Slashdot Mirror

Don't get your hopes up. Cost of maritime shipping is not critical for the final price for many/most goods (ca $2500 for a container from largest Chines port to either LA or New York). Shipping on a large container ship (and they're only getting larger) is ridiculously efficient. A large container ship is e.g. ca 15 times more efficient than a heavy truck on a highway.

Bunker fuel is also the cheapest of fossil fuels. Ships can and do burn the slop that no-one else wants much.

So, while everyone's trying to make a buck, the trucks to and from the port burns almost all the fuel that gets burnt for e.g. that T-shirt in your store.

So, this town's conclusion is (incredulously) that the wind farm is bad because one of the oil tankers that it renders obsolete might hit it. That's not the fault of the wind farm; that's the fault of the goddamn oil tankers!

You know nothing of ships do you ?

http://www.people.hofstra.edu/...

BTW those usage numbers are in tonnes/day.

Labor is about 35% of the operating expense of an airline. Fuel is a distant second. Pilots are the some of the pricier elements of that labor pool, and are often unionized and do strike on occasion. Bean counters just love the idea of taking them off the spreadsheet through the magic of modern technology.

The airlines would love to see these aircraft running on a subway model - no attendants or pilots, maybe one person on the ground monitoring that the airplane stays on track. Just put a soda machine on each plane, one that takes credit card and charges $10 for an RC Cola (Coca Cola is $15 for 1st class only). Send a cleaner through once a day. No carpeting or upholstery, need to be able to hose it out quickly. Complaints? No one on the plane to listen to them except the other equally disgruntled fellow passengers.

And therein lies the problem. The way Electric cars are right now you really wind up needing two vehicles. This reinforces my point that it isn't solving the core issue, and that it's way out of the price range of most regular people.

Wrong. In 2009, 59% of U.S. households had two or more cars, a figure which has trended upwards steadily since their inception — along with an ongoing decrease in the number of households without cars. Today, most American households literally have multiple vehicles.

(for those who are curious, here's the long-term pricing on the minerals in the Simon-Erhlich wager, inflation-adjusted).

No, you dont.

Did you even check, or did you assume? What sort of Americans are you dealing with when they're 'shocked' by 100 km to the next gas station? That's only 60 miles. I've seen signs that say 125 miles to the next, or 200 km. Must be East-coasters who think the mid-west is 'flyover country'.

Let's check your work: You guys average 15530 km per year
Americans average 12k-15k miles per year, this site says 13,476 miles. Which works out to 21,696 km/year. Or 40% more than Aussies, which I'd qualify as 'heck of a lot more'.

Let's verify a bit: Population of Australia: 22.7M. KM driven: 232,453M km. KM per man, woman, and child: 10,240 km.
Population of the USA: 313M. Distance driven: 3M million miles., or 3,000 Billion miles. 9,413 miles per year, or 15,154 km per person. 48% more than Australians.

but if you blow 0.06 an Aussie cop would just tell you to sit down for half an hour and test you again if your BAC reduces he lets you go as long as you pass the personality test).

Personality test? Oh, institutional corruption, got it.

Once again, Australia has already solved this problem. If you cant pay your fines in Australia, a sheriff starts repossessing your property (starting with your car). As for people who drive on a suspended license, they risk years in jail here in Australia.

You mean the totaled car that was wrapped around a tree? Or do you kick people out of their homes in Australia?
Oh, and we do it in the USA as well. Problem being that, especially for multiple DUI offenders they generally drive such crappy cars that it costs more to have the sheriff confiscate it then they get at auction. Oops...

You'd be surprised how many offenders are white collar.

You really think this? The problem is twofold:
1. The poor people can't pay the fines. It costs somewhere around $22k/year to keep them in jail/prison.
2. The rich people can pay the fines, then carry on more or less like nothing happened.
3. Both parties will often obtain a $500-1000 car to drive that they register under somebody else's name so no breathalyzer equipment is installed.

A first time DUI in the USA can run you over $15k. It's not cheap.

You're going to have to face it: There isn't some 'magic bullet' policy difference between the USA and Australia. It's a lot of little ones, and the difference between .05 and .08 for DUI isn't really one of them.

This is why blood tests will reduce the number of people going to court.

With the really sleazy lawyers they'll still go to court, especially the rich types, because all they have to do is convince the jury something is in doubt, that he doesn't deserve the conviction, get some piece of evidence like the blood test tossed out on some technicality, etc... Heck, get some sympathetic drink-drivers on the jury. Lots of options.

Stop locking up pot heads and concentrate on removing actual dangers from society.

Agreed.

We manufacture 60% of all globally produced goods and China/Japan account for the majority of the balance.

If that's true, I don't know what the USA is doing with all those goods since Germany runs them close in export terms and neither can catch China:

2010 WTO Global Exports

Also, technically your Mariner was assembled in Missouri. I'll leave you to consider what that implies.

You say that as if something like OPEC doesn't exist.

No, I say it as if OPEC doesn't have the type of price control it used to have, and not anywhere near the price control it wishes it had. Here's a nifty little link: http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/appl5en/shareopec.html OPEC currently controls about 45% of global output. The Persian Gulf sits at below 30%. Furthermore, OPEC is definitely not the single entity a lot of people make it out to be. Yes, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are pretty much in lock step. You know who else is part of OPEC? Iran, aka mortal enemy of Saudi Arabia.

So yes, they do influence the market. But they are clearly not able to control the price to the degree you intimate.

The same applies to your argument about companies, by the way. And then, as you rightly guessed, politics are also thrown in the mix. And the global economy. All in all, you make my point: while there are some entities that have more control over price than others, there are so many that it is ludicrous on the face of it to argue that there is even the possibility of a cabal. And then there's the data, which conclusively proves that individual actors have very little influence on the price of gas in the US.

While it might be reasonable for someone to question whether prices are subject to global manipulation, it implies that that person has never looked closely at either gas prices or who the players are.

This is M. Hubbert's Curve from 1956 for world peak oil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_peak_oil_plot.svg

Here is his estimate for US peak oil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_US_high.svg

Here is Alaska's production:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_Crude_Oil_Production.PNG

He seems to have done well on the US side of things. Now, perhaps the peak of world oil has shifted by a decade or so (although, by what I'm reading perhaps we're at it):
http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/appl5en/worldoilreservesevol.html

In any case, being on the other side of the peak is a scary thing. Demand keeps going up, as people in China and India get cars, but you have this downward supply.

We move freight by rail:
http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch3en/conc3en/modalspliteuusjapan.html

Nice observation! An even older communication system also resembles the pipes to some degree, namely the major trade routes from 1400-1800: http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/conc5en/tradeflows14001800.html

And what you miss is the US is the third largest exporter in the world. While the US imports more it exports a lot too. Here's what the US exports to China.

Falcon

I think this guy is missing the obvious. Who is guying the Ipods....Americans. That means every time apple sells an Ipod there is a net flow of $4 to china.

And you're missing something. Every tyme a Chinese buys something made in the US money flows from China to the US.

I don't see the Chinese buying products manufactured here.

Because you're not looking and seeing the whole picture. Behind Germany and China the US was the third largest exporter in 2007. Here are some things China buys from the US.

Falcon

ProCD v. Zeidenberg http://people.hofstra.edu/peter_j_spiro/cyberlaw/zeidenberg.htm

It may not be negotiated pre-sale, but you can always return it. Alot of contracts simply aren't practical to negotiate pre-sale.

Let's say you order that computer from Dell - does it really make sense to have the CSR read 15 pages of legalese over the phone? No. They send it to you and you can check it out when you open the box. Don't agree? Don't keep it.

Similarly, if you want to use their software, you agree to their terms of use. Don't agree? Don't use it.

As for your satirical disclaimer - nothing about reading a EULA makes you bound by it. No one is forcing you to use OS X...

This site seems to do be a pretty good introduction, and there are whole books about it (none of which I've ever read) if you want to become an expert.

If you really want to understand this(time dilation), you must read some notes on special relativity, keeping in mind 2 things:

1) Light moves at a constant speed no matter where it originates from/what frame it is in
2) Our appreciation of "speed" is only terms of information/light reaching us from from other frames

Think of this: You have a metre long ruler with a laser source attached to one end, and identical clocks at both ends. If the ruler is now made to move at a constant speed along some visible x-axis, the laser/light beam STILL moves with the same speed c along the x-axis with the ruler. It is not "pushed" along with the ruler at all. This means that it will take more time for the light to reach the other end, even though the light is moving with the ruler which moving with speed v with respect to the axis.

Of course, if the ruler was sliding in the negative x-axis, the light will still have the same speed (i.e it wont get "pulled" in the new direction) meaning that it will complete the "metre" distance in less time as measured by the clocks.

And that is where the story begins. If you really want to know, and it is indeed worth knowing, try:

http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/notes/
http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/Stefan_Waner/dif f_geom/tc.html

No doubt it has shifted, with the US portion being smaller, but here's one:

http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch2en/conc2 en/globalgdp.html

Claiming that not all "unemployed people, disabled people, housewives, single mothers, home healthcare aids" are innocent doesn't imply that they are all guilty. I suggest you start reading here.

No, a really strong economy is both self-sufficient and self-sustaining. In other words, in order to have a really strong economy, you must depend on neither exports nor imports. If you depend on foreign trade, your economy could collapse because of events in foreign lands, which you can't control (I'm assuming that those are sovereign countries, not US free trade partners).

That's not true.

A strong economy can be had with trade if the two nations have comparative advantage in trade.
In real life there's rare examples of it existing only between two countries (usually more are involved), but it is an essential concept given that 28% of the global GDP was from exports.

Restricting trade between countries (so there are no imports/exports) would only affect pricing/availability of goods within a country. For example, if you were unfortunate enough to live in a country without a rich oil supply, then all sorts of products that are created from that supply would either be extremely expensive or non-existant (plastics, fuel, etc).

And even if you were to restrice trade to "free trade partners" (as you reference), that doesn't guarantee that the trade won't negatively affect an economy either. Free trade only refers to allowing products to flow without tariffs; it doesn't stop one country from dumping products into another, thus artificially lowering the price of those goods to drive the foreign industry into the ground.

It's a gray area, and hopefully a new act will pass. The act was created before Internet video streaming was as rampant as it is today. Here's some more info on the act and how it applies to iTunes, etc:

http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/frank_g_bowe/vid eopolicy.html

Yes, and the turbine is much much smaller than Bermuda!
To put it into perspective look at this picture of the gulfstream. Can you even pick out Bermuda?

On the other hand a supertanker is much larger than the turbine. 35m draft!!

AC today 'cause I got me mod points;-)

For a good overview of the relationship between antitrust tying violations, copyright, and patent law, see this law review article. The key point to take away here is that tying can override copyright.

Um. No. A graph with 4 nodes is always planar in graph theory. Once you hit 5 you can construct non-planar graphs. These non-planar graphs can be represented in 3 dimensions without crossing edges.

Some graph theory definitions for you.

That Hexus site is one of the most anoying I've ever seen. Every other word is highlighted with a sponsored link that's often not related at all to the subject at hand. It seems to me that the whole point of that site is to have mildly-useful content simply as click fodder.

A few points:

The mass of the atmosphere (per wiki): 5.1e18 kg
Percent CO2: 0.001267%
Mass of current CO2 in atmosphere: 6.4e13 kg
Total oil extracted prior to 2001: 9e11 barrels (assumed to be 1/3 of total world supply, if you have better data please provide)
Total oil remaining: 1.8e12 barrels
Carbon Dioxide Mass in Oil: about 125 kg (almost a guess, please give better data ifyou have it)

So, if we burn all the available oil on Earth, we will a little more than triple the CO2 in the atmosphere (assuming that nature doesn't adjust and fix things) - in other words go from a neglible 0.001267% to a negligible 0.004%.

I'm not saying that it won't have an effect, just that it may be self limitting, and not the end-of-the-world scenario we see bandied about so often...

(Someone else want to check what happens when we burn all the coal?)

Modes of fossil preservation:

Soft part preservation - Soft tissues are preserved only under exceptional conditions. Examples include preservation of Siberian Mammoths (freezing in permafrost), Pleistocene cave faunas and older mummified remains (dessication), and insects and small animals preserved in lithified tree sap (amber). Soft parts can also be preserved after being replaced by minerals.

Original hard parts - Resistant materials such as calcium, silica, and calcium phosphate are sometimes preserved as original hard parts in shells, bones, and teeth.

Recrystallized hard parts - It is common, however, for original hard parts to be altered during diagenesis and after lithification. Unstable minerals such as aragonite will recrystallize to a more stable form such as calcite. Mineral crystals within an organism's hard parts my regrow to become larger and consolidated. Often recrystallization destroys fine, internal detail within a fossil.

Carbonization - Organic-laden hard parts and soft parts can be preserved as a thin film of organic carbon. This occurs when the organic material is preserved undecayed through burial. As heat increases throughout burial the volitile components of the organic material (N, O, H, and S) are driven off leaving a thin film of black carbon behind.

Replacement - Chemical reactions that occur during diagenesis can result in the molecule by molecule replacement of mineral for mineral or mineral for organic tissue. Replacement can often preserve exquisite detail in fossils.

Silicification - replacement of calcite by silica.

Pyritization - replacement of calcite or soft tissues with pyrite

Phosphatization - replacement of low phosphate apatite with high phosphate apatite.

Permineralization - Porous organic structures such as wood and bone are often preserved by the mineral infilling of the pore spaces. A common way of 'petrifying' wood and dinosaur bone.

Source

-----------

It would have been helpful if the scientists had provided a hypothesis on the preservation of the tissues. I googled this phenomenon and there seems to be a rather broad definition for "soft tissue". Soft Tissue, it appears, can be preserved in many ways (see above). I'm curious as to how this tissue survived micro-organisms, mineralization/calcification, carbonization, or simply, or even dehydration. How was it able to remain soft enough to be squeezed?

Simple, it takes almost as much oil to transport it from the middle east as you can bring over. The real reason gas prices are so high is because of investors taking advantage of the gullible in a speculative market

The compressibility of water is .0000034 lb/ft2. For a change in pressure of one pound per square inch, water is only compressed by about 3 one-millionths of its original volume.

However, at very large volumes, this small compression can become significant. For example, if water were truly incompressable, the oceans would stand about 100 feet higher than they do today. Compression of water in the ocean basins reduces global sea level by 100 feet.

I know the macro and micro worlds are quite different, but water does compress, and pipes and hoses do stretch, therefore there must be some delay in the propagation of the pressure wave, right?

Speaking from some minor experience with fire hoses and associated equipment, slamming valves on and off with a relatively incompressible fluid raises holy hell with fittings, pumps and hoses. It's called a "water hammer," and the effects can be costly. I'm not quite sure if this would be a problem in a microsopic array.

For older temperature proxies, the data is weaker. One of the best methods is based on a related measure. We obtain the isotope ratio from fossil samples, though, instead of from bubbles in ice cores. In this case, we get a measurement of the water temperature in which the fossil formed.

There's nice introductory material on this subject here

As for more local temperatures, there is considerable available evidence about these as well from sedimentary deposits.

Regarding lava flows, of course we have to account for continental drift, geomorphology, pole drift... It appears you are understating the difficulties of science that doesn't affect policy at the same time as you are overstating the difficulties of science that does.

The geophysical record is a complicated beast, but it's the same people getting the magnetic and the climatic data. You don't get to choose which one you believe based on how convenient they are for your political philosophy. Different paleogeophysical records have different amounts of uncertainty associated with them, but the global mean temperature record appears well resolved for the past 400Ka.

It matches the greenhouse gas signature pretty well, too, as is well-known.

Sorry for the delay in answering.

Uninformed jury, maybe, but any decent scientist would be able to explain all sorts of flaws, and in most technical legal cases this kind of explanation of technical subjects is routine, though challenging. There were enough errors in Jurassic Park it was fun to try to identify them all. They existed for the dinosaur models (e.g., brachiosaurs would not chew like a cow) and for many other things. My favourite was using the shotgun sonic source for "ground penetrating radar" at the start. Weird. There are a raft of problems described at this page by a paleontologist.

Many seemingly-plausible 2D image reconstructions (e.g., simple cut-and-pastes) also break down if you analyze the 3D geometry they are supposed to represent, and while it is easy to get them to look right superficially, making them stand up to careful analysis is hard. Even good 3D models can suffer from these sorts of problems.

Your a credit card holder..... Now go google your credit cards... DO IT NOW. Did you find it? I didn't.

To any of you that don't work on transportation networks...

Do you have the slightest idea how much shorter the trip from Europe to Africa will be? Imagine Holland for example, which exports wheat to African countries in many situations. Their cheapest way to travel is of course by road, but too time consuming and it needs a trip through Continental Europe, bosphorus (Turkey, which they don't like at all), then Syria, Libanon, Israel, Egypt, etc. Now we get a direct link from Spain to Marocco.

Here is my prediction on how things will go, if this actually is successful.
1. Marocco and Spain will get rich from customs and the rest of the two continents will depend heavily on them for trade routes.
2. The English shipping industry will loose considerable amounts of money (they already did with the England/France tunnel).
3. Marocco will once again gain political influence in Africa, and will of course probably win over Western Sahara (there's been a disbute there for a long time, in case you didn't know).
4. Someone will figure out a way to involve Linux in this, eventhough Microsoft advertisements will fill the tunnel.

In case anyone wants to know more about the geography of transportation, a good intro is located at: http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/

It's too bad Google doesn't have one of those things where you can watch everyone's search scrolling down the screen live. I bet there would be a lot of "pictures of mountains" searches right about now.

Moving cargo? unlikely. You'll put the cargo where, exactly? Use a truck, train, or other land-based vehicle. If not, use a helicopter.

Now helicopter, *that* is a crazy idea for moving cargo...

I attended Hofstra University on Long Island, NY as an undergraduate (Computer Science and Math). I was told all about how their program was one of the "top in the country", which, though I did not fully believe, trusted was at least "up there". By my second year, the school dropped down a tier (I think tier 2 --> 3 or 3 --> 4). The CS department was full of part time adjunt faculty that were terrible teachers. The equipment would have been new in 1975, and there were no real resources.

I decided to go onto graduate school at Cornell (Comp Sci), and the differences were absolutely amazing. I learned more in the year at Cornell than I did in the 3 1/2 at Hofstra.

I would recommend to anyone who can get into a top CS school to go there-- scholarships, etc to lesser (crap) schools do not help you at all. If I could go back, I wouldn't have gone to Hofstra, it was a waste of 3 1/2 years, and I'm far behind where I would have been if I had gone straight to a better school.

From the udel academic honesty policy:

Academic honesty and integrity lie at the heart of any educational enterprise. Students are expected to do their own work and neither to give nor to receive assistance during quizzes, examinations, or other class exercises.
---

My university's academic honesty policy (Here, page through to p. 54 (PDF page 47)) is much longer, but boils down to the same thing - Dont cheat, Dont help anyone else cheat, if you do we're gonna beat you to death with a textbook.

Legally (copyright law - See This site) I am not sure if code for school counts as a "work for hire" in which case the copyright is held by the school, or as an original work by an author (an "answer for a test" is considered a work for hire). I do not know how the interpretation would hold up in a legal challenge, but if you want to cover yourself you could place a notice in all of your programs claiming copyright (again, the "works for hire" clause may invalidate this. Check with a real lawyer.).

As far as academic honesty policies go, I am SURE that I am in violation of the Hofstra policy (which states that students "must not only avoid cheating, but the apppearance of cheating" - something I've been WAITING for the chance to challenge since I find it obscenely offensive to allow a professor to presume a student is cheating if their paper is too close to the edge of their desk). Certainly by making answers to lab exercises available I violate this policy.

Udel's policy seems more realistic - you are not to give or receive assistance on [any assignment]. I don't believe that you violate the spirit of this statement by making your work available, since your intent is (hopefully) not to have people grab your work, change variable names and submit it as their own.
As for violating the LETTER of the policy - intentionally or not, there is the potential for this to be viewed as "giving assistance" on an assignment. Personally, I think it is no more harmful than talking about the assignment with another student, but in the strictest sense of nearly every academic honesty policy even TALKING about the assignments can be considered giving/receiving assistance.


BASICALLY, this really long post boils down to "See what your school says, then come back and tell us (or at least me)". Whatever you do, try to get it in writing that your site does not violate the academic (dis)honesty policy of your university, that way if someone decides they dont like it in the future and you need to defend yourself against allegations of cheating/collaboration you have something tangible and not "But Mr. Foo in legal said X last year...", only to find (as too often happens) that Mr. Foo has either left or changed his position on the issue.

Best of luck

While I am sure there are plenty of universities like the ones you speak of, I know at least my school (Hofstra University (CS)) has made an attempt to bring a bit of the real world into the classroom with the Software Engineering (CSC-190) course).
While it's only one course, it is a step in the right direction IMO.

But the piece betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how foreign policy is shaped. First, the world we live in is not black and white. More often than not, we're dealing with international problems that have no clean, clear answer.

For example, it's easy to dismiss American Cold War fears of Castro's Cuba. But then, he did ask for and receive assistance from the Soviets in the form of missiles, didn't he?

The Vietnam War was by almost anyone's estimation, a wasteful, stupid blunder of immense proportions. But let us not forget that a large part of the reason the US got involved in the first place was that the Soviets were making advances of one sort or another on almost every continent. They had what the US perceived to be a client state in North Vietnam.

The Soviet Union espoused a form of government that viewed the destruction of capitalism and the bourgeous democracies as a primary goal.

US foreign policy was dictated by the overarching threat of communism. Sure, now it seems a joke - it collapsed from the inside, from its own weight. But just as sabre-rattling from the West scared the Soviets, the US was scared by Soviet threats as well.

Yes, there are other factors at work. Yes, the Soviet Union is now dead. Yes, mistakes are still being made in US foreign policy.

But the September 11th attacks didn't happen because Bin Laden was pissed off about the Vietnam War, or about the Bay of Pigs, or our meddling with Iran. Bin Laden was pissed off because we supported Saudi Arabia, a country whose rulers he sees as morally corrupt.

Our reasons for supporting the House of Saud over the years primarily stemmed from our desire to maintain stability in the Middle East. During the Cold War, the Soviets were trying as hard as possible to exert influence there, in hopes that by choking off the supply of oil to the West, Europe and the United States would become vulnerable.

We utilized balance of power politics, the same thing that Metternich used in Europe to avoid a major war for years. It's not policy driven by right and wrong. It's policy driven by expediency. It's not perfect. Hell, it's barely adequate much of the time.

But I'd much rather trust foreign policy to people who are thinking of overall balances and stability and peace, than people who would rather persue blindly optimistic policy based on idealism.

The track record of idealistic US foreign policy is pretty dismal. Woodrow Wilson got us involved in WWI too late, because he was loathe to go to war. Then his idealism failed at the Treaty of Versailles, because he went along with France's desire to humiliate and punish Germany.

Jimmy Carter was so infatuated with the idea of working with the Soviets for detente, that when they surprised him by invading Afghanistan, he launched a massive arms buildup (yes, Reagan didn't start it - Carter did) and sent the CIA in to support the mujahedin.

So while it's easy to throw rocks, and it's easy to look at history in retrospect, dealing with the day-to-day matters of international relations is a mite trickier.

The UN won't save you from terrorists. Germany won't work to protect American jobs by keeping the price of oil stable. Japan isn't going to keep India and Pakistan from nuking each other. It's a big, complicated, dangerous world out there.

Finally, the argument that Americans are being misled by the government about US foreign policy is a load of crap. American foreign policy aims are well known to anyone who takes the time to read about them.

Foreign policy is a complex topic, and you can't get a grip on it by watching E! Entertainment News. Less than half the eligible population of the US votes. News shows that stick to news get lower ratings than those that pander to the lowest common denominator.

Americans largely don't want to think about international affairs. That is a far more serious problem for the US in the long run than any specific policy blunders.

I really don't care for their choices at all. A lot of them are more like general approaches than algorthms, and I'm not at all sure they are the most influential. I think they are supposed to be "the cleverest of the common fancy methods"

Simple algorithms for common problems are much more widely used, and have far more impact and influence, but try telling *them* that!

I hope these links help. (Warning: many are technical) If anyone has personal favorites that are less dry than many of these, please post!.

10. 1987: Fast Multipole Method. A breakthrough in dealing with the complexity of n-body calculations, applied in problems ranging from celestial mechanics to protein folding. [Overview] [A math/visual approach]

9. 1977: Integer Relation Detection. A fast method for spotting simple equations satisfied by collections of seemingly unrelated numbers. [Nice article with links]

8. 1965: Fast Fourier Transform. Perhaps the most ubiquitous algorithm in use today, it breaks down waveforms (like sound) into periodic components. Everyone knows this one (or should) [Part II of my personal favorite FFT and wavelet tutorial]

7. 1962: Quicksort Algorithms for Sorting. For the efficient handling of large databases. [Definition][Basic Method][Mathworld][More technical explanation][A lecture with animations and simulations]

6. 1959: QR Algorithm for Computing Eigenvalues. Another crucial matrix operation made swift and practical. [Math] [Algorithm

5. 1957: The Fortran Optimizing Compiler. Turns high-level code into efficient computer-readable code. (pretty much self-explanatory) [History and lots of info]

4. 1951: The Decompositional Approach to Matrix Computations. A suite of techniques for numerical linear algebra. [matrix decomposition theorem] [Strategies]

3. 1950: Krylov Subspace Iteration Method. A technique for rapidly solving the linear equations that abound in scientific computation. [History] [various Krylov subspace iterative methods]

2. 1947: Simplex Method for Linear Programming. An elegant solution to a common problem in planning and decision-making. [English} [Explanation with Java simulator] [An interactive teaching tool

1. 1946: The Metropolis Algorithm for Monte Carlo. Through the use of random processes, this algorithm offers an efficient way to stumble toward answers to problems that are too complicated to solve exactly. [English] [Code and Math] [Math explained]