Public transportation is a joke (at least in the US).
In most of the US I'd agree, although not for the reasons the parent stated...public transit works amazingly well with older once-industrial cities, with a high-density downtown and either small clustered neighborhoods or high-density suburbs surrounding. It doesn't work well in a city which is essentially all "suburban." Not surprisingly, public transit does quite where you have the largest concentration of "old" cities. It works in places like san francisco and the pacific northwest, and it is arguably at its best in the northeast megalopolis. In fact you can take local and commuter rails and buses all the way from Virginia to Maine without ever having to resort to long distance solutions like Amtrak or Greyhound, and I've commuted to work on public transit since college, because it's usually faster and cheaper than driving.
Most cities in the US don't fit that model, however. Public transit just won't work without population density and clustered areas of employment, and in the post-WWII development boom we put almost no limits on how much people could spread out. A lot of new development and zoning (at least on the east coast where I live) is beginning to take public transit into account, forcing suburbs back into more of a small-town model, with sidewalks and a centralized school, shopping district, and transit station that everyone can easily walk to. Maryland has more info up at http://www.mdp.state.md.us/smartintro.htm/.
New planning like this is really most effective near an old city with effective public transit, however. Cities which primarily developed in the 50's or later were planned around individual car ownership. When each individual is driving the most effective layout is to encourage a high number of lower-volume commuting routes, and it is very difficult to make mass transit work in a setup like that.
If I remember correctly, it was for a security company which was trying to promote itself as the smart, efficient solution to security needs. I would have loved it even more as a PSA, but it was still remarkably insightful.
Speaking of advertisements that I found to be perhaps a little too close to the mark, another one of my favorites which ran in the DC area was "McDonalds - get Nickle and Dimed"
A couple years ago an ad was run in the DC metro - it had a picture of a brick wall with a single fire alarm bell (like the kind that used to be in schools) on the left hand side, and the same wall on the right hand side, except now it was covered with alarm bells, all mounted at about 3" intervals.
Underneath it simply said "More security does not mean you are more secure."
I think it sums up our situation pretty effectively.
Pong is nothing but is one dimensional gameplay on a two dimensional screen.
Man, I remember the days when all our games were played on two dimensional screens. Back then you had to focus on gameplay - none of this fancy holographic stuff. Games were pure.
This version has a computer-based, laser-guided targeting system. But it was made in 1985. This is not robots gone crazy. This is just a software glitch (or perhaps hardware failure) from an outdated system.
Ahhh, so it's outdated robots gone crazy. Point well taken.
I'm going to second that suggestion. I use URBI for talking to an AIBO as an AI hobbyist - the Java interface can be a bit slow at times, especially dealing with video data, but by slow we're usually talking 3 updates a second instead of 30, which may still be in range for what you want to do. The C++ interface is much more powerful, and from what I've read is quite fast as well. Overall, it's provided a fantastic interface for low-level control of a robot, and I'm pretty happy with it.
I have, over the past year and a bit, been working on a very similar project...getting myself from a rapidly eroding grasp of high-school math and a couple semesters of mostly forgotten calculus through to a pretty solid grounding in algebraic manipulation and proofs, analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems, and the beginnings of modern algebra. And it really was like learning to read.
It's a new way of reading - and a new way of thinking - and it's one that you're unfamiliar with. Start simple and small, and work with basic algebra. I'd get a GRE prep book or something along that line (barrons is the best, IMO), and solve all the problems through algebraic manipulation, working out the arithmetic by hand. No numeric substitution or checking all the answers - you essentially want to be constructing a proof of the correct answer to each question. It helps if you have someone who knows more math than you that you can turn to when you're stuck, so you can skip the frustration of looking up the rules and staring at a problem that just doesn't work. The point is to do enough basic math that it starts to become second nature...the same way that you started out reading things like "see spot run", having to think about the meaning of every word and every step. Eventually, as in reading, you hit a "knee" of sorts, and it starts to become easier, and then effortless. If you really want to learn it quickly and well, math should be the sort of thing you could end up doing for fun after a happy hour, or when you're bored on the train on the way to work. Once the basics are solid and you can do it without effort, then everything else continues to be fun. You're free to focus on the clever plot twists and new ideas of the more advanced mathematics without having to worry about the medium in which they're conveyed - and when you do come across a new notation it's no more troublesome than a new word in a novel - if you can't figure it out from the context you can look it up and continue on your way.
The one exception to the above that I'd recommend is to study linear algebra early, probably before you even review calculus. A solid understanding of spaces, sets, transformations, and dimension helps to tie everything else together in a wonderful way.
The main issue with IBM's cell blades is relative price - The one mentioned at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2177357,00.asp/ starts at $9,995, which is far more than all 8 PS3s and a ton of extra networked memory are going to cost you.
Sony's estimate of 1 teraflop per unit is more than a little bit optimistic, and also counts all the operations performed by the graphics system, which the average researcher won't have access to. For a slightly more realistic estimate of what 8 ps3's running linux can do, I'd point you towards http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store/index.php?submit=software&submitimg%5Bhardware%5D%5Bsolutions%5D=1, who sell turnkey ps3 clusters. They are claiming that 8 units together break the theoretical teraflop mark, which seems more realistic to me. While that isn't among the fastest computers in the world by any stretch, it's still solidly in the realm of what I'd call a supercomputer.
The cell is a fantastic piece of equipment - Dr. Dobb's has what I think is an excellent analysis of the kinds of performance benefits that it offers at http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/197801624. I'm currently running one at home in a PS3 (for neural networks that drive an AIBO - I love Sony's tendency to dump hugely expensive hardware at mass-market prices), and I have every intention of picking up more used ones over the coming months to cluster together as the networks continue to grow. Even all by it's lonesome with code that's far from optimized, the one I have is running about 10 times faster than my main desktop for roughly equivalent computations.
(Note that your mileage may vary - I just happen to like playing with systems that parallelize really well)
Be that as it may, 99% of that beauty and complexity is useless. Just because something is nice doesn't mean it should be used on a daily basis, Latin is nice sounding but I don't want to give a speech in it, English is much better for that purpose.
Honestly, Latin always struck me as one of the more efficient, regular, and cleanly structured languages I've ever learned. Worlds beyond English in that regard. It's also my experience, however, that the only useless words in a language are the ones that other people don't know, and then they're only useless when you aren't trying to sound important and knowledgable without saying anything.:)
With regard to words in common use, some words or forms of expression might initially be redundant, but the subtle patterns of use which emerge start to imbue the choice of one or another with meaning, and then they suddenly _are_ useful, allowing me to distinguish between pork and ham, or between the openings "If I was in the wrong..." and "If I were in the wrong...", or for that matter "If I was wrong". All of them convey different information, place their audiences in a slightly different frame of mind, and allow for more subtle expression of ideas. These are precisely the traits I'd _love_ to have when attempting to move people to action or emotion through speech, and that's why I'll take the complexity of English over the rigid efficiency of classical Latin for any address of the week.
Which is strange, because in almost every other area the English language is amazingly diverse, offering what I've read is a particularly high number of options when choosing the vocabulary used to express a particular idea.
I know it's possible to fashion very creative and effective curses in English, drawing from the Latin and the Germanic sides of the linguistic history, as well as the vocabulary from other languages that it so readily absorbs. I wonder why such things aren't commonly done, or why they fell out of style? Or perhaps most people throughout history cursed with a few simple words, and my view of the past is being skewed by the writings of a somewhat wordy educated elite.
In Quebec and in some Cajun French speaking areas, I've heard people toss out some fairly complicated religious profanities. Does anyone know of other modern languages whose speakers commonly curse in diverse or creative ways?
Someone mod the parent up...that anyone can read these books at taxpayer expense through the library of congress is a very strong argument against the existence of government censorship.
You're right - I had come away with a mistaken impression after reading the fliers they had in the library. It was still enough to get them to close off their internet access, but I stand corrected about the archived data. Thanks!
CALEA, enacted in 1994, requires that telephone companies ensure that their networks do not impede law enforcement agencies from setting up wiretaps. In 2005 the scope of the law was extended to include all "facilities-based" Internet service providers. However, the law has provisions that exempt private networks, such as those operated by many colleges and universities, from such regulation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
What is a "private network"?
Neither the statute nor the FCC's rules define the term. However, it's strongly suggested that interconnected networks will be considered private when made available only to limited constituencies, rather than to the general public. Thus, campus networks that exclude the public at large, such as those that require University ID cards or password authentication, would likely be considered private.
To continue to offer access to the internet to the public at large, a service the AU Library has long offered, is to increase the likelihood that the campus network will be deemed "public" and thus subject to CALEA.
If they're fully GPL-compliant, then they _are_ giving back to the community by opening up the source that they develop using GPL'd code. The tweaks, improvements, and extensions that they make to the OS and other applications become available, and that helps make the software that we all use better in the long run. Free software isn't about making people write certain programs or support certain platforms in order to offset the benefit they derive from not having to reinvent the wheel. It's about the way that we all inherently benefit from people having time and money to spend on things other than more wheels. No tithing is required, which is the beauty of it all.
Not to rain on your parade of nationalist generalizations, but I don't believe the distinction between "damp" and "dampen" is really one that divides along U.S. and Commonwealth English. I've certainly run into both living here in the states, and many of the definitions cited just above come from dictionaries of U.S. English. As far as I can tell, engineering (in most English speaking nations including the UK) tends to use "damp" much more often -- which is why the hydraulic shock absorbers on cars in the UK are called "dampers" and not "dampeners", and the idiomatic "put a damper on things" is far more common here than "put a dampener", but in most other uses you can trade off freely and everyone's going to understand you.
Zippthorne was nitpicking and possibly being a bit curmudgeonly by demanding that people use the variant more common in technical circles, but as anyone who knows the world beyond their borders (or failing that, has read slashdot) can attest, that's hardly a trait unique to a single nationality.
but one was wild speculation, whereas the other had (and has) actual engineering.
Check out http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision.html. The artificial vision system comes complete with a jack in the side of the head and everything. Dobelle even received a Nobel prize nomination for his work, and at least in scientific fields those are tough to get without doing the hard math:)
That's good to know. I've encountered some publicly funded universities where that isn't the case, but I'm glad California set it up that way, and that makes the actions of the police in that matter even more unfortunate.
It seems to me that unless they're trying to stop her from redistributing those ISBN numbers and prices, it's far more of a "We're a private bookstore, so we can ask anyone we want to leave. If you want free reference go to the library" type of issue. It's something of a nasty move on their part, but unless there's something about Harvard's status as an educational institution that prevents that, and which I'm not aware of, then I think it's their right. I don't see why IP has to enter into this at all.
Wouldn't you think that you could presume that the actions the government asks you to do are by definition legal?
Good lord no, and not even from an ideological perspective. If I were running a company, I would hope that my lawyers would thoroughly investigate what we were being asked to do, because from a purely pragmatic viewpoint we want to make sure we don't expose ourselves to lawsuits from our customers. The government enjoys a lot of protection from those, but people simply doing favors for the government don't get those same benefits, and even if what we did was legal, it could still expose us to liability. If they do turn out to be illegal, I'm not interested in a "dramatically lowered punishment", I'm interested in not taking illegal actions in the first place, which is a much safer position to be in.
Furthermore, if the government was just asking us, and not showing up with a court order, I'd carefully consider the costs, including PR implications as well. As a phone carrier, I certainly wouldn't want to be known for spying on my customers, and it would come down to a cost-benefit analysis of cooperation verses refusal. As part of that analysis, I think it would be important to be as certain as one can ever be about the legal status of exactly what we were being asked to do.
In at least every state and territory in which I have lived, the public libraries are definitely free, as are the books being lent. They're very often used by the homeless as a place to stay, and in many cases it offers them a way to learn while they're getting out of the cold, which I'm all for.
The UCLA tasering was not a public library in the same sense, since it belongs to the school rather than the community at large, so they were within their rights to demand an ID and ask people who couldn't show that they were using the library with the school's authorization to leave.
What happened after that I find horrific, and I don't in any way mean this post to excuse it, I just wanted to clarify that the ID requirement doesn't cover general public libraries, and in fact pretty much all of the universities I'm familiar with voluntarily keep their libraries open to the public and just require an ID to check out books, or in many cases now to use the internet, due to new federal legislation which requires them to monitor activity and keep extensive backups if they allow open public use of the network.
True, but as the dihedral angles tend ever more oblique, cornering off less and less volume, the number of vertices -- and therefore the number of corners -- grows larger.
(I'm assuming we're speaking of regular convex worlds, and that the overall volume of the world is not changing)
If we then define the size of your corner as the volume of the (generally irregular) polyhedron you get when you remove everything but the faces which meet at your vertex (the point of your corner), and then re-close the open faces by stringing new edges between the vertices which lost one or more connecting edges. I don't believe it really matters how you go about choosing to connect them, so long as you end up with a convex solid.
Now in order to reduce the volume cornered off by the faces intersecting at a single vertex, you must increase the angle at which they meet (the Dihedral Angle), which in the case of a regular convex polyhedron involves increasing the number of faces.
So to continue your metaphor, your particular corner may be smaller than back in the days of 6-sided dice, but that's only because the 20-sided world has so many more to choose from.
Slashdot Mirror
Most cities in the US don't fit that model, however. Public transit just won't work without population density and clustered areas of employment, and in the post-WWII development boom we put almost no limits on how much people could spread out. A lot of new development and zoning (at least on the east coast where I live) is beginning to take public transit into account, forcing suburbs back into more of a small-town model, with sidewalks and a centralized school, shopping district, and transit station that everyone can easily walk to. Maryland has more info up at http://www.mdp.state.md.us/smartintro.htm/.
New planning like this is really most effective near an old city with effective public transit, however. Cities which primarily developed in the 50's or later were planned around individual car ownership. When each individual is driving the most effective layout is to encourage a high number of lower-volume commuting routes, and it is very difficult to make mass transit work in a setup like that.
If I remember correctly, it was for a security company which was trying to promote itself as the smart, efficient solution to security needs. I would have loved it even more as a PSA, but it was still remarkably insightful.
Speaking of advertisements that I found to be perhaps a little too close to the mark, another one of my favorites which ran in the DC area was "McDonalds - get Nickle and Dimed"
I'd love to get my hands on one as well - I wish I'd taken a picture while it was up.
A couple years ago an ad was run in the DC metro - it had a picture of a brick wall with a single fire alarm bell (like the kind that used to be in schools) on the left hand side, and the same wall on the right hand side, except now it was covered with alarm bells, all mounted at about 3" intervals.
Underneath it simply said "More security does not mean you are more secure."
I think it sums up our situation pretty effectively.
I'm going to second that suggestion. I use URBI for talking to an AIBO as an AI hobbyist - the Java interface can be a bit slow at times, especially dealing with video data, but by slow we're usually talking 3 updates a second instead of 30, which may still be in range for what you want to do. The C++ interface is much more powerful, and from what I've read is quite fast as well. Overall, it's provided a fantastic interface for low-level control of a robot, and I'm pretty happy with it.
I have, over the past year and a bit, been working on a very similar project...getting myself from a rapidly eroding grasp of high-school math and a couple semesters of mostly forgotten calculus through to a pretty solid grounding in algebraic manipulation and proofs, analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems, and the beginnings of modern algebra. And it really was like learning to read.
It's a new way of reading - and a new way of thinking - and it's one that you're unfamiliar with. Start simple and small, and work with basic algebra. I'd get a GRE prep book or something along that line (barrons is the best, IMO), and solve all the problems through algebraic manipulation, working out the arithmetic by hand. No numeric substitution or checking all the answers - you essentially want to be constructing a proof of the correct answer to each question. It helps if you have someone who knows more math than you that you can turn to when you're stuck, so you can skip the frustration of looking up the rules and staring at a problem that just doesn't work. The point is to do enough basic math that it starts to become second nature...the same way that you started out reading things like "see spot run", having to think about the meaning of every word and every step. Eventually, as in reading, you hit a "knee" of sorts, and it starts to become easier, and then effortless. If you really want to learn it quickly and well, math should be the sort of thing you could end up doing for fun after a happy hour, or when you're bored on the train on the way to work. Once the basics are solid and you can do it without effort, then everything else continues to be fun. You're free to focus on the clever plot twists and new ideas of the more advanced mathematics without having to worry about the medium in which they're conveyed - and when you do come across a new notation it's no more troublesome than a new word in a novel - if you can't figure it out from the context you can look it up and continue on your way.
The one exception to the above that I'd recommend is to study linear algebra early, probably before you even review calculus. A solid understanding of spaces, sets, transformations, and dimension helps to tie everything else together in a wonderful way.
The main issue with IBM's cell blades is relative price - The one mentioned at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2177357,00.asp/ starts at $9,995, which is far more than all 8 PS3s and a ton of extra networked memory are going to cost you.
Sony's estimate of 1 teraflop per unit is more than a little bit optimistic, and also counts all the operations performed by the graphics system, which the average researcher won't have access to. For a slightly more realistic estimate of what 8 ps3's running linux can do, I'd point you towards http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store/index.php?submit=software&submitimg%5Bhardware%5D%5Bsolutions%5D=1, who sell turnkey ps3 clusters. They are claiming that 8 units together break the theoretical teraflop mark, which seems more realistic to me. While that isn't among the fastest computers in the world by any stretch, it's still solidly in the realm of what I'd call a supercomputer.
The cell is a fantastic piece of equipment - Dr. Dobb's has what I think is an excellent analysis of the kinds of performance benefits that it offers at http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/197801624. I'm currently running one at home in a PS3 (for neural networks that drive an AIBO - I love Sony's tendency to dump hugely expensive hardware at mass-market prices), and I have every intention of picking up more used ones over the coming months to cluster together as the networks continue to grow. Even all by it's lonesome with code that's far from optimized, the one I have is running about 10 times faster than my main desktop for roughly equivalent computations.
(Note that your mileage may vary - I just happen to like playing with systems that parallelize really well)
With regard to words in common use, some words or forms of expression might initially be redundant, but the subtle patterns of use which emerge start to imbue the choice of one or another with meaning, and then they suddenly _are_ useful, allowing me to distinguish between pork and ham, or between the openings "If I was in the wrong..." and "If I were in the wrong...", or for that matter "If I was wrong". All of them convey different information, place their audiences in a slightly different frame of mind, and allow for more subtle expression of ideas. These are precisely the traits I'd _love_ to have when attempting to move people to action or emotion through speech, and that's why I'll take the complexity of English over the rigid efficiency of classical Latin for any address of the week.
Which is strange, because in almost every other area the English language is amazingly diverse, offering what I've read is a particularly high number of options when choosing the vocabulary used to express a particular idea.
I know it's possible to fashion very creative and effective curses in English, drawing from the Latin and the Germanic sides of the linguistic history, as well as the vocabulary from other languages that it so readily absorbs. I wonder why such things aren't commonly done, or why they fell out of style? Or perhaps most people throughout history cursed with a few simple words, and my view of the past is being skewed by the writings of a somewhat wordy educated elite.
In Quebec and in some Cajun French speaking areas, I've heard people toss out some fairly complicated religious profanities. Does anyone know of other modern languages whose speakers commonly curse in diverse or creative ways?
Someone mod the parent up...that anyone can read these books at taxpayer expense through the library of congress is a very strong argument against the existence of government censorship.
http://www.loc.gov/
I actually went through and tallied up metacritic results this past July. It's a bit out of date by now, but this is what I found:
Wii - 69 Games
13 (18.8%) Green
44 (63.8%) Yellow
12 (17.4%) Red
XBox 360 - 209 Games
91 (43.5%) Green
108 (51.7%) Yellow
10 (4.8%) Red
PS3 - 54 Games
27 (50.0%) Green
23 (42.6%) Yellow
4 (7.4%) Red
You're right - I had come away with a mistaken impression after reading the fliers they had in the library. It was still enough to get them to close off their internet access, but I stand corrected about the archived data. Thanks!
from http://www.library.american.edu/about/policies/calea.html:
If they're fully GPL-compliant, then they _are_ giving back to the community by opening up the source that they develop using GPL'd code. The tweaks, improvements, and extensions that they make to the OS and other applications become available, and that helps make the software that we all use better in the long run. Free software isn't about making people write certain programs or support certain platforms in order to offset the benefit they derive from not having to reinvent the wheel. It's about the way that we all inherently benefit from people having time and money to spend on things other than more wheels. No tithing is required, which is the beauty of it all.
Not to rain on your parade of nationalist generalizations, but I don't believe the distinction between "damp" and "dampen" is really one that divides along U.S. and Commonwealth English. I've certainly run into both living here in the states, and many of the definitions cited just above come from dictionaries of U.S. English. As far as I can tell, engineering (in most English speaking nations including the UK) tends to use "damp" much more often -- which is why the hydraulic shock absorbers on cars in the UK are called "dampers" and not "dampeners", and the idiomatic "put a damper on things" is far more common here than "put a dampener", but in most other uses you can trade off freely and everyone's going to understand you.
Zippthorne was nitpicking and possibly being a bit curmudgeonly by demanding that people use the variant more common in technical circles, but as anyone who knows the world beyond their borders (or failing that, has read slashdot) can attest, that's hardly a trait unique to a single nationality.
Yeah, I for one will only play sports that people didn't just make up. You know, the ones without arbitrarily defined rules.
That's good to know. I've encountered some publicly funded universities where that isn't the case, but I'm glad California set it up that way, and that makes the actions of the police in that matter even more unfortunate.
It seems to me that unless they're trying to stop her from redistributing those ISBN numbers and prices, it's far more of a "We're a private bookstore, so we can ask anyone we want to leave. If you want free reference go to the library" type of issue. It's something of a nasty move on their part, but unless there's something about Harvard's status as an educational institution that prevents that, and which I'm not aware of, then I think it's their right. I don't see why IP has to enter into this at all.
Furthermore, if the government was just asking us, and not showing up with a court order, I'd carefully consider the costs, including PR implications as well. As a phone carrier, I certainly wouldn't want to be known for spying on my customers, and it would come down to a cost-benefit analysis of cooperation verses refusal. As part of that analysis, I think it would be important to be as certain as one can ever be about the legal status of exactly what we were being asked to do.
In at least every state and territory in which I have lived, the public libraries are definitely free, as are the books being lent. They're very often used by the homeless as a place to stay, and in many cases it offers them a way to learn while they're getting out of the cold, which I'm all for.
The UCLA tasering was not a public library in the same sense, since it belongs to the school rather than the community at large, so they were within their rights to demand an ID and ask people who couldn't show that they were using the library with the school's authorization to leave.
What happened after that I find horrific, and I don't in any way mean this post to excuse it, I just wanted to clarify that the ID requirement doesn't cover general public libraries, and in fact pretty much all of the universities I'm familiar with voluntarily keep their libraries open to the public and just require an ID to check out books, or in many cases now to use the internet, due to new federal legislation which requires them to monitor activity and keep extensive backups if they allow open public use of the network.
True, but as the dihedral angles tend ever more oblique, cornering off less and less volume, the number of vertices -- and therefore the number of corners -- grows larger.
Vertices = Edges - Faces - 2
Dihedral Angles:
Tetrahedron: 70.53
Cube: 90
Octahedron: 109.47
Dodecahedron: 116.57
Icosahedron: 138.19
(I'm assuming we're speaking of regular convex worlds, and that the overall volume of the world is not changing)
If we then define the size of your corner as the volume of the (generally irregular) polyhedron you get when you remove everything but the faces which meet at your vertex (the point of your corner), and then re-close the open faces by stringing new edges between the vertices which lost one or more connecting edges. I don't believe it really matters how you go about choosing to connect them, so long as you end up with a convex solid.
Now in order to reduce the volume cornered off by the faces intersecting at a single vertex, you must increase the angle at which they meet (the Dihedral Angle), which in the case of a regular convex polyhedron involves increasing the number of faces.
So to continue your metaphor, your particular corner may be smaller than back in the days of 6-sided dice, but that's only because the 20-sided world has so many more to choose from.