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As well as the more familiar position / momentum uncertainty principle, there is a similar and related energy / time uncertainty that follows the same logic.

delta E multiplied by delta t must be greater than or equal to hbar.

Th greater the precision with which you define the energy of a system you are observing the less precisely you can define the time of the event being measured.

http://galileo.phys.virginia.e...

how do you even know where to begin learning about any subject?

• By having enough to eat/a place to stay such that your immediate survival isn't in question. Learning is hard if you're starving.
• By putting down the distraction rectangle(TFA above is a good example)
• opening the door to your office/desk/work environment, and being open to how other people might be interested in what you can do for them in that area
• By desiring to know about the subject, and making a map of the terms involved that you don't know or suspect are being used as terms of art.
• By finding other people interested in learning about it(Hackerspaces are a great place to do this), and engaging with them with the explicit reason of learning about the topic. Finding or building media that allow you to coordinate this task. Bonus points if you can find people to *teach*.
• By being humble about what you know and don't, and expecting your initial expectations to be incorrect(especially for softer fields like Economics/Political Economy). And especially: publish your results in a way that other people can replicate.
• By collecting relevant data, seeking out sources on relevant data, and if they aren't easily accessible trying to reproduce them yourself while being careful to keep track of what you are doing to obtain said data, what that data is, forming hypotheses and testing them.
• Try to think of a project you can do that relates to your topic of interest, and try to do it.

It doesn't matter if your adviser is Deepak Chopra, if you follow where the data tells you to go and are careful enough. I've helped people from the age of 4 to 80+ learn topics from algebra to video game development and there is no reason why lectures are particularly better suited for learning, or should be exclusively sought after, though they can be the cheaper option (especially in well-beaten paths like intro-to-programming or intro-to-stats).

Hmm... Then could you please explain these studies?

NIH studies
- Association between mobile phone use and inattention in 7102 Chinese adolescents: a population-based cross-sectional study (2014)
- Mobile Phone Use, Blood Lead Levels, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Symptoms in Children: A Longitudinal Study (2013)

Blogs
Study: Smartphone Alerts Increase Inattention – and Hyperactivity (2016)

Just because you change the word "digital media" from "mobile phone" AKA smartphone, that doesn't make you one of the first to study the matter... So TFA is just an advertising for some researchers who want to have some fames.

Nope, C++ was designed to be a practical language every step of the way.

Most of the other languages you mention really were experiments that got way out of hand, especially Pascal and Java.

ref: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~ev...

Funny maybe, but not factual...
http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/d...

You have no clue how poor the human eye is and how good a digital replica is, do you?

Restating some posts with a 180 deg flip might bring to light some amusing realizations.

This is not the path to maximum amusement, but you're damn close. Try a 90 degree flip.

Mark Twain's essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" saved me from a high school English paper. His opening thesis also turns out to be prescient regarding software design, if one replaces "personages" in a "tale" with the variables or objects in a software system.

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. ...
2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. ...
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. ...
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. ...
6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. ...
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. ...
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. ... In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:
12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.


I encourage perusal of the original: http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/...

I have no specific knowledge either, but I know Rei is highly intelligent and from past posts probably works in the field, even if this subject is not his direct area of study.

All that bitching aside, here is a paper with some numbers for you: http://people.virginia.edu/~re...

If Io were the only source of non-ice material to Europa’s surface and no loss occurred, then using the flux values from Table 1, sulfur compounds could be present on the surface at ~7% (molar abundance) relative to H2O, while Na and Cl could reach 0.3%. Silicon and magnesium could be comparable or slightly less than Na and Cl. These estimates assume uniform mixing and ignore hemispherical flux and gardening rate differences, which can produce surface concentrations that are a factor of 10 or more different between the leading and trailing sides (see Fig. 2 and caption).

Seems to me that there could be quite a bit of material present. Much from Io outgassing and 'splash' from impactors to IO settling on Europa, not even counting direct impacts to Europa.

Science.. try it sometime.

For kernels you want predictable latencies, robust OOM handling, and synchronous and predictable memory reclamation. You don't want the complexity of a modern concurrent GC, and you don't want the throughput/memory overhead penalties of a naive GC.

People have tried to write kernels in GC languages before and it hasn't been adopted. See SPIN (Modula-3). Microsoft invested a ton of effort writing Windows code in C# for Vista that never shipped because they couldn't make it robust in low-memory conditions. See also https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~b....

If it's a university, then entry is based upon the combination of your SAT or ACT score and your application letter. It has nothing to do with high school.

Incorrect. Some schools stopped requiring standardized test scores (SAT/ACT) years ago for undergraduate admissions. And I don't know of a U.S. university that will admit an undergraduate student who doesn't have a high school diploma, GED, or proof of secondary education. Three examples, one private, two public (not including my alma mater, which also had the same requirements):

Carnegie Mellon University

University of Virginia

University of Maryland/University College (UMUC) -- also doesn't require the SAT/ACT for "most" degree programs

"The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity." Richard Hamming

Hamming was right. Even at a conservative "interest rate" from this compounding knowledge, an extra hour of work a day will lead, over the course of a decade, to an enormous amount of additional productivity. Far more than you would think just by taking the extra hour as linear addition.

I saw this when I was an academic, you'd have some students stay just a bit longer in the day to get things set up to run an additional experiment or simulation overnight and then immediately have the result first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, others would get in and start the experiment and then be unproductive for a few hours while it ran. I see it in the tech industry, some folks would stay the extra hour to debug or really grok something, then later they'd be able to immediately see what's wrong or what tools could be used.

Burnout is a different thing than compounding productivity gains. I've normally seen burnout where a grad student or an employee is behind and is constantly chasing the puck but not getting more done than anyone else. Occasionally it will be due to working on a team with huge technical debt where there is never an opportunity to get into the virtuous cycle of learning more than enables you to do things more efficiently because you are putting out fires. In other cases I've seen it where people have started into a project that is Not Going To Workâ (possibly because they didn't grok the problem space to begin with) and keep banging their heads against it.

[ And, of course, this probably only applies to those in the "knowledge" business. Flipping burgers or driving a bus for an extra hour isn't going to make you any more productive in the future, sadly. I mean, I wish it were so -- we'd have a single employee making $30/hr easily doing 10x the kitchen work of a random high school student at a fast food joint. ]

At least some research shows quite the opposite actually.

So anyhow, you figure that our being in constant warfare killing each over for fun becaus our religion said so, or apparently just for the LuLZ is a fringe case? Or maybe humans are the best mashchists nature has ever produced, and we just do this to ourselves for something something reason?

As much as I'd like to believe that humanity is inherently peaceful and loving, I'd have to hold two diametrically opposed opinions at one time. one that says yes, Humans are great, and the other that watches the news. That isn't even being pessimistic, it's just counting corpses.

At least some research shows quite the opposite actually.

That the rich can't hide was powerfully illustrated in "The Masque of the Red Death", a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In it the wealthy and connected gathered at the abbey of Prince Prospero to get away from the common people succumbing to a plague outside the walls. But it is not so easy to cheat Death!
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Centuries of case law are completely at odds with your idea.

Yeah, I know I'm going up against tradition here, but it is analogous to the defense of bullfighting as "respecting" a cultural institution.

brick by brick

Until the room is sealed.. Case law has become a prison. Is "hate crime" the final brick?

A really neat class at the University of Virginia:

A report describing the class' pedagogy: Defense Against the Dark Arts

and a link to the current class website: Online syllabus

A really neat class at the University of Virginia:

A report describing the class' pedagogy: Defense Against the Dark Arts

and a link to the current class website: Online syllabus

The Black Panther Party probably made the most serious attempt at overthrowing the government in recent history. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug... Once they started carrying guns, Ronald Reagan signed the gun control laws in California.

Nobody was carrying guns in the Black Lives Matter demostrations. I think it was in the back of everybody's minds that they could carry guns if nonviolence didn't work.

Truer words were never spoken. Just wait until the IoT takes hold, along with distributed AIA (Advanced Artificial Intelligence) all distributed via the Internet. The Internet has turned out be largely a "top-down" broadcasting service controlled by large ISP, large content creators, etc. Of course, they let us have our blogs and our Instagrams and our pathetic little selfie opportunities for fame like Facebook, Pinterest, etc, but the Internet is FAR FAR FAR from the liberating force that it was predicted to be at its outset.

This wasn't always the case; initially, the vig players- i.e. content creators, telecommunications providers, etc. resistedthe Internet, until they discovered human being's penchant for taking control of inter-communications. THAT is when commercial enterprise powers got interested; they have now found endless ways to control the Internet and leverage our wired human propensity for communication for profit.

ESPECIALLY if you are a younger person, .go read Vanevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

or,

Ted Nelson's early ideas about the promise of the Internet Ted Nelson: "The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do." http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/...

no, I don't think he does

The Ghz race is pretty much dead unless we invent better transistors.
But there are other ways to raise the speed, like well actually adding more pipelines to the CPU and making it run more instructions per cycle, but this is not as "efficient" as adding more cores.
I did read somewhere that every extra instruction per cycle per core doubles the core size, while adding an extra core double the performance (if people can use it).

Both of those are trivially false. Wider execution scales as n^2 in theory (though a bit better in practice) but doesn't affect all parts of a core so while some stuctures can double in size the core itself will not. Adding an extra core doesn't double the performance for several reasons: serial parts of a program will limit parallel execution (Amdahl's law), synchronization effects will in practice be worse than that stated by Amdahl and two cores will load the shared resources more than one processor.

There also other paths, like decreasing the pipeline size, which make the CPU take less time to recover from stalls, but the smaller the pipeline, less clock you can put on the chip before the transistors actual speed limit come in and crash the party.

You can also try the VLIW thing again, that allows you to create those "superinstructions that do several things at once" and increase the chip size a lot less than actual extra pipelines, but then its not x86 compatible, and its very, VERY hard to create a compiler that use it well.

Transmeta (and Nvidia Denver) uses translation from the target architecture to an internal VLIW format so virtual x86 compatibility is possible.

Finally, there is the golden goose of getting several cores to act like a single, more powerful core, but that's a nutjob dream i think.

It's not (e.g. Federated cores: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~sk... ) but thinking that it is a general solution for performance surely is.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/pe...

Also https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~l... for C (I guess not C++).

EWD498 in PDF or HTML

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

FORTRAN --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

I don't think people are talking about the crime of fraud in this context. I think they're referring to academic fraud. All the evidence points to this being a pretty serious case of academic fraud.

Cremation takes a LOT of energy:

https://www.quora.com/How-much...

And it's not "clean":
http://faculty.virginia.edu/me...

I don't suppose there's any data yet about how much energy it takes to compost a corpse, but at least you're getting *something* of value at the end. I'd like to think that I'm giving something back after a lifetime of consumption.

This is what a design patent is like:

"Be it known that I, AUGUESTE BARTHOLDI, of Paris, in the Republic of France, have originated and produced a Design of a Monumental Statue, representing 'Liberty enlightening the world....'

The statue is that of a female figure standing erect upon a pedestal or block, the body being thrown slightly over to the left, so as to gravitate upon the left leg, the whole figure being thus in equilibrium, and symmetrically arranged with respect to a perpendicular line or axis passing through the ead and left foot... The right arm is thrown up and stretched out, with a flamboyant torch grasped in the hand.... The head, with its classical, yet severe and calm. features, is surmounted by a crown or diadem, from which radiate divergingly seven rays, tapering from'the crown, and representing a halo."

That protected Bartholdi against anyone making copies of the Statue of Liberty for fourteen years.

Not quite - that's (part of) the description, which has no legal weight on its own but is merely to be used in interpreting the patent claim. There's also a sketch of the Statue of Liberty illustrating the description. Your last sentence is correct - it protects against anyone making exact copies of the Statue of Liberty, but doesn't protect against other statues of Liberty, such as, for example, this one.

I think that we need to scrutinize election rules under the same constitutional lens we're using for gun laws.

The fundamental problem with that approach is that these aren't Constitutional rules. They're PARTY rules. And the parties can make damned near any rule they want, because it's their party. If you want to run under the banner of that party, then they call the shots.

George Washington warned about party shenanigans in his Second Farewell Address. Starting about where it says "[Page 11]".

"By the way, it's worth reading up a bit on Jefferson."

Yeah, I have. Consider Notes on the State of Virginia, by Jefferson:

The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?

[...]

Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious [30] experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed. It will be right to make great allowances for the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move. Many millions of them have been brought to, and born in America. Most of them indeed have been confined to tillage, to their own homes,

Buyers should first consider the fate of Prince Prospero who hoped to avoid the death that awaited all the common people. You may have seen the movie "The Masque of the Red Death" starring Vincent Price. Or you may wish to read the very short story written by E. A. Poe in 1842 ... but with roots in the distant past:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hy...

I couldn't find numbers for the 1950s, but recently the trend has been downwards: http://curry.virginia.edu/rese...

People think the 50s were great, but the reality is very different. There was a lot more violence back then. I'm no expert on the US, but people in the UK are often surprised to learn that during the war kids would be arrested for breaking in to bomb shelters and smashing them, or looting bombed houses, on a quite regular basis. Capital punishment never worked, and while classrooms were certainly grimmer back then a large part of that is due to the really bad kids simply not attending school at all.

NP-complete problems would be trivially solved if you could manipulate time.

Some interesting reading

Whenever I read about some new archeological site that is deemed to be of religious importance, I think of this wonderful piece of satire (great art too) about uncovering the remains of 1980s hotel in the year 4022:

http://www.amazon.com/Motel-My...

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu...

Great stuff. Especially the picture of the archaeologist demonstrating how to wear the ceremonial toilet seat, I mean head dress.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu...
http://people.virginia.edu/~sf...

They could do even better..

The problem is that San Diego is mostly suburb, and suburbs are more dangerous than inner cities.

What "childish antics"? Are hardball negotiation now considered "childish"?

Let's just grab our ankles and ignore our own interests while every country jockeys to satisfy their own interests.

I really have no idea where this idea that we should do everything as a selfless act came from. Selflessness is not really part of our culture.

Its "System Development Foundation" not "System Development Corporation" and Charlie's full name is Charles Sinclair Smith. He's semi-retired now and living the next county over from me in southeast Iowa where we've been collaborating on a couple of projects -- one of which is to photosynthesize all of the CO2 effluent from US fossil fuel power plants (as Charlie got his start co-founding the Energy Information Administration of the DoE under Carter).

Its ironic that in the 80s I was living in La Jolla, which was an epicenter of the neural net revival at UCSD, had taken neural net courses from Robert Hecht-Nielsen and by 1990 had prototyped the highest performance neural network image processing system (as Neural Engines Corporation) -- but I then later worked with Charlie for almost 15 years before discovering he had had played such a key role in the revival of neural nets. Even more ironic is that, circa 2005, I came up with the idea for the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge -- based on Hutter's entirely different, top down mathematics approach to AI -- and Shane Legg, founder of Deep Mind, which is largely identified with deep learning neural nets, actuality studied under Hutter and achieved Deep Mind's famous ability to learn to play video games using Hutter's approach but everyone thinks that capability is uniquely attributable to deep neural net learning alone.

Disclaimer: I work in a cosmology department. What you've just written is total bullshit.

We make predictions, and they work. I could tear apart the nonsense you've written, but instead let me just point to the facts:

http://xkcd.com/54/

http://sci.esa.int/planck/5155...

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/...

I could go on an on posting pretty pictures and graphs matching data, but let me just say that we work incredibly hard to make predictions from our models, we test those predictions against observations and test many of our systems to over 5 sigma. To say that what we're doing is just guessing is frankly insulting to a lot of incredibly hard working people. We /predicted/ the CMB then observed it. We predicted the power spectrum then observed it. We predict the population densities of stars at certain redshifts, point telescopes and damned well count the things and find them to match. We predict galactic rotations, lensing effects, (integrated) Sachs-Wolfe effects and a hundred
other little things, and we damned well test them, lining up our models against observations. We certainly haven't got everything right yet - there's a lot of room for investigation as to what went on before inflation, say, or exactly what type of matter dark matter is (but before you say we know nothing about it, I suggest you educate yourself - we don't know what it comprises, but we have damned good bounds on certain properties like its ratio of pressure to density). We don't know why the cosmological constant takes the value it does, but a whole host of checks all come up with the same number.

So no, we don't have "Guesses". We have repeatedly tested hypotheses from which we observe consistent data and find heavy statistical significance. What you've done is insult a lot of incredibly hard working, very smart people who are very serious about their work.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

-- Edsger Dijkstra

If Dijkstra wasn't dead, he'd laugh in your face. Dijkstra was going for humor (as is obvious from the original letter) and even if he hadn't, he was talking about BASIC as it was in the 70s, before the rise of structured programming, with pretty much nothing in the way of program flow constructs beyond IF...THEN... and GOTO. Modern BASICs, including VB.NET and even VB6 would've been perfectly acceptable to him, in terms of structured programming, though he undoubtedly would've had something biting to say about the syntax.

Sadly, the denizens of Slashdot actually think your use of Dijkstra's words is clever, demonstrating their equal ignorance and lack of wit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

I learned MapReduce for use with CouchDB and it is a powerful technique even when not on parallel hardware -- although a bit of a conceptual shift.

Here is a group using MapReduce with Hadoop for image processing:
http://hipi.cs.virginia.edu/
"HIPI is a library for Hadoop's MapReduce framework that provides an API for performing image processing tasks in a distributed computing environment. "

Linus wrote: "The only place where parallelism matters is in graphics or on the server side, where we already largely have it. Pushing it anywhere else is just pointless." But would Linus really think image processing (like for robots or self-driving cars or using Baxter to sort your kid's Legos) is not an important issue? Sounds a bit like "640K is enough memory for anyone". Failure of the imagination is all too common based on unfamiliarity with some problem domain. Although, to be frank, I thought 32K of RAM on a Commodore PET was more than enough memory for anyone, because I could not imagine writing a program that large at the time. :-)

Also, agent-based simulations or zone-based simulations can often use as much parallel hardware as you can throw at it, even if there may be occasional short synchronization steps. For example you could have a Minecraft-like game with thousands of active entities like wolves, zombies, pigs, and so on -- as well as processes like erosion or plant growth going on in multiple zones simultaneously. Game design could really change with millions of available general purpose cores. My wife and I created an algorithm for growing botanically accurate plants, but current games like Minecraft can't use it to grow each unique plant because it would be too computationally intensive if you had millions of unique plants all growing at the same time.
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

Congrats on your luck/skill in working with Thinking Machines hardware like the CM2. Around 1984, when an psychology undergrad at Princeton interested in AI, I had developed some software called "Mex" for multiple execution where I ran up to 1000 simulated processors on an IBM mainframe under VMUTS. I was using it to help process some data from a robot vision system I had put together (which itself had three 6502 processors). I was really excited about the idea of linking together lots of 6502 processors. I applied for a job then at Thinking Machines but didn't get an offer. A sociology grad student I knew from then (Clifford Nass) got a job offer there (and that is part of why I applied there) but he didn't take the offer, which is kind of ironic. He's brilliant and innovative as his career shows, but not really a programmer or hardware guy, and not all that interested in AI that I knew of:
http://adlininc.com/uxpioneers...

I'm shocked and saddened just now when checking what he is up to now to to see on Wikipedia that Cliff died recently of a heart attack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

What a big loss for Cliff's family as well as the world. And not that long after the sad loss of Professor Jim Beniger, who was an inspiration and good role model to both Cliff and myself in various ways.

I can see though how Thinking Machines could also have benefited from Cliff's cleverness in thinking about human/machine interaction related to control of a (then) new type of machine. Maybe they'd still be in business if Cliff had gone to work with them? And maybe, being associated with MIT, they did not need yet one more programmer or hardware person, no matter how much they were interested in parallel processing or had done their own projects already on it

You could not genuinely investigate the correlation between IQ and ethnic/racial groups because you are unqualified to do so. I know this because you are unaware that qualified people have been looking at the issue for decades, and in that sense, the subject isn't the slightest bit taboo.

Since you asked, pretty much every systematic review of the evidence finds that any differences can be explained by sociocultural factors, environmental factors, stereotype threat, and so on.

Incidentally, one of the reasons why we know this is that IQ has been increasing for pretty much everyone around the world since the 1930s (though there is some evidence that the effect may be slowing now), but it has been increasing at different rates for different groups. Importantly, the IQ of groups like African-Americans has been increasing at a faster rate than for white Americans. There is no possible genetic explanation for this.

Turing's famous paper: On Computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem The paper's in English, but the problem it solved was formulated by David Hilbert, in German, in 1928.

It's about as newsworthy as suicide at Foxconn.
Because there are no suicides here in the west.

Talhelm PhD duct taped a fan to a HEPA filter.
And there are nobody in China that could invent something like that.

BTW, Talhelm is wasting his talents pursuing a career in social psychology.
If only we had talents like him onboard during the Apollo 13 crisis, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert would not have needed NASA instructions to hack carbon dioxide scrubbers.

Kudos to every Chinese is a suicidal idiot news update.

the First Amendment?

"This freedom is widely acknowledged—except by the case’s critics—to be at the very core of the First Amendment. If the First Amendment protects anything, it protects freedom to engage in political speech. And when speech is protected by the First Amendment, so is spending money to speak."

While I believe the first two sentences of this argument are be true, I see no logical reason to infer the final sentence, which I think is false. This being the case, I find entire line of reasoning invalid.

We’re kickstarting a Super PAC big enough to make it possible to win a Congress committed to fundamental reform by 2016.

Haven't these same people already elected a President committed to fundamental transformation of America? Has it not proven to be a disaster both inside and outside the country?

Now they ask for your money to put more of the same people into Congress — because "this time it will be different"?

And how will that help their lesser goal — that of altering the First Amendment?

From a legal standpoint, for an activity to be considered "research", it must be "designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge". http://www.virginia.edu/vpr/ir...

When a website uses A/B testing to improve its own internal operations, it's seeking to privately develop limited knowledge on its own operations, rather than general knowledge. This puts it outside the scope of US federal regulations on research, which have been narrowly crafted to avoid regulating commercial activities like these.

Given these criteria, Facebook was surely engaged in research.

Dijkstra was also the idiot who once claimed "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"

Gee, _how_ is every function call, for, while, do, AND if expression constructed at the assembly level? Via a (un)conditional jump.

There is a time and a place to use a radial arm saw, just as there is a time and a place to use a hand planner. Only an idiot tries to ban "dangerous" tools because other idiots don't know how to use them _safely_.

At the time, goto's encouraged "Spaghetti code". The solution was NOT to ban goto, BUT to teach people how to properly write structured code. Also, IF the language didn't provide proper flow control then the language was brain-dead.

THAT is why the OP got down-voted. For repeating a archaic meme that doesn't explain the context, nor list the reasons for why it is "not even wrong."

* "Considered Harmful" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
* "Spaghettie Code" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
* "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~ev...

Oh, and I'm surprised I got this far down and nobody quoted Djikstra yet. I like to count myself as one of the many programmers who proves him wrong; although it's my understanding that the BASIC to which he referred was inferior even to the line-numbered versions of the 80s. I wonder if he ever qualified or backed up even a little bit from his infamous quote.

How many bugs are there in your programs? If the answer is non-zero, then no, you haven't proven him wrong, because that's what he was talking about. Also, he insulted most other popular languages of the day as well, so you don't need to feel singled-out.

I agree, but this is actually an old tongue in cheek essay, in context it makes more sense perhaps:

"FORTRAN --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums."

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~ev...