It sounds like they are talking about a sort of programming language with thousands of primitives, many of which have hundreds of options; I wish them good luck in organizing that in a managable way, and I see no chance that they will beat Wolfram Research to it.
Sure it could, how many slashdotters are also programmers, for whom it would be *trivial* to take a list:
serial1 vote1
serial2 vote2
.
.
.
And directly check the tally for each candidate.
Sounds like a good idea, but it would probably break the WGA system, and so MS would not allow updates/extras/operation.
Re:We need this type of thing done in the classroo
on
Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why do you have to see everything through the category useful/useless?
Is it so hard for you to imagine that one day, let's say in the next 1000's of years, we will need a guy who can make vacuum tubes? It's never good for any technologies to be lost, even if they seem too old to be useful now.
We can't tell them about the limitations of science, since they are generally ignorant in their deductions and they will draw the wrong conclusion: they aren't ready for the truth.
It's rather like the time Bertrand Russel said he was an agnostic at heart, but that the public would get the wrong idea and so he told them he was an atheist, since he was agnostic in the same sense that he would not past judgment on whether we appeared on earth 5 minutes ago with our memories intact.
I think one of the major barriers to the video-game industries quest for mass media acceptance is the stuck-in-the-1980s tendency to portray women as sexual objects with boys-club-only lack of shame.
Whether or not a politician supports anti-game legislation is not independent of their other policy stances; in other words, these guys lost because of their policies, and there is a notable correlation between loser-policies and anti-game-policies.
Note, however, that the most frequently used phrase in the technical article is "we assume", and so there are at least 100 ways for the 14 years figure to waffle.
Open source software could never make something like Mathematica, and if you refer to Maxima or R then you clearly have not studied Mathematica deeply enough. The organization of this software is so supreme that despite it's enormous complexity it is often one of the first major apps to be ported to new environments, and the recent upgrade to version 6.0 is simultaneously the largest and smoothest upgrade I have ever seen for a 20 year old application.
It isn't really so much of a system as an eventuality. Unless you work really hard to avoid it, you'll end up with capitalism. According to Karl Marx, capitalism is just a phase. The people in this discussion seem to confuse capitalism with the free market; the free market is here to stay, but capitalism is exactly as nasty and shortsighted as it appears.
Capitalism is about capital i.e. the wealth which we produce that then has use in the production of other goods (fab-labs, machine shops, tools, factories, software) and according to capitalism societies means of production should be privately owned. The consequence of this is that 9/10 of what we own are worthless end-products (worthless in comparison to owning the means of production of these products). The consequence is that most of the human race becomes alienated from their labor, they consider work a torment and spend their days not choosing what they work on only to not own the product of their labor! Of course this system will inevitably fail, and not even Marx saw the way that technology in the form of things like open source software and the reprap project will put the means of production in the hands of everyone (communism), and the free market will surge like never before!
It's wrong to say that temperature is defined by the kinetic energy of molecules, and such a definition is incompatible with systems having a negative temperature (many systems can be arranged to have a negative temperature, but of course none have T = 0).
In truth temperature is defined as:
1/T = (change in entropy)/(change in energy)
or in words, temperature is inversely proportional to the rate of change of entropy with respect to energy.
The sentence "schnee ist weiss" is true if and only if "schnee ist weiss" means that snow is white (which it does, to German speakers) and snow is, in fact, white.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, but I still hold that there is no hyper-linguistic truth such as "snow is white" (and here I am refer to the semantic content of the proposition). The status of "snow is white" is so certain that it can be used for ostensive teaching, to teach someone the meaning of the word "white" (if one doubted whether it was white, I should say "that is what we call white"). But at this point I would depend on he and I sharing a common form of life, it would be hard to better explain what I mean (what would you do with a child who could not understand our ostensive teaching? And yet, it is imaginable). And imagine that he is normal in all other respects, except he genuinely disagrees that snow is white; I wouldn't say that he is wrong, he just doesn't share my form of life.
Time is obviously a tricky issue in cosmology, but in relativity a "rate" is measured with respect to proper time i.e. looking at my wristwatch (the measurement device is at rest with respect to me and the variation of gravitational field across my body is ignored).
Now imagine a supernova that brightens and fades like clockwork, except the further I look in terms of distance the nova speeds up. But remember that looking far in distance we see the universe as it was at an earlier time, and we can say "damn that nova is too fast compared to the ones closer to us, we must be slow".
Cosmology is an unusual science: the evidence for accelerating universe, dark matter, dark energy etc is very massive and yet it is difficult to explain these things to a non-expert without sounding totally bogus.
Any invention that puts the means of production in the hands of individuals or communities is a clear advance over the technologies that are so expensive that 0.01% of society controls them all and uses their advantage to alienate us from our labor.
If you say "it is necessarily true" isn't it fair for me to ask "from where does that necessity derive?".
And if your reply is "Cannot truth stand on its own?" then I would say "Truth is a property of propositions, not of things in the world". Do the propositions stand true on their own? They are true only by virtue of their meaning in the language. There are no hyper-linguistic truths, and it is only because humans are similar to each other that people like you extrapolate universal truths.
If a young-earth creationist does not believe the scientific evidence (carbon dating, fossil records, etc) then we have no choice but to try and persuade him over to our style of evidence and inference (scientific observations and logic). If you argue well (not just saying "but its true...") you will bring up the outstanding pragmatic value of these scientific theories and the mathematical deductions that go with them, but the religious person still might not care. Not if it contradicts ideas about the bible which he holds to be absolutely certain. He will likely attempt to convert you to his view using similar persuasion to what you used on him, I'm sure you can imagine.
The article refers to Plato and "great thinkers" but it should have referred as much to philosophy as it did to physics. Like a reference to empiricism to go along with "Are they(the laws) merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world?" e.g. David Hume pointed out that we there is no perceptual difference between causation and correlation (the sense data is the same), and the reaction to this sort of skeptical argument has been to retreat and cling to sense data, as the source and subject of everything that is knowledge about the world (empiricism, logical positivism, modern analytic tradition).
The alternative from Plato is to concentrate on necessary propositions, the kind whose denial is a contradiction (like those found in mathematics). Plato imagined that (the nature of) Courage, Truth, Love, Beauty, Wisdom etc could be known with necessity, after one had completed a rigorous program of education in mathematics. The most important argument from Plato is that we should always keep trying to find the true nature of these things, because its easy to give up and say "there is no truth" but WHAT IF THAT'S WRONG, then we would be giving up something far greater (and then Plato writes dialog about someone being enlightened to a mathematical truth, even after they had tried to give up).
The synthesis between rationalism and empiricism came from Kant, who proposed that there are necessary propositions about the world but they are only necessary because of our "hardwired" categories of the understanding i.e. permanent reality goggles. We are forced to interpret the world in terms of space, time, causality, unity-plurality, etc. Kant also went so far as to say that Newton's Law's were necessarily part of our reality goggles (oops). The point is that reality-goggles allows us to save the idea of necessary propositions about the world, but the modern work on whether they are hardwired by anatomy or language could hardly resolve in a way that would make this satisfying for fundamental physics because quantum mechanics is so counterintuitive.
One approach is to return to Einstein-style derivations and shows that our gauge theories are necessary, all though it seems hard to believe that string theory could at this point deliver a proof whose premises are stronger then its intended conclusion. (to show you that the grass is green, first consider the hyper-cube of dimension 10 whose diagonal...) Another approach is to show that quantum mechanics is fundamentally about our knowledge i.e. take literally the statement "the quantum state contains all the information there is to know about the system".
The bottom line is that the article is a rehash of centuries old philosophical debates, but not presented in a way that will make people more literate in philosophy i.e. you could read the article without getting the impression that a huge body of very interesting work already exists on the subject. And as far as far as Feynman's comments on philosophy, I find that sad since he attracted me to physics in the first place, but it also sheds some light on the other comment of his that I dislike, that "nobody understands quantum mechanics"; of course he doesn't understand, because he was to cynical to even take the first step!
Slashdot Mirror
I like your #4, the political spin against you would be "my opponent wants to tax ALL of everyones income"!
Remember that Einstein said gravity is not a force, it is the absence of all forces; an observer in freefall does not feel his own weight.
It sounds like they are talking about a sort of programming language with thousands of primitives, many of which have hundreds of options; I wish them good luck in organizing that in a managable way, and I see no chance that they will beat Wolfram Research to it.
Sure it could, how many slashdotters are also programmers, for whom it would be *trivial* to take a list: serial1 vote1 serial2 vote2 . . . And directly check the tally for each candidate.
Don't forget that momo romney has the mad money, and mccain is broke!
Sounds like a good idea, but it would probably break the WGA system, and so MS would not allow updates/extras/operation.
Why do you have to see everything through the category useful/useless? Is it so hard for you to imagine that one day, let's say in the next 1000's of years, we will need a guy who can make vacuum tubes? It's never good for any technologies to be lost, even if they seem too old to be useful now.
We can't tell them about the limitations of science, since they are generally ignorant in their deductions and they will draw the wrong conclusion: they aren't ready for the truth. It's rather like the time Bertrand Russel said he was an agnostic at heart, but that the public would get the wrong idea and so he told them he was an atheist, since he was agnostic in the same sense that he would not past judgment on whether we appeared on earth 5 minutes ago with our memories intact.
I think one of the major barriers to the video-game industries quest for mass media acceptance is the stuck-in-the-1980s tendency to portray women as sexual objects with boys-club-only lack of shame.
Whether or not a politician supports anti-game legislation is not independent of their other policy stances; in other words, these guys lost because of their policies, and there is a notable correlation between loser-policies and anti-game-policies.
which, in a nutshell, is the problem with the kind of unrestricted science funding that gets optimistically endorsed around here.
Note, however, that the most frequently used phrase in the technical article is "we assume", and so there are at least 100 ways for the 14 years figure to waffle.
Open source software could never make something like Mathematica, and if you refer to Maxima or R then you clearly have not studied Mathematica deeply enough. The organization of this software is so supreme that despite it's enormous complexity it is often one of the first major apps to be ported to new environments, and the recent upgrade to version 6.0 is simultaneously the largest and smoothest upgrade I have ever seen for a 20 year old application.
Government Official: You mean all the added expenditure associated with e-voting, with none of the negative publicity? I'm sold.
It's wrong to say that temperature is defined by the kinetic energy of molecules, and such a definition is incompatible with systems having a negative temperature (many systems can be arranged to have a negative temperature, but of course none have T = 0). In truth temperature is defined as: 1/T = (change in entropy)/(change in energy) or in words, temperature is inversely proportional to the rate of change of entropy with respect to energy.
Every knows that biology is weak, and Math is strong.
Time is obviously a tricky issue in cosmology, but in relativity a "rate" is measured with respect to proper time i.e. looking at my wristwatch (the measurement device is at rest with respect to me and the variation of gravitational field across my body is ignored). Now imagine a supernova that brightens and fades like clockwork, except the further I look in terms of distance the nova speeds up. But remember that looking far in distance we see the universe as it was at an earlier time, and we can say "damn that nova is too fast compared to the ones closer to us, we must be slow". Cosmology is an unusual science: the evidence for accelerating universe, dark matter, dark energy etc is very massive and yet it is difficult to explain these things to a non-expert without sounding totally bogus.
Any invention that puts the means of production in the hands of individuals or communities is a clear advance over the technologies that are so expensive that 0.01% of society controls them all and uses their advantage to alienate us from our labor.
If you say "it is necessarily true" isn't it fair for me to ask "from where does that necessity derive?". And if your reply is "Cannot truth stand on its own?" then I would say "Truth is a property of propositions, not of things in the world". Do the propositions stand true on their own? They are true only by virtue of their meaning in the language. There are no hyper-linguistic truths, and it is only because humans are similar to each other that people like you extrapolate universal truths. If a young-earth creationist does not believe the scientific evidence (carbon dating, fossil records, etc) then we have no choice but to try and persuade him over to our style of evidence and inference (scientific observations and logic). If you argue well (not just saying "but its true...") you will bring up the outstanding pragmatic value of these scientific theories and the mathematical deductions that go with them, but the religious person still might not care. Not if it contradicts ideas about the bible which he holds to be absolutely certain. He will likely attempt to convert you to his view using similar persuasion to what you used on him, I'm sure you can imagine.
The article refers to Plato and "great thinkers" but it should have referred as much to philosophy as it did to physics. Like a reference to empiricism to go along with "Are they(the laws) merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world?" e.g. David Hume pointed out that we there is no perceptual difference between causation and correlation (the sense data is the same), and the reaction to this sort of skeptical argument has been to retreat and cling to sense data, as the source and subject of everything that is knowledge about the world (empiricism, logical positivism, modern analytic tradition). The alternative from Plato is to concentrate on necessary propositions, the kind whose denial is a contradiction (like those found in mathematics). Plato imagined that (the nature of) Courage, Truth, Love, Beauty, Wisdom etc could be known with necessity, after one had completed a rigorous program of education in mathematics. The most important argument from Plato is that we should always keep trying to find the true nature of these things, because its easy to give up and say "there is no truth" but WHAT IF THAT'S WRONG, then we would be giving up something far greater (and then Plato writes dialog about someone being enlightened to a mathematical truth, even after they had tried to give up). The synthesis between rationalism and empiricism came from Kant, who proposed that there are necessary propositions about the world but they are only necessary because of our "hardwired" categories of the understanding i.e. permanent reality goggles. We are forced to interpret the world in terms of space, time, causality, unity-plurality, etc. Kant also went so far as to say that Newton's Law's were necessarily part of our reality goggles (oops). The point is that reality-goggles allows us to save the idea of necessary propositions about the world, but the modern work on whether they are hardwired by anatomy or language could hardly resolve in a way that would make this satisfying for fundamental physics because quantum mechanics is so counterintuitive. One approach is to return to Einstein-style derivations and shows that our gauge theories are necessary, all though it seems hard to believe that string theory could at this point deliver a proof whose premises are stronger then its intended conclusion. (to show you that the grass is green, first consider the hyper-cube of dimension 10 whose diagonal...) Another approach is to show that quantum mechanics is fundamentally about our knowledge i.e. take literally the statement "the quantum state contains all the information there is to know about the system". The bottom line is that the article is a rehash of centuries old philosophical debates, but not presented in a way that will make people more literate in philosophy i.e. you could read the article without getting the impression that a huge body of very interesting work already exists on the subject. And as far as far as Feynman's comments on philosophy, I find that sad since he attracted me to physics in the first place, but it also sheds some light on the other comment of his that I dislike, that "nobody understands quantum mechanics"; of course he doesn't understand, because he was to cynical to even take the first step!