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now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?

OK, but what are these "non-standard" scientists going to do differently? Do they have experiments that would be a better application of our (collective) money than an upgrade in the standard model?

Even if the standard model is somewhat wrong (it's mostly right, just like Newton's model is mostly right), then what experiments would we do differently to verify it?

these are extremely pertinent and insightful questions that i deliberately didn't ask in the reply that started this thread, as i wanted to keep it to just one (albeit long) point. if it's ok with you i'm going to do a "wandering tour" before directly answering, ok?

first thing: the standard model is "right" because as you can see from those "magic constants" listed in that link to spinor.info https://spinor.info/weblog/?p=... it's *MADE* to be "right" by virtue of the unexplained magic constants being altered and adjusted using statistical analysis to fit the available data. on the basis that there's really not a lot of point to publishing magic constants that made the standard model WRONG, would there?? :)

second thing: if you ever get a chance to meet a particle physicist (theoretical or practical e.g. working at CERN) i invite you to ask them this very simple question: what are particles *actually* made of? they won't be able to give you an answer, and there's a very simple reason why: they've been trained (mind-blinkered), through the Standard Model, to think of particles EXCLUSIVELY at one mathematical step removed i.e. in the FREQUENCY domain.

if you're not familar with this, quantum mechanics is basically about doing an FFT (fourier transform). that's really all there is to it. you move *everything* to the frequency domain, and do all math there. so Yang-Mills theory (which is the fundamental basis of modern particle physics theory) as i understand it is basically Maxwell's Equations moved to the frequency domain. https://www.google.co.uk/searc... and i *think* that perspective is confirmed by this paper here http://inspirehep.net/record/1...

so if everything's moved to a mathematical "hands-off" construct, how the hell is anyone supposed to determine what's actually *inside* particles??

where that went wrong was somewhere around the 1930s, when quantum mechanics got such amazing answers that anyone not formulating theories in quantum mechanics terms was basically left with egg on their faces. the ring model. kaluza-klein theory (which has problems raised by its answers that still haven't been addressed).

so if you want to even *start* formulating a theory that begins to predict actual particles, you need something radically different to start *from*. garrett lisi's "exceptional theory of everything" https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.077... was one paper that showed promise, with some predicted new particles, however lisi himself later worked with a mathematician to *prove* that the theory could not work https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.265...

there was another guy, john williamson, "on the nature of the photon and the electron" http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/11095... who moved Maxwell's Equations to 6D Clifford Algebra, and got some startli

What, exactly, is the purpose of hanging in the clouds of Venus ?

What, exactly is the purpose of hanging out in the near-vacuum of Mars?
What, exactly, is the purpose of life?

If you don't agree with the merits of the human race becoming a starfaring civilization centuries from now based on investments made today in getting the ball rolling today, I'm not going to debate that with you. But if you agree with that, then the whole point in expanding offworld is to develop into a multiplanetary species, where demand drives down launch costs and we learn, step by step, to make everything that we need in offworld environments and to become adept at the multi-month journeys between planets. At first, it's a sunk cost. With time, it's increasingly supported by trade. And after long periods of time, it brings the immense resources beyond our planet into our grasp.

If you want to talk about economics on Venus, here's a few for you.

* Power is immensely abundant. Many technologies that we employ are basically energy costs - to pick an example, isotope enrichment. So once the higher marginal capital cost for doing things on Venus becomes overtaken by the greater energy availability, Venus becomes the logical place to conduct such activities.

* Deuterium levels are ~240 times higher than on Earth. So depending on the level of enrichment you need and the means by which you return it, if you can return goods for somewhere in the "couple thousand to several tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram" range, it's profitable. Deuterium recovery can be rendered an inherent part of nighttime fuel cell power storage, since electrolysis has an excellent enrichment factor.

* Venus's lavas appear to be highly differentiated, and there's a great degree of chemical weathering and atmospheric processing, which can be another resource enrichment process. So concentrations of high value ores far greater than are found on Earth are not unrealistic. There are a couple dozen elements whose values are worth exporting at realistic launch costs several decades from now.

* Even simple rocks from offworld have great value (collectors, luxury goods, etc). It's not theoretical - people really do pay huge sums for offworld items. Their value will of course depend first the abundance of their export (if you export 100kg per year, you can sell for 10x more per kg than if you export 10000kg per year, which you can sell for 10x more per kg than if you export 1000000kg per year...). If you're selling in small quantities, the value could be in the millions of dollars per kilogram. Venus's surface atmosphere is dense enough that you can outright dredge loose rocks.

* The size of the market and sensitivity to export quantity also depends on their aesthetics (aka, moving more from the collectors market into the larger luxury goods market). This means minerals that are durable and aesthetically pleasing. What we've sampled so far of Venus's surface fits that bill - gabbro (sold as "black granite" - large crystalled, dark, hard rock, forms excellent slabs), anorthosite (rare on Earth, often associated with labradorite, which is an iridescent bluish-purple semiprecious to precious mineral), troctolite (rare, olivine (peridot)-rich relative of anorthosite and gabbro - looks like this when cut and polished), etc. It's one thing for your typical sheikh or dotcom millionaire to say "my yacht's countertop is made from the finest tuscan marble." It's another to say "my yacht's countertop is from freaking Venus." You're looking at a very large market in the 4 figure/kg range, a reasonable market in the 5 figure/kg range, and a small but decent market in the 6 figure/kg range.

* Venus's apparently high levels of repeated differentiation, in conditions very different from Earth, likely mean that some minerals, including gemstones, that are rare or no

Scotland is still suffering from the effects of its de-industrialisation. The lowlands and its central belt particularly, used to be home to much labour intensive, heavy industry - steel, shipyards, mining, heavy engineering. The industry is gone, but the people (or their descendants) largely remain. Thus there are many pockets of poverty around. Life expectancy can be extremely low there, due to substance abuse particularly. The area of Glasgow I live in, Calton, has the lowest male life expectancy in the UK - 53.9 years!

Scotland is a special case, and is dealing with some tough social problems that are a legacy of how the world around it has changed over the last 60 years. Scotland has excellent health care though, I've found. They spend quite a lot on social health-care, relative to rest of UK. That the life expectancy is still low is due to that poverty and attendant education and life-choices that seem to correlate with that.

I've noticed that comment wasn't very useful, so here's a link.

Back in '07, this article was published...

http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/~dtngo/Article/Nature_446_782_2007.pdf

As I understand this, in the classical photosynthesis model, energy transfer is sort of modeled like the incoming sunlight excites a population of light absorbing "antennea" pigments which transfer the energy to reaction centers where long term energy storage is initiated (e.g., the CO2->sugar conversion). If the energy transfer was "classically" photoelectric, you'd see a system where light excites a population of antenna of different pigments, which then re-emit the energy at a wavelength compatible with the photosynthesis.

If this was true, you could potentially measure electric field and look for frequency of absorbtion and re-emission (they would look like 2 frequency peaks). However, if there were some sort of state coupling, you'd also see beat frequencies corresponding to the difference in energies between various pigments and the re-emission. That in itself is not that interesting, but the fact that when they sent in pulses, these frequencies corresponding to beat frequencies seems to persist longer than the expected coherence time which apparently suggests that coherence lasts long enough to transit all the way from the antenna/pigments to the location of energy conversion (in this case 660 femtoseconds).

The next step is to hypothesize that you can use QM and treat the full system as essentially coherently absorbing light at with the exactly correct antenna/pigment and re-emitting it essentially lossless to the conversion point, rather than it absorbing a collection/population of antenna over a period of time (some of them efficiently, some of them less efficienty), and re-emitting the energy (the classical model). Of course this is a pretty big step and is not a constructive argument, but it is in line with observations about photosynthetic efficiency and there is now more measurements to back up the potential (QM/coherence) pathway which might be able to explain that efficiency..

When asked in a talk on this, he claimed that they would have fully replicating matter (IE : 'living' inorganic matter) in 2 years. The host who asked the question sounded startled when he said "That would be, er, something amazing, yes" - in other words "Yeah, right!".

On the other hand, the lab's publication list is quite impressive, and full of cool looking polygonal structures : http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/publications.php

If the ring is even the slightest bit uncentered, then it will become more and more uncentered over time, moving in a hula-hoop like rotation around the sun until it eventually touches the sun. You need an active repositioning system to prevent this from happening (like Niven introduced in later books).

http://testservice-eprints.gla.ac.uk/38/1/JIBS_C_McInnes_56_308.pdf

The wavelengths at which different isotopes absorb light are slightly different (Hyperfine structure), so if you tune the wavelength of your laser just right, you can use radiation pressure rather than the (typically weaker) optical gradient force to at least identify different isotopes. (I work in cold atom physics and was just doing this in the lab with Rubidium 85 and 87).

However, the radiation pressure on an atom is limited by the atom, whereas the optical gradient force is limited by the power of your laser. At room temperature, you can't use radiation pressure to separate Rb 85 and 87. There is considerably more freedom to engineer the forces experienced by the particle if you use the optical gradient forces and tricks, like Bessel beams, or more generally SLMs, which are essentially computer-programmable holograms. See, for example, the excellent experimental work of the Dholakia and Padgett groups.

Here is the site of one of the co-authors:

http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/staff/index.php?id=RJ002

The article in question is not quite published yet:

Jack, R. E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R. (in press) Cultural Confusions Show Facial Expressions are Not Universal Current Biology

Here is an earlier one using the same methodologies (PDF):

http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/docs/download.php?type=PUBLS&id=1404

It is about where western and eastern people look at faces using eye tracking when for example learning or recognizing a face. There were some subtle differences.

Here is the site of one of the co-authors:

http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/staff/index.php?id=RJ002

The article in question is not quite published yet:

Jack, R. E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R. (in press) Cultural Confusions Show Facial Expressions are Not Universal Current Biology

Here is an earlier one using the same methodologies (PDF):

http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/docs/download.php?type=PUBLS&id=1404

It is about where western and eastern people look at faces using eye tracking when for example learning or recognizing a face. There were some subtle differences.

How about Rod Page's timemap mashup?

http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/flu/

As described on his blog http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/04/h1n1-swine-flu-timemap.html

This is slightly different than simple polarization, see here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224515.000 -- full article requires log-in. Or here: http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/ The point here is that a "pulse" can now encode more than just an "on/off" state. Instead, a pulse now encodes a "twistiness" level of states (can be 1, 2, 3, or up to 250 as in the NS article.) So, a 2GHz signal can now carries, let's say, 2x8 = 16 Gb/s. The trouble, it seems, is to construct a receiver capable of correctly identifying the pulses.

They're using physics that wasn't even discovered until 1992.

See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/

See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/

See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/

See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/

This is about modulating the orbital angular momentum of photons, a property that wasn't even discovered until 1992.

Each photon can have an integer quantity of orbital angular momentum (0, 1, 2, 3...) without obvious limit (or in the opposite direction, -1, -2, -3...). In principle, and increasingly in experiment, it is possible to encode information by modulating the orbital angular momentum carried. This provides and entirely separate channel with its own bandwidth in addition to traditionally understood modulation. They're right to be excited about it; it has the potential of being just as big in scope as was the invention of radio.

See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/

Am I missing something? These guys are proposing polarizing wireless transmissions.

Yes, you are, and no, they aren't.

This is about modulating the orbital angular momentum of photons, a property that wasn't even discovered until 1992.

Each photon can have an integer quantity of orbital angular momentum (0, 1, 2, 3...) without obvious limit (or in the opposite direction, -1, -2, -3...). In principle, and increasingly in experiment, it is possible to encode information by modulating the orbital angular momentum carried. This provides and entirely separate channel with its own bandwidth in addition to traditionally understood modulation. They're right to be excited about it; it has the potential of being just as big in scope as was the invention of radio.

See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/

Of course you'll need to make sure you've got a license to present the broadcast! Oh and if you choose to use a PC relaying a broadcast (from the internet or from a TV signal) then you'll need to purchase "secondary transmission" rights ...

In the US 17USC111 (a)(5) appears to give a publicly funded school a pass on this. But it does say under ibid (a)(2) that you must comply with 17USC110 (2) which at (2)(D)(ii)(I)(aa) [!] requires that any digital copy is deleted before the end of the classroom session. Oh and you'll need to "[provide] notice to students that materials used in connection with the course may be subject to copyright protection".

Sounds like you need a good lawyer. I hope the TV stations band together and sue all the schools! Justice must be done!!

US law: http://www.bitlaw.com/source/17usc/111.html
US law: http://www.bitlaw.com/source/17usc/110.html
Worldwide situations: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/C/htmlC/copyrightlaw/copyrightlaw.htm
UK licensing: http://www.gla.ac.uk/copyright/video.htm

Yes, buit wouldn't it be great to run at least the software we had in 1998?

what about missing applications such as Photoshop or Video editors?

There is a critical mass: If things start to work more people will try to get things work and check out the source.

Esp. for public authorities the lock-in into special applications is severe and keeps them from switching to Linux. these are mostly trivial from a technological standpoint.

So what really matters is critical mass and a development process that makes it not into elitist work of a close cycle.

At least everyone can run
http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBuilt/winetest-latest.exe
on his windows boxes to support the developers but you really miss a level entry into wine hacking.

Why not link to: http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBuilt/winetest-latest.exe instead? Isn't that guaranteed to be the latest?

Look at http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBuilt/. See the the exe at the bottom. That's the latest one and the one I have linked to. Also, if you sort http://test.winehq.org/data/ to the "last modified" parameter, this one ends on top. Conclusive proof I reckon.

What exactly is this testing, and what do the results mean?

Yes Western countries dont need to have vast machinery to control the media and citizens because the media organisations are quite happy to do it themselves. Yes "the key checks of a free press and the freedom to voice one's opinion are sacrosanct." but it makes no difference because dissenting voices are drowned out by the establishment. For example in the UK the coverage of Palestine and Israel is unfairly biased towards Israel. http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/mediagroup/bnfi_reviews.htm Its not just on this topic the same pattern can be seen again and again eg Iraq.

They have a photo of a politician using the arm available online here.

Terrier - LINK

Indri/Lemur - LINK / LINK

MG - LINK

Oh well, executing Winetest
http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBu ilt/winetest-latest.exe

I understand that your answer is the official party line. I think in 2001 it was the same response.

What I mean is not a per-application tool but a per-Wine tool with feedback of all used applications.

Currently I can't say: function x, it gets executed by Acrobat Reader 2.1, Firefox, fuzzycalc and Darly's Printshop. So the person who implements it can test it with these applications that make use of it.

I understand that a function does not need to be 100% implemented. But think about a sponsor who says: I want to sponsor dll x. Or: My program WAccounting uses these 5 API calls, I want this program to run perfect under Wine, what does it cost me?

What also motivates people is to see a kind of progress bar. I mean a automated script that indicates how much stubs and so on are in there.

I also would like to get informed how to debug an application with Wine. The documentation is heavily outdated and imcomplete here. WINEDEBUG=+relay is intresting, I tried it out. But the documentation is not very informative here.

My perception is that we will get
- almost perfect DirectX games support
- very good installer and crypto support.
because here it really does scale but wine development did not scale that much over the past years.

When most application run it is not to difficult to get people to resolve the remaining bugs. But areas where the wine support probability is low won't develop too fast. It is all about "islands" of supports that expand at the edges. The more applications get platinum the easier it expands,

One great issue these days is for instance that most users can easily get the latest version installed. So wine gets more testing. anyway I would really like to participate in a workshop on how to hack wine.

This isn't really that new. There are folk who have been looking at characterising nano-scale variability for years, and there is a LOT more to it that just the fluctuations introduced by lithographic limits. Glasgow uni's device modelling group. What's odd is that these guys are estimating the fluctuations based on mathematical models when there is pretty good data available for the 65nm technology node already.

.....I can't possibly be the only alpha geek out there who immediately associates a perfect silicon sphere with this:

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~hwloidl/htg-all.html
(see #48)

That cognoscenti also said that about "The Eye of Argon". That, alone, doesn't make it classic literature.

I was wondering about this too.

Try searching for "solid state gyros". There's also this paper too.

But is it yet HTTP-compliant? Specifically, does IE 7 treat the Content-Type header provided by the server as authoritative as required by RFC 2616 Sectino 7.2.1?

I'm sick of sites that, say, put up a Linux boot CD up as a .iso file and don't configure their website to treat *.iso as application/octet-stream and serve it as text/plain, but I hate even more that Internet Explorer will download the file to disk where all HTTP-compliant browsers will properly render the ISO file in the browser window as plain text, resulting in the server never being reconfigured to serve the file as the proper type because the person who set it up only tests with IE!

An inspired diagram. Here's a picture of the some of the technologies that this will usher in.

http://www.aero.gla.ac.uk/Research/LowSpeedAero/Ol dbvi.htm

By making the blade angle steeper presumeably there is more of a vortex from the blade tip for the next blade coming along to hit and make the noise. Although from the number of google hits I got it's probably more complicated than that.

"Hard to fathom. How, exactly, can a 3D Web be useful in any way? What benefits will it offer that we don't have currently? Sounds like more hype regarding a useless technology (read: VR)."

Uh, yeah! Useless like Medical training.

Here's one of mine:
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement" - Lord Kelvin

Kelvin conceded that the only two clouds on the horizon of physics were the results of the Michaelson-Morley experiment and the ultraviolet catastrophe.. Those two problems would lead the complete disruption of classical physics and the establishment of both general relativity and quantum mechanics.

(Also, if I ever formed a band, I would call it "The Ultraviolet Catastrophe" because that name rocks.)

Yes, I have. You should try it some time. And read what I said, googlebot looks for particular meta tags that it cares about. It seems like you are trying to convince me that you are brain damaged.

Ok, you have succeeded in convincing me. There is no clearer way for me to say THEY GET THE EXACT SAME RESULTS. If you cannot grasp this, and are too stupid to try it and see for yourself, then there is no point talking to you.

Just like images.

Google for GD.

I am not asserting that at all. I am asserting that its a waste of time, gets you nothing, and makes your site uglier. And if alt tags don't help for google, then stick invisible text in there, who cares?

Let us recap:
Search for three words in alt text (that are on every page): 2 hits.
Search for three words in plain text: 61 hits.

You still want to stick with your faith that Google weighs all text equally?

The quantum programming wikipedia article has a link to a rather neat paper by Simon Gay, titled Quantum Programming Languages: Survey and Bibliography. This seems to give a pretty good overview of current thinking regarding what sorts of programming languages would be appropriate for quantum computation. The abstract:

The field of quantum programming languages is developing rapidly and there is a surprisingly large literature. Research in this area includes the design of programming languages for quantum computing, the application of established semantic and logical techniques to the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the design of compilers for quantum programming languages. This article justfies the study of quantum programming languages, presents the basics of quantum computing, surveys the literature in quantum programming languages, and indicates directions for future research.

He has the bibliography, complete with paper links available here.

The quantum programming wikipedia article has a link to a rather neat paper by Simon Gay, titled Quantum Programming Languages: Survey and Bibliography. This seems to give a pretty good overview of current thinking regarding what sorts of programming languages would be appropriate for quantum computation. The abstract:

The field of quantum programming languages is developing rapidly and there is a surprisingly large literature. Research in this area includes the design of programming languages for quantum computing, the application of established semantic and logical techniques to the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the design of compilers for quantum programming languages. This article justfies the study of quantum programming languages, presents the basics of quantum computing, surveys the literature in quantum programming languages, and indicates directions for future research.

He has the bibliography, complete with paper links available here.

Sure, if you want an uglier, single paradigm language that's harder to maintain, it's great.

Uglier is in the eye of the beholder. Hell all I hear about Python is how clear and clean it is, but every time I look at it I can't help but think how ugly it is, with all of it's __some_crap_or_another__ and whatnot. Sure, it's nicer than, say, C++, but that's a bit like saying someone is cuter than Karl Malden... Bottom line, saying something is uglier should mean little to anyone who isn't you -- we all like and dislike different things for different reasons.

As for harder to maintain, I suppose you have some evidence to back up this assertion? If you do, I'd love to see it...

The "lines of code" argument is tired, old and bullshit, frankly. Anyone can write a minimal line version of practically anything, but that says nothing for maintainability, readinability or anything else.

I pretty much agree with you on the first point. I won't say it's BS, but I do believe that it's overhyped. The part you may or may not be missing is that it's not the ability to squeeze tokens out of an algorithm that's important. It's the ability to say a lot, and clearly, with just a few words that's important (a subtle but real distinction). This was touched on a bit by Simon Booth and Simon Jones in their paper Are Ours Really Smaller Than Theirs? It's the succinctness that they talk about that is important, as it should lead to fewer errors, and actually aid maintainability and readability as it allows a person to keep more of the program in their head. Of course I don't know if it actually does this -- I'd love to see some follow on research...

Someone's written a 3 line RSA utility in perl, but have you taken a look

Taken a look at it? Hell, I own the t-shirt!

The OSS vision is of a world in which there are no greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support.

The OSS vision is of a world in which there are no greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support.

if i looked like this, i would certainly have a problem with "beards and sandals" wouldn't you? the guy's email address is sjm@dcs.gla.ac.uk. i'm sure this will be useful as the BCS don't know what "feedback" is. such a forward thinking organisation. just like this guy.

if i looked like this, i would certainly have a problem with "beards and sandals" wouldn't you? the guy's email address is sjm@dcs.gla.ac.uk. i'm sure this will be useful as the BCS don't know what "feedback" is. such a forward thinking organisation. just like this guy.

While it's true that the drop in numbers of CS students can be attributed, at least in part, to the whole Web explosion and subsequent collapse, there are fears that the problems are rooted deeper than that.

I'm aware of some studies done at Glasgow which suggest that the drastic reduction in CS applicants year after year is a side-effect of the increased use of ICT in schools, and the increased teaching of ICT in schools. By the end of their secondary education, many kids think ICT is CS, they see ICT as boring, and as such never even consider CS as a potential career move.

It's important for the CS departments around the world to try and counter this trend*, as the computers of today aren't the same as yesteryear. Many efforts are ongoing, looking for new and interesting ways to teach Computing Science to schoolchildren, without which the currently fruitful field of CS could find itself drying up. Those with a natural predilection to coding/hardware/hacking/etc might never discover this interest on their parents' modern 3.xGHz P4 Dell with WinXP installed without some of these approaches. Compare kids brought up with modern PCs and parents afraid of what they've heard about viruses and hackers with kids like myself brought up in the 80's with BBC Micros and Atari STs to play with, for example.

Computing Science taught at a Secondary level, in the UK at least, is a joke, and not representative of modern CS at all. So we have ICT being pushed, and kids calling it Computing, and the ones who actually do take Computing at school not actually being given anything resembling a primer for a University level course. To solve the education problem is but one potential way of improving numbers entering CS programs.

* Some might argue that they shouldn't try to counter the trend and leave the natural selection of those interested enough in their computer to apply to go on to study CS -- then, only the truly interested and motivated fill a space on a CS program. It's wise point out that if people never get a chance to try, then we're throwing away so many potential great minds. Any good CS program should be good at weeding out the crap students from the good, though the quality of courses offered around the world is a different debate entirely.

The parent is Mark Twain's proposal for the improvement of english spelling. Link

...is that the modern English language's orthography is non-intuitive. It's not pronounced as it is written. Many modern languages are pronounced exactly as written, but because of English's long history, great vowel shift, and assimilation of foreign words, English orthography is very confusing.
It should be written "skillz", not skills, because it is actually a "z" sound at the end of that word. Try to pronounce it as written (with the same sound at the end of the word as at the beginning) and you're saying it incorrectly (or strangely at a minimum).
I'd like to see all languages move to using the IPA (http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ipa/ipa.html , but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. It would actually be more possible now than ever because Unicode supports the IPA. (BTW...yes...I am a cunning linguist).

Collective cortex - Java based, but not open source, http://www.collectivecortex.com/ Nariva - Java based, GPL, http://nariva.sourceforge.net/ Terrier - Java based, MPL, http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/terrier/

Like seemingly everyone else heree I also worked on an Image Searching tool for my group project during my Undergrad at Glasgow.

For possibly the worst report of all time, in both web presentation and actual content, see here: http://tlc.dcs.gla.ac.uk/students/level3/imagedb/

We have here two basically opposing world-views, one called Materialism and one loosely called Deism. Materialism, most simply put, says that no miracles occur. At all.

Here is the first error: Pretending that there are two EQUAL world-views. In fact, both have to start with materialism (This defines what is natural), and theists like to think that supernatural things occur on top of this. The fact that no supernatural occurance has ever been observed casts considerable doubt on this.

It turns out that we're in miracle territory anyway, since chemical evolution requires either a miracle of structure, or a miraculously high number of chemical interactions between the roughly 10^81 atoms in our universe during the roughly 10^18 seconds it may have existed in order to form even relatively simple organic molecules, the precursors to proteins.

The thing is, I've personally gone through this and shown you to be wrong on this before. Why then do you keep repeating it?

Just tell me how the wildly oversimplified calculations preferred by creationists apply to this.

As far as the anthropic principle goes, you have this wrong as well. The probablility of us observing a universe suited to life is exactly 1 - unless we lived in a 'supernatural' universe, in which case there is no requirement that the rest of the universe has the same rules.

People will inevitable go on and argue that supernatural intervention renders science impossible, but that's mere rhetorical twaddle.

Actually, the presumption of no supernatural intervention is the basis of our entire society, and a significant improvement on the thousands of years of superstition based thinking.