Slashdot Mirror

The original paper is at http://advances.sciencemag.org..., and is Bronze Open Access with the PDF at http://advances.sciencemag.org...

A skim read (because I'm more interested in the mineralogy than the politics that is obsessing most commenters) tells me :

In addition, although the importation of this expensive foreign pigment into medieval Europe is first materially attested in the 10th century (15), its presence in an otherwise unremarkable womenâ(TM)s community in northern Germany powerfully testifies to the expansion of long-distance trading circuits during the 11th-century European commercial revolution. [...]
Female biological sex was confirmed using both osteological and genetic methods (16)[...]
To isolate the blue particles for further study, we first sought to demineralize the surrounding dental calculus using a dilute HCl solution (0.05 M), as is typically performed during microbotanical analysis. However, we found that this procedure led to color instability and loss (fig. S3); by comparing colors of the acid-demineralized calculus to reference pigments, we confirmed that using an acid as a decalcifying agent is detrimental to color stability and particle size in lapis lazuli, azurite, malachite, and vivianite (fig. S4; see the Supplementary Materials). We then tested an alternate approach on a second dental calculus sample from the same individual, decontaminating the calculus surface and then disrupting the calculus structure by sonication in ultrapure water. Calculus fragments and mineral particles released by this procedure were transferred to a microscope slide without mounting media or coverslip and allowed to dry under controlled conditions. Inspection under light microscopy revealed more than 100 particles of deep blue color (Fig. 2), many of which were observed in situ still encased within fragments of dental calculus (Fig. 2B). [...]
(The colour intensity in the supplied figures is remarkable. I've not seen lapis lazuli under a microscope for decades, but vivianite is a little more common, and is just dull in comparison. )
With the exception of lazurite (the dominant blue mineral in lapis lazuli), all blue pigments that were available and used during the medieval period contain metal (copper, cobalt, or iron) as a major element in their composition [...]
The archaeological blue particles lack copper, cobalt, and iron, thereby excluding pigments containing these metals as major elements, but they closely resemble the elemental composition of lazurite, the sulfur-containing tectosilicate that gives lapis lazuli its dark blue color.

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.u...

"Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? "

There is no way to trace what they did, no way to confirm their methods. Sadly the masses are not equipped to scrutinize the nonsense. [Steve A Morris, 2017-01-11]

You can trace what Hausfather et al. 2017 did by downloading the code they made freely available at bit.ly/2jXSy7G. You can confirm their methods by reading the full paper and following the links at the end which lead to all the data they used. Interested members of the public can read or watch the background they shared.

... they simply don't use 1/3 of the ARGO datasets because its data is "more ambiguous". Translation: "It doesn't fit our needs." [Lonny Eachus, 2017-01-11]

Read the paper to see if Lonny's "translation" is reasonable: "... Two of the three Argo near-SST records assessed, APDRC and H2008, agree well with the buoy-only and satellite-based records and suggest a cool bias in ERSSTv3b during the 2005-2015 period, when sufficient Argo data are available (Fig. 3). The RG2009 series is more ambiguous, with trends that are not significantly different (P > 0.05) from either ERSSTv3b or ERSSTv4. ..."

Lonny Eachus is wrong to claim that Hausfather et al. "simply don't use 1/3 of the ARGO datasets" (presumably a reference to RG2009). They used 3 independent Argo near-SST (near sea surface temperature) datasets, and reported the results from all 3 datasets. Anyone who reads the full paper will see that they mention RG2009 a total of 17 times while reporting the results of using that dataset.

... the study's argument is rather weak. ARGO data has best coverage, best instruments. Yet they arbitrarily throw out 1/3 of the ARGO data sets because they don't agree with their preconceptions. ... In sum, it appears that this paper committed the same likely error as Karl et al. That is to say: ignoring arguably better data because it doesn't fit their preconceptions. [Lonny Eachus, 2017-01-11]

Wrong. Hausfather et al. didn't "throw out" or "ignore" 1/3 of the Argo datasets. Look at figure 3 (backup). They show the results of all three Argo datasets, including four instances using the RG2009 dataset which Lonny baselessly accuses them of "arbitrarily throwing out" and "ignoring".

Paper: (1) "We constructed our own data set from other data sets." (2) Oops. But we left some out. "(3) "We find MOST of the data we used does not match our new contrived data set. So we will ignore it." [Lonny Eachus, 2017-01-11]

Again, Hausfather et al. didn't "leave out" or "ignore" the RG2009 dataset. Look at figure 4 (backup). They show the results of all 3 Argo datasets, including the RG2009 dataset which Lonny baselessly accuses them of "ignoring".

Figure 4 examines four composite SST records: ERSSTv4, ERSSTv3b, HadSST3, and COBE-SST. These composite SST records are compared to instrumentally homogenous datasets (which just means "from a single type of instrument"): b

There is no way to trace what they did, no way to confirm their methods. Sadly the masses are not equipped to scrutinize the nonsense. [Steve A Morris, 2017-01-11]

You can trace what Hausfather et al. 2017 did by downloading the code they made freely available at bit.ly/2jXSy7G. You can confirm their methods by reading the full paper and following the links at the end which lead to all the data they used. Interested members of the public can read or watch the background they shared.

... they simply don't use 1/3 of the ARGO datasets because its data is "more ambiguous". Translation: "It doesn't fit our needs." [Lonny Eachus, 2017-01-11]

Read the paper to see if Lonny's "translation" is reasonable: "... Two of the three Argo near-SST records assessed, APDRC and H2008, agree well with the buoy-only and satellite-based records and suggest a cool bias in ERSSTv3b during the 2005-2015 period, when sufficient Argo data are available (Fig. 3). The RG2009 series is more ambiguous, with trends that are not significantly different (P > 0.05) from either ERSSTv3b or ERSSTv4. ..."

Lonny Eachus is wrong to claim that Hausfather et al. "simply don't use 1/3 of the ARGO datasets" (presumably a reference to RG2009). They used 3 independent Argo near-SST (near sea surface temperature) datasets, and reported the results from all 3 datasets. Anyone who reads the full paper will see that they mention RG2009 a total of 17 times while reporting the results of using that dataset.

... the study's argument is rather weak. ARGO data has best coverage, best instruments. Yet they arbitrarily throw out 1/3 of the ARGO data sets because they don't agree with their preconceptions. ... In sum, it appears that this paper committed the same likely error as Karl et al. That is to say: ignoring arguably better data because it doesn't fit their preconceptions. [Lonny Eachus, 2017-01-11]

Wrong. Hausfather et al. didn't "throw out" or "ignore" 1/3 of the Argo datasets. Look at figure 3 (backup). They show the results of all three Argo datasets, including four instances using the RG2009 dataset which Lonny baselessly accuses them of "arbitrarily throwing out" and "ignoring".

Paper: (1) "We constructed our own data set from other data sets." (2) Oops. But we left some out. "(3) "We find MOST of the data we used does not match our new contrived data set. So we will ignore it." [Lonny Eachus, 2017-01-11]

Again, Hausfather et al. didn't "leave out" or "ignore" the RG2009 dataset. Look at figure 4 (backup). They show the results of all 3 Argo datasets, including the RG2009 dataset which Lonny baselessly accuses them of "ignoring".

Figure 4 examines four composite SST records: ERSSTv4, ERSSTv3b, HadSST3, and COBE-SST. These composite SST records are compared to instrumentally homogenous datasets (which just means "from a single type of instrument"): b

the EXACT OPPOSITE has been *****OBSERVED*****

So you keep claiming, but repeating it louder isn't going to help. If you can produce this supposed evidence, try doing that, because spamming links to some political site won't sway anyone. And while you're at it, see if you can explain away the mountains of evidence showing the accelerating rise in temperatures for the last 150 years.

the falsified data from NOAA, yes, FALSIFIED

Let me guess, you've got no evidence for this accusation of malfeasance either, right? Your sole basis for all this seems to be that you don't like the results, and something something conspiracy. Well too bad, science doesn't work that way. You can spout Lysenkoism all you like, but from here it looks much more like you're the one denying the evidence you dislike, and producing none of your own.

NOAA are completely open about their data correction methods, which are peer reviewed, confirmed independently, and are corroborated by data & analysis from NASA, CRU, and other international agencies. And if you still don't like it, take their raw data (yes, it's always been available) and do your own analysis (if you can get your methodology through peer review, ha ha). That's what the Berkeley Earth people did (you can check their data too) - and surprise surprise, their results agreed with NOAA, NASA, and the others. So your unsubstantiated claims of "tainted" data are laughable in the face of the real evidence.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade you from your religious beliefs.

What a coincidence; "no amount of evidence" is exactly what you've produced. And yet it's you that has repeatedly dismissed all the evidence against you, citing only some purely hypothetical political manipulation. "Zombie minion" indeed.

Long time to reply, I know, but thought it best to present my complete lack of bona fides and say I've never programmed in either language, but I am familiar with this old joke

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.u...
A good book, might be a bit hard to find nowadays, uh, nevermind found it on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Fairylan...

Basically people hacking genomes to create new drugs to get high on (and other stuffs) been a while since I read it.

... Karl et al. conclusion is an outlier. And you don't have to be a scientist to know it... if it weren't, there wouldn't have been news media all over the place reporting "No 'Hiatus' After All". Outliers are outliers. They can be recognized from their conclusions, as I did, but by lay people they can also often be recognized by the media uproar they stir. Simple logic says that if it hadn't been NEWS, it wouldn't have made a stir in the news. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-07-23]

Jane's method of spotting outliers via media uproar is cute, but it would be more rigorous to actually look at Fig 1 (a) and (b). The new global trend's central estimate is within the error bars of the old estimate. ... [Dumb Scientist]

... All it takes is simple logic to clearly show that Karl et al. results are an outlier. I didn't exactly make this up, either. Lots of others have been saying it. In fact, even many of the big news sources haven't dared to touch Karl with a 10-foot pole. It's just that -- ahem -- "credible". ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-07-28]

Again, spotting outliers via media uproar isn't as rigorous as actually looking at the data. So let's reproduce Fig 1(b) in Karl et al. 2015, which shows trends from 1998 to 2012. Let's calculate those trends for all the land/ocean, global, and satellite datasets listed here:

HadCRUT4 trend: +0.050 ± 0.139 C/decade (2 sigma)

NOAA trend: +0.079 ± 0.131 C/decade (2 sigma)

Karl(2015) trend: +0.086 ± 0.148 C/decade (2 sigma)

GISTEMP trend: +0.100 ± 0.141 C/decade (2 sigma)

Berkeley trend: +0.096 ± 0.137 C/decade (2 sigma)

HadCRUT4 krig v2 trend: +0.111 ± 0.152 C/decade (2 sigma)

Karl(2015) krig trend: +0.111 ± 0.157 C/decade (2 sigma)

RSS trend: -0.055 ± 0.246 C/decade (2 sigma)

UAH trend: +0.054 ± 0.251 C/decade (2 sigma)

All these trend estimates are consistent with my previous statement: there hasn't been a statistically significant change in the warming rate, and there isn't a statistically significant difference between the projected and observed trends.

Do these results support Jane's claim that Karl et al. 2015 is somehow an "outlier"?

Wow! So much wrong with your info. C++ performs constant string concatenation, too.
Matter of fact, everything in your 1st paragraph applies to C++ as well.

And the "external function" example has nothing to do with C; that's a function of the program ld,
and C++ uses ld to build its executable as well.

Also, see the Stroustrup interview -- a real eye-opener!

Although I don't know about Java (last time I programmed early versions in high school), but I can relate with C#, JavaScript and high level C++. Your assertion is correct, knowing about the metal does not translate to actually being a good programmer. But my experience is that programmers that can program C or ASM on average are the better programmers. My experience that these relatively harsh environments separate the wheat from the chaff. Bad code in C# may manifest as a slow and resource hungry application, but in C it will almost certainly cause subtle memory invalidation. Most people will stop programming low level code for their sanity and only the good programmers remain. Most "modern" languages where designed in a way so that it is really hard to shoot yourself in the foot...

How do you actually test that cigarettes cause cancer? A big observational study? Well maybe people smoke because they're stressed or not health conscious, and they have a natural per-disposition to lung cancer. Build it from theory? Sure the smoke causes these problems in the lungs that we would expect to cause cancer, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're causing the cancer.

That sounds a lot like Ronald Fisher's objection to the hypothesis that smoking causes cancer. He proposed that to a "rational skeptic," it was impossible to determine whether smoking itself caused cancer, or that something which caused cancer also caused people to want to smoke.

The only way around this would be a randomized controlled trial of smoking, which would not be ethical.

So you are correct: if modern science could never demonstrate to the satisfaction of the founder of modern statistics that smoking causes cancer, there is nothing that we can conclusively prove. Popper dealt with this nicely when he noted that we only ever accept theories provisionally, and advised that the evidence we demand should be proportional to the consequences of being wrong.

Currently their wages aren't falling so they didn't see a need for it yet:

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk...
.

Whoosh

Epidemiology by itself isn't a junk science. It crosses into junk science when someone leaps from observed statistical associations on non-randomized samples to wishfully ($$$) declaring causal relations. Such associations are at best a hint that there may be causal relation, but one needs hard science, such as randomized trials or animal/human experiments to find out what kind of links (e.g. causal or protective/therapeutic) connect those correlated variables.

That's how it is done in normal science, you use statistical hint to make hypothesis that is followed up with hard science. But antismoking "science" is stuck on the same hint since 1950.

And it is not for lack of trying hard science. There were thousands of experiments done since then. The problem was that they all went the "wrong" way -- the smoking animals live longer, perform better on cognitive tasks, get cancers less often, etc. What can poor scientific mercenaries do, when their bosses want the opposite result, but stick with what works, parrot the statistical hints disguised as "science." This was so unusual pattern that already in 1958, the father of modern statistical methods, famous British mathematician R. A. Fisher noticed it and wrote (pdf; this article also contains a very readable exposition of the sample randomization topic):

"Most of us thought at the time, on hearing the nature of evidence, which I hope to make clear a little later, that a good prima facie case had been made for further investigation. But the time has passed, and although further investigation, in a sense, has taken place, it has consisted largely of the repetition of observations of the same kind as those which Hill and his colleagues called attention to several years ago. I read a recent article to the effect that nineteen different investigations in different parts of the world had all concurred in confirming Dr. Hill's findings. I think they had concurred, but I think they were mere repetitions of evidence of the same kind..."

Yet, the antismoking "science" still rests its case squarely on the same kind of soft/junk science that Fisher objected to over half a century ago.

Well then, who can argue with that?

REPLACING TRIDENT

The warheads carried by the Trident missiles are manufactured and designed in the UK by the Atomic Weapons Establishment.

No, not really.

REPLACING TRIDENT

The warheads carried by the Trident missiles are manufactured and designed in the UK by the Atomic Weapons Establishment.

1. 1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. 2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. 3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply accept this.
4. 4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. 5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. 6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light.
7. 7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. 8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. 9. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. 10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

How about Grignr?

01. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

02. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

03. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply accept this.

04. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

05. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but would run on only five percent of the roads.

06. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light.

07. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

08. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

09. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off. link

...as demonstrated by Mark Twain's famous quote that I paraphrased to use as the title of this blog post.

Sorry, that's a damned lie.

Mark Twain attributed the quote to Disraeli, not to himself. But even that attribution is now considered inaccurate, as described by The University of York Department of Mathematics and on this Wikipedia page.

That link really misrepresents the state of the industry.

First of all, most artists who create their own CDs don't make anywhere near $8 per CD. Having a CD produced varies greatly but the less you produce the more it costs per CD. Many artists go for short runs when they are starting out but they still have to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for 100 CDs.

If you are shooting to make minimum wage and you have to sell 147/month (or more since you say they make less), you might want to press more than 100 at a time.

Secondly, they put single track sales on the same chart as whole album sales. This is comparing apples to oranges. In order to convert the two you'd have to at least multiply the track price by the average tracks per album. On iTunes, at least, the assumption is that there will be at least 10 tracks per album - if you look at the chart this means that the track download approximately matches the album download.

I don't really see what you are saying here. The chart says you have to sell a certain number of whole albums (with any number of tracks), or you have to sell a certain number of individual tracks.

Lastly, the figures for album download and track download represent what might be a typical deal for an artist with a major label but the fact is there are a lot of independent labels out there that are little more than a group of artists who formed a label for the purpose of selling songs in marketplaces like iTunes. These independent labels take little, if anything from the artist so the artist ends up making close to 30% from a sale.

This means that on a $9.99 album the artist would make close to $3. If you look on the chart that would place selling an album through iTunes well above the $1.00 they would get from selling a retail album CD (high end royalty deal). At those rates they would have to sell approximately 390 albums a month through iTunes in order to make minimum wage, far better than most of the other methods in the article.

so you are saying they didn't list every possible combination of artist/label/independent. I missed where they claimed to have done that. Just imagine an extra entry between the second and third line.

Basically that article follows the old saying, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Yes, streaming music does make an artist less per unit than other sales and, yes, if you do everything yourself you can get a larger cut. What it ignores are the gains you get from taking a smaller cut but joining a larger distribution model that gets your music out there and listened to.

It shows precisely how much you are going to have to benefit from that larger distribution model in order to make the same amount doing other things. Most bands will probably chose more than one way to offer their music. If I were a musician I'd stay away from spotify.

that's what artists say subscription services are doing to the music industry

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

That link really misrepresents the state of the industry.

First of all, most artists who create their own CDs don't make anywhere near $8 per CD. Having a CD produced varies greatly but the less you produce the more it costs per CD. Many artists go for short runs when they are starting out but they still have to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for 100 CDs. There are also the studio, production, and marketing costs which may or may not be present depending on the individual artist and the desired quality of the final product.

Now, if they sell a good chunk of those CDs they'll make decent money but many of them struggle to sell even a couple of dozen when they are starting out and they often sell them at far less than $9.99 because their goal is getting their music heard, not making money. So saying they make $8 on a $9.99 sale just does not reflect reality.

Secondly, they put single track sales on the same chart as whole album sales. This is comparing apples to oranges. In order to convert the two you'd have to at least multiply the track price by the average tracks per album. On iTunes, at least, the assumption is that there will be at least 10 tracks per album - if you look at the chart this means that the track download approximately matches the album download.

Lastly, the figures for album download and track download represent what might be a typical deal for an artist with a major label but the fact is there are a lot of independent labels out there that are little more than a group of artists who formed a label for the purpose of selling songs in marketplaces like iTunes. These independent labels take little, if anything from the artist so the artist ends up making close to 30% from a sale.

This means that on a $9.99 album the artist would make close to $3. If you look on the chart that would place selling an album through iTunes well above the $1.00 they would get from selling a retail album CD (high end royalty deal). At those rates they would have to sell approximately 390 albums a month through iTunes in order to make minimum wage, far better than most of the other methods in the article.

Basically that article follows the old saying, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Yes, streaming music does make an artist less per unit than other sales and, yes, if you do everything yourself you can get a larger cut. What it ignores are the gains you get from taking a smaller cut but joining a larger distribution model that gets your music out there and listened to.

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/crash.htm

I would say that it these students are in an engineering or science program, they must know how to use these tools, just like someone in a science/math program must know how to use Mathematica. That said, if the course in question is just a survey course, the specific tools may be less important than the exposure. For this there may be alternatives. For instance, an only breadboard simulator is available. Google circuit simulators and there may be more available. I am not sure what is available for CAD.

Here is another issue. If the class teaches the design techniques and not the application, the maybe students can use whatever they want. What distresses me is that we are no longer teaching the high level concepts, but the mouse based menu selection. Instead of teaching the concept of cut and paste, we are teaching the menu commands. The problem is when the menu changes, the students are SOL. For career training, this is fine, but I think we should be teaching at a higher level for college. For instance, in my college, we were just told to write a program to solve the problem or create a simulation. How we did it using the available tools were up to us.

A while back you mentioned about the USB probing could be made faster (and asked why I was using pciehp). Well you were right USB probing DID get faster (boot tracing SVG of EeePC 900) and I no longer need pciehp on my EeePC 900.

I bet that making the kernel more asynchronous than it already is (with the current async patches) won't save any more significant amounts of time on this particular setup though! : )

Extend the hyperlink one word to the left (across "Britain's ...") and it makes sense.

FWIW, pictures!:
http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/brainscan_images.htm

and the Uni press release:
http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/skull.htm

Extend the hyperlink one word to the left (across "Britain's ...") and it makes sense.

FWIW, pictures!:
http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/brainscan_images.htm

and the Uni press release:
http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/skull.htm

Here's another sample and another sample.

Edward Tufte's forum also has a discussion on Nightingale's diagrams.

I don't want to advertise my site but I think this is the most fuckable math article out there. Unless you also love some Polly Nomial fun...

"A number of nuclear reactors"? All you can say is that Quebec had at least one nuclear reactor in the 1980s. See this page for background.

The reality is that anybody making any confident statement about fluoride - positive or negative - is speaking way beyond the evidence. Fluridisation is a very contentious issue, and tends to be debated in a highly polarised, politicised manner, with possibilities stated as certainties and much wailing and gnashing of mottled, slightly less caried teeth. In 1999 the UK Department of Health had the York University Centre for Reviews and Dissemination do a systematic review of the evidence on the benefits and/or harm of fluridisation. There's not much of significance since.

Their most important result wasn't about fluride, it was about the studies - almost to the last one, they were methodologically flawed. The ones which met the minimum quality threshold suggested that there was maybe, possibly, something like a 14% increase in the number of children without dental caries in areas with fluoridated water, but the variance was enormous (some studies even had negative results). So if someone says there's overwhelming evidence that fluridation works, they're talking out of their ass. There may be a small gain to be had, but this isn't established scientifically.

Then there's the potential negatives. Fluoridation gives about one eigth of people fluorosis (discoloured teeth). There are other factors too, though these are less well established, such as a Taiwanese study which found a high incidence of bladder cancer in women from areas where the natural fluoride content in water was high. It's an early result, and the authors of the study even note that there's potentially a statisitcal problem with the study, but the possibility remains. I've heard this result stated as fact.

This story is great news for people who worry about global warming, because however hot the earth gets, even if it gets hot enough to kill us all, when the earth eventually cools it seems that life 2.0 will spontaneously evolve.

Hmmm...they must have stolen it from Rocheworld.

I was as confused as Kjella, until I found the euclid's proof myself ( http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/cyc/p/primepr f.htm )

I suck at maths, but this is what i made from it:

{P(1)*P(2)*...*P(n)}+1 is either a prime, or at least one of its divisors is a prime larger than P(n).

So i guess that means that there are infinte number of primes then.

You obviously know nothing about OCaml, Haskell, or Standard ML.

I've looked into Haskell before. Just scratched the surface, really, but definitely more than "know nothing".

If you did, you'd see immediately how they either take care of all those problems at compile time, or it's completely impossible for them to even be affected.

Bold statements like this are bullshit. Any language can benefit from static analysis. How can you seriously claim otherwise? Obviously a language like C would benefit more than Java, and Java would benefit more than Haskell, but no language checks for every possible problem at compile time.

Here's a counter-example to your claims: Catch - Case Totality Checker for Haskell: "A Haskell program may fail at runtime with a pattern-match error if the program has any incomplete (non-exhaustive) patterns in definitions or case alternatives. This paper describes a static checker that allows non-exhaustive patterns to exist, yet ensures that a pattern-match error does not occur."

Honestly... no structure, no planning, no discipline, nothing but planning not to have a plan.

it's a tower of 3 numbers, 3^3^3

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/cyc/g/graham. htm

here's the beginning, taken from:
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook918.htm

With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement in the Ancestor Wars precisely: Saturday, June 2, 2007. That was the night Lena dragged me along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. We'd been out to dinner, it was almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open 24 hours.

"Don't you want to discover your place in the human family?" she asked, fixing her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. "Don't you want to find out exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?"

The honest answer would have been: What sane person could possibly care? We'd only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I wasn't yet comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.

"It's very late," I said cautiously. "And you know I have to work tomorrow." I was still fighting my way up through post-doctoral qualifications in physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and doing all the tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their slaves. Lena was a communications engineer--and at 25, the same age as I was, she'd had real paid jobs for almost four years.

"You always have to work. Come on, Paul! It'll take fifteen minutes."

Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told myself that it could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming city streets.

It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air was still. The Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of Sydney, prime real estate, an ostentatious display of the movement's wealth. ONE WORLD, ONE FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There were bureaus in over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various "culturally appropriate" names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Ele'ele in Samoa) and I'd heard that the Children were working on street-corner vending-machine sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.

In the foyer, a holographic bust of Mitochondrial Eve herself, mounted on a marble pedestal, gazed proudly over our heads. The artist had rendered our hypothetical ten-thousand-times-great grandmother as a strikingly beautiful woman. A subjective judgment, certainly--but her lean, symmetrical features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didn't really strike me as amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The esthetic buttons being pushed were labeled, unmistakably: warrior, queen, goddess. And I had to admit that I felt a certain bizarre, involuntary swelling of pride at the sight of her ... as if her regal bearing and fierce eyes somehow "ennobled" me and all her descendants ... as if the "character" of the entire species, our potential for virtue, somehow depended on having at least one ancestor who could have starred in a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.

Well worth reading, along with the rest of the stories in the collection "Luminous" by Greg Egan. here's another link to some favourable reviews of his stuff: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/e/eg an.htm

> I will offer this explanation of why many people are happy with the bible, unchanged and not newly interpreted.... the laws that govern the supernatural (known as moral or spiritual law) is known primarily through revelation. People who believe the bible is that revelation, and complete, are very unlikely to change their interpretation of it....

My question is this: How *much* of the Bible have they read?

I was born and raised a Christian (Protestant) by my parents for all my childhood. Part of my upbringing was going to church and Sunday School, neither of which I particularly enjoyed. Despite that, I never questioned the existence of God or the Holy Trinity.

As time went on, however, I began to feel small, nagging doubts about my religion, "like a splinter in the back of your mind, driving you mad." Questions I directed to my pastor and Sunday School teachers received unsatisfactory answers or evasive responses. One answer I consistently got was, "If you want the truth, you can always find it in the Bible."

Okay, I thought, if everything I'm feeling uneasy about can be resolved by the Bible, I might as well read it. All of it. The whole thing. (I was still a kid at the time, and I was already a voracious reader who devoured entire computer programming texts and technical references -- so it didn't seem that crazy to me.)

Big mistake.

Bear in mind that I was writing and debugging programs on my home computer at the time, so I was accustomed to identifying logical inconsistencies and contradictions in documents. The first whopper was in, of all things, the Book of Genesis: there are *two different* accounts of Creation, and they are mutually incompatible! From there it just gets worse and worse. By the time I had *finished* the Bible, my faith was in worse shape than before!

The only way to reconcile such a horribly inconsistent Bible is to read it *selectively* -- picking out valuable passages while disregarding the others. Yet this runs counter to the idea of the Bible as an authoritative reference! Instead of deriving your judgement directly from the Bible, you'd be exercising your individual judgement ON the Bible. In other words, you'd be *interpreting* the Bible's value system through your own unique value system!

Because of this quandary, I ended up "losing my religion." I could not in all honesty put my faith in a Bible that was literally full of holes; to do so would make me a hypocrite. (Ironically, Jesus had some choice words for hypocrites.)

For a more humurous sendup of old-fashioned Biblical values, check this out:

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/laura.ht m

Novell has made a couple of choices which don't display a clear committment to formats one can play with FLOSS.

Recently they started an audio show distributed online and this show is encoded exclusively in MP3 format. I wrote to them suggesting that they upload a WAV or FLAC file to archive.org and let archive.org make derivative files in a variety of formats including Ogg Vorbis, thus simultaneously offloading bandwidth and hosting resources while allowing people to hear their show without necessarily giving up their software freedom.

Now their "narrated screencam" is distributed exclusively in RealMedia format, for which there is no FLOSS player. This doesn't have to be this way—one could distribute the same movie in Ogg Theora+Ogg Vorbis format as well as their (apparently) preferred non-free format.

By contrast the Fedora project, York Student television (including Fluendo's Java player; I don't yet know if this will work with the Free Java software, but it's a handy way to point someone to a URL and let them watch the show) and a number of others distribute audio in Ogg Vorbis and movies with audio in Ogg Theora+Vorbis one can play on any platform using Free Software. There are even plugins for proprietary players to play these files (like illiminable's Windows Media player software).

It's "The Big Bounce" by Walter S. Tevis, written in 1958. It's in the great short story collection "Where Do We Go From Here?" edited by Asimov.

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/a/as imov.htm
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/t/wl trstvs.htm

It's "The Big Bounce" by Walter S. Tevis, written in 1958. It's in the great short story collection "Where Do We Go From Here?" edited by Asimov.

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/a/as imov.htm
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/t/wl trstvs.htm

I wish people would look up the original press release instead of advertising the physorg tarpit.

Here.

(yes, all the stupid "teleportation" stuff was in the original)

A correction: I just followed the paper trail back and discovered that it isn't talking about cloning as I discussed above: it's talking about cloning as one would normally imagine it (actual copies), but with limited fidelity. If you want to get above the ceiling on fidelity, you have to start entangling your states as per my discussion of cloning above. Please save me some embarrassment by not modding the parent up. :-)

(The paper in question: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~schmuel/papers/LBb 01.pdf )

At least as far as several of the greatest writers in the last 2 centuries are concerned, I did get it right. For your reference (because I can't warp you back to the discussions I have had on this rule):

http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/059.html

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/cyc/s/split.h tm

http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/writing /grammartrap.html ( see "Examples of Fake Rules" down towards the bottom)

So as long at it sounds good to my ear, I will continue to split infinitives. Of course, a once over of your own post is in order.

Best resource to computer science students wanting to shoot themselves in the foot here.

Surely you know that C++ is a hoax? What you fail to take into account is that people learn from their mistakes. Languages do become easier (though at an expense). For instance a lot of C program instability and security problems come from failing to free() memory or trying to reference null pointers. Modern languages use system based memory allocation with automatic garbage collection. Perl has many ways of doing things, an obscure syntax, and worst a hacker mentality. C and Java programmers are introduced to "style guides" before learning the actual syntax and functions, which enables one programmer to simply read the code of another. Python uses indenting to enforce its own style guide. Your binary example is not cross-platform as it would have to be recoded for every platform. When I was at college we had to program an embedded processor directly in binary using a toggle switch, and it wasn't easy and quite error prone.

Multiple languages leads to a survival of the fittest, with derivative languages borrowing from the previous stronger surviving languages (eg C# from Java). Programmers are lazy and thus driven to make life easier for themselves. Hence they create new or even competing libraries (ala Qt vs GTK)... and languages. And long may it continue.

Phillip.

You can view her experience at http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/polly.ht m