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The poster is referring to a Holmes-Ginsbook device.

Yes, but 2 + 2 = 5 is only a short story.

Google gives this:
'At the moment, there are 1089 works of mathematical fiction listed in this database.'
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/all.php

http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf52

I found the above list because I was searching for information on a story I read and enjoyed, "The Mathenauts". The basic idea is that it is possible to travel into a universe or dimension of pure math, and discover new mathematics by exploration. Some of the explorers don't come back; the chief danger is to lose yourself in the math and never return to our reality. You become imaginary, or something like that.

The story "Division by Zero" by Ted Chiang. Can be found in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others (they're all great stories, actually).

The story "Luminous" by Greg Egan, from the collection of the same title. What happens when mathematicians discover that: (a) there is a flaw in the structure of mathematical truth; and (b) that mathematical truth can be altered by performing calculations around the flaw.

Someone has already collected a bunch of mathematical fiction here.

There is a web site dedicated to mathematical fiction - http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/default.html. I've found plenty of great novels here. You can search on Math Content Rating to get more or less math depending on your tastes. Includes plays and movies as well. I'm not affiliated with the site, just a fan...

Here's an excellent source of mathematical fiction... Alex Kasman's curated list of mathematical fiction! I highly recommend it.

Also, a story I discovered through this list, which was truly spectacular: Ted Chiang's "Division by Zero". Freely available here.

My brother-in-law is a mathematician and has spent some time compiling a http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/list of mathematical fiction, including novels, short stories, and other mediums. Some of these might be interesting to students to see math applied in new situations.

More manueverability in college majors. Some majors are so predefined it's stifling. Interested in taking Spanish next semester just to try it? Tough, this flowchart says that your 18 credits have been defined that semester, and none of them are for singing. Some of these flowcharts even define full-time classes for summer, spring, and fall, to get all that you supposedly need for the 2 or 4 year degree. No wonder people get liberal arts degrees, looking at those charts people have a huge degree of choice in what they do semester to semester.

You can go to a liberal arts school and still get a BS. IMHO, it's the best of both worlds, but then again I'm biased. :)

As for TV, one used to say Star Trek, but recent versions have less and less to do with science, and in any case aren't in production now. I enjoy the new Doctor Who, but that has a great deal of fantasy these days.

But for reading please avoid at all costs any novelisations of TV or movies. Hack writers can't bring anything worthwhile to plots whose shortcomings are only too apparent without special effects and explosions to distract.

Short story anthologies might be a good bet. Many excellent ones, perhaps the annual Hugo Award Winners.

And see Mathematical Fiction for a listo f books and stories about maths. I like Greg Egan and Rudy Rucker, but they might be beyond most kids.

My two favorite science fiction movies happen to have the around the worst physics. The Fifth Element and Independence Day, the former for it's charming intent (and Bruce Wills' bonked-over-the-head scene), and the latter for gigantic explosions done the right way.

Which is testament only to suspension of disbelief. However, I will point out one thing. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu refers to variation of parameters in an appropriate way. In the recent Transformers, some character or another (who can remember), a signals analyst, refers to it as "Foiray" analysis.

If that's indicative of a decline in the standing of science, I'm tempted to say it's due to a general decline in appreciation for people who actually know how to do things, and the ascent of people who can sell. But my life experience tells me otherwise, people I actually know generally admire engineer types who can do the mysterious things that make stuff work.

Another thought I had was that possibly it's opportunity-related. Maybe there just aren't as many jobs for wonks any more. Again, my experience is to the contrary, every company in my line of business is chasing the same fairly small pool of people, and that includes the offshore talent.

So I don't know. It could be as simple as the fact that there is so much money to be made in the entertainment business, movies don't have to be good anymore and directors don't have to passionate about their material. Because mispronouncing Fourier tells me that someone surely didn't give a damn.

It's actually based on the classic "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", a 1943 short story written by Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore (under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett). See http://math.cofc.edu/kasman/MATHFICT/mfview.php?ca llnumber=mf300.

I loved the story when I read it back in High School. It actually does properly lend itself as an ET-style tale, since it's about young kids being taught very different ways of thinking. It's easy to believe Hollywood would mess this up like they have so many before it, but don't immediately discount it based on the fact that kids are prominent in the story.

I understand that college isn't cheap. You can find good deals in education though. I came from a lower middle class family. My parents made just enough to not qualify for any free college money (and I'm not a woman or a minority), but not enough to actually pay for it. So what I did was live at home and go to a local school. Now, we were fortunate enough to have a good local college nearby, but my example shows that education doesn't have to cost 100k+.

Also, while in school I worked 25-30 hours/week while taking 12 hour class loads and summer school and only finished 1 semester late with ~10k in student loans. I throw this out there because I keep seeing shows on TV where people are crying about being 100k in debt and all they have is BA in history or something. Many (not all) of these people should have thought about the consequences of going to party for 4 years before it was too late. School should be about getting an education, but so many people have been sold on the experience (partying, sports, etc...) that education often seems to take a backseat.

Even if we did think that we had found something beyond nature would that mean that we *really had* found something supernatural, or just that our knowledge of nature is limited? For early man, lightning seemed to be beyond nature, but of course it wasn't.

Carl Sagan posed a test for the existence of God: if pi, represented in base 11, were to contain a string of 1s and 0s that form a circle when plotted on the right-sized screen, then that would convince him that God really did exist. However, it may turn out to be the case that pi contains any arbitrary string of digits, in which case his test will be satisfied ... but for the wrong reason. It would be a natural rather than supernatural satisfaction of the test conditions.

So either way, your epistemology is toast. You cannot prove conclusively that something which seems to be beyond nature actually *is* beyond nature; nor can you prove conclusively that all of the many open questions in science can in fact be answered by science.

The good scientists know this, which is why relatively few of them, with the exceptions such as Sagan and Dawkins, will make grandiose claims about science demonstrating the non-existence of God.

Specific factual issues:

1. You're incorrect in claiming that literalism is a 20th century phenomenon. The central point of the Bible, the resurrection of Jesus, was taken as literal truth by the majority opinion from 1st century until roughly the 18th century (F.C. Baur, I think, was the first, IIRC). Generally speaking, historic theology worked within a combination of literal and allegorical interpretations until the 19th century.
2. You are wrong to think that the Bible was seen as inaccurate until the 20th century. Even until the late 19th century, the Bible was considered a reliable guide to archaeology. Some still try to use it in that way.
3. There is no "anti-science movement" in the United States. That term is a scare phrase used to try to link various separate arguments (creationism, flat-earthism, anti-global-warming-is-man's-fault, anti-ozone-layer-is-man's fault, anti-birth-control, anti-vaccination, etc.) into one coherent package. But there is no such coherent package, and there is no "anti-science league" or any recognized leaders of an "anti-science movement." Different individuals have different takes on each of the issues mentioned above, and there is little correlation between one's opinion on one issue (say, creationism) and another issue (say, vaccines).

   The term "anti-science" is really just an ad hominem attack in disguise. The term is used to label certain groups so that their arguments against belief X, held by many scientists, can be dismissed out of hand on the grounds that the group in question is just "anti-science." That's a classic ad hominem fallacy. If X is right, then the identity of its adherents and of its detractors is irrelevant.

Of course, en-masse bra manipulation has already been proven using a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain and a Brownian Motion producer (a nice hot cup of tea).
http://math.cofc.edu/kasman/MATHFICT/mfview.php?ca llnumber=mf458

I helped on this project when I was a CS student:

http://www.cs.cofc.edu/~manaris/ZipfMIDI/

The selection criteria is based on the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law. Applied to music, it contends that more "pleasing/beautiful" music has a Zipf-like (logarithmic) distribution (counts of notes, note durations, etc.). Check out this paper:

http://stono.cs.cofc.edu/~manaris/publications/Evo MUSART2003.final.pdf

We also envisioned a "composition tool" which allowed a composer to feed it particular sequences which the algorithm then manipulated to create a Zipf-distributed composition. Not sure what the status of this is, though.

I helped on this project when I was a CS student:

http://www.cs.cofc.edu/~manaris/ZipfMIDI/

The selection criteria is based on the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law. Applied to music, it contends that more "pleasing/beautiful" music has a Zipf-like (logarithmic) distribution (counts of notes, note durations, etc.). Check out this paper:

http://stono.cs.cofc.edu/~manaris/publications/Evo MUSART2003.final.pdf

We also envisioned a "composition tool" which allowed a composer to feed it particular sequences which the algorithm then manipulated to create a Zipf-distributed composition. Not sure what the status of this is, though.

Reminds me of the story by Arthur Clarke "Technical Error":
http://math.cofc.edu/faculty/kasman/MATHFICT/mfvie w.php?callnumber=mf169

I am stumping for a time and place in school for a reasonable discussion of what non-scientists believe. (Emphasis added)

- jeps

While our main chapter is in New Orleans, we also have a chapter in Charleston SC and Greensboro, NC and about 150 members worldwide.

http://www.cofc.edu/~jonesl/crds.html

Or, for that matter - Edgar A. Poe's Ballon Hoax (1844) which preceded Verne by a good 20 years (From Earth to the Moon wasn't published until IIRC 1865).

Not sure if Verne had read Poe, by Poe did have a very good reputation in Europe, so it's highly likely.

I will admit this freely. I have used my college's (The College of Charleston) wireless network to download pr0n.

For compounds made up of nonmetals, the first element named is the one with lower electronegativity, with the second having the higher electronegativity. If more than one binary compound is formed by a pair of nonmetals, the Greek prefixes di (two), tri (three), tetra (four), penta (five), hexa (six), etc. are used to designate the number of atoms present. The mono- prefix is rarely used.

Since H and O can form h2o or h2o2, I think dihydrogen oxide would be strictly correct, as it is a covalent binary nonmetal compound.

http://www.cofc.edu/~deavorj/101/nomenclature.html

Check it out here: http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj/binprefixes.html

This lesson was brough to you today by the letters S, I and it's metric dammit!

As the site seemed to be slow w/ just subscribers...

Mirror of the images hereNot all of them are there yet, but the skeleton is there. Refresh often.

spare him!!

Uploading the gallery right now
MIRROR HERE

Interesting post. I'm sure that it depends on the school sometimes, though. I have spoken with some from other colleges who tell me that they could turn in programming assignments that did not compile. That would never fly at my school. And while I sure did question some of the theory classes that I had to take, later on I realized their importance.

A couple of weeks ago a fellow graduate friend of mine told me of someone with whom he works (who's graduate from another college, not our program) had him look at some code he had written. One of the things he found was a for-loop in which the author had on a certain condition break out of. My friend responded to this, stating how this was not a very elegant way of writing code and was not true to the form of the fuction of a for-loop, since the idea is that before the iterations begin you state exactly how many times you will iterate. The guy's response was "Well, it still works."

Before it went KABAM, I made a quicky mirror

here

Apart from this image the new trend of making next generation operating systems which have giant interfaces really worries me. I always felt the advantage of running 1600x1200 (or 3200x1200 in my case) was to have more workspace, not a higher resolution interface. When OSX came out I installed it on my iBooks, then immediately uninstalled it primarily due to it's absolutely intrusive interface (secondarily due to lack of support for the software I was using at that time. My PC recently suffered an HD crash and I couldn't find my Windows 2000 Pro CD so I installed XP (yeah, I tried linux... Redhat to be exact, and the out-of-the-box ceased to function after two reboots), and came across a similar issue... the interface is too big, too audacious, and clamors for attention.

In Vegas the person with the biggest, brightest, flashiest sign will make the most money... but when it comes to OSs small, fast, and unobtrusive is the key, too bad nobody else sees that.

Here is a mirror.

I Didn't get a chance to fix the links to the images, so Here is the directory with a dump of them.

(And where is the Coward option?)

Here is a mirror.

I Didn't get a chance to fix the links to the images, so Here is the directory with a dump of them.

(And where is the Coward option?)

Save the guy some bandwidth. Click here for it.

Mirror

Right here

What it does, actually, is when you compute pi in base 12, at around two trillion decimal places, only ones and zeroes appear, and by putting those ones and zeroes in a 2-D array, you end up with the picture of a circle.

SI base units:

Length - already covered by the AC
Mass - already covered by parent
Time - AC
Angle - there are very good mathematical reasons for using radians
Solid angle, luminous intensity - does anyone ever use these ones? :-)
Amount of substance (mole in SI) - I'd hesitate to call this a dimensional unit, since it's just a very large number.
Temperature - the AC quoted a unit of energy. Temperature is not energy, so you'll need a real unit of temperature.

The other missing one is either current or charge (intuitively, you'd think the charge on the electron would be the ideal base unit, but in fact SI defines that in terms of current (charge/time), because current is easier to measure, using the force between current-carrying wires).

thanks to cofc.edu via Google

Even here in the "backward south" we're going wireless (eventually). The College of Charleston, whose Computer Science department was rated best in the Southeast, has a campuswide wireless network put together. Maybe by the time next semester rolls around they'll turn it on. Until then, I'm relegated to the wireless network in and around the J.C. Long building (which covers Andolini's Pizza, behind J.C. Long) and any other networks I can sniff out with Kismet.

Even here in the "backward south" we're going wireless (eventually). The College of Charleston, whose Computer Science department was rated best in the Southeast, has a campuswide wireless network put together. Maybe by the time next semester rolls around they'll turn it on. Until then, I'm relegated to the wireless network in and around the J.C. Long building (which covers Andolini's Pizza, behind J.C. Long) and any other networks I can sniff out with Kismet.

What does it take to get people using standard notation?

1 000 bits = 1 kb
1 000 000 bits = 1 Mb

Of course what you really meant was 64 kb/s and 1.544 Mb/s, as 64 kb is a capacity, not a data rate.

For those who wish to communicate with the rest of the world, the following calculations actually make sense:

• 10^18 bytes = 1 000 000 000 000 000 bytes = 1 decimal terabyte = 1 terabyte = 1 TB
• 2^50 bytes = 1 125 899 906 842 624 bytes = 1 binary terabyte = 1 tebibyte = 1 TiB

For the uninitiated, these terms are described here

Even accounting for your typographical error, 2^63 != 9 * 10^18 (9223372036854775808 != 9000000000000000000)

Well, I've done a Java for juniors and seniors who already know OOP here at VT. In the past we have used the Core Java Volume 1 book, but that's not appropriate to your audience, since they don't already know OOP.

Take a look at Java Software Solutions (Addison-Wesley, author=John Lewis), if you are looking for a book tied directly to a language that the students will be working with. (Shameless plug: John was my Master's advisor, and I contributed to the text). It's been very well received at the collegiate level and is well supported. Since your students know C, they may be able to skip a few intro chapters on programming, data types, etc... or at least get through them quickly.

Deitel and Dietel's Java texts are also popular.

If you are looking for only a discussion of OOP topics and not bound to a particular language, I can't be of too much help there, I've not perused any of those recently.

One final point. Please consider attending SIGCSE (http://www.cs.cofc.edu/sigcse2002) in February. It's an invaluable resource for computer science instruction for both new (novice) and old (er, experienced) instructors. SIGCSE is a great place to make contacts, get help on related issues, check out the texts, etc....

So the real question is this: When will Loki go public? They are probably the single hottest Linux company out there in the sense that games are the only sure-bet out there today. People may buy databases at work, but for every database there's 50 employees who go home and play SimKillMyCo-Workers. And then they buy the expansion pack, sequal, cheat books, etc. If Loki can convince the gaming biz to let them do all of the ports, their profits may require a new set of units (the yottabuck may not be sufficient).

That leaves me to wonder when I'll be allowed to buy in. Either that, or are they hiring? ;-)