Slashdot Mirror

It's not plagiarism when you cite your sources.

http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/

I looked into this when crafting a living will. I want my body to go to science and have a use. This is one.

What happens to my body after it is donated?

Once we receive a body, we assign an identifying number and we place it at the Anthropology Research Facility (ARF), our outdoor laboratory. The body may be used in a decomposition project or not. Regardless, all of donations go to the ARF and are allowed to decompose naturally. Once the body is skeletonized, we recover the skeletal remains and clean them further. The cleaned bones are accessioned into the Bass Donated Skeletal Collection and are labeled with the identifying number. At this step, the remains are inventoried, measured and other data are collected. Once in the collection, all skeletal remains are utilized by researchers from varying academic and medico-legal institutions.

Why wouldn't you need length? You're sorting on length. You need something to hold the spaghetti strands in an upright position, so you need volume. Volume increases faster than the material needed to bound it does.

http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross...

Surface area = 6 * length^2

Volume = length^3

The more hardware you add to make the cube bigger, the much more spaghetti you can sort. The hardware increases less than O(n).

Even if other hardware components increase at O(n) (not sure of that even), because your container hardware increases at less than O(n) your total hardware increases less than O(n). You get an advantage because nature increases volume faster than its bounding lengths.

Related: Ultimate Free Lunch

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

You are about to be schooled becasue I am really tired of the meme the south has been trying to shove down everyone's throat.
Here are some excerpts from the Declaration of Causes of Secession. Its all about slavery.
The real question is, can you accept new factual data and change you view? That is something only a thinking person can accomplish, so I have my doubts.

Georgia:
" For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

Mississippi: Note the sue of the term 'products'
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin"

South Carolina:
"But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation."

texas

She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-w...

Those aren't even the most disturbing parts of the declarations of secession
Consider yourself schooled and I look forward to your apology and forming an actual fact based opinion.
Or digging you heals in and rebutting the the brilliant rebuttal of 'Nu-uh'

Here are some excerpts from the Declaration of Causes of Secession. Its all about slavery.
The real question is, can you accept new factual data and change you view? That is something only a thinking person can accomplish, so I have my doubts.

Georgia:
" For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

Mississippi: Note the sue of the term 'products'
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin"

South Carolina:
"But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation."

texas

She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-w...

Those aren't even the most disturbing parts of the declarations of secession
Consider yourself schooled.

Thank you for illustrating my point with a real life example.

I'm pretty sure I was just hallucinating webpages like these:
http://edugreen.teri.res.in/explore/renew/biomass.htm
http://www.seai.ie/Archive1/Files_Misc/REIOBiomassFactsheet.pdf
http://www.ratical.org/renewables/biomass.html
http://www.biofuels.fsnet.co.uk/challenge.htm ["The author of this paper, following a long-standing interest in renewable energy, obtained a small Sustainable Communities Award from the Millennium Commission in 1998 to study the viability of electric vehicles and, subsequently, sustainable transport fuels. As a result of this research he was one of the first people in the UK to be awarded a Millennium Fellowship."]
http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/etcfc/docs/Biodiesel-CleanGreen.pdf

etc.

I must have also had two more bouts of weekly hallucinations going on for 4 months of a semester each, in which self-declared environmentalists were lecturing me and the rest of a class of 30 to 100 students on the environmental benefits of biofuels without mentioning even once that they compete with growing food. Are you kidding me? It we've had more than our share of environmentalists protesting against *delays* in the large-scale application of biofuels in Germany and enthusiastic exclamations of biofuel being used in lorries, ships, airplanes etc. as a sign of a green future. The Green Party being first among them.

Well, that depends on whether it's a "first generation" star that began as just hydrogen or a second,third,fourth,etc. "generation" star that uses the gas from a previous star's supernova gas cloud thus incorporating some of the elements created during said supernova.

The Sun is still mostly hydrogen and helium but there are trrace amounts of other elements: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/sun/composition.html

Since the Earth has elements that aren't hydrogen and helium, we know our Sun isn't a "first generation".

Wow! Linking to a slashdot comment to prove a point? What? Is Wikipedia too good for you?

Photons have no "rest mass".
But as every photon is moving it has 'kinetic' mass, h*v / (c^2).

Also, the slashdot comment indicates 'kinetic mass', but doesn't survive a unit check... Wherever this equation came from, its wrong.

Here are some resources for you:
http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/09/q-how-can-photons-have-energy-and-momentum-but-no-mass/
http://pveducation.org/pvcdrom/properties-of-sunlight/energy-of-photon
http://web.utk.edu/~cnattras/Phys250Fall2012/modules/module%201/photons.htm
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html

The simple fact is that, had the North lost, or not fought, millions of people would have been doomed to a life of slavery.

Complete and utter propaganda, entirely contradicted by the facts.

Err, what? The seceding states publicly declared that they were fighting to defend slavery. South Carolina goes on at length complaining about the northern states exercising their states rights and basically not enforcing fugitive slave laws. Jefferson Davis and his VP Alexander Stephens were very clear that slavery was the most important part of the Confederacy. Slaves in 1860 were the largest form of wealth in the US. And slave-based agriculture was extremely profitable.

Slavery ended in the rest of the world for that reason, not because they had bloody civil wars all over the world.

Nonsense. Slavery ended in the rest of the world for 4 major reasons:
1. Many religious groups had declared slavery to be morally evil. Right or wrong, that was a big influence.
2. Wage earners and their employers didn't want to have to compete with slaves and their slaveholders. Slaves have always been cheaper than wages.
3. Slaves revolted and/or escaped. Sometimes they won (e.g. Haiti), but even if they didn't win they raised the cost of holding slaves.
4. Governments who's ideology promoted equality (which the US kinda did, but Revolutionary France is a better example) banned slavery in order to be consistent.

The reality of the Civil War was a *lot* more complicated. Slavery was only the third or fourth most important issue until Lincoln turned it into the moral justification for the war. Which was a brilliant PR move on his part, since even a century later we're believing in it.

The difficulty with your version of history is that it is directly contradicted by documents and statements made before and during the Civil War.
Here are Declarations of Secession from the four States that decided to explain their reasons

I could give you an almost endless list of primary sources to dig through,
but if those declarations aren't convincing, I don't know what else would do it.
Anyone who says that slavery was not central to the issues of the Civil War is engaging in historical revisionism.

And, Lincoln didn't really want to end slavery in the South, his plan was to prevent any new States from having slaves, thus allowing slavery in the South to die out in its own time.

If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save Slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy Slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

Ignore whatever you learned growing up and go straight to the sources.

Here's another example:
http://web.utk.edu/~bursar/Fall2012FeesUG.pdf

So for that school, in-state is $9100 a year, while out-of-state is $27600. That's in-line with the grandparent poster's estimates.

Here's another example:
http://www.utexas.edu/tuition/costs.html

So for that school, in-state is about $9800 a year, while out-of-state is about $32000.

Both of these ignore the possibility of a community college for the first two years of school, which can save a lot of money for someone working his or her own way through college.

There was a huge stink about this when the RHIC was brought on line (stranglets will eat Long Island !!!). This report covers the basics.

Why not indeed! http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/cosmology/gammaray.html

Or if Hessian prefers to read it from the horses' mouths:

The declaration of causes of seceding states: http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html

For fun, ctrl-F "slave", then quickly alt-N through the document. "Obsessed much?" But, Hessian, do read through them properly. Note the tone of indignation that anyone would dare object to slavery. Hell, the Mississippian declaration is a check-list of rhetorical arguments still used by conservative politicians and Fox's talking heads:

"It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice." The lamestream media and liberal schools/teachers' unions are brainwashing the nation against conservative values.

"It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain." "State's Rights!"... except for the other states. (And those endless appeals to the sacred Founders, who were totally on our side.)

"It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better." Substitute "welfare" for "freeing slaves".

"We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers," We're not slave-owners, we're job creators.

"It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst." Or gay rights, or equal pay, or affirmative action.

"It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause. " It's War! War on Christmas, on Christianity, and on America!

"It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood." That illegitimate, divisive government; how dare they win elections!

"It tramples the original equality of the South under foot." No awareness of irony.

Oh, and there's even made-up "science": "and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun."

Given a choice (which I won't have until EVs are a lot cheaper and have a lot more infrastructure) I'd certainly drive an EV. And my intuition is that you're right about big power plants being more efficient making every car carry around a little fossil-fuel plant. But not everybody agrees. I'm not taking sides on this one, I'm just pointing out the issue.

It's always seemed to me that private cars are a fundamentally inefficient way of moving people around, and will always have a huge cost, no matter how we power them. Not that people are going to give up the convenience and the privacy as long as the costs, both monetary and environmental, are bearable. But what with diminishing natural resources (not just fossil fuels, but all the non-renewables that go into making everything, including electric cars) and increasing environmental problems, the day when these costs cease to be bearable is well at hand. Sorry, Mitt.

concentrated in a region at the galactic core that is only about the size of the Solar System.

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/active/smblack.html

1. You're using the TDP of each of the processors, instead of a measured power draw while running the benchmark. Are those other processors drawing their TDPs while running this benchmark? I doubt it. Usually the TDPs for any given processor are listed for some sort of power virus type test which is difficult if not impossible to hit running real code. It's possible that this benchmark hits the TDP of each of these processors, but I'd want proof of that, and generally I'd want measured power draws, not TDPs.
2. More importantly, dynamic power scales quadratically with Voltage (P=C*V^2*F) (Wikipedia reference). If you run these processors at a slower clockspeed and lower voltage, their power draw drops by the V^2*F factor. The performance slows down because of the lower frequency, sure, but you get a squared factor by decreasing voltage, plus some power reduction due to lower frequency, while only having a linear slowdown factor due to the lower frequency. In other words, they can get into a much more efficient power band by not running at their highest voltage/highest frequency. They can run up at high voltage/high frequency because users want super-responsive computers and super-fast GPUs, but for doing long-running power efficiency comparisons, you'd never run them that way. You'd find the sweet spot on the V/F curve and run them there. Cortex-A9 is designed to live at a different point on the perf/power/V/F curve - it's effectively already down at a lower frequency/lower power/lower peak performance point, yet at its performance point it is very efficient. You'd need to sweep across a range of freq/voltages to find the sweet spot of each processor before you compare them like this.

Nowhere in my post I had said that. I merely said that slavery was the issue which triggered Civil War, as opposed to states rights (which were a shibboleth for slavery in that particular context). I fully support respecting and extending states rights in today's context.

Hmm... I said the southern democrats shifted to the republican party because of much of the same reasons of the civil war and if you picked slavery you would be an idiot. Then jumped in, you claimed those reasons are slavery. Well, we all know slavery was one of the issues for the civil war, but it had been dead for almost 100 years when these democrats start moving. But you brought it up so I had to ask.

If that is the case, can you explain why most of the secession announcements from the states spoke at length about slavery, but not about any of those other things?

I don't have to explain that. Slavery was definitely part of the issue at the start of the civil war, It was not the only issue and slavery definitely was not an issue 100 years later- but the other issues still were there.

But yes, you're right that economics was the key issue. That's because the agrarian economics of Southern states that that time was wholly reliant on slavery as an institution. They could barely compete with the industrial North when their cotton was picked by slaves; they couldn't compete at all if slaves became workers that demanded a fair wage for their labor. Everything else was chump change in comparison to that single issue.

lol..South Carolina threatened to secede 3 times before actually doing it. John C. Calhoun wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest shortly before resigning from vice president of the US in protest. In it, he argues that the tariffs were protectionist in nature and was a pretext to further damaging the South's economy in favor or protecting the industrial interests of the north. He did bring up slavery in that context too, but this illustrates the complexity of the situation outside of just slavery. The entire south thought they were being used and abused to protect the north's economic interests without slavery even being part of the question. It is the entire big business runs government ordeal that we see today. Generations of making the civil war only about the slaves has allowed us to forget history and empower it to repeat itself.

Georgia wrote in it's reasons for secession

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects. Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of po

Part of the problem with this sort of thing isn't just that it only works when it isn't widely known. Even if it is only marginally known, it will make criminals take security systems (even real ones) less seriously because they know there's a decent chance the system is fake. Since there's evidence that criminals already have poorer impulse control and less are less risk averse than the general population http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294626-overview, http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/71/6/720.full, http://web.utk.edu/~wneilson/EcLett-Crime.pdf, this is likely to make them more likely to break in general. This will make alarm systems be less effective deterrents. Essentially this is very close to defecting in the n-player version of the prisoner's dilemma.

Even if it does deter people, it could easily lead to more and more intimidation required to get criminals to take the threat seriously, which could lead to an arms race of ridiculous looking security measures. Overall, this seems socially irresponsible.

2 things, lets head off the 'Not about Slavery' crowd at the pass.

1: Lincoln, and the North fought the Civil War to preserve the Union. But lets not forget the South fired the first shot and seized Federal property. The war to preserve the Union turned into a war against Slavery out of necessity. You can see Lincoln evolve, to the point that when he thought he would lose the 1864 election, he had a meeting with Frederick Douglass to try and urge him to get as many slaves out of the South via the Underground Railway before the elections.
Lincoln was assasinated by John Wilkes Booth, who spoke the following words a few days before assasinating Lincoln.
"I had never seen Mr. Lincoln up close and I knew he was a tall man, however nothing could have prepared me for the sight of him. A long shadow did he have. And his arms, when at his sides, touched near his knees. Very professionally he said that there would never be any suffrage based on differences in the way people look. Upon this, Booth turned to the two of us and said, “That means nigger citizenship. Now by God I’ll put him through!”
Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction collapsed, and for the next 100 years, African Americans in the South were subjected to the same deprivations of Slavery just without the term. Up until the 1964 CRA (things weren't rosy in the North, but they were a hell of a lot better than the South for African Americans, read "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson
For the Civil War years, read "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James McPherson, read "Grant's Memoirs" or watch the 27 part lecture (1 hour each) by Yale Historian David Blight.
2: For those claiming the Civil War wasn't about Slavery, get real. It was very much about slavery for the South. They were fighting for States Rights, the right to keep slaves. The South knew they had to expand Slavery to survive, the North wanted to contain slavery. The South knew it was all about slavery at the time, a fact they proclaimed in speeches and also clearly documented in the Articles of Secession (I've included relevant passages below).
'Declaration of Causes of Seceding States' http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
--------
Georgia
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.

Mississippi
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
South Carolina
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery,
Texas
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government *a

The average velocity of meteoroids entering our atmosphere is 10-70 km/second. The smaller ones that survive the trip to the Earth's surface are quickly slowed by atmospheric friction to speeds of a few hundred kilometers per hour, and so hit the Earth with no more speed than if they had been dropped from a tall building. For meteorites larger than a few hundred tons (which fortunately are quite rare), atmospheric friction has little effect on the velocity and they hit the Earth with the enormous speeds characteristic of their entry into our atmosphere.

source: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/meteors/impacts.html

CNG is safer

"Although CNG is a flammable gas, it has a narrow flammability range, making it an inherently safe fuel. Strict safety standards make CNG vehicles as safe as gasoline-powered vehicles. In the event of a spill or accidental release, CNG poses no threat to land or water; it is non- toxic. CNG also disperses rapidly, minimizing ignition risk relative to gasoline. Natural gas is lighter than air and will not pool as a liquid or vapor on the ground. Nevertheless, leaks indoors may form a flammable mixture in the vicinity of an ignition source. CNG is primarily methane, however, which is a greenhouse gas that could contribute to global cli- mate change if leaked. Methane is slightly soluble in water and under certain environmental conditions (anaerobic) does not biodegrade; if excess amounts accumulate, the gas can bubble from the water, possibly creating a risk of fire or explosion.
Reported incidences of bus fires are related to engine failures, not the use of natural gas. Natural gas buses have onboard gas detectors and other safety devices, such as tank safety valves that allow fuel flow only when the engine is keyed on. Also, the tanks must be inspected and approved by the U.S. Department of Transportation after certain periods of use.
There are some different safety concerns with CNG buses than diesel fuel buses, such as greater breaking distance due to increased fuel storage system weight. This is a relatively small concern, however, because the fuel system is a small fraction of a bus’ total weight. CNG buses also might accelerate slower than their diesel counterparts."

- EPA
http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/etcfc/docs/EPAFactSheet-cng.pdf

The Civil War was not primarily about slavery in the North - it was about preserving the union. In the South, slavery was the primary issue. "State's rights" was about the right of the southern states to do with their property (i.e., humans) as they saw fit. Notice how in Georgia's Declaration of Causes at http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html#Georgia how slavery is mentioned in the second sentence and further throughout the document. OK, there are some other causes listed, but to say 'the war wasn't about slavery' is true for only one of the belligerents.

The Moon is too unstable for human underground habitation and strip mining is still the best way to mine if you can get away with it.

The moon is virtually dead geologically and has been for 3 billion years. "the energy associated with the Earth's seismic activity is about 10^14 times larger than that of the Moon"

(Dark side of the moon; more mining friendly?)

You do realize that it's not really dark, right? It is only "dark" in relation to the Earth, not the sun.

For shielding, why not use lead plates, bet yet gold

So you want to lift large amounts of very dense materials (or rare) from the earth to the moon rather than use the materials that are already there and adequate? I guessing you recently received your MBA.

Behold the horrors!
Microfocus COBOL for jvm and j2ee (this possibilty came up with one of my clients but we went a different route): http://visualcobol.microfocus.com/overview/platform/jvm/
The University of Tennesee's Innovative Computing Laboratory is in the final stage of their F2J project, which will support Fortran 95 language to java bytecode: http://icl.cs.utk.edu/f2j/overview/index.html
Ada to JVM, read about projects and products here: http://www.adahome.com/Resources/Ada_Java.html
There was gcc back end to emit jvm bytecode, but RMS killed it because of Sun's Java license at the time. Things have changed since then, maybe that project will be resurrected.

>>lol wut

Edumify yourself:
https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/b360905554fdb7d985256ec5006a7755?OpenDocument

For those interested in an open-source alternative, there's MAGMA, which provides a bunch of linear algebra routines implemented in CUDA. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it looks promising.

Hmm,

here's a graphic with the sun and planets drawn to scale, http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/sun/interior.html

I don't think the sun would notice if we threw the entire planet in to it, From that page
"the radius of the Sun is about 109 times that of the Earth, which implies that the volume of the Sun would hold approximately 1.3 million Earths"

So, the professor, Brad Vander Zanden, appears to be a professor at the University of Tennessee. Great, it seems to be an ok school; it's a top 50 public school, and a top 100 overall US school. That's a respectable ranking. He even has something of a research page. However (and I don't live anywhere near there so I don't have personal experience, and things could have changed since this list was compiled), their computer science program is ranked rather low, so I don't know if he's all that great an authority.

Here's my opinion (disclaimer: please don't trust my opinion, a random guy on slashdot, either): basically, if you know math, you will use it. You don't need it; you will still find a way to survive in the software world without knowing math, but math will open many doors for you. Would you really want to be shut out from understanding computer graphics, understanding artificial intelligence, and algorithmic complexity? That's just in computers, if you close your mind to math you'll be closing your mind to understanding the way the physical world works, too. You'll be losing the logical/mental discipline that comes from understanding math. Why would you want to give up all that, and try to live as a code monkey?

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. That's 152 years ago, six generations ago. Within less than a decade, the fossil record provided overwhelming proof that his theory of natural selection was correct. Late 20th Century and early 21st Century genetic research has provided additional irrefutable, supporting evidence. Charles Darwin was correct. Scientifically this has been known for well over a century.

And yet Creationism, a.k.a. Intelligent Design, still prevails in many classrooms.

We have historical precedence for this, the Ptolemaic system. It held sway scientifically for over 1400 years. Many regarded the Copernican system as blasphemy many decades after it was scientifically established. It took centuries to overcome this hurdle.

I suspect the same will be true for Evolution versus Creationism. Perhaps in 2111, Evolution will be taught in every American public school classroom ... but then again, perhaps not.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. That's 152 years ago, six generations ago. Within less than a decade, the fossil record provided overwhelming proof that his theory of natural selection was correct. Late 20th Century and early 21st Century genetic research has provided additional irrefutable, supporting evidence. Charles Darwin was correct. Scientifically this has been known for well over a century.

And yet Creationism, a.k.a. Intelligent Design, still prevails in many classrooms.

We have historical precedence for this, the Ptolemaic system. It held sway scientifically for over 1400 years. Many regarded the Copernican system as blasphemy many decades after it was scientifically established. It took centuries to overcome this hurdle.

I suspect the same will be true for Evolution versus Creationism. Perhaps in 2111, Evolution will be taught in every American public school classroom ... but then again, perhaps not.

They *TRY* to emit a specific wavelength, but after time and use, that wavelength shifts, and that specific filter becomes useless.

I was about to call bullshit on this one, but you are in fact right.

Diode Laser Frequency Stabilisation, courtesy of UTK & Google.

They *TRY* to emit a specific wavelength, but after time and use, that wavelength shifts, and that specific filter becomes useless.

I was about to call bullshit on this one, but you are in fact right.

Diode Laser Frequency Stabilisation, courtesy of UTK & Google.

Read the official secession documents, and then tell me that this was about the right to choose more than the right to own slaves.

Thats a wonderful soapbox speech which has nothing at all to do with supercomputers or the issue at hand. Linpack is no longer the most relevant benchmark and just as we saw in benchmarks for video cards, the system can be gamed to show exceptional performance on the benchmark while failiing to live up to that same standard on real world work. For instance, current and near term systems from IBM are exceptional and place more emphasis on memory bandwidth and power use than just pure compute ability. Focusing just on Linpac is similar to just focusing on clock speed. There are a number of new benchmarks being developed which attempt to quantify performance other than solving sets of dense linear equations.

See for instance graph500 or green500 or hpc challenge

...is that *no* single-figure-of-merit benchmark is going to be worth anything. Sandia's "Graph 500" Johnny-come-lately isn't going to be any better than Linpack that way, and will just skew the results towards a different not-generally-useful architecture. A far better idea has been around for over five years: the HPC Challenge benchmark. It consists of seven different tests (Linpack is just one) which stress different aspects of system design. Anybody who knows anything about building big systems would identify some mix of these tests that best approximates their own workload, use that as a starting point for looking at likely alternatives, and then remember that it's just a starting point. The only benchmark that really matters is the one that you run yourself on your own application, but that can be a very expensive and time-consuming exercise so these lists can be a good way to figure out which systems deserve that more extended analysis. Linpack, on the other hand, isn't even useful for that. What's sad is that some people either didn't know (which says something about how we train engineers) or didn't care until a Chinese system found its way to the top (which says something even worse).

But NASA invalidated the tests

The results of these experiments were complex. The first three gave positive results, but the complete absence of any organic compounds in the Martian soil according to the mass spectrometer experiment suggests that the positive results for the first three were not evidence for life, but rather evidence for a complex inorganic chemistry in the Martian soil. Thus, the Viking verdict was that there was no evidence for present or past life on Mars.

It's not as complete as CULA, but for free there is also MAGMA. Also, nVidia implements a CUDA-accelerated BLAS (CUBLAS) which is free.

As far as OpenCL goes, I don't think there has been much in terms of a good BLAS made yet. The compilers are still sketchy (especially for ATI GPUs), and the performance is lacking on nVidia GPUs compared to CUDA.

Note also that recent research suggests that the human optics system may be a type known as blocked tetrachromatic instead of trichromatic (with one set of frequencies blocked by the optics system) and that some women may be functionally tetrachromatic due to the fact that women have two X chromosomes, one of which occasionally carries a mutated gene for one of the light receptors (which would really make them blocked pentachormats since the 4th functional receptor is different from the 4th "blocked" receptor of the human baseline condition, so they've got five photo receptor types, like butterflies, only with one of them blocked) . Looking for Madam Tetrachromat .

Online test: Are You a Tetrachromat?

If shallow graves can be told apart from the native terrain w/ Lidar over a period of 1 week, 1 month, 1 year etc, than it might work. You would pry need to do a full body farm treatment on it though.

online videos: algebra + calculus
http://justmathtutoring.com/
http://www.mathtutor.ac.uk/
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.graderocket.tv/index.php

Uni Maths Videos
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/
http://press.princeton.edu/video/banner/
http://academicearth.org/subjects/mathematics
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2009/01/calculus-video-lectures-bonus-basic.html
http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/ (requires iTunes download)

Resources from Universities
http://www.germanna.edu/tutor/helpful_handouts.asp?menuchoice=Helpful%20Handouts (wow)
http://mathforum.org/

Free online books:
http://www.jamesbrennan.org/algebra/systems/solution_set.htm
http://cnx.org/content/m18205/latest/?collection=col10624
http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/ (Differential eqns)
http://www.purplemath.com/
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

PowerPoints
http://www.online.math.uh.edu/HoustonACT/

Tutoring services
http://www.nutshellmath.com/

Collections of Links
http://math.about.com/od/mathhelpandtutorials/Math_Help_and_Tutorials_by_Subject_and_or_Topic.htm
http://pathstoknowledge.net/

Problems
http://projecteuler.net/

Some computer Resources
http://www.graphmatica.com/
http://archives.math.utk.edu/visual.calculus/

Mod parent up. Also, gravitational lensing sometimes produces distinctive distortions and arcs.

The proper website for the (in)famous body farm is: University of Tennessee: Forensic Anthropology Center.

without einstein who was skeptical of some of newton's predictions, we wouldn't have relativity today.

I'm with you that we need bigger space-based telescopes, but I don't think building more in orbit is the best solution. Given the raw material possibilities presented by lunar regolith, I could see the energy cost of moving some materials to the far side of the moon being well offset by the lower amount of materials that must be shunted up there by rocket. We may not have the requisite technologies to set up a lunar optical observatory right now, but I'm confident the technologies could be developed fairly quickly, given a concerted effort.

Why not make the source itself a formal language? That way the idea of source code control for law would fall out naturally along with a better legal system.

From Example of Normalized English Input to NLESB:

Normalized English has been developed by Layman E. Allen and his colleagues; see for example, Layman E. Allen, ``Language, Law and Logic: Plain Legal Drafting for the Electronic Age,'' Computer Science and Law (Bryan Niblett ed.), 1980, pp. 75-100. Normalized language has been used in the Tennessee statutes (Tenn. Code Ann. sect. 33-6-104(a) (1991)).

An example of the form of Normalized English used as input to the NLESB system follows. Note that the formatting is for the sake of readability, and is not necessary for NLESB.

Subsection (a). IF AND ONLY IF
(1)(A) A person has threatened or attempted suicide or to inflict serious
        bodily harm on himself, OR
        (B) The person has threatened or attempted homicide or other violent
        behavior, OR
        (C) The person has placed others in reasonable fear of violent behavior
        and serious physical harm to them, OR
        (D) The person is unable to avoid severe impairment or injury from
        specific risks, AND
(2) There is a substantial likelihood that such harm will occur,
THEN
(3) The person poses a "substantial likelihood of serious harm" for
        purposes of subsection (b).

Subsection (b). IF AND ONLY IF
(1) A person is mentally ill, AND
(2) The person poses a substantial likelihood of serious harm because of
        the mental illness, AND
(3) The person needs care, training, or treatment because of the mental
        illness, AND
(4) All available less drastic alternatives to placement in a hospital or
        treatment resource are unsuitable to meet the needs of the person,
THEN
(5) The person may be judicially committed to involuntary care and
        treatment in a hospital or treatment resource.

A 2cm rock hitting the top of a flat-roofed building or dinging a car in the parking lot wouldn't be that dangerous or publicized,

Quote: "The average velocity of meteoroids entering our atmosphere is 10-70 km/second. The smaller ones that survive the trip to the Earth's surface are quickly slowed by atmospheric friction to speeds of a few hundred kilometers per hour, and so hit the Earth with no more speed than if they had been dropped from a tall building."

Well.

CC.

I couldn't agree with you more. It's NAT that breaks the Internet, not applications that are broken. There are many complex and ugly hacks application protocols have to employ to get around the fundamental brokenness of NAT. Then Internet was designed as a peer to peer network, but the prevalence of NAT is a great obstruction to that ideal.

Though there are real technical difficulties impeding IPv6 adoption, I suspect ISPs are also dragging their feet adopting IPv6 because they will no longer be able to charge inflated prices for additional addresses and a move back toward the original peer to peer nature of the Internet would give power back to individuals and take it away from them. Or maybe I'm just paranoid.