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It blew my mind that you could represent things with punched holes, like they showed me. Years later, the Atari and the PC came out. That old 7090 was the one that blew my mind, but the Atari was the first one that I could actually use myself.

BTW, I'm the rugrat who dumped the pencil sharpener into the card reader... sorry 'bout that.

Now Eric, much as he was an evangelical dick at times, was no "Kroch".

And don't make me disassemble "modzilla", unless I missed a crucial CPD meeting.

Err.. there's no BSD-equivalent of GCC that I know of (though LLVM is close from what I can make of the license). Let's not argue about hypotheticals or parables.

This cluster has 70 Playstations (one article said that they'd ordered 100, but only 70 are in the cluster... Obviously the others are being used for "research".)

Many of the input accessibility features also exist in the X server itself, and can be adjusted via a tool like AccessX. Many of our users are not disabled, but use MouseKeys for convenience, or BounceKeys to compensate for their overly sensitive laptop keyboards.

Dude. *DO NOT* use patchpro. It is a complete piece of shit! Instead, do one of two things:

A) periodically download "rec+sec" patch bundles from sunsolve.sun.com and install them

B) Or, do what I do and run your own superglue patch server. This is just an nfs share with the patch collection unzipped into it, along with a cron job that updates it once a day on the server. Truely trivial to manage.

Info on superglue (written about my particular superglue installation, which you can use if you want, but I wouldn't trust some random dude to distribute OS patches!): http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/wiki/space/Superglue

To get the superglue script, read through that page, mount my nfs share, and get the superglue script. It's just a shell script. It is installed as an encap package (encap.org), so you can copy that and install it yourself.

The 'Matrix' story stolen from Sophia Stewart?

"Baudrillard's vision reminded me of another dystopian prophecy from the beginning of the twentieth century, E. M. Forster's chilling [1909] tale "The Machine Stops." The story is about a future world of billions of people, each of whom lives in a comfortable multimedia chamber that delivers necessities automatically, dispenses of wastes, and links everyone in the world into marvelously stimulating web of conversations. The only problem is that people long ago forgot that they were living in a machine."

Excerpted from "The Virtual Community", Howard Rheingold, 1993. ISBN 0-06-097641-1

this articles a good read so take the time to go through it as it summarises innovation from the early internet years to date.

innovation. The trick is finding that one crazy idea. The problem with crazy ideas, though, is that for every one good crazy idea, there's a thousand bad crazy ideas

the eternal quest for an idea. you better start with a good idea. if you don't, no matter how hard you try it wont pan out.

the Internet community back then, the key technical people, didn't want the Internet to become easy to use or graphical, ... Only smart people could use the Internet ...so we needed to keep it hard to use

what other examples can you think of right now?... only smart people can use [insert you own example]

Mosaic started with 12 users in February 1993. It had 1,000 users within three or four weeks. About 10,000 users by spring. It was up to 1 million by early 1994

Posters who question why Andreessen has such prominence should reflect on this. No Mosaic (mozilla), no Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE Based on NCSA Mosaic code base licensed from Spyglass), no World Wide Web in the early to mid 90's. No doubt someone else may have invented the browser but how much longer would it have taken?

At first that makes you like a little bunny rabbit ... Everybody wants to play with you ....within a year ... fearsome competitors shooting at your head with high-powered ammunition

Larry, Sergi do you feel the hot breath of the MS juggernaut as you approach your IPO. Will google will be a repeat of Netscape/MS tussle?

Oracle database was a huge success ... Larry's spent the last 25 years trying to come up with the next product

it sure helps when the government (CIA) is your preferred backer. Why does oracle feel the need to keep trying to re-innovate or create the next best idea?

innovation comes from companies that are 2 years old, populated by 19-year-olds ... preposterous that Marc should think that innovation is .. the province of little entrepreneurial companies.

In fact it's both. The technical revolution was spurred on the back of the transistor. This was the combined effort of Bardeen, Brattain and shockley at Bell Labs - no small comany there ... but look at Intel, though a big company now, it was started with the (not so young) Noyce, Moore and Grove. What about the Linux kernel, third person shooters and that other search engine, Yahoo?

Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts from 1810-12, signed a law that blatantly redrew districts to give his party an advantage (think 90% in one district of the opposition, 55% of your own party in the other x districts -- if you work the math out, it's a safe way for the ruling party to increase its representation.) Here's the link and a picture of the "Gerry Mander" editorial cartoon which we still remember: http://www2.uiuc.edu/ro/observer/archive/vol11/iss ue5/gerry.html

Doing this stuff by computer is -scary-. It means that it's no more than an afterthought for a lawmaker to manipulate the rules of the electoral system.

At the same time, even "safe" incumbents have to do case work and at least occasionally vote the way their constituency wants; otherwise, the media will notice, the citizens will notice, and they'll get kicked out of office. We often underestimate the intelligence of the average voter.

Doppler shift, related to Hubble's Law, except in the expanding universe, everything is redshifted, going away; if you're going fast TOWARDS something, you'll get blueshift. If the Red stop light (or stop-sign) looks blue or even amber or green, you're approaching the ultimate speed limit. Try this at home.

Kennedy: Banging Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy

Bush: Banging Laura Bush

I don't care if GWB turns up in the next Paris Hilton tapes, there's no comparison in this category.

Here's a pretty good site with coordinate data. I used it for a Catia model once. If you want data on the performance of the airfoil as well, such as polar curves, here is another site. Anyways, one thing to take note of is that not all modern airplanes use modern airfoils. For example, the Gulfstream GIV uses a modified NACA airfoil.

Not as fun as 3DOSX

I love when people start their arguments with 'I'm not a scientist but who cares, obviously I'm right anyway'. Here's a hint, you didn't spend your life studying rock formations and chemical compositions etc. in excrutiating detail, SCIENTISTS DO.

Your statements that: "When you look back at the history of that explanation, it becomes pretty clear that nobody cared much, then someone noticed plant leaves and bark patterns in some lumps of coal and everyone said "Oh, that must have been it." (HINT: Petrified forests weren't grown by stone trees)" (care to explain this incomprehensible non-sequitur?)

and:
"...the "fossil" explanation becomes pretty unlikely. When you look back at the history of that explanation, it becomes pretty clear that nobody cared much.." borders on the idiotic. Like I said before, people devote thier lives to the study of coal fossils, there are whole museums centered around the fact. Oh silly me though, I forgot, it's you the non-scientist who's the expert on these things.

What really irritates me about posts like yours is not the fact that you support a "crazy idea" in science as a pet theory; there's no problem with that. It's that you're so blinded by your own ignorance on the basic science underlying the theories you wish to supplant and simultaneously so laughably self confident despite that ignorance, that you end up making yourself look like an ass and making your theory look well...crazy.

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers, such as HTTP or Web servers. A plain HTML document that the Web daemon retrieves is static, which means it exists in a constant state: a text file that doesn't change. A CGI program, on the other hand, is executed in real-time, so that it can output dynamic information.

For example, let's say that you wanted to "hook up" your Unix database to the World Wide Web, to allow people from all over the world to query it. Basically, you need to create a CGI program that the Web daemon will execute to transmit information to the database engine, and receive the results back again and display them to the client. This is an example of a gateway, and this is where CGI, currently version 1.1, got its origins.

Come on, these days you should implement things as Java web services, or maybe a simple LAMP solution using MySQL and Perl, Python, or PHP.

CGI is just so mid-90s!

huh. the guy who initiated and led the Blue Gene project in the beginning was Marc Snir. But then I believe some major fallout happened and it underwent major technical and managerial changes. oh well.

It seems like some scoundrel still has a lyrics site specializing in both classical and modern dance music here.

Blatent theivery!!

No game yet but some folks are working on a Quake 3 map viewer for The Cube () at the Beckman Institute. The cube is a six sided room that closes in upon entry, while 3D images are projected on all sides. With about 400 square feet to move around in, and active 3D glasses this is about the most convincing holodeck I have seen.

The movies have been updated since I last looked, and I didn't immediately see one of my favorites where an inexperienced player dons the headset, walks close to an in-game ledge, and literally falls down when his character does. Quite immersive, apparently. :)

The movies have been updated since I last looked, and I didn't immediately see one of my favorites where an inexperienced player dons the headset, walks close to an in-game ledge, and literally falls down when his character does. Quite immersive, apparently. :)

But in brief, it appears to be a problem about the "topology of real algebraic curves"

"Topology" is all about the shape of things. e.g a donut and coffee cup are the same from a topological viewpoint because you can transform one to the other without tearing the donut or coffee cup. There is probably lots of good introductions on the web.

As to "real algebraic curves", here is a link:

I quote:

Curves that can be given in implicit form as f(x,y)=0, where f is a polynomial, are called algebraic. The degree of f is called the degree or order of the curve. Thus conics (Section 7) are algebraic curves of degree two. Curves of degree three already have a great variety of shapes, and only a few common ones will be given here.

Basically polynomials of several variables is what they are, as far as I can tell. y = x^2 (which is a parabola) is a simple example.

So Hilbert was asking about the "shape" of algebraic curves (I think).

Now that was just the first part! I am not really sure the second part is about ...

The link again is

here

I welcome corrections from anyone with more math knowledge.

Paranoid about losing that ranking, I have always been careful to have any other pages I create (on various servers in different domains) point back to that home page. Now, it would appear that doing so is harming me. A search on my last name alone point to a site that I just happened to visit and put my last name on. Including both first and last names goes to some other site.

I think this pretty much rules out specific highly-commercial keywords as the ones being targeted by google.

The same applies to chemical waste which is produced in levels that are orders of magnitude higher than nuclear waste. Anybody cares about it? And nuclear waste will be safer with time due to the decay process while chemical waste will be in most cases toxic forever.

Every year 300 million tons chemical waste is produced in the USA while only total 30000 tons of nuclear waste (and only a small fraction is high-level waste which is very dangerous) link. Surely, some nuclear waste is more dangerous but there is a lot less of it.

[Someone who's frustrated with Linux boxes hanging all the time.]

The signature refers to the Doppler effect as it applies to light.

Thats muons, not protons.

Actually...
There is no reliable way to link an IP to physical locatoin in a halfway decent amount of time.

There is a number of projects, such as this one(there are many better projects out there, but this was one of the first I googled.)

You can generally get an area, but not with certain ranges, and certainly not specific addressing without either a re-write of a majority of hte structure of the internet, or mass forced cooperation with isps(would this even be feasible?)

I see 911 service in the future if VOIP continues to proliferate as more of an "emergency box" system such as what is used on many college campuses(push the blue button and it will beep/flash and campus police will come) and(or?) something similar to the 911 buttoms many senior citizens have for when they fall down in the bathtub.

hm... will be interesting to see how it turns out regardless of how they go.

or however u do that...

what about the one and only paper he wrote, on pancake networks.

Lockwood is a smart guy. When I was an undergrad, I had him as a professor when he was at U of I (I was surprised he wasn't there anymore). ECE 291 was one of the coolest classes offered. I haven't read his paper yet, but it looks like it's a two-edged sword that could be used to restrict transfer of any data, and someone still has to program the filter...

Hmm, guess this means my submission a couple hours ago won't go through (dangit, Wired!)...

Here is the official press release and the list.

There is a lot of good points to note all around. The first is the G5 Terascale cluster at Virginia Tech at #3 (10.28 Tflops/s, 2200 CPU, Infiniband) is the first academic computer to break 10 teraflops/s. This extra performance was promised at Mac OS X Developer's conference last month. Not to sure if the price is a testament to Infiniband ($1.5 million cabling, cards, and routers) or the Macs ($4.2 million list).

Good thing too because in a surprise move the NCSA cluster made the list at #4 (9.82Tflops/s, 2500 CPU, Myrinet). This cluster is built using Dell's running Pentium 4 XEONs and Red Hat Linux! One subtle point to note is that they didn't get all the systems online in time (there should be 2900 CPUs, not 2500). I bet some programmer at PSC and an ex-Chief Scientist of SDSC is appreciating having a hand in edging out NCSA for #3--not to mention Apple beating Dell for #3.

The fastest Itanium cluster is at #5 (8.63 TFlops/s, 1936 CPU, Quadrics) which is looking like the odd man out boxed in by a PC based systems using Myrinet, the P4 Xeon above, and the most powerful Opteron system at #6 (8.05 Tflops/s, 2816 CPU, Myrinet). Another point of similarity:did I mention it's also using Linux?

And finally, It's easy to overlook #73, a single compute node of BlueGene/L (1.44 Tflops/s, 1024 CPU). Imagine 128 of these connected together and you have something that will easily take #1 when it's completed even if we handicap it 20-40%. As noted on SlashDot earlier, this will be running Linux.

Alas, I am probably too late to become modded up. Oh well.

I use Epkg, an Encap-compliant manager, along with a typical install command of "PREFIX=/temp/usr/local make install", and then I move the contents of /temp/usr/local into /usr/local/encap/[package name]-[package version], then typed "epkg [package name]". All Epkg does is manage symlinks. There's no database to corrupt or dependencies to worry about.

Almost all programs that can be installed with the "./configure ; make ; make install" dance work fine with Epkg. Gnome is an exception, with that miserable Scrollkeeper nonsense. I've since said "to hell with it!" and dumped Gnome into /usr/local/gnome to solve the problem.

I can completely understand where you're coming from, though. LFS is *definitely* high-maintenance. If I didn't have so much free time, I wouldn't bother with LFS and would use Slackware instead.

Before Google, before WWW, there was...
Archie - the first search engine

Just to elaborate a little on why the photographer is paid so much:

• Equipment: cameras are not cheap. You could easily bring $20,000 in equipment to a wedding. You can't just go in with a single camera, you know... you need AT LEAST three. Two always on you, with different lenses, etc, so there's never a risk of needing to change film at a critical moment. You also take pictures of important events using two cameras, in case one malfunctions, the lab screws up the processing, etc. A third camera is in the car in case on of the two primaries fails. Of course, that's the simple scenario, assuming you're just shooting one type of film. Add to that digital, or slides/prints, and you need more equipment. Want decent lighting? Have an assistant (who has to be paid) follow you around with a second flash (wireless). Oh, and you probably have to buy (no, not rent) your own tux. Furthermore, you're providing the film.
• Experience: knowing how to pose the bride isn't easy. I'm always amused when watching them get arranged. There are things that the average person just doesn't see, like position of hands, what's in the background, lighting (and proper placement of shadows!), etc.

Of course, I'm slightly biased, having a father who is a pro photographer. I'll acknowledge that there are many crappy photographers out there. But it's an art, so don't attack the entire field.

Finally here's my proof that I am qualified to make the above statements. ;)

UIUC engineering grad here...

I don't know if you intentionally left this out or not, but there is yet another higher quality computing system on campus. The Engineering Workstations (EWS for short), have far more reliable services than the campus wide service as well. At the time I was there (96-00) they were a mix of Solaris, HPUX and AIX, although I have heard this is changing. I did have the pleasure of using the CS department computer systems as well (did a minor in CS) and I can't say that I saw that much difference between the CS and engineering computers, other than the CS labs having a lot more horsepower...

The above posting is somewhat more insightful that it appears at first glance. Consider this: I have yet to attend or visit an institution where the CS/EE departments did not have their own computing services departments.

I can quite specifically point to CRL at UIUC and CTS at Wash U. Both are "wholly owned subsidiaries" of their respective CS departments (although CTS provides support for other deparments...for a price). And both are far more competant than any of the other IT staffs at their institutions.

Now, why is this interesting? Think--CS and EE departments make much heavier use of Unix (especially free Unix) than other departments. Their respective IT departments manage to keep these abused and Unix-heavy infrastructures up and running far more effectively with far less fuss than the underutilized and MS-heavy infrastructures of other departments (actually, to be fair, the Olin B-School does have a better-than-average IT support staff. Nowhere near as good as CRL or CTS, but better than average. Something to do with hiring a bunch of employees with a 25% turnover rate).

Let's summarize the interesting facts:

1. CS and EE departments make punishing use of their computing resources.
2. CS and EE departments tend to be Unix-centric, especially Linux and BSD (although HP and Sun do have a strong yet diminishing presence).
3. As a result, CS and EE departments tend to have thier own, separate facilities.
4. As a result, CS and EE departments cannot take advantages of the enormous economies of scale inheirent in large-scale administration (it should be roughly as easy to admin 1000 machines as 100 or 10000).
5. Despite this, CS and EE departments tend to enjoy fairly reliable, trouble free computing.
6. In contrast, other departments suffer from poor-performing, unreliable computing.

If this is computing with no QC, no support, and no accountability, someone needs to sue those bastards pushing 6-sigma for screwing everybody else over.

The above posting is somewhat more insightful that it appears at first glance. Consider this: I have yet to attend or visit an institution where the CS/EE departments did not have their own computing services departments.

I can quite specifically point to CRL at UIUC and CTS at Wash U. Both are "wholly owned subsidiaries" of their respective CS departments (although CTS provides support for other deparments...for a price). And both are far more competant than any of the other IT staffs at their institutions.

Now, why is this interesting? Think--CS and EE departments make much heavier use of Unix (especially free Unix) than other departments. Their respective IT departments manage to keep these abused and Unix-heavy infrastructures up and running far more effectively with far less fuss than the underutilized and MS-heavy infrastructures of other departments (actually, to be fair, the Olin B-School does have a better-than-average IT support staff. Nowhere near as good as CRL or CTS, but better than average. Something to do with hiring a bunch of employees with a 25% turnover rate).

Let's summarize the interesting facts:

1. CS and EE departments make punishing use of their computing resources.
2. CS and EE departments tend to be Unix-centric, especially Linux and BSD (although HP and Sun do have a strong yet diminishing presence).
3. As a result, CS and EE departments tend to have thier own, separate facilities.
4. As a result, CS and EE departments cannot take advantages of the enormous economies of scale inheirent in large-scale administration (it should be roughly as easy to admin 1000 machines as 100 or 10000).
5. Despite this, CS and EE departments tend to enjoy fairly reliable, trouble free computing.
6. In contrast, other departments suffer from poor-performing, unreliable computing.

If this is computing with no QC, no support, and no accountability, someone needs to sue those bastards pushing 6-sigma for screwing everybody else over.

CGI == "Common Gateway Interface", i.e: the method the browser uses to do a POST to the webserver. To quote from a website that is presumably an authority on the subject, "The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is a standard for external gateway programs to interface with information servers such as HTTP servers." It's the CGI programs themselves that are run on the server. Maybe you missed this in your rush to criticize my post?

My original point being that how would MS break IEs ability to use Google (without being completely obvious)? By corrupting it's ability to use HTTP POSTs?

There's a solution to that if you're using the Cisco VPN3000 client: this mailing list posting by a friend of mine explains how to make it work.

Let me know what isn't true?

Mosaic was paid for by the tax payers.
Mosaic, being public funded, was free to anyone, including microsoft, and netscape.
Netscape didn't have any special rights to coding web brosers anywhere just cause they were the same people, in part, who were already compensated for mosaic.
A computer should be able to browse a network, and see the things the user has rights to see.
The internet is a very large hetrogenious network.
Information is stored on networks, in a manner not totally unlike any other storage device.
Part of the job of an OS is to allow users to access and interact with the data they have rights to.
Things like how information is retrived, and rendered, are part of what the OS is responsible for.

It's also worth noting, that I think I remember using netscape on xterminals before Winsock was popular and IE was even anything. I know windows is so different from what they were used to. It's tempting to tackle the easy problems first. But had netscape tackled the hard problem first, and well. Then, if they'd managed to leverage that success, stay out in front and develope new markets. They might have owned the internet on windows. That would have been a pretty stiff challenge, but one presumes they didn't lack talent. They were happy with the lead they had, and watched as more talent, if in numbers rather than density, and superior captital ground them into dust. But ultimately, they let it happen. After all, they had their IPO money, they were rich, why continue to bust there balls when they can just kick back?

See coding, unlike makeing cars or microprocessors, has a very low barrier to enter the market. It's why netscape got anywhere, after all. But they didn't appreciate, that this also applied to rivals, fierce competitors, like Microsoft. They could have been Yahoo, Google, hotmail, Real Networks, Outlook and Exchange all roled into one. Maybe even competeing with Novell, and becoming an ISP. It's hard to say how that route might have taken them. Harder still to imagine a person who could have stewarded a company through the explosive growth they could have had, if they could make better choices. Microsoft might have been beaten in to a technology deficit deep enough that they would be compelled to buy Netscape, and publicly enough that the government would nix the deal. But none of that happened, because they didn't know how good their idea was, until everyone else did too.

A timeline:
X-Mosaic (I think the first time I saw it was mid/early '93)
Trumpet Winsock
Mosaic 1.0 Final Nov 1993
Mosaic first good implimentation of tables in late 1994
Netscape 1.0 Final Dec 1994
Netscape 1.1 Final Apr. 1995
IE 1.0 Final Aug. 1995
Mosaic 2.0 Final Nov. 1995
IE 2.0 Final Nov. 1995
Mosaic 2.1 Final Jan. 1996
Netscape 2.0 Final Mar. 1996
IE 3.0 Final Aug. 1996
Netscape 3.0 Final Aug. 1996
Opera 2.1 Final Dec. 1996
Mosaic 3.0 Final Jan. 1997 (Mosaic Ends)
Netscape 4.0 Final Jun. 1997
IE 4.0 Final Oct. 1997
Opera 3.0 Final Dec. 1997
Netscape 4.5 Final Oct. 1998
Opera 3.5 Final Nov. 1998
IE 5.0 Final Mar. 1999
Opera 4.0 Final Jun. 2000
Netscape 6.0 Final Nov. 2000
Opera 5.0 Final Dec. 2000

Notice, that even though they came late, VERY LATE, to the party, Opera managed to carve out quite a niche for themselves.

• Composite files built at request time,
• The results of running a script,
• Interaction with a web application 1 2 3 4,
• Remote procedure calls and object access 1 2,
• Instant messenger communications, and sometimes
• Static files.

...what's on the other side? Why isn't that part of the Universe?

It is part of the Universe.

Imagine a square sheet of rubber (so we can stretch, bend as we like). It has a finite area, and four edges. We choose one edge and glue it to its opposite edge. Now if you start from one point and draw a line in the right direction, you'll get back to where you started. Otherwise you'll just spiral around until you hit an edge.

Now we take the two circular edges and we glue them together, giving a donut (a torus). Now if you go in [what you see as] a straight line in any direction, you'll never reach an edge. The surface of the donut doesn't have any sides in the way the original sheet of rubber did, but it still covers a finite area.

N.b. The problem with this example is that it's difficult to think of just the surface of the donut, without imagining it being 'in' some larger space such as the 3D world.

Now if you want a headache, try to imagine doing this starting not with a square, but rather a cube, and joining opposing faces together. The first pair is easy - you get a sort of square donut shape. The second pair gives you a donut with an inner donut removed - something like the inner tube in a tyre.

The third one is the real bugger - you have to imagine joining the inner surface of the tube to the outer one, without going through the tube. I've seen a video that included a representation of what a similar manouvre (sp?) would look like in the 3D world that the cube started in, and I still can't fully get my head around it.

No matter what direction you moved in this weird twisted-cube-thingy, you'd never see an edge. It would give you the same effect as if there were an infinite array of cubes , with the exact same thing happening in each one. When you reach the edge of one cube, you ust move into the next one ... which is identical to the last one.

This article says that the Universe is doing the same sort of thing, only starting with a dodecahedron instead of a cube (i.e. 6 pairs of faces instead of 3). Don't seriously try to picture this, or your head'll explode ...

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is, as another poster said, located in both cities. But the bars which implement the system that guy was talking about are all in Champaign.

caveQuake

The guy that did that work is one of the princples of Visbox, a company that does high end displays. They were at Siggraph this past year.

Nobel Prize winners should be people whose invention "benefitted the whole mankind". Did these guys theoretical research achieve that?

Do you think the experimentalists would be doing anything other than flailing about without great theorists like Anthony Leggett? In an awards ceremony for Tony in the physics department at UIUC a few months ago, I heard experimentalists telling of how important their interaction with him was. How most of their major contributions to science stemmed from discussions with him. How he'd politely tell them when they were wasting their time (but were welcome to continue, since they might discover something new and unexpected, like that the 0th law of thermodynamics was wrong).

When the condensed matter theory group was moved to a different building, the experimentalists were happy that they'd have theorists walking past their labs. There was even a video [warning, 156M] of them trying to catch the theorists in big nets and force them to do calculations.

When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?

Physics has always been about understanding. From my theorist perspective, it pisses me off to see all the experimentalists that get PhDs without having the slightest clue of what they've done. They have something strange happen in an experiment, manage to reproduce it, and they've gotten themselves a PhD. It's then a theorist's job to figure out why. Of course, I'm exaggerating here. I know several good experimentalists.

Now for my own little rant:
Why does everyone constrain physics into Theory and Experiment? What about those of us that do Computational Physics? You know, like lattice QCD? Our work is necessary and important, but I can guarantee it'll never get a Nobel.

Hrmm... now I'm gonna have to listen to one of my friends say "My advisor got the Nobel Prize and yours didn't."

Nobel Prize winners should be people whose invention "benefitted the whole mankind". Did these guys theoretical research achieve that?

Do you think the experimentalists would be doing anything other than flailing about without great theorists like Anthony Leggett? In an awards ceremony for Tony in the physics department at UIUC a few months ago, I heard experimentalists telling of how important their interaction with him was. How most of their major contributions to science stemmed from discussions with him. How he'd politely tell them when they were wasting their time (but were welcome to continue, since they might discover something new and unexpected, like that the 0th law of thermodynamics was wrong).

When the condensed matter theory group was moved to a different building, the experimentalists were happy that they'd have theorists walking past their labs. There was even a video [warning, 156M] of them trying to catch the theorists in big nets and force them to do calculations.

When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?

Physics has always been about understanding. From my theorist perspective, it pisses me off to see all the experimentalists that get PhDs without having the slightest clue of what they've done. They have something strange happen in an experiment, manage to reproduce it, and they've gotten themselves a PhD. It's then a theorist's job to figure out why. Of course, I'm exaggerating here. I know several good experimentalists.

Now for my own little rant:
Why does everyone constrain physics into Theory and Experiment? What about those of us that do Computational Physics? You know, like lattice QCD? Our work is necessary and important, but I can guarantee it'll never get a Nobel.

Hrmm... now I'm gonna have to listen to one of my friends say "My advisor got the Nobel Prize and yours didn't."

Nobel Prize winners should be people whose invention "benefitted the whole mankind". Did these guys theoretical research achieve that?

Do you think the experimentalists would be doing anything other than flailing about without great theorists like Anthony Leggett? In an awards ceremony for Tony in the physics department at UIUC a few months ago, I heard experimentalists telling of how important their interaction with him was. How most of their major contributions to science stemmed from discussions with him. How he'd politely tell them when they were wasting their time (but were welcome to continue, since they might discover something new and unexpected, like that the 0th law of thermodynamics was wrong).

When the condensed matter theory group was moved to a different building, the experimentalists were happy that they'd have theorists walking past their labs. There was even a video [warning, 156M] of them trying to catch the theorists in big nets and force them to do calculations.

When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?

Physics has always been about understanding. From my theorist perspective, it pisses me off to see all the experimentalists that get PhDs without having the slightest clue of what they've done. They have something strange happen in an experiment, manage to reproduce it, and they've gotten themselves a PhD. It's then a theorist's job to figure out why. Of course, I'm exaggerating here. I know several good experimentalists.

Now for my own little rant:
Why does everyone constrain physics into Theory and Experiment? What about those of us that do Computational Physics? You know, like lattice QCD? Our work is necessary and important, but I can guarantee it'll never get a Nobel.

Hrmm... now I'm gonna have to listen to one of my friends say "My advisor got the Nobel Prize and yours didn't."

Look at where they were when they did the research they got the prize for.

"The decisive theory explaining how the atoms interact and are ordered in the superfluid state was formulated in the 1970s by Anthony Leggett."
(http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/2003/press. html)

If you look at his CV you will see:

1967-1983 University of Sussex.

(conflating lectureships and professorships here)

So in the 70s, when he formulated his theories, he worked in the UK. Brit.

What's also astonishing is that one university (Dept of Physics and the Beckman Institute at University of Illinois at Urbana) can claim TWO nobel prizes this year -- Paul Lauterbur (Medicine, for MRI) and Tony Leggett (Physics). Quite impressing.

What's also astonishing is that one university (Dept of Physics and the Beckman Institute at University of Illinois at Urbana) can claim TWO nobel prizes this year -- Paul Lauterbur (Medicine, for MRI) and Tony Leggett (Physics). Quite impressing.