Slashdot Mirror

There's not much to do anymore, at least for me.

Well I'm a mathematician and to my mind there is an awful lot to be done on the mathematics pages on Wikipedia.

The majority of mathematics articles on Wikipedia typically begin with a rambling, incoherent and unhelpful introduction to the topic. When they do begin to properly define the entity at hand, they typically pick the most opaque and rambling definition possible. Important properties are often glossed over while any pertinent mathematical oddities are given their own individual sections on the page. Throughout the spectacle, hyperlinks to equally poorly written articles are liberally thrown down as though the author believes the reader would actually benefit from the topics convoluted connections to some advanced graduate level topic. This article basically sums up the situation in a nutshell.

I've actually attempted to change things, but it's an uphill struggle which I for one know I can't win. Time and again I have been faced with what I can only describe as completely inane article custodians whos arguments at times read like a satire of themselves. In the instance of only one article I was told that "Compound interest is the best way to introduce e^x as everyone understands compound interest", "It's better to talk about the properties of a function before defining it", and "Thinking that a certain method is a better way to introduce a topic breaks Neutral Point of View policy."

At times, the stonewalling becomes so exasperating that I end up losing patience somewhat and end up essentially telling these people outright that they are being stupid. Bad idea. I have recently been brought up on Wikiettique charges of hurting someone's feelings, and despite my complete and utter lack of ability to change just about anything on the site, have been labeled "a bully"; a label to go with my being a "Point of Viewer".

My current opinion is that the Wikipedia editors and custodians have the mentality of 12 year olds. I have tried and tried to explain to these people that the articles they have taken charge of are in need of serious reform; with mathematical bric-a-brac like havercosine coming before the sum of cosines formula on trigonometry pages. If you try and change something, they will revert it. If you try and argue a case, they will dismiss it. If you press them on their opinions, they will appeal to WP:RULES. If you press them further, they will quite literally start crying. I deeply, deeply wish I was exaggerating here. I cannot believe I once thought so highly of Wikipedia and the people that ran it. The influence of these pages on the learning and perception of mathematics worldwide terrifies me.

Now, maybe I'm just an old crank, too stuck in my old ways. But you tell me where the formula for the the sum "cosA + cosB" should be on this page. Before or after the formula for the sum of an infinite number of cosines, or that for "versed cosine"? Now; guess where it is?

Wikipedia is rotten from the top to the bottom. I used to think that the rot set in at the top with Wales, and slowly trickled down to the user base. Now I'm not so sure. It may be that Wikipedia was always going to primarily attract the type of person who is not interesting in providing knowledge for all, but only those for whom its articles are personal prestige projects, intended to impress only themselves and their imagined audience.

You mention some good points; however, regarding the reading speed issue, the best way to improve reading speed is simply to do it often. That doesn't mean you have to read lengthy tomes necessarily, as these days you can improve your reading (and writing) skills just by reading articles, blog posts, and random user write-ups on the web. And once you get into the habit of proof-reading your e-mails/forum posts (more than once for longer ones), it starts to become so second nature that you do it without realizing. That itself will probably improve your reading speed.

The thing I forgot to mention in my earlier post was the proliferation of electronic writing aids. With stuff like spell check built into web browsers like Firefox and even T9 on cellphones, it's a lot easier to pick up on simple typos before you hit send. Of course, not everyone knows to use these things, which adds to the frustration of those who do.

But ultimately you're right, sometimes it's just not worth the effort to correct a minor typo on disposable communications—especially with the fast-paced lifestyle many tend to live these days. For me personally, it's a bigger issue when it comes to more permanent forms of communication (Wikipedia entries, printed works, etc.).

3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher

Dunno about that one... The Gemini program's launch vehicles tended to suffer what was called the "Pogo" effect once they reached a certain speed and altitude. Tended to scare the shit out of the first astronauts to experience it.

The Apollo program had solved that.

/P

That's a different thing. Ares is aerodynamically unstable, because it has a thin and heavy first stage and a large-diameter, light second stage -- that thing will constantly try to turn around while flying through the atmosphere and needs constant control to keep it flying with the engine pointing backwards.

Try to throw a dart with the light and fluffy bit forward and the thin and heavy bit backward and you know what it is like.

3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher

Dunno about that one... The Gemini program's launch vehicles tended to suffer what was called the "Pogo" effect once they reached a certain speed and altitude. Tended to scare the shit out of the first astronauts to experience it.

The Apollo program had solved that.

/P

Whilst I'm not overly surprised by the decision why have they left it this late, as its a well documented problem thats been around since the beginning of space flight.

I swear, Your Honour, she's a 9000 year old space alien with the appearance of a 12 year old human female!

Actually you can back that up saying you wanted to have a fantasy about Della Lu, a human from an era where immortality exists. She's 9000 years old and her face is morphic.

Actually, you can back that up by some twisted fantasy about Verner's Della Lu, a Human from an era where immortality exists. She's 9000 years old and her face is morphic.

I always thought the geek humor was supposed to be

i) complex; it has to be somewhat sophisticated and intricate; highly technical in-jokes are preferred
ii) negative; someone's folly or misfortune is always fun to mock.
0.70710678118654...) rational; it's good to be ha-ha only serious and make you think in the same go as it makes you laugh.
0.0078749969978123844...) computable; there has to be some algorithm which produces jokes. Here on slashdot, you use a bayesian filter to figure out if the post or story you want to respond to is best served by Soviet Russia, Car Analogy, I for one, ???-profit, but-does-it-run-linux or Imagine-a-Beowulf-cluster-of-those?

I too, fell in love with portal. Its ingenious game design, its captivating darkhumored narrative, its terrific ending and song (props to Coulton).

For a non-commercial indepth review of the orange box as a whole, here's a shameless plug for my brothers assessment: http://www.everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=1922474&lastnode_id=124

my personal runner up, has gotten far less media attention, but as PC gamer i would like to point to the excellent standalone / expansion pack for "company of heroes": Opposing fronts. This is the game i've played the most this year in conjunction with the original game. The way the two merges, so you can play OF with vanilla COH players, and the constant polishing by Relic has made this a lasting game, with many hours worth of gaming yet in store.

COH is to me the best RTS ever concieved (and i've played a few), and OF has added to it. While the new campaigns are nice, the new factions themself enrichen the game as a whole. I cant wait for the sequel or additional expansions.

Despite enjoyable WII sport hours with co-workers and my sisters zealous praise of the ps3 (she works for a sony partner.. and happens to get a lot of games), being an old stubborn PC gamer (64c +) I have yet to see a game to make console gamer out of me ;).. though i cried a little inside, when i read about Mass Effect. You can keep your halo marketing-fueled halo ;)

Oh.. and nethack still rocks. I have yet to beat it. Made it to dungeon 16 this year.

I used to collect Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, and I played for some time, back when I was about 13. I even went so far as to submit self-designed stats for a legendary character in the Warhammer universe. My submission was answered by one of their designers: a guy named Tuomas Pirinen: not only was he very polite, he was actually quite encouraging about the whole thing, even my rough sketches (which, although not particularly bad, were obviously drawn by an arty teen). I've still got the letter he sent me, somewhere. I found the whole thing to be quite satisfying. Imagine my amusement when I discovered that he left Games Workshop, to work in IT, because 'IT pays better' - http://everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=871858/

Crushing by elephant is fun, but what other dictionary has a huge article on worldwide contemporary pornography....

did you know: "Pornography in the United States tends to feature mostly blonde women with large breasts (usually augmented by breast implants) and buttocks and often with tattoos or body piercing. Men in pornography tend to be older and heavily muscled. American pornography movies often attempt to promote pornographic stars, and the boxes for video tapes tend to be extremely gaudy. Plot in pornographic movies is often minimal."

Its great to hava an encyclopedia you can quote from withoud worries of the BSA knoking down your door. There is ofcourse a slightly cheaper alternative. If you see EDB, dont panic!

Hi,
We all saw that Asimov broke up with a traditional model for robot stories, as he did not paint his robots as foes. Rather, restringed by the Three Laws of Robotics, those robots were well behaved servants to mankind, and could not be used for evildoing.

How do you feel this going on the real world? I am by no means a tchnofobist, but, day by day, I see A.I. researching on one side, and Unmaned Warcraft Machines on the other evolving more and more. Military wil certainly have little concerns in add more and more "smart algorithyms" in their war machinery. So the question is: Given current trends can we be spared of a "Terminator Universe" like cenario? And if so, how shall it be achieved?

Your conspiracy theory, like almost all conspiracy theories, contains elements of both truth and falsehood. No, we almost certainly won't polar bears cavorting over the poles of Venus. However, Venus is undubitably friendly to Earth life. The question is to which types of Earth life it is friendly. We know that thermophiles and other such extremophiles can survive in similarly challenging environments on Earth. However, it would likely require some fairly major bio-engineering in order to prepare such Earth organisms to live on Venus.

Beyond even just the well publicized extremes of temperature and pressure, any life-form on Venus would have to contend with heavy metal snow and clouds made of sulfuric acid. While I'm sure that we have separate varieties of extremophiles on Earth that can cope with each of these challenges separately, creating a synthesis of these traits would require significantly greater experience with practical genetic engineering as well as significant funding. We just don't have the funds right now to return Venus' friendship, which I'm sure is a situation that /.ers have experienced before.

Well,
Unfortunatelly I guess you will have to read the articles pointed in the story. As well as the twelve other documents.
When you are done, if you can make any sense of it, you could help the world by making a good sumary, and posting it in places like the nice everything2 semi-clopaedia.
I for myself am still to try SVG witch is a usefull WEB XML recomendation at all.

I read this far down the thread hoping someone would have a comment about these orphaned devices, and how to give them a new lease on life. (This one has a modem, USB, and some kind of TCP/IP stack. There must be something useful we can do with it!)

I was wondering, which was the first option for 24 bit color (truecolor)?

Both at high end workstations, and for home desktop? I remember seeing ads for true color boards in 1989 Mac magazines. When were them avaliable to the PC? Where they at all avaliable to Intel PCs or Amigas earlier than for Macs?

If someone is kind enough to answer in a nice way (I could not find an answer in google), please consider making it ready for a write up at E2.

you insensitie clod!

For those who don't know who the Start Wars Kid is, check Everything2:

http://everything2.net/index.pl?lastnode_id=124&no de_id=1479019

IBM had a RISC chip called the 801 way the hell back in time but never commercialized it, and so the ARM was the first RISC CPU that anyone was able to buy. I went hunting for dates once and wrote this writeup on E2 which has the dates of these assorted processors. The 801 is from 1979, the ARM2 in 1985 (ARM1 is also in 1985, but never commercialized) and ROMP in 1986. POWER happened in 1990. There is enough time between 801 and ROMP, and further enough time between ROMP and POWER, to ensure that each processor somehow advanced the others, if only because IBM was busy laying their share of the groundwork for how RISC processors and processors in general would work. IBM has always advanced the science of computer technology by at least their fair share, if not more.

Other interesting factoids for those too lazy to visit the link, or to wait for the page to load, though probably anyone who has drilled down this far will fire it up in another tab or window; The Motorola 68020 (1984) was the first 32 bit processor. The first general-purpose 16 bit microprocessor was the Texas Instruments TMS9900 in the TI 99/4(A), in 1976.

I know about AIX on the RT, I know that was the primary OS, but the fact is that the system tanked because it was mismarketed as a PC, though it's true it was priced like one, scaled up for performance. I managed to track down both AOS and BSD 4.3 (IBM and not IBM, as you apparently know) for my RTs.

Blimey. I thought Stanley Unwin was dead.

There are some nice write ups on it at everything2. Just take a look there.

There are some nice write ups on it at everything2. Just take a look there.

Shouldn't those be called traffic koans?

Desktop applications sucked because the developers were smart and the users were stupid.

Web applications suck because the developers are stupid and the users are smart.

Solution: have the desktop developers design web sites and fire the webdevs! I mean, I've been waiting WAY to long for a boss key on e2, anyway.

actually Feng Shui is chinese - and it's a lot more than a type of interior design. (Not that I subscribe to it, or to anything else, for that matter)

Just in case you would like to know what tropospheric ducting is.

For those who, like me, think they don't need to know the name of every other proprietary cute software around, one can always check here what is it that these people are talking about.

Minimal hassle for you, easy backups, and everyone will fear you.

My general strategy would be similar, EXCEPT for the CEO. Just backup his data after he goes home, and compliment him on how well he's backing stuff up. Then when everyone complains about backing up, he'll well - back you up - so to speak.

... Sometimes I hate myself.

I just finished death march and the only ones I would recomend it to is those who are new to the software-development-project-team thing (like me) and want to know the signs things are getting ugly. The book offers very little (read:two) actual advice on how to solve or at least survive the mentioned problem situations and practically every chapter end with a summary wich basicly explains how everything you just read is only relative and how the advice may actually be of no help whatsoever on your particular situation...

If you are in panic about your project, stay away from this book, you dont have the time If you want to know if you should panic about your project, get it!It does offer more help for the project managment people who should consider this one but after reading it you might want to consider other career options like profesional wresteling or anything involving sharks or snakes.

An really quick hint is the software developer bestiary

Excellent, now we need to start stockpiling these semiconductor's in preparation for the heat death of the universe.

What do you mean we won't be around by then?

But when you can only watch karma go down, that gives the impression that you are no longer actually doing anything useful. (Plus it's possible to actually lose karma on a score 4 post!) It takes away the measure of how well you've been contributing.

(To lose karma on a score 4 post, get modded up to 5, then modded down. The +3/4 (depending on the starting score) will be dropped, but that last -1 will strike you!)

Keep in mind that without the karma cap, I tried to actually be meaningful because I could get feedback via moderation. Now the only feedback I get is from watching each post and reading and responding to replies. This is more work, and it means that in order to guage how well I'm doing on Slashdot, I have to go through my user history list and check on all my comments: not fun.

Besides, all karma really does is turn Slashdot into a game. In some Geeks in Space episode, CmdrTaco (I think) was talking about the (then) new experience point/level system in Everything2, and how it turned it basically into a game. Same thing with karma. Cap the max score, and then it becomes pointless to try and be useful. The bottom line is the karma cap has at best pissed a lot of the karma whores off. It has at worst turned some people into trolls .

So yeah, whenever I have something useful to say, I'll say it, but I won't try and be as nice. If you look through my recent comments, I'm starting to become more of a troll simply due to boredom. (And, probably, due to the fact I really don't have anything to say.)

I really don't think the karma gap has done anything useful. What Rob should really do is consider how to make moderating actually worth while for a moderator. The novelty wares off quickly. Honestly, it really isn't worth the hour it would take me to be a Good Moderator. So maybe that's why moderators seem to suck - they really don't have the time to go over every little thing and figure out how best to moderate. That's how things like the DAEHTIHS protocol get moderated up as "insightful" until someone suggests reading DAEHTIHS backwards.

Check out Holloway's writeup on Logo. Pity everything2 has turned into such a police state and he left though.

Here's something you might find interesting -Everything2.net

Spoon

Have yourself a read of this.

Goddamnit... cleartype type thing for printers

URLS ain't what they used to be, that's for sure.

Of course, I'm busy with other things right now, but if someone like, say, andover.net were to offer me funding to setup a site like this... ;)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

BTW, I go a bit more into detail lambasting his and other such websites on Everything2 (go to the node entitled "Christian movie reviews", look for the writeup authored by Magenta), in case you care.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Oh well, Rob doesn't have a color fetish like I do (look it up on everything2... seems to be down right now so I can't make a link right to the node), so I think I'd still win the contest. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.