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I thought that a large fraction of "conservatives" strongly favor post-birth abortion.

They call it capital "punishment".

Which probably does not "work" (deter crime) https://math.dartmouth.edu/~lamperti/my%20DP%20paper,%20current%20edit.htm

is often applied in error https://www.cbsnews.com/news/death-penalty-mistakes-the-rule/

and is probably a tool of racism https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/opinion/09dow.html

FWIW I enjoy shooting and have little time for SJW types; OTOH, taxes are merely the cost of renting time on the massive piece of capital equipment known as "society" ; it is possible that even a 90% marginal rate can be justified; maybe: something like this https://web.archive.org/web/20130411183250/http://www.sff.net/people/jack.haldeman/people.htm might male it more palatable

In part edge computing is driven by advances in the speed and low power cost of MCU's, which just now are capable of running some types of machine learning. There are several advantages to local computing, see our paper: NoCloud: Exploring Network Disconnection through On-Device Data Analysis https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~...

Not trying to start a flame war even remotely, but nothing in your reply refutes the fact that the licensing is why these companies choose the BSDs. They don't pick BSD for superiority; Legal likes BSD license because it's compatible with IP, while GPL inherently isn't. I'll even add Netflix into the company list: they use FreeBSD on very specific back-end machines (and very few of them), but everything else is Linux (this comes from someone who actually works there).

FreeBSD was a good solid OS in the 4.x days, possibly lingering into the 9.x days. 10.x onward are pretty bad (you need to follow commits and mailing lists to understand these claims. They are not without merit). One of the worst problems introduced in 10.x is how load average is completely unreliable, which is still there as of 12.x/HEAD, despite the problem being 100% reproducible on both bare metal and VMs. DragonflyBSD is more promising in the sense that it's based on the development approach of 4.x and massively improved to work with present-day systems, hardware, and needs (Matt Dillon was one of the first people to track down the Ryzen bug); several FreeBSD committers (src and ports) switched many years ago for a multitude of reasons (some political). Instead in FreeBSD, people focus on mission-critical things like breaking ABI compatibility because the word rendezvous was spelled rendevous. There are only a couple kernel developers who remain that are of high quality: Konstantin Belousov and John Baldwin are two main ones; Warner Losh still lingers somewhere and comments on proposed the quality of proposed commits, and Alexander Motin does good work on storage subsystems and ZFS but his other stuff is questionable. Go through svn-src-all sometime and you'll see the names are few and far between compared to olden days.

Modern Linux (I am talking about the kernel/OS, not userland, and not a distribution!) is substantially better, and actually supported by device vendors for device drivers and kernel-level software. I name some names later.

GNOME and KDE and Wayland aren't relevant to any of the companies I listed and what products they make that use BSD, apparently with the exception of Citrix (I'm only familiar with their NetScaler devices, which were originally from the company of the same name (Citrix bought them in 2005)). These companies are using BSD kernel and partial userland (i.e. not ports/packages), plus their own in-house-developed binaries.

systemd isn't a requirement for Linux (though I fully agree it's a travesty and should be abolished, and am also terrified of how fast it was adopted across so many major distros), but there are distros which don't use it. I will admit that the downside to using one of these less-known distros is that their general support is worse; for example, Devuan, the Debian fork that lacks systemd, has questionable ZFS support (and its ZFS maintainer is some guy who sounds like he should be on a hacker's IRC channel). I would really love to know why so many distros switched, including some which were server-focused; OpenRC really seems like it's suitable for both servers and desktops. As someone who had to migrate EC2 servers running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with in-house Upstart scripts to 16.04 LTS, I've really learned to hate systemd. Hours of my life and time absolutely wasted. But the kernel is still good.

ifconfig is userland, not kernel, but I agree it's "deprecation" (for the ip(8) command) is silly, but this is a per-distro thing (many distros still include it). In contrast, remember when ISC tri

We're talking about students that enter the country legally, in comparison to other students that have entered the country legally.

No we're not as the linked study shows. The data was reported by institutions.

- The survey captured 522 valid responses from higher education institutions throughout the United States.

The actual definition of 'international student' varies among institutions but at least one specifically states illegals are in this category and one other that states the opposite. So your statement that only legal residents are included is categorically incorrect.

You hypothesize that maybe the same number want to enter, but are deterred by things that haven't changed and didn't deter their predecessors.

The study states gaining physical presence in the US as the number one issue, along with other factors.

- Survey respondents cite that the key factors contributing to these declines are visa application issues or denials, costs of U.S. higher education, the social and political environment, and the increasingly competitive global market of higher education options. The vast majority of institutions (94.7%) indicate that it is not just one reason, but multiple of these factors that contribute to new student enrollment declines.

You then make up the idea that this is about illegal immigration, which it isn't.

True, it doesn't talk about this and contains no data to support this. However it does show a correlation between international enrolment and admissions selectivity.

People will want to dismiss this "Oh noes, Ethiopia will be poor." But the truth is this is how things go from bad or barely manageable to absolute hell. Civilized societies turn to civil war and in our time feeding grounds for terrorism. The Yucatan peninsula went from 1.2 million people, with scientists, politicians, and surprisingly advanced civilization at the time, to just over 100k in less than 100 years. Drought was a big part of that.

Imagine what kind of havoc had to have happened for 9/10 of your friends and family to not have descendants. That's serious war and hell, and we see our own human history showing that we're not good at these long term planning challenges. The funny thing is that there were politicians in the Yucatan, in the beginning, that tried to get people to change farming practices to cope with the changing climate, but they were always immediately voted out of office because it would have affected profits.

So laugh and dismiss all you want, but vote for leaders that take this seriously and plan properly.

(Emphasis mine)

Sorry, I read that and just laughed out loud! Cats and dogs living together! Bwa ha ha ha.... !

Seriously.

Do you have any hard evidence to cite? Something without, for example, emotional content?

Imagine what kind of havoc had to have happened for 9/10 of your friends and family to not have descendants. That's serious war and hell, and we see our own human history showing that we're not good at these long term planning challenges. The funny thing is that there were politicians in the Yucatan, in the beginning, that tried to get people to change farming practices to cope with the changing climate, but they were always immediately voted out of office because it would have affected profits.

So laugh and dismiss all you want, but vote for leaders that take this seriously and plan properly.

If I rightly remember, the code would have been

10 PRINT "HELLO";
20 GOTO 10

Note the semicolon.

this website explains

The PRINT statement allows several quantities, including quoted strings, separated by commas (,) or semicolons (;). If by commas, BASIC moves to the start of the next zone. Zones are 15 characters in width. If by semicolons, BASIC does not move but starts the next item at the next space.

But since I haven't used basic since the mid 1980s, I could be mistaken.

Melting of Arctic sea ice is already causing an increase in precipitation in the region:
https://www.dartmouth.edu/pres...

A Google search returns several articles about magnetic shielding, but are unfortunately rather vague about whether they speak of Solar or Cosmic radiation.

But this article suggest that is it possible.

Also, common sense would tell us that if the Earth's Magnetosphere can protect us, then an artificial one should also be able to protect astronauts.

In the year 2016, a disturbing amount of human activity is run through Excel instead of proper databases.

A similar study from 2009 tested for errors in various operational spreadsheets and concluded, "Our results confirm the general belief among those who have studied spreadsheets that errors are commonplace." The Financial Times commented on the prevalence of spreadsheet errors in business, saying it's probably a function of training and organizational culture.

I've heard from a few salespeople in the software industry that their biggest competitor in the SMB space isn't $BigCRMCorp, but Excel spreadsheets that have acreted over the years.

This absolutely doesn't surprise me. The concept of thinking about where one's data lives is nearly extinct outside of technical circles, and even Access is seen as "too complicated" by a lot of people. The utility of third normal form is obvious to us, but lots of people are perfectly served with pivot tables. How many people receive formal training in any form of database anymore? Even lots of web designers who use MySQL on the back end of their CMS software don't do a whole lot in PHPMyAdmin unless they have to.

Excel is very simple, ubiquitous, and has a low ceiling of functionality. It's the lowest common denominator, and unfortunately, it's "good enough" for lots of people.

In the year 2016, a disturbing amount of human activity is run through Excel instead of proper databases.

A similar study from 2009 tested for errors in various operational spreadsheets and concluded, "Our results confirm the general belief among those who have studied spreadsheets that errors are commonplace." The Financial Times commented on the prevalence of spreadsheet errors in business, saying it's probably a function of training and organizational culture.

I've heard from a few salespeople in the software industry that their biggest competitor in the SMB space isn't $BigCRMCorp, but Excel spreadsheets that have acreted over the years.

http://collections.dartmouth.e...

Some of the items are scary spot on (like the amount of carbon dioxide we would see in the atmosphere).

A bunch of MIT types calculated that based on total assets in the earth (not just available to extract), we would hit several "limits to growth" between 2020 and 2100.

For example: We used as much chromium in 2014 as we did from 1900 to 2000 combined.

here's a summary of the 30 year update.
http://www.unice.fr/sg/resourc...

Many of their projections are following.
Food is a little higher- but so is population.

Here's the unavoidable situation they said we would hit.

Using so many resources that we overshoot the carrying capacity of the earth and then permanently lower it as a result. So if 6 billion were what it could carry for a very long time, by going to 12 billion, we might reduce the capacity to 3 billion.

And it projects a very rapid population reduction. 70 years to fall from 12 billion back to 1950s level populations.

The projection is we'll run low on multiple indusrial metals at the same time and prices of those metals will skyrocket.

---

Now the fun bit. It's too late to do anything about it. We passed the point of no return back in the 1990s. It's a genuine "bend over and kiss your ass goodbye" situation.

And the good news... Many of us will be dead by 2040-2050 when it starts to get nasty tho we may see some signs as early as 2035 (I'll be 74 then-- my most likely lifespan is to 2038).

Nice theory, but the way people make decisions is pretty complex and influenced by many factors. Research does not support your conclusion: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~cha...

If the death penalty was an effective rational deterrent to murder, then the death rate from automotive travel would put the auto manufacturers out of business. The fact is the risk assessment gadget in people's brains is one of God's crappiest products ever.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~etrnsfer/water.htm

Nice theory, but the way people make decisions is pretty complex and influenced by many factors. Research does not support your conclusion: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~cha...

You are probably right for the long term.

But for a decade or two it can be extremely painful and people did die homeless and of exposure as a result of the industrial revolution. While the people after them got jobs, they got no training and thus had no employment. Close to 10,000 of them in england revolted and were put down by the army.

Likewise, rising productivity was a major factor in the decade long destruction of the lives of 25% of the population of u.s. citizens in the early 20th century.

However, for the long term, the club of rome predicted the collapse of the economy and mass death starting in 2030 in the "limits to growth".

And a lot of their other predictions were accurate or didn't go far enough.

The book is hosted here:

http://collections.dartmouth.e...

The predictions updated thru 2010 are here:
http://www.thwink.org/sustain/...

Even if you don't believe in the club of rome and the limits to growth, a lot of wealthy and powerful people do believe and that effects you.

Less science fiction than AI and and warp drive. Infact many in the industry think it's possible today... Think about it a bit logically, we can modify any gene, there exists in the wild diseases that only effect X race, put them together with a new transmission method(mosquitos, air, etc).. time...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/2013...

I visited that link. From what I read, the "no bigger than a large desk" solution is for solar wind, not cosmic rays, which are more energetic. In fact, reading farther down, there was a reply, 'let me rain on this parade' about the strength and power requirements of a field strong enough to deflect cosmic rays. It also gave a link to an article that seems similar to the one I remember reading except that it's gloomier https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/Shielding/docs/Parker_06.pdf as in 5 meters, not 3 feet of water. It also talks about the possibly negative effects of such a strong magnetic field.

Two things that I wonder about wrt a magnetic field. I'm not an electrical engineer or a physicist, but, do you need to constantly supply power to such a field? Permanent magnets maintain a field without using power. Also, could the astronauts protect themselves from the field by being in something like a faraday cage?

The article mentions that the 'poles' of the magnetic field would not be shielding from the field. How about the astronauts live in the poles and just protect that patch of space with a water shield? (Ooh, Ooh, where's the patent office?)

The Hurd is definitely a better example.

Absolutely, since it actually is microkernel-based. And GNU's not Unix, and neither is The Hurd. It's a POSIX-compatible Unixlike operating system, but it ain't Unix or UNIX.

As far as I know, nobody has run GNU/Hurd through the Single UNIX Specification validation suite, and therefore it's apparently not eligible to have the "Unix" trademark used for it (i.e., it's not a "Unix(R) system"), and none of its code can trace its ancestry to any Unix code from Bell Labs.

However, it probably looks enough like actual Unix systems that one could ask whether it violates the "Unix philosophy"(TM) or not; given that its userland is GNU, Doug McIlroy might argue that it's been fed enough goodies to bring it to a disheartening state of obesity (joining Linux, for much the same reason, and, I suspect, most other Un*xes these days in McIlroy's opinion). On the other hand, the usual flavors of pipeline continue to work on it, Linux, and those other Un*xes, the obesity notwithstanding, which is good enough for me.

Provide proof that we live in a moral universe.

Wrong question.

Evidence that we live in a moral universe: We care about morality.

How many times have you appealed to morality "defined by us" as a standard of behavior?

The absurdity is that "defined by us" morality is no morality at all.

Also, how is doing bad things to people who do bad things moral?

You don't believe in self-defense, then. If a young girl is being attacked by a robber, a rapist, a murderer ... you would call her immoral for defending herself with a weapon and doing bad things to her attacker. She must submit to the robbery, the rape, to die ... or be called immoral by you.

Funny how you do nothing about the immoral robber, rapist, murderer. You help the immoral instead of the victim ... and you call this "morality"?

If there were a universal standard, we certainly haven't found it.

You confuse rebellion against a universal standard with an inability to find the universal standard.

Same-sex marriage and child adoption are not longer "bad things" - to the contrary, children raised by same-sex couples are exposed to far less domestic violence.

Liar.

Divorce is not longer a "bad thing."

Liar yet again.

" Divorce represents one of the most stressful life events for both children and their parents."

That's the thing about "universal standards" - there are so many different ones.

Yes, there are an infinite number of wrong answers.

1+1 = 3 is wrong. 1+1 = 4 is wrong. 1+1 = 5 is wrong ....

That does not mean there is no right answer. That does not mean that it is impossible to find the right answer. People who argue what you just argued are beyond stupid, you are foolish.

The stupid can't help it; the foolish choose it. The upside is that you can choose to stop being foolish. Repent.

Europe banned Fluoride in drinking water since at least the 1980's.

And all their teeth fell out! ;) Just kidding, they got refrigeration too.

The biggest risk is that fluoride is not fluoride. Sodium fluoride dissociates well, but most water supplies use silicofluorides that don't, and they cause heavy metals to cross the blood-brain barrier because the silicofluoride compounds interact biologically.

The dominant fluoridation chemical is actually toxic waste from fertilizer plant smokestack scrubbers that would have a real disposal problem if there weren't municipal water supplies to dump it in.

And those problems don't even touch on osteoporosis, the economic problems with watering one's lawn with fluoridated water, or the moral issue of involuntary medication.

I've got cavity-free kids on well water. Toothpaste with xylitol (birch/watermelon sugar alcohol) is the simple answer. In Scandinavia they give the kids a couple pieces of xylitol gum with their school lunch - far more economical than the US system and with fewer risks. But in the US, government programs are a secular religion that may only ever be tweaked, not found to be foolhardy.

editors:

s/University/College/

(hoping that wasn't an editorial 'correction' since TIME got it right)

Also, there's a party all day on campus tomorrow.

Physics is not accessible to mathematics

This is very much still an active topic of discussion, actually, and certainly not as settled or clear-cut as you seem to think. You can start with Wigner's essay.

And just to provide the opposite viewpoint to yours, some people will of course argue that physical reality is mathematical.

I graduated from Dartmouth in 2002 with a CS degree. Let me tell you, the reason they are throwing this big party for BASIC is because that department hasn't done shit since 1964. If I had to do it again, I would do it at a different school. The only good thing I can say about Dartmouth is that I found refuge in a gentle, fostering fraternity -- and that is the one thing that the Dartmouth administration has been bent on destroying. That campus is a wasteland of feuding heartless conservatives and asinine liberals. Good riddance.

BASIC was kind of cool, though. I used it in middle school to print endless streams of naughty words. I don't know if it can do anything besides that.

I graduated from Dartmouth in 2002 with a CS degree. Let me tell you, the reason they are throwing this big party for BASIC is because that department hasn't done shit since 1964. If I had to do it again, I would do it at a different school. The only good thing I can say about Dartmouth is that I found refuge in a gentle, fostering fraternity -- and that is the one thing that the Dartmouth administration has been bent on destroying. That campus is a wasteland of feuding heartless conservatives and asinine liberals. Good riddance.

BASIC was kind of cool, though. I used it in middle school to print endless streams of naughty words. I don't know if it can do anything besides that.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~acskills/success/notes.html

For scientific computing, you will be doing a lot of collaboration and very likely sharing codes with other scientific programmers, very few of whom enjoy learning new programming languages all the time. To simplify/enable collaboration, you should follow what the community uses. In physics, generally that means Fortran. Anything past Fortran90 is basically modern, it's really not too bad to learn and even has basic object-oriented stuff, though not as good as C++. F77 is mostly obsolete and a major pain in the neck, but you will see it around in older codes, as well as a lot of the libraries. There are C/C++/Python/f77/etc codes around, but most physicists use >F90, especially in high performance/parallel computational work. But there are subfields of physics with their own popular tools too. My advice is to go with whatever the majority of your colleagues are using, placing a very big premium on what your adviser and group members use, which is who you will collaborate with the most. What the majority in the field uses is usually suitable for the job anyway.

It sounds like you're interested in parallel computing as well. Fortran is probably the best option then, mostly for the libraries, but you can still interface from C/C++ or whatever. Also, if you have a lot of computationally intensive stuff, you should try to get supercomputer access. Ask around, you should be able to work something out. You'll need to decide on OpenMP or MPI for parallel programming, depending e.g. on your memory, shared/distributed etc. Here's a quick rundown: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rc/classes/intro_mpi/parallel_prog_compare.html
Most scientific hpc (high performance computing/supercomputer/parallel) is on unix/linux.

What field are you in exactly, and what is the nature of your data mining?

People who use a handheld computer while driving should have their license suspended, and the circumstances should be used to determine the amount of time they spend in jail... no exceptions should be allowed, in my not-so-humble and somewhat emotionally outraged opinion. There are very few people I know who are adept at utilizing the interface to most of the Apps or other built-in functionality of a complex device like a smarphone, without error or distraction, while they are concentrating on it alone. Doing it while operating a 2-4 ton vehicle jeopardizes the lives of others. Professional drivers shouldn't be excepted either. If Fedex or UPS needs GPS routing, it should be predetermined and the relevant segment should be set before it's begun. I see people, even truck drivers, almost every day who have their little plastic digital appendage hanging off the side of their heads, oblivious to some subset of the information around them. The only reason the law isn't severe in this regard is the whim ("interests") of the industrial heads who want to enhance so-called "worker productivity." By and large we just aren't equipped to split our consciousness effectively between the complex metaphorical representations of information processing commands and the tasks inherent to safely operating a vehicle while it's moving among other vehicles and pedestrians, while also trying to discern between irrelevant commercial signage and nearby road markers and traffic signage which might be critical for the lawful operation of said vehilce. It's hard enough to write a brief description of the variables, let alone executing the tasks in a timely fashion. There's plenty of research that's be done, and we've all been directed to it from time to time. Some of the latest indicts adults more than kids. (Not that this should surprise anyone since the distinction is arbitrary as far as brain science is concerned.) Whether that direction comes from television, newspaper reporting, academic journals or news aggregators like Slashdot doesn't really matter. The courts need to be empowered to stop punish people who use lethal devices under circumstances where it's not reasonable to expect due care and consideration are possible for your fellow citizens. People need clear rules as well as swift and sure punishment when they endanger others through lack of adequate concern.

It is indeed quite baffling if you really think about it.

There's an essay by Eugene Wigner about exactly that topic:
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

Pythagoras. I first learned this lesson from a book by Harry Parth, but this works:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit3/unit3.html

Hi Professor Dawkins and thanks for offering to answer some of our questions.

In the past, some science educators (Dr. Tyson for example) have criticised what they perceived to be your overuse of the stick in promoting rationalism and fact-based decision making where they considered the carrot to be a better tool. There is some evidence that simply stating the facts may actually be counter-productive: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

Would you mind talking about the efficacy of both approaches to the greater understanding of the value of fact-based decision making?

You've got it half right. The american tax system is hopelessly complicated, and should be simplified. But you should also pay more in taxes, not less. Essentially all other countries in the western world have higher taxes than americans, but don't pay (or pay orders of magnitude less) for health insurance, putting your kids through college, and soforth. In total, we have more money for food, paying rent, having fun etc.

Numbers by the WHO (for 2005) say that US spends 15% of GDP on healthcare when you add private and goverment spending. Doing the same math for other western countries: Germany is in second place behind the US with 10%. Third place is the UK, 8.2 %. Both of these countries have what you call a "socialist" healthcare system, but the average person spends less on healthcare in total than you do.

Or to put it another way: the WHO ranks the US healthcare system as the most expensive in the world (2005 numbers), but only the 37th best in the world (2000 numbers).

Long story short: Americans are really, really stupid if you fall for the GOP calling Obama a socialist. In the rest of the western world, Obama would be a good way out on the right side of politics. The two-party system is killing you guys over there. But then again, when more than half of GOP voters polled still believe Obama was born in Kenya (question 64), I guess you almost deserve what's coming...

See, this is the basic problem with liberals. They do not understand the basic foundations of any other viewpoint. It has been demonstrated in many studies - conservatives can pass a "Turing test" and pretend to be a believable liberal; Liberals cannot pass the same test pretending to be conservatives. (In my opinion, because once you understand the conservative argument it is difficult not to agree with it.)

Without a reliable cite, it's hard to believe the "many studies" are accurate or useful, or even very interesting. If an herbalist can fake being a chemist, but the chemist can't fake being a herbalist, do you really want to believe the herbalist is superior?

The intriguing fact is how easily conservatives agree with, or believe, their own argument. According to When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions (pdf), political people, notably conservatives, are quite susceptible to "motivated reasoning." This states that when confronted with a reality opposed to their views, conservatives become even more convinced of their indoctrination. Which goes some way toward explaining your opinion that "once you understand the conservative argument it is difficult not to agree with it." Conservatives will be inclined to dismiss this study, since it's based on science, which they trust less than their dogma.

Liberals, meanwhile, enjoy the catchy phrase "reality has a liberal bias." Confirmed somewhat by these studies: Misperceptions, the media, and the Iraq War (2003), and Misinformation and the 2010 Election (pdf).

Though the argument should be made that being conservative or liberal are not the only 2 choices. For example there are people who find that science, facts, evidence, and fairness should largely influence political decisions.

For example, I don't even see latin mentioned in any of these...

http://hms.harvard.edu/admissions/default.asp?page=requirements

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dcal/documents/TSS_NEJM_reading

http://www.hhmi.org/grants/pdf/08-209_AAMC-HHMI_report.pdf

You might impress a stogy old prof on an admissions committee with a latin class on your course transcript, but I doubt it will help you get a jump start on your medical degree more than learning conversational skills in a non-dead foreign language in preparation for patient care in our now increasingly multicultural society.

Apologies to Dr Sheldon Cooper of course, advanced biology courses are probably a better investment of time if one is aiming towards a jump start on a medical degree ;^) Physics, although important, hasn't changed much in it's application to medicine (other than perhaps radiology), but being on top of genetics and cell biology is becoming increasingly important. Getting the basics down early allow time to learn all the new stuff that is coming down the pipe.

BASIC was invented by a mathematician, John Kemeny, and a computer scientist Tom Kurtz. They did this as part of a revolutionary change in how students were taught mathematics, and suceeded admirably.

Here's an online version of Kemeny's book Introduction to Finite Mathematics with Laurie Snell and Gerald Thompson. What you have to understand is that this book looked nothing like the books on applied math of the day. It was truly revolutionary, and a lot of modern books have copied its ideas.

You'll also find that BASIC is very well suited to solving the kind of problems that are in that book. It's even arguable that BASIC's suitability for solving simple number crunching problems is what made the microcomputer revolution possible (remember, the killer app for the early PCs wasn't games, it was the spreadsheet - people bought micros so they could program compound interest...).

It's of course not so well suited for programming consumer software, but then again the language was invented 15 years before consumer software took off.

http://cs.dartmouth.edu/~averyyen/CCP/project.pdf

But seriously, wouldn't anyone actually coding this system up for production use quickly realize that some points in a picture are going to be chosen more often than others?

Windows 8 is the next evil I spoke about this in 2000 on irc.openprojects.net before it became freenode. Here we are; almost 12 years later and now I am not a troll, but was deemed one. Robert Cringely was deemed a troll but there you go; what the fuck do I know? apparently nothing.

http://cs.dartmouth.edu/~averyyen/CCP/project.pdf

But seriously, wouldn't anyone actually coding this system up for production use quickly realize that some points in a picture are going to be chosen more often than others?

According to this paper, they are called bgrep and bdiff.

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2011-705.pdf

Yes

Oh, this one again. I've seen this claim made for neural nets back in the 1980s, and for DNA computers in the 2000s. It's bogus.

The guaranteed-optimum solution to the TSP is NP-hard. The "gets to the optimum 99% of the time and close to it all the time" solution is easy. It was developed at Bell Labs in the 1960s. Here it is:

That's not true. There is no approximation algorithm that always returns no worse than k times the optimal solution unless P=NP. See section 2.3 of the following pdf for more information.

Where do you get this from?

Umm, people I've met who did it, reading and the like.

Here's three fairly prestigious ones for starters:

http://www.hbs.edu/mba/faq/#app_work

http://www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/admissions/faqs/index.html

http://www.stanford.edu/group/mba/blog/2007/08/no_work_experience_required_to.html

http://www.topmba.com/articles/ukireland/uk-meeting-mba-challenge

P.S. Did your MBA include statistics?

How many of them have been photoshopped to make the photo look worse?

http://www.oddee.com/item_96803.aspx
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

There was a website dedicated to outing such photos but I can not find it.

Ayup, I've worked at a lab doing that for the past few years...

The Interactive Media Laboratory (IML) is part of the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. IML specializes in combining emerging technology with innovative instructional design. For over 18 years, it has produced high-end interactive multimedia educational programs for both patients and health care providers. Additionally, it has developed distance learning systems capable of delivering rich multimedia over the Internet.

http://iml.dartmouth.edu/

What I find really interesting is that it's often not the complexity of games and interactions in games that drives adoption and success, but careful selection of course material, subject-matter experts, and good underlying layout and design. Although leisure games are often sold solely on the level of explosive interaction and realistic blood-and-guts, at the end of the day, so-called "Serious Games" (yeah, I think it's funny, too) have to really provide more tangible results than "Total Kills," and as a result there has to be a interesting balance between pure amusement and education.

One of the ongoing mysteries in mathematics is how often mathematical systems turn out to be applicable to various fields of science. This is sometimes a bit of an embarrassment to mathematicians, who often pride themselves on their refusal to even consider the real world. The ongoing usefulness of obscure branches of mathematics to scientists hasn't been satisfactorily explained, to my knowledge (though there are a number of interesting conjectures).

Indeed! The first time I read this (as a teenager), I spent the next three weeks or so annoying the hell out of every non-scientist/non-mathematician friend that I have... I'm somewhat "used to" the idea now, but it really was an amazing wake-up call the first time.

Yes, we host lots of similar traces on CRAWDAD and are always looking for more. This paper describes one of the largest traces, taken over five years on the Dartmouth campus (alternative link for non-academic users).

CRAWDAD is a community based effort of sharing data captured on a wireless network, only after anonymizing. This has proved to be very useful to the research community in general.

Very real statistics about the protocols used and the kind of traffic patters observed over a period of time can be observed from the data sets. All of this with users not being very conscious of their activities. I say this because some of the data sets are for durations as long as 5 years. It is a lot easier to avoid surfing pron for a 45 minute lecture than to avoid it altogether for the entire duration of stay on campus. Having said that, I am sure some of the detailed statistics like popular IM clients, top 20 websites etc can not be found out from the CRAWDAD traces.

People are already playing with some parts of it

There are also non-javascript tools that have been doing this sort of thing for a long time. A particular favourite of mine, specifically devoted to lute tablature, is to be found here. This OSS program has been around for many years, and does not generate modern music notation, but it illustrates just how powerful PostScript can be when used for the purpose.

What, like these?

I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you?

[emphasis and link added]

Although developing a hacked-up personal computer implementation of a language with a publicly available spec (note the date) unencumbered by copyrights or patents was better that Ballmer could do, it wasn't exactly a great achievement in computer science.