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Its not like the USA was built on industrial espionage gleened from Britain's industrial revolution

now everything is global, who is to say that USA doesn't still do it, but now they take the info from any country "legally" Hmmmmmmm....
dodgy fnckers

The "one child" policy creates a huge premium on having a male child. Boys are regarded as preferable to girls for several reasons - not least because they can continue the family line. Quoting from this article, which appeared in Hong Kong newspaper in 1995:

"The birth of a girl has never been a cause for celebration in China, and stories of peasant farmers drowning new born girls in buckets of water have been commonplace for centuries. Now, however, as a direct result of the one-child policy, the number of baby girls being abandoned, aborted, or dumped on orphanage steps is unprecedented.

It is impossible to overstate both how crucial the one-child policy is to China's stability and how rigidly it is enforced. Everyone agrees that if the population, already at 1.2 billion, is allowed to grow, the result will be economic collapse, environmental ruin, famine "

In fact, the Chinese government has tried to get people to place a higher value on baby girls, in an attempt to stave off future social problems resulting from the huge gender imbalance in the population. Here's one example: a quick Google will turn up others. The cultural predisposition towards baby boys, allied to the knowledge that you won't be allowed to "try for a boy" if your first-born happens to be a girl, has to make you think that their efforts are doomed to fail.

evi.tar.Z (Not to be confused with the vi mode for emacs)

An emacs "emulator." The idea behind it is to turn vi into a modeless editor (one that is always in input mode, with commands done with control keys). It is actually done with a shell script that replaces the EXINIT environment variable.

More Russian soldiers died in WWII than other allied soldiers fought.

Look at the numbers. Russia had over 9 million people killed during WWII, and another 18 million wounded. Compared to the rest of the allied powers who had approx 2.8 million killed and 3 million wounded. (Source: http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob62.h tml).

Does this mean WWII was unilateral? I mean, look at the number of deaths alone and you see a HUGE difference in the number of soldiers!

I agree with your ipse dixit despite your ad hominem, although prima facie evidence has indicated ad infinitum (as you noted a priori) that Slashdotters are cannot post sans such phrases a fortiori, being that said phrases are the de facto lingua franca of condescending morons et cetera and it is easier to insert such phrases than to begin with tabula rasa.

Handy list of Latin phrases said morons use. Now you, too, can sound like a condescendant!

I haven't been to Trinity Site (yet...), but I'm told they gathered up as much of the trinitite/atomsite as possible and stored it in 50 gallon drums. That said, if you go to the White Sands Missle Range Museum you'll find a few pieces in a glass display case in a small room near the back. IIRC, the same room had parts from the bunkers too.

If you are EVER close enough to pay a visit, DO IT. The New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo and the National Atomic Museum in Albequerque are other "nearby" must-sees.

According to this page the museum on Kirtland AFB is being combined with the National Atomic Museum. I am pretty sure they were separate entities before, but both rocked. I'm sure they will only become better. I hope they keep the two B28 bombs from the Palomares, Spain collision on display.

All but one of the guys who dropped the nukes committed suicide.

And so did many victims of the Holocaust.

And yet, many of the Nazis who committed what were -- unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- unarguably war crimes, did not commit suicide, and some continue to collect pensions from the German government to this day.

I'm not trying to say that no American ever committed war crimes; My Lai was also unarguably a war crime (and may Calley burn in Hell!), and some of the U.S. military's actions in Iraq -- as in throwing prisoners in a river to drown -- surely are atrocities.

I'm just pointing out that suicide isn't necessarily what the guilty do. Indeed, I'd be inclined to suggest that the really guilty, people like Josef Mengele ("Angel of Death" responsible for human experimentation at Auschwitz, died vacationing at a Brazilian beach), Rudolf Höß (first commandant of Auschwitz, executed), and Erich_Priebke (perpetrator of the Ardeatine caves massacre, still alive), tend to be so -- for lack of a better word -- evil that they feel they're not guilty and therefore feel no need for suicide or other punishment. (Indeed, Priebke so strongly felt that the killing 350 Italian civilians was not his responsibility but the responsibility of those who ordered him to do it, that he openly admitted his actions from fifty years later to a television news crew's cameras -- and it was only this admission that led to his trial).

For the record, I believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more illegal than any bombing of cities in the war -- and all major combatants bombed cities in World War II. Dead by conventional bomb, dead by V1 rocket, dead by fire-bombing, dead by atomic bomb -- they're all dead. I'm unaware of any difference in ways of being dead, with the possible exception that atomic bombs mean a quicker death.

Also, for the record, I believe any crime involved in dropping the atomic bombs pales beside the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Korea, China (in "the Rape of Nanking" (warning: link includes a disturbing picture of mass decapitation) the word "rape" is used pretty literally -- but includes ripping babies from their mothers' arms and bashing the babies' heads against walls, prior to raping the mother), the Philippines, and the Bataan Death March, not to mention the Japanese forced labor camps in which tens of thousands died.

To those who contend that we "could have" beaten Japan without recourse to atomic bombs, I ask them how many more America boys would have had to have died to achieve an unconditional Japanese surrender using only conventional weapons -- and if those arguing against using atomic bombs had any of their family members on the line.

I wasn't in the Pacific fighting Japan, but Paul Fussell (later professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania) was -- after fighting Hitler's legions in Europe -- and I'll defer to his opinion and that of the other boots on the ground: "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb"

But let me ask you: how many American boys would you have sacrificed in further conventional war against Japan, so that you, safe at home, could claim the moral high ground of an atomic-bomb-free but protracted conventional war ?

Being a Midwestern hayseed and all, I almost took that at face value, but I decided to check, just in case.

According to the 2000 Census, only 13.2% of white households in Manhattan made more that $200K.

So even among the wealthiest ethnic group living in the most expensive borough of NYC, $200K is still 87th percentile.

Not quite stinking rich, given those rather rarefied demographics, but nowhere near "lower middle class."

Cite (pdf).

It wouldn't surprise me if some Closed-Source companies have foreign nationals working on their software as well.

In either case, whoever's using software for National Security better audit the source code themselves. I wouldn't want missle systems to use Linux or Windows or some other RTOS without a careful audit.

Since when has making a product unavailable for purchase meant you can steal er violate copyright?

From City University of New York's discussion on fair use:

"The fact that a work is out of print or unavailable, or that there is no ready market for permissions weighs toward favorable to fair use."

Not exactly a guarantee, but the fact that, for most abandonware, no legit source exists weighs positively in favor of otherwise-illegally obtaining it falling under fair use.


Of course, considering the four points that determine whether or not a given activity falls under fair use, I'd say the idea of abandonware scores at best a 50:50 shot. For the "purpose and character", noncommercial preservation of culturally relevant materials weighs as a positive. For "nature of the copyrighted word", a game purely for entertainment scores a negative. For the "substantiality of the portion used", I'd call 100% a definite strike against abandonware. And for the "potential market", that could go either way... Currently unavailable would count as a positive, but by infringing copyrights to get the ROMs, one could argue that downloading them would tend to reduce the potential market (though, I would personally say it increases the market, when a friend comes over and plays Pac-Man via MAME and then goes out and blows $1500 on a vintage machine...).


PS - IANAL, as if it needs saying.

Automated theorem provers have been around for a long time, if you can express your thoughts using first order logic. Here's a program from 1986... lisp code

Bullshit. The owner of any particular work can put whatever restrictions they with on it's use.

No, they can't.

Read this

The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it's course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregan, Colorado or and other river may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce

After the snow stopped and the winds calmed midday Tuesday, much of the mangled debris remained. In the week after the blizzard, the poles and the wires complicated the city's cleanup efforts. The New York Tribune reminded citizens in an editorial on March 13 that a law had been passed to bury the wires, that the companies had the money to make it happen, and that it was "high time to have done with tricks and subterfuges to avoid the plain requirements of duty and of common sense." Unsurprisingly, in the months after the storm, corporate opposition to the city's efforts to force burial of the wires remained strong: Brush Electric Company, for instance, threatened to leave the city if it was forced to bury its wires.

After the snow stopped and the winds calmed midday Tuesday, much of the mangled debris remained. In the week after the blizzard, the poles and the wires complicated the city's cleanup efforts. The New York Tribune reminded citizens in an editorial on March 13 that a law had been passed to bury the wires, that the companies had the money to make it happen, and that it was "high time to have done with tricks and subterfuges to avoid the plain requirements of duty and of common sense." Unsurprisingly, in the months after the storm, corporate opposition to the city's efforts to force burial of the wires remained strong: Brush Electric Company, for instance, threatened to leave the city if it was forced to bury its wires.

~ the only possible way you could compare Hitler to anyone ... is to ignore most of what Hitler did.

Like the part where Hitler suspended civil liberties "temporarily"?

More info here: Sun in China

So it's ok for you to point the finger at us when your own house isn't in order but not ok for me to return the favor because mine isn't? Lest you forget who started this thread with the long list of what is wrong with America and why we didn't have the right to criticize the Chinese.

And, unlike France, the US is responsible for actually destroying democracies and creating dictatorships on a wide scale

No, they just prevented them from emerging as democracies in the first place. That's so much better.

The French invented unilateralism. While the rest of the West was working together to oppose the Russians and protect freedom the French decided that they would pull French forces out of NATO command, ask the allied forces to leave French soil ("Thanks for saving us from the Germans after we collapsed and surrendered... please leave now"), and refuse to let their most important (and as you said in a previous post "bad-mouthing your oldest ally to hell and back") and oldest ally use their airspace to strike a terrorist state (Libya under Quaddfi) who had just killed American servicemen (and a Turkish civilian!) in a terrorist attack on a Berlin disco. Sure hope they wouldn't have expected us to use their airspace if the Russians had defeated NATO forces in Germany and rolled across the Franco-German border on their way to the Bay of Biscay. Hey, what's a World War if Paris doesn't fall? ;)

Oh, and by the way, the French did not threaten the use of a veto with regards to a UN resolution supporting an invasion of Iraq

That's bullshit and you know it. Go read this and tell me otherwise. Let me quote the opening sentence for you: French President Jacques Chirac said Monday that "no matter what the circumstances" France will vote against a new U.S.-backed resolution currently being considered by the United Nations Security Council that would give Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a March 17 deadline to disarm or face possible military consequences.

Thanks for allowing a fair and open debate Mr. Chirac! Ever consider the fact that maybe the inspectors would have gotten more corporation out of the Iraqi regime over the years if it didn't appear like the French were protecting them from the consequences of not cooperating? But then, what should we expect from the French other then appeasement of dictators? How well did the Munich agreement and the betrayal of Czechoslovakia work out for you guys?

So, even if there had been a vote, any French "no" vote wouldn't have been a veto, because the required support was non-existant

Hard to say there wasn't enough support when the French refused to allow a fair and open debate on the subject. And according to the above quote, they would have veto'ed it anyway. So your argument is moot.

At least when we veto your resolutions on Israel we allow you to say your piece first. And BTW, we are supporting a democratic state that is surrounded by millions of enemies that want to see it pushed back into the ocean. Whereas the French were supporting a mass murderer with whom they had oil contracts worth billions. Tell me, which one of us here has the claim to the moral high ground?

No matter how legitimate of a claim that they have, giving into dictators, terrorists and despotic states is a bad idea (see the Munich agreement). Perhaps if the Muslims would stop bl

So it's ok for you to point the finger at us when your own house isn't in order but not ok for me to return the favor because mine isn't? Lest you forget who started this thread with the long list of what is wrong with America and why we didn't have the right to criticize the Chinese.

And, unlike France, the US is responsible for actually destroying democracies and creating dictatorships on a wide scale

No, they just prevented them from emerging as democracies in the first place. That's so much better.

The French invented unilateralism. While the rest of the West was working together to oppose the Russians and protect freedom the French decided that they would pull French forces out of NATO command, ask the allied forces to leave French soil ("Thanks for saving us from the Germans after we collapsed and surrendered... please leave now"), and refuse to let their most important (and as you said in a previous post "bad-mouthing your oldest ally to hell and back") and oldest ally use their airspace to strike a terrorist state (Libya under Quaddfi) who had just killed American servicemen (and a Turkish civilian!) in a terrorist attack on a Berlin disco. Sure hope they wouldn't have expected us to use their airspace if the Russians had defeated NATO forces in Germany and rolled across the Franco-German border on their way to the Bay of Biscay. Hey, what's a World War if Paris doesn't fall? ;)

Oh, and by the way, the French did not threaten the use of a veto with regards to a UN resolution supporting an invasion of Iraq

That's bullshit and you know it. Go read this and tell me otherwise. Let me quote the opening sentence for you: French President Jacques Chirac said Monday that "no matter what the circumstances" France will vote against a new U.S.-backed resolution currently being considered by the United Nations Security Council that would give Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a March 17 deadline to disarm or face possible military consequences.

Thanks for allowing a fair and open debate Mr. Chirac! Ever consider the fact that maybe the inspectors would have gotten more corporation out of the Iraqi regime over the years if it didn't appear like the French were protecting them from the consequences of not cooperating? But then, what should we expect from the French other then appeasement of dictators? How well did the Munich agreement and the betrayal of Czechoslovakia work out for you guys?

So, even if there had been a vote, any French "no" vote wouldn't have been a veto, because the required support was non-existant

Hard to say there wasn't enough support when the French refused to allow a fair and open debate on the subject. And according to the above quote, they would have veto'ed it anyway. So your argument is moot.

At least when we veto your resolutions on Israel we allow you to say your piece first. And BTW, we are supporting a democratic state that is surrounded by millions of enemies that want to see it pushed back into the ocean. Whereas the French were supporting a mass murderer with whom they had oil contracts worth billions. Tell me, which one of us here has the claim to the moral high ground?

No matter how legitimate of a claim that they have, giving into dictators, terrorists and despotic states is a bad idea (see the Munich agreement). Perhaps if the Muslims would stop bl

Probably not, but they had universities when the anglo-saxons were still living in grass huts.

Funny thing about Chinese civilization. The quickly reached their peak, then stayed there ossified for the next 1500 years.

Your single number is fucked up. "1500 years"? 1500 years ago is 500 CE. I hate to tell you this, but the dynasty of the Later Han collapsed in 220 CE. The Sui didn't reunite China until 589 CE, and China didn't really get going again until the Tang attained full control in 626 CE. Now, the universities grandparent was referring to were the imperial universities of the Han, already with 3,000 students in 8 BCE. We should consider that a peak -- and it doesn't correspond to your schedule.

So your date isn't a peak at all, but a trough in one of the many interregnums between Chinese dynasties.

You see, China's history is largely a story of the cyclic rise and fall of dynasties, one after the other. There has never been a time when Chinese civilization was allowed to ossify for such a long time as you posit -- dynasties collapsed much faster than that. And as far as "peak"s are concerned, China has had many peaks. The Han, the Tang, the Song, the Ming...

If you want objective evidence, instead of subjective cultural achievements, let me point you to Admiral Zheng He's 15th-century maritime voyages -- which the following article is referring to when it says "during the Song dynasty, China developed the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated merchant marine and navy". That article should be edifying as to why, despite its invention of gunpowder, printing, and the compass, China never conquered the world.

Well, this comment hasn't been flawless, but no, yuri benjamin, Brandybuck isn't right. Hope you enjoyed my theory, though.

> (And if you think the US is expansionistic you need to remember who annexed all of Eastern Europe.)

If some Nazi shitheads murdered 30 million of your people, you may want a buffer between you and them as well. Before that, they had fun with the Napoleonic wars... understand the Russians have lost MILLIONS of people to invaders.

It's not fair, but almost understandable.

It's all about context -- not blindly being afraid of the Reds. :)

Something I've wondered for a while... what's up with the points coming off the stars?

As was mentioned in another post, those are diffraction spikes from the supports for the secondary mirror.

Newtonian reflectors and classical Cassegrain telescopes support their secondary mirror with "spiders" that produce diffraction spikes. There have been various efforts over the years to eliminate these from that type of telescope. One method is to seal the tube with an optical flat (a flat piece of optical glass) which supports the mirror. The trade-offs include longer times for the scopes to reach temperature equilibrium, distortion from imperfections in the optical figure of the flat, and slight light loss. Other attempts have included the use of spiders with curved support arms, which reduce or eliminates spikes at the cost of slightly degraded overall image contrast.

Other telescope types, such as refractors, Maksutovs, Schmidt-Cassegrains, and Yolo reflectors have no diffraction spikes, but they are all more optically complex (Yolos, for instance, require toroidal mirrors) and are more difficult to produce as a result. Refractors have the added problem of chromatic abberation, which is the fringing of color on the edge of bright objects. Various complex, multi-element objectives have been developed to reduce, or even practically eliminate, this problem. The problems are optical complexity, cost, and light loss. Figuring a 3-element objective lens for a refractor means grinding six optical surfaces with precise curves. Compare that to a Newtonian which has a single parabolic primary mirror and a flat optical secondary.

There are many other telescope types than the few popular types I mentioned here and each have their proponents. Most designs that have survived the test of time can be made to perform well, but each has trade-offs.

Here's what hosting CIS Society's president post today (scroll down) on society's web forum:

"Microsoft has also issued the CISS rights to duplicate and hand out almost everything that Microsoft makes to students. You will hear more about this in the very near future. THIS INCLUDES ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS SUCH AS WINDOWS 2003 WHEN IT IS RELEASED!"

One thing missing from your list is the actual discovery of DNA by Miescher, which happened around the same time as Mendel's work (the significance of neither study was realised at the time). Don't read these links over breakfast!:

http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/ahp/LAD/C4/C4_Disc overy.html
http://www.fmi.ch/members/marilyn.vaccaro/ewww/ind ex2.html

The CUNY Honors Program not only gives us iBooks, it also pays for our tuition and board, so it's a win-win situation. The iBooks do come with a strange contract though - Microsoft Office must be uninstalled when we finally buy the laptops (for $1). I guess that's because our licenses aren't for personal use, but come on, who's going to actually delete all the software?

I dunno, a few other places that I would regard as more reliable and trustworthy on this issue than Slashdot posters seem to suggest that Pay As You Throw should at least be piloted in NYC. Even the EPA is for such programs...

You are absolutely nuts. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, a whopping 4% of Oregonians are Mormon, compared to 21% who answered "No religion."

But Oregon is one of the most liberal (not to be confused with libertarian) states in the union. Even if this were a good idea, Oregon would not be the place to try it.

If you want some REAL hard math problems you can try here.

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!

poor punctuation is a very serious problem in today's world. the people at cuny.edu have made important, significant progress in this field. enj0rk!

"The army has been irrelevant since their failure"

You must have missed the entire Cold War. You know, the one where the old Soviet Union had hundreds of tanks waiting to rush into West Germany? Or the massive, one-sided land engagement in "that desert war" in 97? It wasn't all air power, though it went a long way in the outcome. Think of it this way; Somebody with heavy weapons on the ground has to actually claim the land from other people with heavy weapons. I guess you could theoretically carpet bomb every fox hole and bunker, but it's not realistic.

"Even then, an air/naval blockade and nukes was more than enough to eliminate japan."

Make no mistake, without those bombs, the cost of invading Japan would have been astronomical in lives, probably more than dropping the bombs themselves. Refer to planned operations Cornet and Olympic as to the scope of this undertaking. This article describes it as well as anything could. Yeah, we had the fleets and airforce, but the Imperial Japanese didn't care. It was going to be to the last man, woman and child with a conventional war. Think Vietnam, only a thousand times worse.

Here at Boeing, everything old is new again! You want a Sailor Inhaler? Suck on this; The A-7 Corsair strike fighter and it's cousin, the F-8 Crusader fighter. Both were slowly fazed out in favor of dual engine aircraft (over-water redundancy).

The show will demonstrate how small-mid sized businesses can save money and take advantage of the latest technology showing off such goodies as Bayonne, LTSP, X Terminal services, OpenOffice.org, and Evolution

If you are interested in what GNU/Linux solutions are out there for your small to mid sized office, come over to Segal Theater at CUNY Graduate Center, 34th St. and 5th Ave from 10am-5pm next Friday the 24th. [Free and Open to the Public]

This is a volunteer demonstration. With work like this, we are changing the face of New York. If you are interested in coming or helping, contact paulr at nylxs.com.

What do the japanese have to do with the chinese? your whole argument is pointless.

Instead of decreasing tax and sending a few Ambassadors they chose war, a stupid decision. End result: America had its independence

I know many people get confused between Japanese and Chinese, but I assure you I'm not one of those (many) people. The Japanese commander Yamamato knew that an attack on US might not be a good idea, *but he had to do it anyway*, intended result: Japan woud secure Malaysian/Singapore oil fields; actual result: Japan was nuked and beaten back to its homeland. So was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour a good idea? No, it caused their destruction. The British forces defending Malaysia and Singapore were weak, the British had no idea about how to wage a modern war, resulting in the sinking of the greatest British batteleship the HMS Hood, also due to a Titanic-psyche in the design stage of the battleship. If the Japanese didn't attack Pearl Harbour and went straight for Malaysia, the US would have just sat there looking at the $$ cost of war, like they did at the beginning of WW2. The Japanese attack would have been more of a success.

The real point is that people that know better are ordered to start wars, even though the war might turn out badly, because some politician or Emperor thinks it was a good idea at the time, or has misguided notions of supremacy. Same as the attack on the Chinese embassy in Serbia by the US. If the military can use old maps and old information, and they have billions of dollars to keep up to date with 3D terrain models, then what do the politicians use? Can they only really start wars when it's a good idea, do they really know what they're doing? Think of it this way, when Japanese Emperor said, "Attack Pearl Harbour so that we can take Malaysia, Singapore and China" would any of his Generals have the balls to turn to him and say, "My Emperor, dude, that's a stupid idea, you're a stupid asshole man. Forget Pearl Harbour". Does anyone have the balls to say this to Bush? The last person that said this to the President really caught his eye - she was an intern called Monica Lewinksy.

The really sad thing is that the bigger countries gain from instability, because they can justify wars. Like if Iraq does even the slightest thing, America can blow it up, and then say "Iran is next, Saudi Arabia is next" and maintain power over them like that and keep oil prices low. In the same way China can never say, "Yeah Taiwan do whatever you want, no problem" because it would lose an advantage, at the very least it can say, "if companies in Taiwan start firing Chinese workers we'll invade Taiwan" thus allowing China to hold power over the country. The US is very dependent on VIA and chipsets manufactured in Taiwan that if the Chinese were seriously going to invade, the US would detect the build-up and send in a couple of Aircraft Carriers on "permanent military excercises" or whatever. Until I see a couple of American aircraft carriers next to Taiwan, I'm not worried.

You're right, cyber attack is stupid now, not enough critical systems are Internet-enabled yet. Thing is that's changing, I'm starting to see realtime control systems for the military written in Ada having more and more interconnectivity, battlefield networking and the like. Combine this with a 10GigaWatt UWB pulse to disable Aegis and goalpost gun interceptors, and you're looking at a whole pile of trouble when you fry electronics. Then again what panic would be created if all TV was knocked off the air (terrorist strike) at broadcast point (nuke in Hollywood) and CNN.com was defaced, the headline reading, "Terrorists have used some sorta hallucingenic mind control technique to brainwash the National Guard, The President says please all civilians go to your National Guard base and kill everyone." I'm sure a few people would take this advice. This would be in line with The Art of War teachings by Sun Tzu defeating your enemy with the minimum effort.

Physics is based on observation and on mathematics. And anyone without overweening ego issues can have the courage to admit that mathematics is particular and specific to our cognitive, embodied perception.

Platonic ideals are as likely as Great Sky Gods, or GUTs. There are no Natural Laws, but instead narrative descriptions of the world. These stories use metaphor and analogy, and their popularity waxes and wanes along with the lives and influence of their storytellers. Blend Kuhn (anti) and Kuhn (pro) and Foucault with a dash of Popper. And don't skimp on the hermeneutics.

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

There are a number of difficult questions in the field of research in combinatorial group theory for which no reasonable-time (non-exponential or worse) algorithms are known. Genetic algorithms have proven to be surprisingly effective for some questions in this area; I am part of an open-source project (the Magnus project, an endeavor of the New York Group Theory Cooperative) which has implemented a number of genetic algorithms in our software for computations in combinatorial group theory. See this page for a descripition of some of the genetic algorithms implemented in our software. In particular, some difficult theoretical questions that had been studied for more than 20 years turned out to be answered quickly (less than 30 seconds on a 300 Mhz PII) via a genetic algorithm approach. (The most remarkable of them was the dismissal of a potential counterexample to the Andrews-Curtis conjecture which had been very resistant to theoretical and traditional computational approaches.)

I know of other successes of genetic algorithms in research mathematics in areas like control theory and modelling, but I am most familiar with algebraic applications. In the situations described above, there are good measures of `fitness' and a good notion of two reasonably-fit individuals combining and possibly mutating to make even-more-fit offspring. It is much more difficult to apply the techniques where there is not a good measure of fitness or of combination.

For those of you that might be interested, I just launched a new site dedicated to models of human language acquisition. Over time I hope to provide a repository of relevant news on researchers, conferences, papers, and books from fields including A/I, computational linguistics, developmental psychology, machine learning, and cognitive science.

I will also use the site to share information about my own work. Like HAL, my model learns (and "learn" should always be taken with a grain of salt) from the bottom-up, but the words it acquires are grounded in visual perception. The basic idea is to resolve nouns to objects and verbs to actions/relationships in short spatial-motion videos. My work is based on work by Jeffrey Mark Siskind, David Bailey, Jan Norris, and Katherine Nelson.

Upon completion of my dissertation, I hope to release some or all of the Java code for my model on the site.

With all the bad news here are some pictures I previously took of the World Trade Center: physics.baruch.cuny.edu/wtc

If you think the US is the first democratically-based government, then please realize it's only two hundred some years old. What you said doesn't seem to make sense. Anyway, China was a democracy (actually, a republic) here, here, and here.

simple enough if placed in a loop. All that remains is a method of refreshing the signal. To this end, I thought of taking a gas laser, pumped to just a few photons below the point it will lase, and use it as the terminator of the loop. In this way, it gets a refresh on each loop

Good idea. A material that slows down light (such as this one; thanks ultrabot2k1), used as a delay line, gives you optical DRAM. Just make sure you don't try to take your idea into outer space.

Or you could just make optical SRAM by using these optical transistors (a D latch/flipflop is two NOTs and a mux).

Actually it is possible to slow down light. Granted, this we're still a few years away from seeing any usable applications for this technology, but it's still a pretty cool concept.

Sorry about that... lameness.

Here is a link to the full email I got from Dr. Anshel giving a little background to the story.

Your courses at hunter seem to integrate "applied" and "theoretical" knowledge of New Media - as opposed to many other Universities which will separate theory from studio. Could you elaborate on your teaching philosophy and why you teach the way you do?

Also, what relationship does teaching have to your other work?

Thanks,

Danny (also an educator/consultant)

If they do manage to achieve this, the question will be what is the impact? Will it be similar to the liberating effects of the printing press, or to that of Dynamite and other high explosives turned to war?

Or perhaps it will have more of the impact of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses?

Eerie...like missing a belly-button.

Does it strike you strange that soon after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and Soviet Union that people seemed to ho-hum those events? I'll never forget Tianimen Square in June of 1989. Especially this photo of the man standing in front of the tanks.

These were global events that shaped the future -- still impacting today. How soon we forget.

• 1929.com Interesting, but needs more material.
• WPA Writer's Project A Library of Congress collection. Good photos.
• Songs of the Great Depression Brother, can you spare a dime?
• Downside.com See the guy jump out the window, just like 1929. A service of Animats

Also check out Magnus.

Sometimes there just aren't any easy choices

With this in mind, read this and ponder for a bit:

When my parents had their third child, everything seemed perfectly normal (whatever that might be) for the first 6 months. Then they started to notice that she did not respond very well to outside stimuli, and she seemed to be developing quite slowly compared to the first two children. So, as any concerned parents might do, they took her to the doctor. He then gave them the news - their baby was bon with an inherited birth defect known as Tay Sachs. For those of you that do not know about Tay Sachs and do not have the time to read over the website, I can tell you this - there is no cure, and an early death is inevitable. Parents of a child with Tay-Sachs will have the opportunity to watch their child die as their central nervous system slowly fails. It usually begins with the loss of eysight and hearing, and the disease progresses from there.

When my sister was two, my parents had to decide between intubating her so that she could eat (which would prolong her life by a year or two, but she would continue to suffer) or not intubating (in which case they could watch her starve to death since she could no longer swallow). Every hour or so, someone had to suction out her mouth so that she would not choke on her own saliva.

How's that for a tough decision? Imagine how much easier it would have been on my sister if my parents would have had the choice to let her die quickly, keeping in mind that there is no cure.

So I ask you to think about this - if you were unable to move on your own or communicate in any way to the people around you (in fact, quite often not knowing that there were people around you at all), and if you knew that you were doomed to a very painful existance for the short time that you were alive, do you think perhaps you might lie there hoping that someone would see fit to shorten your life, or would you choose to live as long as you possibly could?

I know what I would want...