Domain: st-and.ac.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to st-and.ac.uk.
Comments · 222
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Re:Want some cheese with that WHINE?
Lets cut the crap and get to the heart of it. Statistics will prove MS wrong once again here. For example all it takes is a little research to find out that the
.net CLR is actually written in C++ which right out of the gate gives you slower performance by an order of (a/b) * a.(1/b) due to the dynamic late binding of C++. Okay, that's a fact, the proof can be on Professor Kyzinsk's web page.
Second we all know that in java you reference everything by a reference, unless you are working with primitives, which only a rookie does because they are about 50% slower than a pointer. With the .NET stuff you are dealing with a VC constructor that is already overloaded on every instruction.
That's right, that makes .NET very flexible because you can generate a polymorphic polymorphic constructor on a standard method. Yep, that lets you do nice things like super(super(super))). But do you want to talk slow???? It's been pretty well documented that Java will always be faster than .NET. Not to mention that .NET has no support for RMI. Heh.. can you say strike three you're out. For you non-believers here is a snippet of the code from .NET....heh..pure crap. -
I care!
Oh god no! Math is not a language. Math is not an errand boy of science either. Mathematics is the process of precise and perfect (free from contradiction) thought. I have mathematics in my mind, but what I write on paper is just symbols... NOT math. 1+1=2 are symbols that you see in your web browser, but the concept is something which exists in all intelligent humans from birth, but from birth, we do not have these names or symbols associated with the concept of 1+1=2. The concept is intuitive, in the sense of Knronecker and Brouwer's constructive mathematics. Brouwer especially, argued against the hopeless linguistic approach to mathematics, pushed by the formalists - such as Hilbert . Hilbert and followers believed that mathematics could be formalized into a language: complete, perfect, and free from contradiction. Of course, your intuitionists (mathematicians who believe that mathematics was a mental activity separate from language and symbols) warned that such an idea was a fruitless sterile effort - an impossibility.
So Hilbert proceeded with his program to formalized mathematics. He black-listed Brouwer from the popular society of mathematics, and then Hilbert failed. Brouwer claimed that a linguistic formalization of mathematics was silly, but it wasn't until quite some time later that Godel proved that Hilbert's program to formalize mathematics was absolutely impossible.
Because our schools teach us a history of wars, as opposed to a history of men who actually did society a great service, we have people who know little to nothing about what math is and why we have it and who helped along the way. Also, because Hilbert and followers were more popular than Brouwer and intuitionists, schools continued in the tradition of Hilberts inherently flawed program.
The mathematics that you were taught in school was most likely this flawed approach. That would explain why you believe that mathematics is a "language" - you were taught such. Now, it is up to you, to correct your understanding of something which was incorrectly taught to you. Taught to you as a formal language of symbols with a finite set of rules that you had to memorize -rules which govern the movement of these sybmols, rules which are then applied to the symbols, in order to generate new theorems.
Mathematics is a purely mental occupation, where you create exact and perfect ideas in your mind. These ideas, most likely, do not exist in any true sense, outside of your mind. Because we are all limited in the quality of memory, we use formal symbols to aid in our mental constructions. Because no man has ever communicated his soul, his mind, directly with another man, we use formal symbols to aid in a form of crude communication of our perfect and exact ideas.
I believe, that once people understand what math really is, they see the beauty. -
I care!
Oh god no! Math is not a language. Math is not an errand boy of science either. Mathematics is the process of precise and perfect (free from contradiction) thought. I have mathematics in my mind, but what I write on paper is just symbols... NOT math. 1+1=2 are symbols that you see in your web browser, but the concept is something which exists in all intelligent humans from birth, but from birth, we do not have these names or symbols associated with the concept of 1+1=2. The concept is intuitive, in the sense of Knronecker and Brouwer's constructive mathematics. Brouwer especially, argued against the hopeless linguistic approach to mathematics, pushed by the formalists - such as Hilbert . Hilbert and followers believed that mathematics could be formalized into a language: complete, perfect, and free from contradiction. Of course, your intuitionists (mathematicians who believe that mathematics was a mental activity separate from language and symbols) warned that such an idea was a fruitless sterile effort - an impossibility.
So Hilbert proceeded with his program to formalized mathematics. He black-listed Brouwer from the popular society of mathematics, and then Hilbert failed. Brouwer claimed that a linguistic formalization of mathematics was silly, but it wasn't until quite some time later that Godel proved that Hilbert's program to formalize mathematics was absolutely impossible.
Because our schools teach us a history of wars, as opposed to a history of men who actually did society a great service, we have people who know little to nothing about what math is and why we have it and who helped along the way. Also, because Hilbert and followers were more popular than Brouwer and intuitionists, schools continued in the tradition of Hilberts inherently flawed program.
The mathematics that you were taught in school was most likely this flawed approach. That would explain why you believe that mathematics is a "language" - you were taught such. Now, it is up to you, to correct your understanding of something which was incorrectly taught to you. Taught to you as a formal language of symbols with a finite set of rules that you had to memorize -rules which govern the movement of these sybmols, rules which are then applied to the symbols, in order to generate new theorems.
Mathematics is a purely mental occupation, where you create exact and perfect ideas in your mind. These ideas, most likely, do not exist in any true sense, outside of your mind. Because we are all limited in the quality of memory, we use formal symbols to aid in our mental constructions. Because no man has ever communicated his soul, his mind, directly with another man, we use formal symbols to aid in a form of crude communication of our perfect and exact ideas.
I believe, that once people understand what math really is, they see the beauty. -
I care!
Oh god no! Math is not a language. Math is not an errand boy of science either. Mathematics is the process of precise and perfect (free from contradiction) thought. I have mathematics in my mind, but what I write on paper is just symbols... NOT math. 1+1=2 are symbols that you see in your web browser, but the concept is something which exists in all intelligent humans from birth, but from birth, we do not have these names or symbols associated with the concept of 1+1=2. The concept is intuitive, in the sense of Knronecker and Brouwer's constructive mathematics. Brouwer especially, argued against the hopeless linguistic approach to mathematics, pushed by the formalists - such as Hilbert . Hilbert and followers believed that mathematics could be formalized into a language: complete, perfect, and free from contradiction. Of course, your intuitionists (mathematicians who believe that mathematics was a mental activity separate from language and symbols) warned that such an idea was a fruitless sterile effort - an impossibility.
So Hilbert proceeded with his program to formalized mathematics. He black-listed Brouwer from the popular society of mathematics, and then Hilbert failed. Brouwer claimed that a linguistic formalization of mathematics was silly, but it wasn't until quite some time later that Godel proved that Hilbert's program to formalize mathematics was absolutely impossible.
Because our schools teach us a history of wars, as opposed to a history of men who actually did society a great service, we have people who know little to nothing about what math is and why we have it and who helped along the way. Also, because Hilbert and followers were more popular than Brouwer and intuitionists, schools continued in the tradition of Hilberts inherently flawed program.
The mathematics that you were taught in school was most likely this flawed approach. That would explain why you believe that mathematics is a "language" - you were taught such. Now, it is up to you, to correct your understanding of something which was incorrectly taught to you. Taught to you as a formal language of symbols with a finite set of rules that you had to memorize -rules which govern the movement of these sybmols, rules which are then applied to the symbols, in order to generate new theorems.
Mathematics is a purely mental occupation, where you create exact and perfect ideas in your mind. These ideas, most likely, do not exist in any true sense, outside of your mind. Because we are all limited in the quality of memory, we use formal symbols to aid in our mental constructions. Because no man has ever communicated his soul, his mind, directly with another man, we use formal symbols to aid in a form of crude communication of our perfect and exact ideas.
I believe, that once people understand what math really is, they see the beauty. -
I care!
Oh god no! Math is not a language. Math is not an errand boy of science either. Mathematics is the process of precise and perfect (free from contradiction) thought. I have mathematics in my mind, but what I write on paper is just symbols... NOT math. 1+1=2 are symbols that you see in your web browser, but the concept is something which exists in all intelligent humans from birth, but from birth, we do not have these names or symbols associated with the concept of 1+1=2. The concept is intuitive, in the sense of Knronecker and Brouwer's constructive mathematics. Brouwer especially, argued against the hopeless linguistic approach to mathematics, pushed by the formalists - such as Hilbert . Hilbert and followers believed that mathematics could be formalized into a language: complete, perfect, and free from contradiction. Of course, your intuitionists (mathematicians who believe that mathematics was a mental activity separate from language and symbols) warned that such an idea was a fruitless sterile effort - an impossibility.
So Hilbert proceeded with his program to formalized mathematics. He black-listed Brouwer from the popular society of mathematics, and then Hilbert failed. Brouwer claimed that a linguistic formalization of mathematics was silly, but it wasn't until quite some time later that Godel proved that Hilbert's program to formalize mathematics was absolutely impossible.
Because our schools teach us a history of wars, as opposed to a history of men who actually did society a great service, we have people who know little to nothing about what math is and why we have it and who helped along the way. Also, because Hilbert and followers were more popular than Brouwer and intuitionists, schools continued in the tradition of Hilberts inherently flawed program.
The mathematics that you were taught in school was most likely this flawed approach. That would explain why you believe that mathematics is a "language" - you were taught such. Now, it is up to you, to correct your understanding of something which was incorrectly taught to you. Taught to you as a formal language of symbols with a finite set of rules that you had to memorize -rules which govern the movement of these sybmols, rules which are then applied to the symbols, in order to generate new theorems.
Mathematics is a purely mental occupation, where you create exact and perfect ideas in your mind. These ideas, most likely, do not exist in any true sense, outside of your mind. Because we are all limited in the quality of memory, we use formal symbols to aid in our mental constructions. Because no man has ever communicated his soul, his mind, directly with another man, we use formal symbols to aid in a form of crude communication of our perfect and exact ideas.
I believe, that once people understand what math really is, they see the beauty. -
Re:Nobel Prize Research Refuted?
Schwarzchild said, "So at least two Nobels could be invalidated because of new research or having awarded the prize too quickly."
No, all Nobels could be invalidated because that is the "way of science". All science has the ability to be refuted. Most of science will eventually be replaced by "newer better theory".
The main crutch of science is its reliance on the belief in the existence of mathematics, outside of the mind of the creative subject. Ever since the Greek's popularized the idea of the existence of ideal mathematical objects, outside of and separate from our minds - popular mathematics and science have held onto that belief. Note that this belief is metaphysical.
It wasn't until a little over a hundred years ago, that a few mathematicians started to object to the metaphysical belief of ideal/transcendent mathematical objects (mathematical laws, constants, etc... which forever exist, independently from the creative subject's mind). One of these insightful mathematicians was Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, who passionately argued against the use of these metaphysical beliefs in mathematics, and he went as far as to claim that the law of the excluded middle was in fact, not a mathematical law at all. It was a metaphysical belief.
Mathematics around the turn of the last century was in a crisis. Several branches of mathematics were showing inconsistencies/paradoxes - errors! Mathematics is without error, and therefore, many mathematicians were running wild, hoping that their mathematical edifices didn't crumble into dust, by the quake of another paradox. Brouwer argued that these paradoxes were the result of the use of non-constructive mathematics - he began to reconstruct all of mathematics, but the more popular David Hilbert feared that Brouwer was trying to drive mathematicians from the paradise of classical mathematics. So there was a big fight, and Hilbert ended up getting Brouwer black-listed from the popular mathematics scene. To this, Albert Einstein made the famous comment, "What is this frog and mouse battle among the mathematicians"?
It turned out that Hilbert's program was impossible and still most likely contained paradoxes.
Today, most people still use non-constructive methods in their math, and many people still believe in the existence of ideal/transcendent mathematical objects. This is why we end up with "laws of nature", in science. Time and time again, we have forgot what Brouwer was throwing such a fuss about, and time and time again, we find our mathematics and science in error.
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Re:Nobel Prize Research Refuted?
Schwarzchild said, "So at least two Nobels could be invalidated because of new research or having awarded the prize too quickly."
No, all Nobels could be invalidated because that is the "way of science". All science has the ability to be refuted. Most of science will eventually be replaced by "newer better theory".
The main crutch of science is its reliance on the belief in the existence of mathematics, outside of the mind of the creative subject. Ever since the Greek's popularized the idea of the existence of ideal mathematical objects, outside of and separate from our minds - popular mathematics and science have held onto that belief. Note that this belief is metaphysical.
It wasn't until a little over a hundred years ago, that a few mathematicians started to object to the metaphysical belief of ideal/transcendent mathematical objects (mathematical laws, constants, etc... which forever exist, independently from the creative subject's mind). One of these insightful mathematicians was Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, who passionately argued against the use of these metaphysical beliefs in mathematics, and he went as far as to claim that the law of the excluded middle was in fact, not a mathematical law at all. It was a metaphysical belief.
Mathematics around the turn of the last century was in a crisis. Several branches of mathematics were showing inconsistencies/paradoxes - errors! Mathematics is without error, and therefore, many mathematicians were running wild, hoping that their mathematical edifices didn't crumble into dust, by the quake of another paradox. Brouwer argued that these paradoxes were the result of the use of non-constructive mathematics - he began to reconstruct all of mathematics, but the more popular David Hilbert feared that Brouwer was trying to drive mathematicians from the paradise of classical mathematics. So there was a big fight, and Hilbert ended up getting Brouwer black-listed from the popular mathematics scene. To this, Albert Einstein made the famous comment, "What is this frog and mouse battle among the mathematicians"?
It turned out that Hilbert's program was impossible and still most likely contained paradoxes.
Today, most people still use non-constructive methods in their math, and many people still believe in the existence of ideal/transcendent mathematical objects. This is why we end up with "laws of nature", in science. Time and time again, we have forgot what Brouwer was throwing such a fuss about, and time and time again, we find our mathematics and science in error.
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A boson by any other name
How do they name particles? The boson is named after Bose (the physicist, not the audio system). So how is a Higgs particle different from a normal boson, and how are particle names decided?
A physicist told me that Bose deserved the Nobel, but didn't win due to politics. (In any case, it's probaly cooler to have a subatomic particle named after yourself rather than win the Nobel.)
On another note, from the article:
"Such a Higgs signature may have been seen in several unusual events observed recently at Lep. "
Yeah, such as a cut in funding. :)
w/m -
Re:Looking for the patent clerk.
Check this out: Einstein Biography and those of related scientists.
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BNF
One very important thing to remember is all the modern computer languages can be expressed with rules using BNF(Backus Normal Form). These computer languages are called Context Free languages. None of the known spoken languages are can fit into the definition of a structured language except Sanskrit.
Panini was a Sanskrit Grammarian from India in 6th century BC. Panini's grammar provides 4,000 rules that describe the Sanskrit of his day completely. This grammar is acknowledged to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all times. What is remarkable is that Panini set out to describe the entire grammar in terms of a finite number of rules. Frits Staal
has shown that the grammar of Panini represents a universal grammatical and computing system. From this perspective it anticipates the logical framework of modern computers.
Read more about Panini Panini Grammer -
Re:That's not an Archimedes original.William of Moerbeke (1215-1286) was archbishop of Corinth and a classical scholar whose Latin translations of Greek works played an important role in the transmission of Greek knowledge to medieval Europe. He had two Greek manuscripts of the works of Archimedes and he made his Latin translations from these manuscripts. The first of the two Greek manuscripts has not been seen since 1311 when presumably it was destroyed. The second manuscript survived longer and was certainly around until the 16th century after which it too vanished. In the years between the time When William of Moerbeke made his Latin translation and its disappearance this second manuscript was copied several times and some of these copies survive. Up until 1899 Heiberg had found no sources of Archimedes' works which were not based on the Latin translations by William of Moerbeke or on the copies of the second Greek manuscript which he used in his translation.
Other links of interest.....
My point was that other sources exist, I know the arabic scholars created a vast wealth of knowledge, but translations from the greek were made at much later dates than that which we base our work on.
HTH
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Re:That's not an Archimedes original.William of Moerbeke (1215-1286) was archbishop of Corinth and a classical scholar whose Latin translations of Greek works played an important role in the transmission of Greek knowledge to medieval Europe. He had two Greek manuscripts of the works of Archimedes and he made his Latin translations from these manuscripts. The first of the two Greek manuscripts has not been seen since 1311 when presumably it was destroyed. The second manuscript survived longer and was certainly around until the 16th century after which it too vanished. In the years between the time When William of Moerbeke made his Latin translation and its disappearance this second manuscript was copied several times and some of these copies survive. Up until 1899 Heiberg had found no sources of Archimedes' works which were not based on the Latin translations by William of Moerbeke or on the copies of the second Greek manuscript which he used in his translation.
Other links of interest.....
My point was that other sources exist, I know the arabic scholars created a vast wealth of knowledge, but translations from the greek were made at much later dates than that which we base our work on.
HTH
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Re:Sounds like..
why dont people get the idea "DO NOT REINVENT THE WHEEL"
Throwing out your old nasty code so you can rewrite it isn't called "reinventing the wheel". It's called "throwing one away". Yes, GIMP 2.0 might take longer to be released. Provided they don't go crazy and decide to make an "application platform" instead of the thing they're supposed to be making, it could actually speed up development, because the architecture should be cleaner and easier to understand. Besides, the GIMP code isn't nearly as nasty as the Netscape code was.
Maybe you're referring to the fact that GIMP is an image manipulation/paint program, and there are lots of those out there. Not many of them are scriptable though. Very few run on Linux. Even less are open source, and let you make your own tweaks/bugfixes/improvements. Plus it's free (as in beer -- I covered the other free in the previous sentence). These attributes together make the GIMP useful and valuable to some people. If it had no unique qualities, then maybe it would be "reinventing the wheel". But that isn't the case here. -
Re:microcore - can already do itOrthogonally persistent operating systems can be unplugged on a whim and will restart where you left off. They use similar technology to DBMS with transactions, logging, rollbacks etc. There is one called Grasshopper that was developed as a joint project between Sydney (Oz) and Stirling (Scotland) Universities.
That's old hat these days. The latest joy in systems research is nanokernels for OPJS.
Charming -
Tesla, Heaviside, etc...
this is not new, or even that uncommon. for example, people are taught of Maxwell's equations. they are really Heavis ide's equations. Heaviside was an outsider, and the Royal Academy shunned him. that's how it goes.
the real question is how far we should go to `fix' it. when have we crossed the line into re-writing history as inaccurately as it currently is? a historical text can never fully encompass a time, a person, or an achievement. it can never be fully `right.' what is the reasonable trade-off between `correct' and simple?
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Andrew Wiles information, resourcesLook here for biographical information about Andrew Wiles. Also look here for some more resources including a pointer to Wiles' original article on solving it. And a good, fairly non-technical book on the subject is Simon Singh's Fermat's Enigma.
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Links to STW Info
Like the article says, Wiles solved a special case of STW to knock off Fermat's Last Theorem. I guess this is a proof of the general version (but the article is a little vague--any number theorists around who are in the loop?)
- on Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics
- H ow it relates to FLT
- Several link on FLT and STW
- If you're at a University or otherwise have access to the American Mathematical Society's MathSciNet, there are a couple of papers
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Re:Okay if they change the title ;-)
The Brits get us colonials back in their own British Museum of Science & Industry in London, which was (and may still be) running an exhibit on the history of computers this summer when I visited. It mentions various developments in America here and there, but you'd think that computers were invented in Britan if that's all you saw.
Alan Turing devised most of the theoretical basis for computers in mathematics, but all the modern computers that we use are called Von Neumann machines for a reason.
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Re:Okay if they change the title ;-)
The Brits get us colonials back in their own British Museum of Science & Industry in London, which was (and may still be) running an exhibit on the history of computers this summer when I visited. It mentions various developments in America here and there, but you'd think that computers were invented in Britan if that's all you saw.
Alan Turing devised most of the theoretical basis for computers in mathematics, but all the modern computers that we use are called Von Neumann machines for a reason.
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And another one...
I'm currently working on CommerceServ, another open-source e-commerce system. It's a little on hold right at the moment because of coursework, but I hope to get back to it within a few days.
More info at:
http://wired.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/ ~rnicoll/commerceserv/.Enjoy!
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Human y2k check
The terminally bored amongst you can now check thier own y2k status at:
http://wired.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~rni coll/humany2k/
It'll be better soon, honest, I've only just written it!
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GEM installer package
If you want to try it out without copying 300kB of data onto each of five floppies, which the original GEM installer requires, you can try my highly unofficial installer package which you can find at my GEM page.
This currently has a silly little bug which prevents it from running of MSDOS machines, only DRDOS ones (it's that = vs == thing in the batch language), which I will fix ASAP.
You may also find the source interesting if you like hairy batch files.
GEM is scarily fast on my P90...