impossible to type one word with one hand only.

There's no need to trust me, though. You could always ask the current world record holder for typing, or read up on a Discover Magazine article that goes into much more detail.

HJ Hornbeck

Er, the convincing Discover Magazine article is actually
here, their search page is a bit wonked. The article is called "The Curse of QWERTY".

HJ Hornbeck

Unless we used self-replicating robots to manufacture and maintain it. I remember an article I read on that possibility a few years ago, intended for use in Earth's deserts, not on the moon, but it should translate. Just give me a second to find it... ah, here it is, "Robot, Build Thyself", Oct '95, Discover Magazine. This way, you would only have to deliver one (or at least, just a few) robots to the moon, and wait.

I knew Mono was supposed to be highly contagious, but I didn't think it could jump species! That's what happened with AIDS, in other species (like simians-SIV*, bovines-BIV** and especially felines-FIV) it was harmless, but when it jumped to humans it became deadly. Does this have something to do with the Viral nature of the GPL? I guess Microsoft knew what they were talking about after all. Poor Gnomes... that's probably why you can't keep them as pets. Same thing with penguins at the South Pole - you can't get too close to them or they will get sick and die because their immune systems aren't as strong as ours. :(

I don't understand why anyone at the Register would show any sympathy for any of this. I'll bet they're happy about all of this misery. From what I understand, they're a morbid bunch of vultures over there!

* Not sure about Ximians and XIV, though I think that they were the first to develop Mono.

** I understand that Bovine cracked DES. I'm not sure how that compares to other viruses, but it sounds just awful.

-castlan














*** What are you looking for, I didn't use 3 asterisks anywhere in my post! Get out of here! I said SCAT! Shoo! Run along.****

**** Alright, if you really need more information of how FIV might have jumped to humans, you might want to look here

I believe this is the Discover article everyone's referencing:

I think this is what you're thinking of.

Guess what. Discover magazine had an article even earler: June 1998! Read it from their archives here, or search www.discover.com's archives for June 1998 in the Technology section with title keyword "machine". And this article is even MORE informative!

I think this is really neat. Now if we could just figure out why the darn thing works the way it does...

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

For some reason the URL didn't make it into that. here it is: http://208.245.156.153/archive/output.cfm?ID=1455. Showed up in the preview too.

These things use Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) in order to restructure themselves dynamically. This, in and of itself, is not a new concept. FPGA's have been used for years in prototyping or in the first products released. It's much cheaper and easier to reprogram an FPGA if a bug is found than it is to create a new chip design. Once the bugs are gone, FPGA's are replaced by hard-wired silicon in the rest of the line.

Now on to using FPGA's in supercomputers. First of all, an FPGA is slower than a hard-wired chip. These machines pick up speed from the fact that they can use portions of the chip that otherwise would have been on standby. It's super-charged serialization. By restructuring the circuitry for each task, they can take advantage of the majority of the chip at all times. This is not an easy task, and I find it quite impressive. (On a side note, the restructuring is software-controlled.)

When I read this story, I immediately associated it with an article from several years back about Inman Harvey and Adrian Thompson. Thompson was using an FPGA to run genetic algorithms for hardware development. Essentially, make a machine design the chip. He had some very interesting results. The chip designs took advantage of the physical chip rather than just the wiring. They were incredibly efficient, but Thompson couldn't understand why they worked. (He suspected such things as electromagnetic coupling and communication through the power supply.) This is all only moderately related, but it's very interesting, regardless. The article is from June, 1998 and can be found here if anyone is interested.

There was also an artical in discover a number of years ago about bacteria that live in rocks hundreds of feet into the earth's surface.

They live by oxidizing the minerals around them like Cr to Cr+2 (please pardon any possible chemistry mistake).

If people can connect to one another even the smallest of voices will grow loud.

I remember a while back IBM announcing that they'll be using SOI technology with Alpha procs. CMOS 9S (not CMOS 99) and Alpha? What a team. The press release from the horse's mouth is here. Thet whole "low-k dielectric" thing reminds me of an article I read some time ago (June 1998) in Discover.

Gah. Posting this twice because I'm seeing a lot of disinformation. The Electoral College protects us from mob rule. The individual voter has MORE power with an electoral college system. Going to strict "one person one vote" will enable the candidates to complete ignore minorities in favor of large voting blocs. Read this: Math Against Tyranny The only reform that should be made is using Maine and Nebraska's system of splitting the electoral votes by district.


Regards,

Please read this before spouting off about how mob rule is better: Math Against Tyranny


Regards,

This year, Discover magazine published an article the month before the election about the problems of electing candidates based on simple majority, which begins to fail when more than two candidates have a strong following. With the fuss about Nader voters "taking away" votes from Gore, this is very relevant in this election.

Four years ago, they did a similar article on the electoral college, and how it actually gives more power to the average voter when a very large pool of voters exists.

Both articles should be required reading for all scientifically-minded would-be voting reformers.

In 1996, Discover published another article on the Electoral college called Math Against Tyrrany by Will Hively that argued almost the opposite point. Why is there no reference to this old article with the current article. The old article is here.
The Author's point is pretty good. He summarizes his argument with a comparison to a baseball series, and it goes as follows. Not using the college is like determining the winner of a baseball series by who scores the most runs. That's silly, because if three of the games are blowouts, but the other 4 are really close, it's the games that are close that really matter. If team can win three of the games by ten point margins, but lose the other games by 1 point each, which is the better team? The one that only won three games, but won them by 10 point margins, or the one that won four games, even though they were very close. If a team (or candidate) can do really well in a few big games (or states), but can't win the games (or states) that are really close are they the better of the two teams? I don't think so.

The electoral college is like the world series.

Say on average, team A should be able to score 2 more runs per game than team B. If you were to determine the winner of the world series by who scored the most runs after 7 games ( popular vote) then team A would almost never lose. Occasionally, team B would outscore team A in a game but on average, team A would come out ahead. And since you're totalling the runs, all that coming out ahead adds up.

On the other hand, if you determine the winner by who won the majority of the games (electoral college), team B's chances improve. The odds that they'll win 4 close games while losing 3 not-as-close games are better than their chances to outscore team A over 7 games.

If you're a player on team b, your actions in the second scenario matter more than in the first. Or to make an analogy, if team A is much better than team B, then no matter what you do on team b, it's generally meaningless. But if the difference is not as great, then while your actions in an electoral college may still be meaningless, they'd be less meaningless than in a straight popular vote.

The article presents this concept with better backing so give it a read.

Winning solely by popular vote would be like winning the World Series by runs.

To win the World Series, you need to win games. To win the presidency, you need to win states.

Without the electoral college, a candidate could just go with one dividing issue and win on that. Things as they are, candidates have to travel from state to state and discuss a variety of issues.

Anything that makes it harder for the candidates is a good thing in my book.

The REAL discover article on the electoral college from 2 years ago.

Math Against Tyranny

Here's an article about how the electoral college among other things, helps prevent extremist from getting elected. Math Against Tyranny by Will Hively from Discover Magazine 11/96.

"In this country, the way this system works, the only votes that matter are those of the electoral college. My history profs would smack me for not remembering details, but there is at least one instance in history where the electoral vote and the public vote differed. Which canidate do you think won?"

Actually, I think discover mag had an article about this. The electoral college makes each vote more important. Read it here:

Math Against Tyranny

joel