Slashdot Mirror

As a public service, here are some facts about Culberson County, Texas.

* The county seat is Van Horn.

* As you can see by the satellite photo, the rugged Guadalupe Mountains meet the barren, flat Llano Estacado.

* Culberson County includes the highest point in Texas, part of Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

* Road geeks will appreciate the significance of this fact: Van Horn is the western terminus of U.S. Highway 90.

* Due to the lack of water, tourism and mining are the only sources of income. For details on how the county's 3,407 souls bide their time while waiting for the new spaceport to be built, see the Handbook of Texas Online.

And in the tongue-in-cheek words of singer-songwriter Brian Burns:

Welcome to Texas,
Don't anybody get me wrong;
We're glad y'all came to see us,
Just don't forget to go back home.

http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/area-view.php?RECORD_KEY(A reas)=AreaID&AreaID(Areas)=7
=]

I really liked the original "WebCalendar": http://www.math.utexas.edu/webcalendar/ . Perl-based, e-mail reminders with daily to-do summary e-mail, supports iCal and VCS file import/export, a shared "corporate caelndar", Free/Busy functionality, nice interface, tooltip information drill-down, GPL'd. No direct Palm support, though. Very stable. I wish the PHP WebCalendar hadn't "borrowed" the name... :(

I had many happy client users! But, to be fair, Outlook/Exchange supplanted it. I do think the functionality of Outlook/Exchange is quite nice, and is going to be hard for F/OSS to beat.

Maorong Zou's Webcal: http://www.math.utexas.edu/users/mzou/webCal/index .html There are at least 3 programs going by the name of Webcal, but this one actually works...

Maorong Zou's Webcal:
http://www.math.utexas.edu/users/mzou/webCal/index .html

It runs on Apache and it works. Need I say more?

i've worked at the university of texas at austin in several departments for about 8 years doing technical work, and still work for the university now. i have worked for about a year and a half in a couple of startups, and done some conslutting on the side over the past 10 years, so i am not speaking totally from within a vacuum of outside experience.

i started out as a student worker, with very little (3 months) outside experience, but with a healthy curiosity and a few years of hacking on stuff on my own time. i have since graduated, been promoted 4 times, achieved approximately an 5-fold salary increase, and changed departments twice. i've had a net very positive experience working at the university, and recommend it to anyone who is not already on the dot-com-dollars treadmill.

however, i think it's a lot like any other job, for the most part--if you can stand the salary, and you like your boss and co-workers and most importantly enjoy what you do, all the piddly shit like appeasing the bureaucracy and occasionally getting trumped by a PhD kind of falls by the wayside.

since i'm basically getting paid the same thing i was as a worker at the startups i was at (minus sometimes worthless stock options and signing bonuses), i include only the pros and cons that are university specific--for instance, i've always had flex time and an extremely casual dress code (tshirts and sandals have always been allowed), both in industry and in academia. and of course, you have to evaluate your situation; i've always worked for research-heavy departments, but a job at the student union (doing the same kind of work) carries a different sort of interaction potential--not so many people who are actually into learning, more morons and bureaucrats.

pros:
- 40 hour work week. i love my work, but even more than that, i love having a life outside of work. i actually get *paid* for any overtime and it is almost never mandatory.

- great job security. if they even want to fire me for any reason not related to breaking the law, they have to give me a year's notice (they have to lodge a complaint that i am told about, and let it sit for a year before i can be dismissed).

- cool toys. we get donations of the darnedest things. i was probably the first person in my state to run linux on a pentium pro (got a prerelease box from intel to do benchmarking on. that took a researcher one day, after which he told me to do whatever i wanted with it). we have some huge clusters, and sun is constantly trying to donate interesting (if not amazing) things to us, like a cluster of thin clients and a beefy server to back them up.

- very relaxed atmosphere; there are deadlines but there aren't many of them and they're rarely hard. nobody has ever said "your failure to deliver on time is costing us $X!"

- some free tuition (currently a $6000/year value if you play the system for all it's worth), potentially leading to a degree if you want it to.

- working in an environment where the value of learning is well-understood, and continued education is encouraged and to some degree funded.
i mostly just enjoy working with smart people, and with people who are motivated to learn about solutions to their problems instead of having me solve the problems for them.

- access to all of the resources of the university: gym, olympic swimming and diving center, libraries, libraries, libraries, museums, university-only events (mo rocca once came to speak; you needed a university ID to get in, for instance. usually concerts, plays, sporting events, etc are cheaper for university personell in addition to students). as well, the university subscribes to a lot of services (lexis nexis, encyclopaedia britannica online, OED online, online magazine/research repositories, etc) to which i automatically get access.

- best 401k plan i've been offered. vests after a few years and gives a 2.3% * (years employed at any salary) * (highest average annua

My guys beat your guys by over a decade.

However -- rail guns are on the cusp of military viability. The University of Texas at Austin's Institute of Advanced Technology got 10 million dollars to develop viable rail guns. Just a month ago Janes reported that a prototype of the military rail gun had been tested, and that it was nearing viability.

UT-IAT has devised a common low-cost projectile concept for both naval surface-fire support and army non line-of-sight (NLOS) engagements using an EM gun launcher. It has a flight mass of 15 kg and contains either multiple kinetic-energy flechettes or a smaller number of sub penetrators made of tungsten. In its naval guise it has a muzzle energy of 64 MJ; a muzzle velocity of 2,500 m/s; a maximum range in excess of 500 km and an impact velocity of 1,600 m/s. From a more size-constrained land tactical platform it would be expected to have a muzzle energy of 20 MJ; a muzzle velocity of 1,400 m/s and an impact velocity of 700 m/s out to ranges in excess of 100 km.

Incidentally, a fun game, if you're ever bored, is to imagine what would happen to the human body if one were to hold and fire a rail gun (even a wimpy one that shot at a mere 1,600m/s and not at "near the speed of light"), and the law of conservation of momentum actually worked. Really! Try at parties!

Fond wishes,

Moiche

• Memory Performance on Dual-Processor Nodes: Comparison of Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron Memory Subsystem Architectures
  

OPTE is using LGL to make their graphs. Their website is at http://bioinformatics.icmb.utexas.edu/lgl/.

I have tried to get it running on Linux and FreeBSD, but it doesn't want to compile due to mismatches in their C++ classes. This is with gcc 2.95, 3.3 and 3.4. (See http://www.mavetju.org/~edwin/lgl.fail.txt for the full log)

Has anybody gotten LGL to compile on their machines? Or does know patches to get it working?

Thanks in advance, Edwin

I've got some books that I've been looking for for years and won't find anywhere for any amount of money.

Look on ABE Books and see if you can find it listed there. It's a website listing, as they say "13,000 booksellers selling 70 million books" and is a decent place to get older and otherwise unavailable books.

I picked up a copy of the 1926 printing of The Historical Atlas by William Shepherd through them for $8, just because it has some absolutely cool maps of Europe from the first millenium A.D. Most of the maps are available at the UTexas Library website but I wanted a copy to hold in my hands. The 1926 printing is significant, it is the latest edition that is out of copyright.

Actually all radio workers, including HAMs and radar technicians, are routinely taught about the short-range thermal effects of RF power.

This form compares simulated exposures with the recommended limits. It says you should not stand at less than 6 feet from an antenna transmitting 100W at 900MHz, or less than 6 inches from a cellphone transmitting 1W.

The uncertainty is about possible long-range non-thermal effects.

is better than all of these !
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/~jcorneli/a/elisp/nero.el

Easy. The US Congress simultaneously introduced a bill to repeal Lenz's Law, so it won't be a problem in the US.

For ethics reasons, I can't just put it online. It was a project for class, and I'm sure my professor is still assigning it. However, I'm also sure that if you look up my professor and ask him if anyone ever wrote a Pascal compiler in Haskell, he will happily tell you about me. It's really his decision whether or not to release it. I consider it a simple programming exercise, really. It was just something I did for class. Mind you, we didn't implement all of the language. I think we left out enumerated types and subtypes, and some other stuff. I'm pretty sure we did Arrays, but I can't remember. It's been a really long time.

Here's his webpage:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~novak/

I don't really consider it a big deal to write a compiler for the very first version of Pascal. It's not that tricky, especially when you're taking a Compilers class at the time with a good professor. It was a little interesting getting the circular type references handled in the right way, but after that everything pretty much fell into place. If you absolutely need a working compiler for Pascal in Haskell, I'll try and finish it.

Oh, and of COURSE there wasn't any optimisation. I'm no compiler writer.

... or here...

Look at a population map of china. Now look at one of the US. Half of china has a population density of less than 2.5 people per square mile, and the other half has more than 500. Getting a large section of the country wired very quickly is pretty easy. The US population, on the other hand, is spread really thin. So it's not surprising that China could overtake the US quickly.

I predict 2 years ago.

http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/Research/data/Publications/ sig03.pdf
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~nav/rtgraphics.html
http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/performanc e_tools/HighPerformanceToolsTechnologiesLC.pdf

Microsoft sued by University of Texas for blitzing the "Longhorn" name?

For goodness sake it is a CODENAME! People just reference things by the codename because it is easier.

And how exactly did "tiger direct" get "Tiger" trademarked?
Wait, on second thought, don't we all know the answer?

Is it just me? But don't you think that the longhorn icon is too close to the University of Texas' trademarked logo? Unless MS has paid UT for the use of it, I don't see how the longhorn icon that has been floating around passes muster. I mean, even look at the colors! It's all too reminiscent of U Texas. I'm sorry, every time I'll see MS Longhorn, I'll be thinking of U Texas instead and somehow tie the two. Before you go and say that the U Texas logo still looks different than MS Longhorn icon, think about the actions that MS has taken in the past for seemingly different uses: Lindows versus Windows, MS wanting to trademark "Windows," etc. I hope U Texas is looking into this to develop a case against MS.

Is it just me? But don't you think that the longhorn icon is too close to the University of Texas' trademarked logo? Unless MS has paid UT for the use of it, I don't see how the longhorn icon that has been floating around passes muster. I mean, even look at the colors! It's all too reminiscent of U Texas. I'm sorry, every time I'll see MS Longhorn, I'll be thinking of U Texas instead and somehow tie the two. Before you go and say that the U Texas logo still looks different than MS Longhorn icon, think about the actions that MS has taken in the past for seemingly different uses: Lindows versus Windows, MS wanting to trademark "Windows," etc. I hope U Texas is looking into this to develop a case against MS.

I mean something that highlights the logical structure of what's going on. The most trivial example is probably picking out sequential vs. iterative vs. conditional logic in algorithms. Of course you can do these things in LISP, via cond and such, but there's no particular emphasis on them; they just look like any other bit of LISP.

That's true for most languages. Many languages, like C, Perl, and Java, don't diffferntiate between how a condition is used. It's simply a condition. Others, like COBOL and even Common Lisp, take a more natural language approach to loops (i.e (loop for i from 1 to 10 do ...)). Python also has a natural language like loop syntax, but its loops are primarily of the "for each element in" type, which makes them only marginally more clear than C's (i = 0; i < 10; i++).

Actually, let me backtrack on that statement. Yes. Lisp's use of parens in atypical, especially when parens are typically only used in arithmetic and logical expressions in Algol like languages. That said, syntax is a pretty trivial thing especially when there's much bigger things like expressability to be concerned with.

I realise that this is necessary in a language that prides itself on simple-but-flexible syntax, and indeed that a lot of LISPers would argue that it's an advantage, but experience suggests that most programmers prefer something a bit more explicit.

Maybe you thought that, but I don't think you've had much experience using Lisp.

Consider, for example, the loop example shown here (scroll down a page or so). While the Scheme code shown has power and a certain elegance, the same algorithm could have been written significantly more clearly and concisely in a language that provides syntactic sugar for list manipulation and pattern matching.

First off, that's Scheme not Common Lisp. Scheme has some interesting and unique features that differ it from Common Lisp and pretty much other every other language out there. For instance Scheme is has first-order proceedures, where Common Lisp does not. (Symbols have both function-value and a seperate symbol-value in CLISP.) Scheme also has continuations, which I believe is a unique feature among all languages.

That said, the example shows an ass syntax, but that's not the way loops are typically done in CLISP. Instead there's widespread use of the loop macro, which has gobs and gobs of syntatic sugar. So much so, a loop statement resembles an English language sentence. The loop macro also has a handy collect mode that makes the loop return a list containing the value of the last expression on each iteration through the loop. For instance (loop for i from 1 to 5 collect i) would return the list (1 2 3 4 5). It's quite useful.

I don't know what you think counts as "most things that are in standard libraries", so I'm going to guess that you're talking about the minimalist approach taken by, say, C.

And C++.

I'm talking about the behemoth that is Java's standard library, or a rather more powerful approach like Perl's CPAN.

It's hardly fair to compare CPAN to anything. CPAN pretty much let's anyone who has thrown some code and perldoc together to submit. It's more like freshmeat than any sort of standardization group. This isn't a knock against CPAN. CPAN is great. I use it all the time. I wish more langugages had a clearinghouse like Perl. But CPAN is by no means "a standard library", since there's no standardization going on what so ever. Yes, certain CPAN packages are included with each Perl release, but not all 15 slightly incompatable MIME modules make the cut.
In fact, I don't believe any MIME module is included in the standard distribution. If you want to talk about Perl's standard library,

Stop getting your knowledge "out of the air" and look it up.

Xerox was paid a significant amount for them, including apple stock.

If by steal you mean legally came to an agreement with xerox. Then yes.

Well, I think you're right--all of a sudden you'd have millions of pissed off gamers taking a quick glance at their PC, then looking again, and thinking, "hmm, maybe America's Army isn't such a bad bet after all."

All the army guys would have to do then is promise the XBOX Live outage victims that they could play with something like this, or this, or these or even better, one of these

Conveniently leave out the part about pushups and getting yelled/shot at and you'd have hordes of HALO fanatics breaking down your doors to come join up. So hey, Al Qaeda, if you're reading this, better leave XBOX Live alone!

I think one of the better net admin jokes on this date was using the swedish chef text filter on all webpages in certain sections of the my college's site :)

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/jbc/home/chef.html

Two other systems are Otter a resolution-based theorem prover and the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover - the classic Lisp-based inductive reasoning tool. Honestly, I find the inference-based reasoning of Otter to be a lot more straighforward and intuitive.

I dabble in AI now and again so I haven't read up on everything that's out there, but in my limited travels what I haven't yet seen is a neural network implementation which can learn and grow itself.

Here in America, the right of the accused to receive a fair trial depends on the rights of media to publish this stuff immediately.

Well, far away places like Canada often have strange traditions.

The probably meant Dijkstra
but then again, they wrote the C0|\/||\/|3|\|7470r, who am I to question?

And yes, a loose, closed, set of networks refered to informally as "Duh intraweb" existed in the very late eighties.

No. It was the internet well before the "web" was just a sparkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/chris/think/Early_D ays_Of_TCP/Timeline/index.shtml

The thing gore started did not create the internet.
It EXPANDED it.
If you first built your house in the 1970's and then added an expansion to it in the 1980's, would you be correct in referring to that action as "creating the house"? No.

So is that an axiom then? That what Dijkstra said 30 years ago is true. I certainly don't see any arguments building up to your conclusion.

That would have been unnecessary, given a better citation. Which portions of Dijkstra's original argument are no longer applicable?

I seem to remember Dijkstra saying that people educated with gotos were irreperably impaired and couldn't write good code and yet there is a generation of successful coders out there who grew up with BASIC and yet had no problem pushing the boundaries with more sophisticated programming styles as fashions changed.

That was a weaker argument. Yet, as part of that generation, I wouldn't say there was "no problem". For many years I had to struggle against habits learned during that time, in order to use more structured approaches effectively. I have also seen similar struggles in my contemporaries.

The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.

Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve.

When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.

I think it has to do with the people who say non-white people are inheritly inferior and need government assistance. You know, the Democrats.

Maybe you're talking about equal opportunity. Nobody needs that, because everybody knows that even if you're born into a poor family and attend crappy schools, you've got just as much chance of getting good SAT scores and those scholorships as anybody else... so laws to level the field aren't needed.

And, heck... just because women are still earning only 76 cents for every dollar a man makes in the same job, they don't need equal opportunity laws either. The market will settle down to equality (at the current rate, in another 30 years).

The party of old money

and actors.

--- SER

Ask and ye shall receive.

Well, he did use the Encheferizer.

Fine-tuning is evidence FOR naturalism, not against it. See here, summarized here. On fine-tuning in general, see also here.

Your first link is absurd; there are virtually no reliable predictions yet about how life appeared on early Earth via naturalistic means, so there really isn't anything to "refute". If you want to talk about what happened to life once it was here, there's plenty of that, and it presents no problems for naturalism.

See above regarding your second link.

I always laugh whenever theists tell me that naturalism requires greater "faith" than religion. Sorry, but even if the naturalistic genesis of life was incredibly improbable (and there is no reason to believe it is), the existence of an eternal, omnipotent, omniscience, sentient being is even more ridiculously improbable than that, as far as I'm concerned. If somebody wants to change my mind, they should provide evidence that this being actually exists, not lame "God of the Gaps" arguments based on attacking claimed holes in naturalism.

This reminds me of the DepthX submarine which was described in a recent issue of Wired. The probe would drop down, melt through the ice, and then autonomously search for hydrothermal activity on the sea floor.

The group working on it is currently putting together a version to explore and search for life in a rather hostile water-filled cave in Mexico. They've got a progress report here, with many details and pictures.

Some other links related to a Europa probe:

http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/archive/design/europa/
http://www.cosmographica.com/gallery/portfolio/por tfolio351/pages/352-EuropaProbe.htm (neat painting)
http://www.cascadia.ctc.edu/facultyweb/instructors /jvanleer/astro%20sum01/astro101/missions_to_europ a.htm
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021102/fob3r ef.asp

Scientific articles:

The Challenge of Landing on Europa
Possible ecosystems and the search for life on Europa
others

This reminds me of the DepthX submarine which was described in a recent issue of Wired. The probe would drop down, melt through the ice, and then autonomously search for hydrothermal activity on the sea floor.

The group working on it is currently putting together a version to explore and search for life in a rather hostile water-filled cave in Mexico. They've got a progress report here, with many details and pictures.

Some other links related to a Europa probe:

http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/archive/design/europa/
http://www.cosmographica.com/gallery/portfolio/por tfolio351/pages/352-EuropaProbe.htm (neat painting)
http://www.cascadia.ctc.edu/facultyweb/instructors /jvanleer/astro%20sum01/astro101/missions_to_europ a.htm
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021102/fob3r ef.asp

Scientific articles:

The Challenge of Landing on Europa
Possible ecosystems and the search for life on Europa
others

Personally I think the Russians know a lot we don't....

I wonder if that's why the Soviets tried to fry the brains of our diplomats?

They found that just about everyone could, on a small but repeatable level, affect the output of a random number generator just by concentrating on it. (The implications of that, if true, are staggering enough alone)

Extremely careful analysis is required when looking for very small effects in the midst of large masses of data.

See for example: http://quasar.as.utexas.edu/papers/reg.pdf

Frequentist analysis breaks down in a variety of circumstances, and Bayesian analysis must be used instead. The most familiar case where frequentist analysis breaks down is when there are a very small number (or just one) event(s). But it also breaks down in these large datasets when one goes hunting for very small probability events.

Looked at informally, what is more probable: that humans have a small but significant ability to alter events by thinking about them (that evolution has somehow missed out on improving on) or that the experiments and analysis are somehow flawed? Naively, the latter hypothesis is more plausible, and the paper linked above demonstrates this to be the case.

--Tom

It seems like they need to watch this again. (In searching for an appropriate link, I also stumbled upon a strange amalgamation of Monty Python and JRR Tolkein. It's bloody hilarious if you know both.)

Look at the titties on these naked mole rats

Now available for your perverted pleasure, rubber naked mole rats!

There are plenty of good blogs by physicists, and programmers that I read regularly. I have learned about functional programming languages worth learning from them; about some interesting physics articles, etc.

It is hard to find the good blogs, of course, but once one has found one, he can go on via their blogrolls.

Some good blogs: Bruce Eckel's On the Thought, physicist Jacques Distler's Musings, Lambda the Ultimate: The Programming Languages' Weblog, cosmologist Sean Carroll's Preposterous Universe, etc.

Some of us have been working on that sort of thing for years. We master data from our tool into NIS, DNS, LDAP, SAMBA, and DHCP, and I suspect lots of places have various home grown tools to do likewise. Any large place will need things of this kind, anyway.

EDSAdmin looks very nice, though. Nice job!

What web based calendar does everyone use? We have been using WebCalendar(spiffy name eh?) and it works ok, but the interface is kinda hokie looking (plus it is waaaaay too busy). Anyone else have any preferences?

And a more detailed analysis by Jefferys.

Another, more detailed discussion by Jefferys on the PEAR experiments.

Here is Jefferys' side of the exchange, criticizing the PEAR team's incorrect use of p-values.

It says that large enough random data will eventually generate data with a specific meaning to us. Check out this paper from the University of Texas.

One of my science group teammates in the Faculty of Engineering, UNAM already worked on this phenomenon. They built an associative machine (AI pattern recognition program) using a block of memory filled with random data.

In short, Ramsey Theory is nothing but the scientific explanation behind the Bible Code: It's RANDOM DATA. Period.

Well, the guys at Princeton just earned a "-5, stupid" moderation from me. Bet they didn't predict this ;-)