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The parent post should be modded insightful, not funny - the probably best known wooden display/mirror has just 830 pixels.

Yeah, let's just ask Alan Sokal about that.

Here is another text covering the basics of special relativity, it is decent for those with a passing interest in the subject IMHO.

Franz Kafka, perhaps?

For a more recent treatment, I found an interesting article/lecture notes, DeBeers and Beyond by Luis M. B. Cabral of NYU's dept of economics, describing sanctions on individuals (e.g. Israeli diamond investors and Australian Diamond Miners) and against governments (e.g. Zaire and Russia). Apparently the "diamonds are forever" slogan means don't resell your diamonds and don't use them for investment (since your sales reduce the DeBeers cartel's profits).

For a more recent treatment, I found an interesting article/lecture notes, DeBeers and Beyond by Luis M. B. Cabral of NYU's dept of economics, describing sanctions on individuals (e.g. Israeli diamond investors and Australian Diamond Miners) and against governments (e.g. Zaire and Russia). Apparently the "diamonds are forever" slogan means don't resell your diamonds and don't use them for investment (since your sales reduce the DeBeers cartel's profits).

So .. corporate trainer?? is that the new code word for 'escort' in NYC??

You're an ass. No newsflash there, since that's something you (and everyone around you) already knows. Immature to boot.

You're also probably jelous of my girlfriend getting $2,000 a day to teach people at companies like Pfizer, CS First Boston, Merck, IBM and Astra Zenica how *not* to behave like 5 year olds. It's apparently not as easy as you might think! People in high power corporations can usually be pretty immature.

At any rate, I don't blame you for being jelous. I'm am too! I'd love to get that kind of money for what I do and I feel that I work much harder than she does.

But if you're serious about getting into her line of work, you can start by getting a PhD in Psychology, then working as a VP for a large bank for about 7 or 8 years before striking out on your own.

I knew I had a winner when she chatted me up on the subway because I was standing in front of her on the 6 train reading this book. A beautiful well spoken girl who can hang with me in a conversation about artificial intelligence? I don't blame you for wanting to be me!

And to a Slashbot, it's hysterical

Like At no time did the US lend support to him, or his organization is hysterical?

Like this picture of Saddam Hussein shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld.

Or maybe this article in the Dallas Morning News of all places: Saddam Hussein: former ally, future defendant

Or this story printed in California, Mossouri, Oklahoma, and Conneticut.

I know this is offtopic but the other discussion is archived.

PS: I can prove Clinton never cheated with Monica. A google search for "Clinton cheated on his wife by getting a bj" turns up zilch.

I can see it now, next generation P2P networks where only 99% (or whatever) of the file is shared. ... Actually that begs the question, how much of a song do you have to share to cross the line into the illegal

This is actually similar to the way that the Publius censorship resistant publication network works. They split the file into a number of smaller, encrypted blocks.

Any block by itself is completely useless and cannot be considered infringing. A user simply requests the various blocks and when all are obtained, recreates the original file in whole.

Many other peer networks designed for anonymous distribution also use similar methods.

The people on the side of literary and science criticism and philosophy make some excellent points, and in Sokal's replies he gives ground and even offers retractions (usually in the form of "Oh, I never meant to say that in the first place. Here's what I really meant..." (paraphrased)).

These are complex issues. And, while the typical layman, science geek or Slashdot reader might take a cursory look at the Sokal hoax and hastily conclude that "Har! Har! Those Pomo eggheads sure got taken down a notch!" or look at it as a "score for hard science", if you look deeper you'll see that Sokal isn't standing on as solid a foundation as he'd like you to believe.

Not that he didn't have any points worth making. He did have one, relatively minor, point. Specifically, that certain authors sometimes misuse scientific terms. However, this does not mean that postmodernism, much less all of philosophy or all of the humanities are fraudulent.

Of course none of this will deter scientimists, crypto-materialists and logical positivists the world round from continuing to build monuments to Sokal anyway.

For more on this subject check out Richard Dawkin's article post-modernism disrobed

Also here Noam Chomksy reaches similar conclusions.

From Chomsky's comments...

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.

Try the Sokal articles.

It is not the engineers thinking they understand everything; it is the engineers demonstrating that the lit crits understand nothing technical, and arguing by extension that the odds of them understanding anything in their own field, absent evidence to the contrary, seem to be very, very low.

It is also a disease to think that you must be an "expert" in something to have any sort of valid opinion. The fact that dedicated attempts by smart people with no agenda and an honest intent to find meaning in postmodern lit-crit have failed is a strong indictment that can not be waved away with "Oh, they're not experts", and merely provides more fuel for the idea that lit-crit is full of crap and rather then demonstrate some sort of meaning, they must resort to ad-hominem to defend it.

Note that engineering disciplines can indeed meet that criteria; even if you don't understand math you can see there's something there. Even if you don't understand structural engineering, you can see buildings that stand vs. those that don't. (Consider the recent earthquakes in California and Iran, with similar magnitudes but vastly different outcomes.)

These people aren't making appeals to authority, they aren't standing on their "engineering creds", they're demonstrating pointlessness. It would be a fallacy to claim "I am an engineer, therefore their writing is pointless." But they are not doing that; they are saying "After a serious attempt to find meaning in these writings, we have failed and have been forced to conclude there is none." You want to prove otherwise, you need to produce the unabiguous "meanings" for these sentences; "our" side has done its work (as I am with these guys).

Indeed, if anyone is guilty of assuming competence, it is these lit folks, literally attempting to re-write the world so that engineering and science are just "another point of view", all the while willfully failing to understand why they are different.

The engineering and science toolkits are perfectly applicable to the task of analyzing lit-crit. The failures of the analysis must be laid at the feet of the lit-crit, not the techniques.

Grow up, branch out. Experts are just people who have studied something for a while, and they may yet be wrong. Nothing prevents an engineer from being an expert in something else, too. Stop pigeonholing people and stop suffering from "expert disease", OK? It's not good for any of us, because you can vote.

Try the Sokal articles.

It is not the engineers thinking they understand everything; it is the engineers demonstrating that the lit crits understand nothing technical, and arguing by extension that the odds of them understanding anything in their own field, absent evidence to the contrary, seem to be very, very low.

It is also a disease to think that you must be an "expert" in something to have any sort of valid opinion. The fact that dedicated attempts by smart people with no agenda and an honest intent to find meaning in postmodern lit-crit have failed is a strong indictment that can not be waved away with "Oh, they're not experts", and merely provides more fuel for the idea that lit-crit is full of crap and rather then demonstrate some sort of meaning, they must resort to ad-hominem to defend it.

Note that engineering disciplines can indeed meet that criteria; even if you don't understand math you can see there's something there. Even if you don't understand structural engineering, you can see buildings that stand vs. those that don't. (Consider the recent earthquakes in California and Iran, with similar magnitudes but vastly different outcomes.)

These people aren't making appeals to authority, they aren't standing on their "engineering creds", they're demonstrating pointlessness. It would be a fallacy to claim "I am an engineer, therefore their writing is pointless." But they are not doing that; they are saying "After a serious attempt to find meaning in these writings, we have failed and have been forced to conclude there is none." You want to prove otherwise, you need to produce the unabiguous "meanings" for these sentences; "our" side has done its work (as I am with these guys).

Indeed, if anyone is guilty of assuming competence, it is these lit folks, literally attempting to re-write the world so that engineering and science are just "another point of view", all the while willfully failing to understand why they are different.

The engineering and science toolkits are perfectly applicable to the task of analyzing lit-crit. The failures of the analysis must be laid at the feet of the lit-crit, not the techniques.

Grow up, branch out. Experts are just people who have studied something for a while, and they may yet be wrong. Nothing prevents an engineer from being an expert in something else, too. Stop pigeonholing people and stop suffering from "expert disease", OK? It's not good for any of us, because you can vote.

Of course, I'm not oblivious to the ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment. Professional communities operate largely on trust; deception undercuts that trust. But it is important to understand exactly what I did. My article is a theoretical essay based entirely on publicly available sources, all of which I have meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented. Now, it's true that the author doesn't believe his own argument. But why should that matter? The editors' duty as scholars is to judge the validity and interest of ideas, without regard for their provenance. (That is why many scholarly journals practice blind refereeing.) If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't? Or are they more deferent to the so-called ``cultural authority of technoscience'' than they would care to admit?

I didn't bother to read the article, but a few key words in the write-up reminded me of Sokal's Hoax.

Another widely reported exploration into post-modernist literature was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal. Sokal says, in order to "test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes."

They really tended to detract from those "tender" hobbit scenes! ;-D

R

"The report, released last week, found that of $6.9 trillion in accounting entries, only $2.6 trillion could be fully documented and $2.3 trillion in accounting entries "[were] not supported by adequate audit trails or sufficient evidence to determine their validity." Information on the remaining $2 trillion in entries arrived too late and could not be examined, but it is reasonable to assume that the $2.3 trillion in undocumented entries -- representing one-third of all entries -- is a conservative figure."

In the forward for "The Universal Computer" (by Martin Davis) there are a couple of quotes:

"If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincided with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence I have ever encountered."

Howard Aiken in 1956

Let us now return to the analogy of the theoretical computing machines... It can be shown that a single special machine of that type can be made to do the work of all. It could in fact be made to work as a model of any other machine. The special machine may be called a universal machine..."

Alan Turing in 1947

NOTE: In Mr. Aiken's defense, he is probably referring to a differential analyzer (which was an analog computer)

When I was in high school, my (supposedly) CS teacher read an article that stated, "the world would no longer need programmers". She attempted to persuade me from becoming a programmer because in the future no one would need programmers. It would be a dead profession. The year was 1994. Okay, she was half right (there won't be anymore jobs for a while, and they'll all go overseas...), but still.... You can't extrapolate. My teacher never would have imagined (or actually just read the other article) about the internet.

What if AI takes off? I think in the future even the soft sciences will become more computational. Look at fields like bioinfomatics or computational linguistics. There are all kinds of new areas opening up. The problem is that the world doesn't revolve around computers, but all the phenomena of our universe may be one really grand one. Programmers have to learn other skills. I see biologists, actuaries, and engineers (outside of EE/ECE) write code all the time. You need to attach an extra skill to your code.

All this just goes to prove, you shouldn't extrapolate about science or computing, unless your one of these guys:

Alan Turing
Albert Einstein
Kurt Godel
Nikola Tesla
Gordon Moore
Jules Verne

Of course, I'm extrapolating (and as you can guess, I'm not one of these guys...), so if you're a good philosopher you can safely ignore my post. Nothing to see here.... Carry on.

...maybe this is her attempt to show that the editorial standards of academic journals are slipping?

I mean, that sort of thing has happened before.

Mirror

http://www.scps.nyu.edu/ claims I "need a 4.0 browser to view this website" when I identify as Opera and then manages to link to two non-existing pages where I can download "proper" browsers. A classic example of a site that can't properly do browser detection and most likely hasn't had its code updated in ages.

http://www.expensable.com/ however seems to work quite nicely in my Opera 7.x for Linux.

The problem is that there are still so many sites that are borken in other browsers. (Well, one of the problems, anyway.) Not necessarily because the other browsers are bad, but because developers assume that everyone is going to have IE, think they should force everyone to use IE, or just don't bother to test at all. Off the top of my head I can think of two sites which are intentionally broken:
http://www.scps.nyu.edu and
http://www.expensable.com. (expensable.com, by the way, is an excellent showcase for bad design, but most of it you'd have to log in to see. For example, the main interface is in a popup, and if you have popups blocked, you just can't log in, and it gives you no indication why.) Try going to either of those sites with your User-Agent string set to something unusual. Sure, you and I know how to change that...but for my mom, who can't even figure out how to change her Windows desktop image on her own, that's going to be a deal-breaker.

Back in my day we didn't have this abstract stuff [introduction to a book]. No sir. No turing machines and no compilers. We had to hard code our algorithms. We didn't have punch cards either. I had to manipulate the very laws of physics. My computers were huge, took large grants from the government to build. Heck, one of my employees (a woman) had to pretend to be a man just to find work.

--Charles Babbage

Better yet, since members of the legislative assembly of the Australian Capital Territory are chosen using Hare-Clark, the ACT electoral commssion has contracted a company to build free software electronic voting and counting systems to conduct elections using the method.

PR systems like Hare-Clark are somewhat difficult to count by hand, and the most accurate algorithms, such as Meek's Method must be done by computer.

Incidentally, complexity is one of the major problems facing adoption of proportional representation schemes... the mechanics are somewhat difficult to explain to nontechnical voters, and thus debates on the issue lend themselves easily to spin and misrepresentation.

(The other major issue, of course, being that PR tends to threaten established politicians and other elites... here is an interesting site, for instance, that discusses the impact of PR in New York after communists and blacks were elected using the method back in the 1940s).

It's sad that when people tell horror stories, others reply, "Yeah, that's about normal." We should not sit idly by while companies continue to 'mistakenly' swindle consumers out of money. I have personally spent countless hours fighting with RCN (a cable/phone/internet) company to refund $182.91 that they owe me. The full story is available at my RCN sucks page. I've had to resort to telling my credit card company to refuse payment, because RCN still refuses to return the money they owe me.

Though not quite as elaborate, this reminds me of an applet a former professor of mine wrote for some amusement one day:

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/poetry2/

I stand corrected, K is not S or R. I just downloaded the demo version from here:

http://www.kx.com/download/download.htm

Strangely, the whole install comes in at only 308k. Suffice it to say that I can't imagine there being much in the way of statistical models in there.
Kdb's niche is in handling huge amounts of time series data, such as every tick of every stock on an exchange. A regular db isn't designed for such frequent small updates, and also can't optimise tasks like correlation. What you really want to do to compute a correlation is step over two arrays in parallel. With a normal database, you'd have to fetch large chunks of data from each table and then running your calculation in main memory.

Here's a good overview of array databases generally, as well as Splus and Kdb in particular:
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/shasha/papers/jagtalk.html

As far as I can tell, the thing K gets used for most is technical analysis, the strategy Malkiel criticizes but that remains popular. If you want to find all the cases where stock broke through its three-month high on a Friday after 4:00, Kdb is the way to go. Unfortunately, when I looked a few years ago, there didn't seem to be any way for a private individual to get historical intraday data in any volume except to log it yourself from a subscription quote service.

Here's the Splus homepage, btw.

What about automata, mechanical robots built from the 17th century onwards? If Asimo rates a nomination, surely some of its conceptual ancestors should be nominated too? Automata as real as R2D2 were fooling aristrocacy with their chess playing abilities, if I recall correctly.

There's a good gallery of automata here.

Fox News crew was Krusty For Congress, which mocked the perceived rightward-leanings of the channel with pseudo-news items such as "Do Democrats cause cancer?" and "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple" scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

It's not percieved, the proof is here. This is a former producer for Fox's News Watch media show giving the dirt on how the bias comes down from Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes everyday in an email nicknamed "The Memo".

Expect to see more info as "The Memo" starts getting leaked. Fox is truly biased, the proof is in information like this. For more analysis, including a rebuttal from Fox, check this out. You might also want to read this commentary over at Editor & Publisher deconstructing Fox's spin on the latest "liberal media" salvo they fired.

Not to get too off-topic, but there are also now several (increasing) prizes for beating top ranked players (well, rather, any professional player and occasionally there's a prize for beating a dan ranked amateur) in Go.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, there is an excellent, if somewhat dated, article that discusses some of the difficulties for getting a computer to play Go well. It also talks about Janice Kim, a 1 dan (professional) at the time (now a 3 dan), beating the then-best program when the computer had a 25 stone handicap. To give an idea, a 9 stone handicap in an experimental games between evenly matched professionals generates about 140 point advantage.

As I said, it is a bit dated (5 years old) and computers have improved, but we are still nowhere close to beating a professional.

Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychology at John Hopkins has written a book that investigates the links between creativity, intelligence and bipolar disorder. She explores the possibility that many famous "great minds" were manic depressive. The book is a fascinating read, though very technical in its language and with lots of charts and tables. She also covers this subject in the definitive textbook on the illness, of which she is a co-author.

Doesn't seem like anyone else has.

OOo_1.1.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz.torrent

I notice that the Minivac was masterminded by none other than Claude Shannon, according to the ad. Cool.

sorry: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

There have been several incorrect statements about how the input will work. Here's the facts that I found from a manufacturer of this device:

1) If you have small fingers you can press the inset button to get a number.
2) If you have large fingers you can press the four buttons surrounding the number.

But what happens when you hit 2 of the surrounding buttons? Or one alpabetic button and a one numeric button. This mistake could happen if you were trying to hit the letter or the number, so there is no real smarts that could be added to the device to make it "forgiving" to these types of mistakes. So, without using the device I will still have concerns about how easy it is to mash the wrong button combinations.

Also, full blown handwritting or speach recognition not panaceas, when you concider that it is not uncommon for a people to make mistakes reading their own handwritting, or listening to other people.

Although it would be interesting if hand printing and diction started being taught in school again to help with computer interfaces, I don't think that they will ever become the primary input method for a computer. Typing is faster than handwriting, and more accurate. And having cubicles full of people talking to computers all day would be too annoying (then again I've never worked in a call center :).

For cell phones, eatoni's WordWise is the best thing I have seen yet. It is a predictive method. And let me tell you I hate most predictive input methods, and usually end up switching back to multi-tap. But with wordwise you use a shift key to provide a little more info, which lets it do an incredably good job at guessing. The site has a bunch of research that shows how the number of keystrokes is smaller than both predictive and multitap methods. Plus, unlike predictive methods where your next keypress can dependant on what the current guess is, WordWise is non-modal, allowing your actions to become habituated, and thus even faster (ie you can touch type on it).

For PDA's Quick Writing is very cool. It requires you to learn the input method, just like you have to learn how to type, but is it damn fast. Faster than grafitti, and often even faster than handwriting. Think of it as cursive on amphetamines :)

- jackson

If research/rhetoric classes were only about getting all the grammar right and adequate use of a thesaurus, it'd be a killer app for the lazy and uninspired student. I honestly can't see myself or other writing teachers actually using it, except maybe as a research tool.

SCO is saying that the lurkers support them in email.

I saw his Trash Mirror at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Very cool installation, and a wonderful geek-friendly museum, worth the visit if your from or in NYC.

Mirror in progress:

http://acm.cs.nyu.edu/~tugrul/gnome2.4/

Have you read the story surrounding "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"? This physicist submitted a paper full of complete nonsense to a social science journal, and they actually accepted it! He later reveals his hoax in a later paper. Needless to say, the original journal did not publish it.

Have you read the story surrounding "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"? This physicist submitted a paper full of complete nonsense to a social science journal, and they actually accepted it! He later reveals his hoax in a later paper. Needless to say, the original journal did not publish it.

Allow me to quote the title: "Ground-breaking work in understanding of time; Mechanics, Zeno and Hawking undergo revision" I don't understand what the hell he's talking about. Either I'm not as smart as I think I am, or he's BSing his way through this. Zeno's theories are pretty well-established, you know "Man is walking across a road, if you keep on dividing the time intervals, he'll never get there." This Lynds seems to just be restating the theory with some fancy terms. I wouldn't be surprised if this were another Alan Sokal or, even worse for the realm of physics, Bogdanov brothers type of work.

Mirror in progress of those videos...

This might give me the final push in ordering a R/C heli. Any advice on starter models and how steep the learning curve is?

*goes back to playing the R/C heli mission in GTA Vice City*

If b, you might find this interesting also.

That's what inspired Alan Sokal to submit a spoof of that garbage to Social Text as genuine. Scroll to the top of Sokal's page and you'll find a link to elsewhere.org's Postmodern Generator!

In other words...

It's a nice proof-of-concept on the programming/humour side, but of little value for Literature essays."

... no duh.

Check out his cool applet.

This sort of stuff (actually much cooler, and actually working) has already been devloped.
Check out the various anonymous p2p storage projects here : www.scs.cs.nyu.edu

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