Um, I look at C and assembler are more about moving data into and out of registers than anything else. The "rules" have more to do with 4th century algebra then 20th century linguistics. Granted, 19th century Boolean logic does contribute a bit.
If you have a computer that can be programmed in English, please share. I can finally quit my day job and do something useful other than constantly have to translate between human thought and machine symbology.
Computer science will never find the perfect language. It doesn't exist. Any time you try to render an idea in a language, any language, you have to simplify it.
We have known that language is an imperfect form of communication. The greeks knew it (hence the god Rumor.) The Taoists knew it. In 6000 yeras of recorded history we have not found a perfect language. If it doesn't work for huminty, why would computers be any different, where context is implied in almost every respect?
For you non-Philadelphia residents, Disney was planning to partner with some of our Urban slumlords to build an entertainment complex. All we ended up with was a dug out hole in the middle of old city.
Can you please explain to me who we are defending ourselves against? We are surrounded on each side by 2 oceans and a pair of countries we dwarf in population and production capacity.
The only reason we spend so much "defending" our insterests is because our "interests" are largely in other people's countries. For God's sake, look at Rome. They tried to occupy the world, and hollowed out their own economy in the process.
There are no communist threatening us with nuclear missiles. There are no Fascists sweeping over the world with tanks. At this point we are tripping over the results of our own occupation of hostile countries. If we weren't in Saudia Arabia, we would have no Osama Bin Laden. Simple. Our being jack-booted thugs gives everyone else a common enemy.
Florida isn't all that bad a launching place. For the slight performance hit of launching from 30 degrees, we have a logistical advantage in the fact we can bus and truck supplies to the facility.
What facility remains, of course. From what I understand a good chunk of the space center hasn't seen repairs since Apollo.
You know, I was going to try to poke holes at your post, but there is a certain amount of truth to the notion that Nasa is more or less insulated from having to perform.
Period.
The problem is not unlike that of weapon systems in the 1980's. Contractors would dump billions of the government's dollars into systems that never worked. Every time it was "we almost had it working, but we need another $xxx,xxx,xxx." No one wanted to call them to the carpet, because no one wanted to be the one who signed the check for billions of dollars down the tubes.
Oddly, many of these billion dollar "learning experiences" centered around space-based defense systems researched by the same companies that Nasa contracts out R&D to as well.
We have to get away from billion dollar at a time projects. Only the big dogs can play, and they have a tendency to sit on their ass once they have a contract.
How can privatizing fix anything dealing with the space program? The folks with wads of cash don't invest in anything "new" until they can see a market for it.
Space travel is monsterously expensive. At least with air travel there was something to see on the other side of the connection. Air was a logical extension to shipping and rail. Space travel isn't really taking you anywhere.
Until someone finds a pot of gold, space will only operate on the "Christopher Columbus" model. Crazy folks who have adventerous patrons.
MY point was that rules seem to be situation dependent in every other human endeavor. Why would the laws of the Universe be any different?
Even if the reasons the rules seem to change is because they are expressions of a deeper truth that can't be expressed in algorythem form, you are still left with no master equation and instead (just like in engineering) you have to pick from a set of tools to solve a particular problem.
You are making unfounded accusations against another person. We have laws on the books because this is a grave problem, and has been since the invention of the printing press.
What do you mean they have no comment? They have been trying to beat us over the head for months about matching comments in the Linux and Unix source code files!
They are sending the raw picture uncompressed. Well, they might use a run-length encoding, but the result is a lossless image. JPEG is so much smaller because it really cuts corners, and exploits the fact that our eyes are more sensitive to contrast than the magnetude difference between colors.
With scientific imaging, OTOH, you want the raw information coming off the CCD. They are interested in everything, not just what the human eye can see.
So, with lossless encoded, 3 greyscale images actually come out to be the same size as a color image. (Look at a color TIFF for example.) The advantage of the B/W and filter approach is that you need only one capture device. On a spacecraft there are many design advantages. Besides, you now have 3 copies of the same image. You never know when one copy will pick something up that the others missed.
what we do know is that the "rules" of our observable universe change extremely slowly, if they change at all.
Well, if have learned anything from geology and climatology, it's that what previously looked like a steady constant system today has in fact been subjected to sudden and violent changes in the past. Continental "drift" is not a gradual process. It occurs one violent event at a time. Ocean currents don't gradually fade. They abruptly stop and then change direction.
No one has bothered to even look to see if the rules by which our universe exists today are the same as a few million years ago, or a few billion years ago. How would you be able to tell that, say, the gravitational constant of the universe has been constant all along?
We can't. We don't have any observations before about 3000 years ago. That's not even a clock pulse to the universe. Heck, even in our own systems we continually tear down and rebuild the rules. Look at building codes. Look at military tactics. What used to work no longer does. And these are far simpler systems than the inner workings of the Universe.
What do you mean absence. Look at dogs. We took wolves and turned them into a wide variety of shapes and colors from Great Danes to Chiwawa's all within the last 40,000 years.
The same is true with almost any domesticated animal. For pete's sake the entire science of animal husbandry is application of Evolution, just under our control.
Of course, our efforts in domesticating animals show that one force seems to be required to really make evolution work properly: a regulator. Someone who reviews what's good, what's bad, and what is really cool, though unexpected.
Next time some god-boy goes on a rant about how evolution doesn't exist, quote the parable of the Wheat and the Tares. In it Jesus talks about how God can't really tell what is useful and what is not until it has had a chance to develop. Once it is clear what is good, and what is not, someone comes by and clears the crap out.
And of course there are those New-Age whackjobs who think that in truth we are simply making the rules of the universe up as we go along.
I used to think it was crazy. But then I imagioned what life would be like for a process on a Linux box. In some respects, the system never changes. In other respects, as chunks of the system are refined an upgraded, previously famliar systems take on more complex, and at times, incomprehesible behavior.
A process would be oblivious to the universe stopping and restarting with a new kernel. (Assuming the system had a suspend-to-disk function.) You would only be able to understand the universe indirectly through it's behavior, not through reading it's source. And assuming you could read parts of the source, it is always being updated and revised.
It the process under Linux is too strange, how about a citizen under a government. Laws are just another form of code, and they too are every changing. Some parts are like the Constitution, broad in scope and largely set in stone. Others are like legal precidents, situation specific and sometimes arbitrary.
There is some comfort in knowing that we really don't understand the Universe, it's origins, or how it's all going to end.
We really should be working on how to make our little section of the Universe a better place to live. Fixating on the past or the future wastes the present. Fretting the big things comes at the expense of managing the little things. Frankly all that brain matter going into understanding outer space could be better used to fix things up around here.
Last I checked, Fusion still doesn't work, climatology is still a black art, and we still can't get better than a 5 day forecast into the weather. We have a population that is growing at a faster rate that the planet can support, and and economic system that exploits those that do work to enrich the elite while wasting resources and destroying the environment at a predigious rate.
And to top it all off, our modern agriculture techniques are stripping topsoil at the rate of an inch a year.
Any of those problems will have a bigger impact on our lives before we have to worry about the heat death of the Universe, or lack thereof.
I like the idea that what we view as the universe is actually an interference pattern. Thus, what we try to describe with physical models of the universe is describing an effect, not the underlying cause. Like those psuedo science studies that prove mice exposed to flourescent light die, or taking this strange herb cures some dread disease based on anecdotal evidence from a self-selecting population.
Now, forget about superstrings. Science has to work out a few more forces in nature first. There is no decent explaination of why life actually works. It has this habit of taking disorder and generating order out of it. There are some pretty wild things this does to thermodynamics.
Next, Physics needs to study emergent intelligence. There are too many self-regulating systems out there for every one of them to be a fluke. And I'm not just talking about organisms. Tides, climate, the orbits of stellar bodies. Yes it sounds wacko. But it may explain why things can be completely random at a quantum mechanical level, but balance out in larger systems.
Investing a whole lot of time tryign to invent new maths to solve problems that are only caused by the last new math you invented is pointless. There are too many life-and-death questions of immediate importance that require serious work.
Something just rubs be the wrong way about any theory of the universe that lumps 96% of the universe into "and the other stuff...".
It's like the damn superstring theory. Superstring doesn't really make any decent predictions. It does explain things that we could never observe, thus It's not testable. (And the standard model has a pretty decent working description of what we do see already.)
Dark Matter to me is a fudge factor created to explain by cosmolgist's math is off. It would be like me inventing "virtual customers" to explain shrinkage at a store.
Try stopping on gravel or sand with an ABS system. One ice ABS is on equal footing (or lack thereof) with conventional disk brakes. They can be a pain in the ass to dry off if you drive through a puddle.
Say what you will about race car drivers, every trip I take out out the road I'm tailgated by some dumbass who thinks his anti-lock brakes give him instant stopping power. That is of course until he decided that it's uncool to either signal or be in the same land for 30 seconds. Every one of those model cars I see do that have ABS standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, I look at C and assembler are more about moving data into and out of registers than anything else. The "rules" have more to do with 4th century algebra then 20th century linguistics. Granted, 19th century Boolean logic does contribute a bit.
If you have a computer that can be programmed in English, please share. I can finally quit my day job and do something useful other than constantly have to translate between human thought and machine symbology.
We have known that language is an imperfect form of communication. The greeks knew it (hence the god Rumor.) The Taoists knew it. In 6000 yeras of recorded history we have not found a perfect language. If it doesn't work for huminty, why would computers be any different, where context is implied in almost every respect?
For you non-Philadelphia residents, Disney was planning to partner with some of our Urban slumlords to build an entertainment complex. All we ended up with was a dug out hole in the middle of old city.
Teach me to take up a non-sports related hobby. If I'd had a TV I could have seen the evil that was unfolding not 10 blocks from my house, I ...
Er, the Flyers are the Hockey team and the 76ers are Basketball, or do I have them switched?
And people ask me how can I live in a city. $60/month for 768/768 dsl, unlimited local and long distance calling, and 2 static IP's to boot.
Waylan-Yutani
It's a world of cash
It's a world of boom
it's a world of crash
Which is why every day
we must try every way
to merge our large caps overall.
Merge our large-caps over-all
Merge our large-caps over-all
Merge our large-caps over-all
Merge our large caps overall.
The only reason we spend so much "defending" our insterests is because our "interests" are largely in other people's countries. For God's sake, look at Rome. They tried to occupy the world, and hollowed out their own economy in the process.
There are no communist threatening us with nuclear missiles. There are no Fascists sweeping over the world with tanks. At this point we are tripping over the results of our own occupation of hostile countries. If we weren't in Saudia Arabia, we would have no Osama Bin Laden. Simple. Our being jack-booted thugs gives everyone else a common enemy.
What facility remains, of course. From what I understand a good chunk of the space center hasn't seen repairs since Apollo.
Period.
The problem is not unlike that of weapon systems in the 1980's. Contractors would dump billions of the government's dollars into systems that never worked. Every time it was "we almost had it working, but we need another $xxx,xxx,xxx." No one wanted to call them to the carpet, because no one wanted to be the one who signed the check for billions of dollars down the tubes.
Oddly, many of these billion dollar "learning experiences" centered around space-based defense systems researched by the same companies that Nasa contracts out R&D to as well.
We have to get away from billion dollar at a time projects. Only the big dogs can play, and they have a tendency to sit on their ass once they have a contract.
Space travel is monsterously expensive. At least with air travel there was something to see on the other side of the connection. Air was a logical extension to shipping and rail. Space travel isn't really taking you anywhere.
Until someone finds a pot of gold, space will only operate on the "Christopher Columbus" model. Crazy folks who have adventerous patrons.
Even if the reasons the rules seem to change is because they are expressions of a deeper truth that can't be expressed in algorythem form, you are still left with no master equation and instead (just like in engineering) you have to pick from a set of tools to solve a particular problem.
You are making unfounded accusations against another person. We have laws on the books because this is a grave problem, and has been since the invention of the printing press.
Slander is slander no matter how it's printed and published.
What do you mean they have no comment? They have been trying to beat us over the head for months about matching comments in the Linux and Unix source code files!
With scientific imaging, OTOH, you want the raw information coming off the CCD. They are interested in everything, not just what the human eye can see.
So, with lossless encoded, 3 greyscale images actually come out to be the same size as a color image. (Look at a color TIFF for example.) The advantage of the B/W and filter approach is that you need only one capture device. On a spacecraft there are many design advantages. Besides, you now have 3 copies of the same image. You never know when one copy will pick something up that the others missed.
Well, if have learned anything from geology and climatology, it's that what previously looked like a steady constant system today has in fact been subjected to sudden and violent changes in the past. Continental "drift" is not a gradual process. It occurs one violent event at a time. Ocean currents don't gradually fade. They abruptly stop and then change direction.
No one has bothered to even look to see if the rules by which our universe exists today are the same as a few million years ago, or a few billion years ago. How would you be able to tell that, say, the gravitational constant of the universe has been constant all along?
We can't. We don't have any observations before about 3000 years ago. That's not even a clock pulse to the universe. Heck, even in our own systems we continually tear down and rebuild the rules. Look at building codes. Look at military tactics. What used to work no longer does. And these are far simpler systems than the inner workings of the Universe.
Despite all that math, Cosmology still starts out with "In the beginning everything was in darkness and then [indetermined] said let there be light."
The same is true with almost any domesticated animal. For pete's sake the entire science of animal husbandry is application of Evolution, just under our control.
Of course, our efforts in domesticating animals show that one force seems to be required to really make evolution work properly: a regulator. Someone who reviews what's good, what's bad, and what is really cool, though unexpected.
Next time some god-boy goes on a rant about how evolution doesn't exist, quote the parable of the Wheat and the Tares. In it Jesus talks about how God can't really tell what is useful and what is not until it has had a chance to develop. Once it is clear what is good, and what is not, someone comes by and clears the crap out.
Evolution by any other name to me.
I used to think it was crazy. But then I imagioned what life would be like for a process on a Linux box. In some respects, the system never changes. In other respects, as chunks of the system are refined an upgraded, previously famliar systems take on more complex, and at times, incomprehesible behavior.
A process would be oblivious to the universe stopping and restarting with a new kernel. (Assuming the system had a suspend-to-disk function.) You would only be able to understand the universe indirectly through it's behavior, not through reading it's source. And assuming you could read parts of the source, it is always being updated and revised.
It the process under Linux is too strange, how about a citizen under a government. Laws are just another form of code, and they too are every changing. Some parts are like the Constitution, broad in scope and largely set in stone. Others are like legal precidents, situation specific and sometimes arbitrary.
Ok, time for more coffee.
We really should be working on how to make our little section of the Universe a better place to live. Fixating on the past or the future wastes the present. Fretting the big things comes at the expense of managing the little things. Frankly all that brain matter going into understanding outer space could be better used to fix things up around here.
Last I checked, Fusion still doesn't work, climatology is still a black art, and we still can't get better than a 5 day forecast into the weather. We have a population that is growing at a faster rate that the planet can support, and and economic system that exploits those that do work to enrich the elite while wasting resources and destroying the environment at a predigious rate.
And to top it all off, our modern agriculture techniques are stripping topsoil at the rate of an inch a year.
Any of those problems will have a bigger impact on our lives before we have to worry about the heat death of the Universe, or lack thereof.
Now, forget about superstrings. Science has to work out a few more forces in nature first. There is no decent explaination of why life actually works. It has this habit of taking disorder and generating order out of it. There are some pretty wild things this does to thermodynamics.
Next, Physics needs to study emergent intelligence. There are too many self-regulating systems out there for every one of them to be a fluke. And I'm not just talking about organisms. Tides, climate, the orbits of stellar bodies. Yes it sounds wacko. But it may explain why things can be completely random at a quantum mechanical level, but balance out in larger systems.
Investing a whole lot of time tryign to invent new maths to solve problems that are only caused by the last new math you invented is pointless. There are too many life-and-death questions of immediate importance that require serious work.
It's like the damn superstring theory. Superstring doesn't really make any decent predictions. It does explain things that we could never observe, thus It's not testable. (And the standard model has a pretty decent working description of what we do see already.)
Dark Matter to me is a fudge factor created to explain by cosmolgist's math is off. It would be like me inventing "virtual customers" to explain shrinkage at a store.
Say what you will about race car drivers, every trip I take out out the road I'm tailgated by some dumbass who thinks his anti-lock brakes give him instant stopping power. That is of course until he decided that it's uncool to either signal or be in the same land for 30 seconds. Every one of those model cars I see do that have ABS standard.