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Oh - it's a pretty oblique reference. http://www.ericweisstein.com/f...

That was their clear (compromised) channel challenge key.

I looked at the site and it is filled with fluff that you might see on public tv. Compared to MIT it is a joke. There are plenty of resources already available and it would seem that if they concentrated on cooperation and not empire building they would do better at serving their stated intent. If they had a format like stackoverflow it would be even better. Google already indexes and if there were a data base that was peer reviewed that would allow access at any level of understanding and problem resolution it would be more useful. I remember a wonderful source of information that used to be on the web and got sued out of existence by an encyclopedia company IIRC.
I think that wikipedia is trying to do this with the science, but seems a bit mired in their own process at this point.

In case you think authors should hire a contract lawyer, let me tell you the vast bulk do make less than they would have made by working the same hours flipping burgers.

While it's certainly true that the vast bulk of authors do make less than they would have made by working the same hours flipping burgers, there's still significant money involved. It's the hours it takes to write a book that brings down the hourly rate.

My first visit to a contract attorney turned a profit for me. He reviewed the draft contract sent by the publisher and (because he knew what was usual and customary in the industry and I, a first-time author, did not) doubled the royalty percentages it offered. The modified contract was accepted without comment by the publisher, and the increase in first year's royalties alone, due to the attorney's work, more than paid his fee.

In addition to this, the attorney added clauses that stipulated what would happen in cases I had not considered -- for example, what would happen if the book were published in non-traditional media (only a theoretical possibility at the time, but most of my sales now) and how I would be compensated if the publisher bought the rights to the book, but never published it. Things like that.

In my opinion, people who sign business contracts without the advice of an attorney are taking a huge risk. Ask Eric Weisstein, author of Mathworld, about the dangers involved when an author signs a contract without consulting an attorney first.

In early MacPaint successor FullPaint by Ann Arbor Softworks, back in those days of single bit graphics, clicking command-L applied one iteration of John Horton Conway's Game of Life to the current selection rectangle.

Trying it idly one day on a screen grab that included a MacDraw ruler soon lead to the discovery that a long straight line with every 17th cell live on the next row generated a field of pulsars and I was hooked on what was effectively the study of Life in a narrow cylindrical universe.

The idea of filling space so easily soon also had me playing with agars where the early Mac's reliance on 8x8 patterns in the absence of colours largely confined my options to finding something close enough to a critical density that it would sustain interesting erosion from a single changed cell, eventually settling mostly on a pair of beacons, either in or our of phase:
11000000
11000000
00110000
00110000
00000011
00000001
00001000
00001100

I've resumed playing around with these every time I've found a better tool. That experience informs my strong position on disagreements over the border of order-edge of chaos and has very much informed my last few months' work with the much more productive tool of Golly 2.0 running the Generations 345/3/6 rule which Mirek Wojtowicz christened "LivingOnTheEdge" in 2001 and commented only: "In this very chaotic rule it's hard to tell if patterns will survive or die out." It may have been neglected for seven years but I'm making up for that now, and still discovering something unexpected emerging more days than not.

In early MacPaint successor FullPaint by Ann Arbor Softworks, back in those days of single bit graphics, clicking command-L applied one iteration of John Horton Conway's Game of Life to the current selection rectangle.

Trying it idly one day on a screen grab that included a MacDraw ruler soon lead to the discovery that a long straight line with every 17th cell live on the next row generated a field of pulsars and I was hooked on what was effectively the study of Life in a narrow cylindrical universe.

The idea of filling space so easily soon also had me playing with agars where the early Mac's reliance on 8x8 patterns in the absence of colours largely confined my options to finding something close enough to a critical density that it would sustain interesting erosion from a single changed cell, eventually settling mostly on a pair of beacons, either in or our of phase:
11000000
11000000
00110000
00110000
00000011
00000001
00001000
00001100

I've resumed playing around with these every time I've found a better tool. That experience informs my strong position on disagreements over the border of order-edge of chaos and has very much informed my last few months' work with the much more productive tool of Golly 2.0 running the Generations 345/3/6 rule which Mirek Wojtowicz christened "LivingOnTheEdge" in 2001 and commented only: "In this very chaotic rule it's hard to tell if patterns will survive or die out." It may have been neglected for seven years but I'm making up for that now, and still discovering something unexpected emerging more days than not.

The human race is but an acorn in the game of Life we call the Universe.

Why not make a series where a crew get to go out of the galaxy.

Microsoft-as-the-theater-owner-cigar-smoking-gas-c loud attack!!

Good luck finding them by then though... :)

Don't worry about finding *them*. Worry about them finding *you*:

http://www.ericweisstein.com/fun/startrek/TheChang eling.html

STER-I-LIZE!

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.

Imagine you were stranded on a desert island. No idea how to build a fire, no idea how to make potable water, no idea how to build a trap, no idea what plants were edible. How well could you survive? Now imagine you had a survival manual. How much better do you think you could survive?

The idea behind the laptop is to help educate the population so they can work on building their own infrastructure. Your idea of building their infrastructure for them is the flawed reasoning behind most current forms of welfare. If you simply give things to people, there is no incentive for them to improve their own condition. You are handing them freebies, and if they improve their own condition you will take the freebies away. What the hell kind of incentive is that? c.f. ST:TOS A Taste of Armageddon. If you take away all the bad things about being in poverty, there remains no incentive to rise out of poverty.

The key to eliminating poverty is to give people the information and tools to climb out of it on their own. With information, you've given them the tools to get out of poverty, but they themselves have to make the effort to utilize those tools. Doing it this way, they don't feel beholden to foreign powers or grow dependent on foreign aid, and you aren't stuck babysitting a perpetual 3rd world nation.

Nooo, I don't quite agree. Firstly, I think there is a big difference between the Everett "many worlds" interpretation and the far more ordinary Feynman "sum over histories" decomposition of the propagator. The first is pretty much a purely philosophical or metaphysical point, untestable, while the latter is firmly rooted in good mathematics.

Let's assume you mean Everett. In that case, no, my believing the universe is deterministic doesn't mean I fail to subscribe to the methods of QM. It does mean I refuse to accept that before a measurement is made, the universe is in some weird state in which all possibilities latent in the wavefunction can be said to really exist, somehow. If an electron's wavefunction has a finite amplitude here and also there, with there being 200 million light-years distant, then I flatly refuse to believe that when the position of the electron is actually measured, and it's found to be here, then something real has changed, instantly, 200 million light years away. Even leaving aside relativity, that's just insane -- logic error -- must sterilize .

Hence I do not believe that the universe decides, only at the point of measurement, which eigenstate of the measurement operator to fall in to. I suppose that makes me a believer in some kind of hidden-variable theory. Yes, I know all about Bell's Inequality and Aspect's experiments. Very interesting and all that, but there are a number of ways other than the nonexistence of hidden variables in which these experiments could be explained.

By the way, I accept the possibility -- no, the probability -- that even if we know electrons or whatever are doing something definite when we do not measure them, we will still be unable to measure it, even in principle. This isn't hard to accept. After all, we know (or believe) that events outside of our light cone exist, and obey the normal rules of physics. But we'll never be able to observe them, even in principle.

The Horta?

As for your comment on the movies declining post-Generations, go watch First Contact again. That is the best TNG film and only movie that comes close to Wrath of Khan in many peoples eyes, though I personally prefer Undiscovered Country myself.

Uh... you mean the one where they completely destroyed the entire concept of what the Borg are by introducing the "Borg Queen"? Sorry, but that one's gotta be pretty low on the list, even if it was relatively good cinematically. If anything, I'd say that was the point from which (inclusively) nothing decent has come out of the Trek universe. Or at least, it was through that act of dumbing-down that what had been one of the Trek universe's most interesting plot elements became one of its most lame.

As for all the other post-original-cast movies (i.e., Generations and all that followed), my biggest general complaint is that they all failed to do anything "grand" enough to warrant being motion pictures in the first place, as opposed to regular two-part episodes. It felt like we might as well be watching any of the season finale/premier two-parters, only on the big screen and with marginally better special-effects and no commercials. Even Generations wasn't really "special" in any way other than being the first motion picture with the TNG cast, and the insultingly dismissive Kirk cameo. And Insurrection? How original was that story?

I agree about The Undiscovered Country being, out of all the Trek movies, the next best after The Wrath of Khan, though.

Boy, sometimes you wish that once, just once - a star trekkie would be elected president of the United States of America!
http://www.ericweisstein.com/fun/startrek/Assignme ntEarth.html/

..please report to the disintegration chamber. Your former city has been destroyed.

New Clustering Search Engine to battle Google
More like New Clustering Search Engine goes Beta. Let's wait until it's production stable before talking about who it's going to take down in a fist fight reminiscent of the Spock/Kirk battle in Amok Time.

Clusty by Vivisimo? Did I even spell that right? They need to consider naming things that people can:
A) pronounce
B) spell
C) are actual words or at least close to words that qualify for both A & B.

Clusty sounds like something you would call the fat cheerleader. It also will be often mispronounced as Klutsy, so it's a very bad name for a search engine (of all things).

The search engine uses Overture for it's results but offers new features such as an encyclopedia search, clustered results, and a gossip search.

This is a Microsoft tactic: add features to get market share, and it's an evil tactic because nothing new comes out of it, except bloat and bad karma. The fact this is based on Overature leads me to believe that it won't be able to take Google head-on at all. Clusty uses the Google interface but shows sponsored results first (evil), and displays 404 pages in the results. (FYI dteam was the first 3d design guild that is no longer)

I don't think they really have a hope of competing with Google. If it ain't broke don't fix it, so most people will just continue to use Google.

You're mixing up your Ray Bradbury with your Harlan Ellison, my friend. In Ellison's Star Trek episode, Kirk saves a girl from being run down in the street, she is able to organize a protest that delays the US entry into WWII, and the Nazis win, the Federation ceases to exist, and Kirk & Co are stuck at the "City at the Edge of Forever".

In Bradbury's story, english spelling and the outcome of the presidential election (and who knows what else) are affected.

If you look at the entire thesis of the Kirk character you will find that his main mode of operation and motivation is to bend the rules of the game in order to triumph over the evil of the moment. Whether it be the modification to the programming of the Kobashi Maru test, or the bluff played in the corbomite maneuver when the deck was stacked against him, Kirk always bluffed and cheated death throughout his whole career. This is in fact evidenced in the whole entry into the Nexus. His most certain death obverted by the luck of the draw as he tumbled into the Nexus, and not the vacuum of space. His character lived expecting to squeak by and live another day. This is part of the enduring charm of the Kirk character. However when finally the odds caught up with him and death was upon him, such a statement of utter astonishment that he didn't make it through this time is quite fitting.

E.g. Eric Weisstein's Treasure Trove of the Life Cellular Automaton contains 236 animated GIFs.

With the patent expiry happening, I even developed a CGI script which inputs a particular subset of patterns written by Andrew Trevorrow's LifeLab and outputs an animation of however many generations and whatever display window is nominated, but I'm not about to invite a Slashdotting of a tool only designed for personal use and running on a limited capacity server.

If I recall right (and have the spelling right), then to see it, all you need is a Star Trek Original Series episode called "The Corbomite Maneuver".

We all know that Alexis is the vindictive first wife of Blake Carrington, who will lie, cheat, steal - stop at nothing, really - to stake her claim to the Carrington oil fortune. Not satisfied with her twisted little poker hand of kidnapped babies, amnesia, pregnancy, infidelity, and treachery, she has armed herself with a new weapon - FUD.

Yes, Alexis claims that Linus Torvalds could not have been the father of Linux, because he was with HER the night Linux was conceived. While the story sounds somewhat plausible (what self-respecting male geek wouldn't go for a little Edith Keeler?), but she's gotta be about the crustiest piece of British crumpet this side of the Guardian of Forever. Sheesh. Even the Nordic winter can't tone that image down.

One can only wonder what peccadillo Linus had committed to incur the wrath of such a parasitic, psychotic banshee. Perhaps he simply didn't grovel to her liking. Sadly, it seems Linus has been added to the long list of poor innocent bastards who crossed Alexis, and will forever bear her scar.

Who the hell let you look at the constitution?!!! That's classified!

<overact class="Shatner">That which you called Ee'd Plebnista was not written for chiefs or kings or warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people!</overact>

Gene changed it because we can't have people selling drugs in the perfect Trek universe (that would too....human.

My memories of the earlier episodes are foggy... but I...seem...to...remember...

Wasn't there an episode which involved women taking some sort of drug that made them beautiful and excude large amounts of sex-appeal...

Ahhh, google I love you. Mudd's Women it was called...

Is that why we will have to go back in time to get a whale to talk to the evil telescope...

Yes, and the entire situation will seem strangely familiar, but no one will comment on this.

My comment was based on accounts of some parts of the plans showing up in garages, etc., of family relations of former von Braun team members...

Though your comment brings up an interesting fact -- there was one episode of Star Trek which actually uses the Saturn V as an intercontinental ballistic missile. The episode, Assignment: Earth, contains spliced-in footage from the launch of the very first Saturn V, the Apollo 4 systems verificaation test. (The episode was aired in early 1968, before Apollo 8's launch in December of that year which was the first manned use of the Saturn V rocket.) Views on film in this episode include the dramatic launch from several different engineering cameras (take a good look at the markings on the rocket -- they're not the same as the ones on the manned launches), along with the separation of the interstage ring from the second stage (with the S-1C stage visible way off in the distance.)

The irony of this situation is that the Saturn V was part of the first family of manned space launchers that was not developed from military rockets -- the Space Shuttle being only a partial exception as its design was heavily influenced by Air Force requirements -- and it may very well be that the public's first widespread view of it, on national television some nine months before Apollo 8's Christmastime flight, was as a supposed launcher for orbital hydrogen bombs! And they would have been gigantic bombs -- the Saturn 5's two-stage LEO-only variant, which didn't actually fly until 1973, placed the Skylab station into orbit. I can't imagine the V would have been required -- something little like an Atlas could have done the trick. But it wasn't as dramatic for TV purposes as Apollo 4 was...

If a bunch of you dorks decide to follow ESR and his ego and start wearing buttons and hats with a glider on them, I think I'd have to wear an eater in protest. (And as a show of geek superiority)

If the Life theme is desired, why not a glider gun instead of just a glider. For example, Gosper's -- seems more apprpopriate. The logo could be a depiction of a state where a new glider was just emitted.

In TOS, there were examples of the entire ship entering the atmosphere, although it was clear the ship was not designed to do so on a regular basis.

http://www.ericweisstein.com/fun/startrek/Tomorrow IsYesterday.html

I am not sure whether or not the Saturn Vs were more or less safer than the SRBs on the Shuttle. However, I should point out that the fact that a Saturn V never had a catastrophic failure should not be taken to mean that they are thus safe.

According to this site, there were 32 Saturn launches(15 of them Saturn Vs). Out of that number, there was one non-critical rocket failure on Apollo 6(Saturn V), and two accidents unrelated to the rocket (Apollo 1 & 13). Compare that to the shuttle, which had 107 launches, and 1 critical rocket failure. Since Saturn Vs had only 15 launches, it's not really fair to say they were "safer" than Shuttles - the statistical margin of error could easily account for 1 or 2 failures if you extrapolate from 15 to 107.

I just don't know what to say. I am rendered speechless. That is the ugliest monstrosity I've seen in a long time. Comparing it to an iMac is a incredible insult to Apple Design.

Drop the iMike moniker, he should name the thing Kollos.

I am the real Micheal Van Laferie - the above poster is an imposter! I am the one who works for Apple and Nokia and the real reason why the data rate had to be reduced was that the higher rate might have presented a security risk as it would have allowed terrorists to wirelessly transmit the nuclear launch codes within the 0.042 millisecond window allowed by the Lockheed firmware. (http://www.lockheedmartin.com/factsheets/product1 74.html)

I believe the existence of the above poster may be traced to an unfortunate accident during one of the initial 802.11g throughput tests when the trans-partenthic output demodulator encountered unexpectedly high interference from the mobile device's trilithium battery. I myself haven't felt quite the same since then - and I can't get this James Brown song out of my head.

Just to set the record straight,
Micheal Van Laferie
Den Hague

P.S. You can tell that I am the real M.V.L. since I know HTML and I can spell.
further information

I immediately thought of Spock's Brain

Luma:

"What is brain? Brain is controller?"

McCoy is confident before performing surgery to replace Spock's brain:

"Why it's so simple a child could do it."

From "Hoagan's Heros" to numerous "Star Trek" episodes, America has had a love affair with NAZIS . And who wouldn't, with their advanced technology and friends in high places.

Make no mistake about it, those NAZIS didn't pussyfoot around -- they got things done. But if you were on the side of right, you too could take a place in the NAZI technilogical utopia.


(And don't even get me started on the gay SM scene's infatuation with the NAZI dream!)

From "Hoagan's Heros" to numerous "Star Trek" episodes, America has had a love affair with NAZIS . And who wouldn't, with their advanced technology and friends in high places.

Make no mistake about it, those NAZIS didn't pussyfoot around -- they got things done. But if you were on the side of right, you too could take a place in the NAZI technilogical utopia.


(And don't even get me started on the gay SM scene's infatuation with the NAZI dream!)

A question. If we could have a button to press to eliminate any selected person, group of people, or all the members of a country, with 100% accuracy and no collateral damage, should be ever push it? What conditions would justify pushing it? Would the world even survive 5 years past the invention of the perfect weapon?

[aside] Sounds like the Tantalus Field in ST:TOS "Mirror, Mirror".

Initial gut reaction: this would provide too much power -- power that would obviously bring the most benefit to those who would use it most (and therefore those who would deserve it least). Seems like we'd end up with either Hitler/Stalin type of totalitarianism, or gangster/warlord type chaos, depending on how hard it was to gain access to this weapon.

If *everyone* could easily use this weapon, then I suppose it's possible we'd end up with a cold-war-like detente, where everyone is afraid of offending anyone else. It wouldn't last very long, though. Someone's bound to start the explosion sooner or later. Fear of retailiation can supress hostility, but it can't establish permanent peace.

The scariest part of a weapon like that is that it lets people do violence without risk to themselves. I don't know if facts would back me up on this, but I tend to think that war was better (i.e., more horrible, hated, and avoided) when the people deciding to do violence to others bore the primary risks, rather than delegating those risks to underlings. Things sure seem to be moving in the opposite direction, though.

No. The Star Trek translators work by mapping concepts in the mind of one being to concepts in the mind of another being. If you don't believe me then watch the Star Trek (The Old Series) episode "Metamorphosis." Kirk explains the technology behind the Universal Translator to Zephram Cochrane.

John Conway's Game of Life, the most well-known cellular automaton, shows how nonlocal phenomena can be generated from purely local rules.

Since exposed to the science minded through Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American in 1970, Life has introduced many to the study of complex systems, emergence, etc, etc, which I now see as providing a broader context for the physics (and chemistry and biology and collaborative systems) which we find in this world.

For the record, this does not mean that I am convinced that our cosmos is a cellular automaton, but rather that complex systems provide a tool even more powerful than traditional math for modeling, and thus in some ways understanding, our world.