Well, like blueg3 pretty much explained, you do X, Y follows, you think maybe Y might have something to do with X, so you do more experiments that could prove you right but might also prove you wrong (This is important! The possibility for falsification must exist). You share your results with colleagues, who also do experiments of their own, preferably different ones, until enough evidence is gathered that your theory is probably correct.
I could give a pill to 500 people suffering from a cold, and then go "after one week, 97% were cured, therefore my pill works". I hope you agree that that is NOT scientifically acceptable proof. To prove that a medical treatment works, for example, you need double blind tests on sufficiently large groups. Especially if the treatment is not a logical one from a medical point of view (like cracking a perfectly healthy spine to cure a bowel problem).
They carried out reproduction in space of sea urchins, fish, amphibians and birds, but no mice? If I were to study the effects of microgravity on pregnancy, I would put something similar to humans (at least a mammal) at the top of my list, instead of first trying a whole list of species that don't really resemble us.
Why use centifuges to "simulate" zero G (?!) and not just send a few mice up to the ISS? OK, it might be difficult to get them to actually reproduce, maybe put them on a 1G centrifuge for the actual copulation bit and then let them float again.
More than 50 years ago, my dad had a dog that would take the bus to the city, and come back home again the same way. In the beginning the drivers just thought the dog was with one of the passengers, but after a while they noticed the same dog over and over again with different passengers, or even boarding alone. Somehow the dog always managed to take the right bus home.
Me too! Truly amazing, the amount of freedom you had in that game. All 6 degrees, you don't even get that in an airplane. It did take a while to get used to the controls, I used a joystick and the keyboard but it still felt like I needed one more hand. Maybe I should have had pedals, too. It was really great, though, being able to choose how you were going to through a passage: straight, sideways, upside down (if such a thing exists, really), lowering yourself into it, anything went. The most unique game experience I've ever come across.
There are lots of interesting algorithms, that are probabilistic. The definition is, that if you run it long enough, the solution will be found.
Indeed, and such algorithms are widely used in practice, but they are not theoretically considered a "solution" because you might (in theory) have to wait forever to get a path, and you will never really be sure that no path exists (which is an important element of the Hamiltonian Path Problem).
If a probabilistic algorithm is considered to be good enough, they should at least compare the bacteria against a computer running a probabilistic algorithm as well, and find that the computer is probably a lot faster.
Even worse, the colony does not even SOLVE the problem! If you let the bacteria grow enough, you have a pretty high probability of getting a solution. But no guarantee, because it's all probabilistic. If some of the bacteria happen to reach the correct solution, they turn the right color. Which is pretty easy to detect if you're just looking for a big patch of yellow bacteria, but not if there are millions of possibilities and only a few bacteria turned the specific color you are looking for. Sure, you could use resistance to antibiotics instead of colors, and kill off the bad solutions, but still, if no bacteria are left, that does not mean there's no solution.
And since the number of possibilities grows exponentially with problem size, so will the required size of the bacterial colony. So forget about solving the HPP with 500 or so nodes.
Then, on top of that, DNA is not exactly reliable. Already in this small and simple experiment, unexpected colors like pink etc. turned up.
Post-its are not the only problem. If people have to come up with a new password every time, many end up using a sequence of "strong" passwords like "june2009!", "aug2009!", etc...
In any case, a password is only as strong as the e-mail account that can be used to retrieve it. Or even worse, the secret question which is usually orders of magnitude easier. Or the IT help desk (just give them your name and they'll give you a new password)
Another pet pieve about passwords I have always had: if a system limits the amount of guesses to three (or some other number), PLEASE don't consider duplicate guesses as seperate attempts! If someone enters the same, incorrect password twice, you can be fairly sure this is not some evil attacker trying to guess a password by trying the same one over and over again until it works. A user will often enter the wrong password, think he made a typing error, enter the same wrong password again, and then be left with only one more attempt before his account is blocked. This happened to me once: my debit card was blocked because I used the same incorrect code twice, then tried to enter the correct code only to get a keyboard malfunction that registered the third digit twice, immediately accepting those four digits without requiring an "enter" key.
Plus, it launched on July 4th, not a particularly significant day for North Koreans... And while anybody could look it up, who here can say they know the dates of big Chinese holidays? Really?
Well, it's not like there's a big blockbuster Hollywood movie like "Born on the First of October", or a movie called "National Day" with aliens attacking Peking on the first of October, so thay might explain why fewer people know the big Chinese holidays
O, and the North Korean one is the 9th of September, by the way. Finding that out took a similar amount of effort, actually even less because I still had the Wikipedia window open.
If you're still not sure whether or not the North Koreans know about the fourth of July, the fact that they launched seven missiles on precisely that day this year must be a coincidence too? And the fact that they tested a long range missile on that day three years ago? And their nuclear test on U.S. Memorial Day?
Another, more common problem in optimization is floating point math. For example, "T = S+Y; C = (T - S) - Y;" may be "optimized" to "T = S+Y; C = 0;" while the whole point of the calculation was that C contained the rounding error!
Most programmers stopped "thinking about the code" long ago and just slap together a bunch of libraries. That's why my DVD/HD player takes about 30 seconds loading operating systems (I hope that last 's' is an exaggeration, but I fear it may even be correct) before it will even eject a disc.
As for the supposedly huge performance improvement of 18% (that's all?!), I have regularly hand-optimised code that ran more than twice as fast.
My bank thought typing passwords on a keyboard was insecure, because of keyloggers and such. So they came up with a "solution": an on screen keyboard with numbers in a scrambled order, where you have to click the buttons to enter your password. So now anyone looking over my shoulder can see exactly which buttons I pushed in which order (a dot appears for each pressed button, so I can't even pretend to press different buttons in between). O, but the password is displayed as dots, just in case someone is looking over your shoulder...
Then there's a few banks that use key cards, with a grid of codes. "Enter the code from C4". I guess they're not aware yet that pretty much everyone has a small digital camera in their pockets... Who cares the card has a hundred codes on it, if you only need to take one picture of it?!
You would think there should be plenty of Apple fans more than willing to donate a part of their liver to Steve Jobs! Why did he have to wait 6 months on the queue?
You can't just "setup and watch silently" to capture a user's admin password. Access to keyboard events or any other function that monitors the keyboard is blocked during the password prompt.
But sneaking in with a package... yep, if you allow users to install any software they like, you can't keep them from installing malware. Except if someone would finally make an OS that allowed non-trivial software to be installed without requiring root passwords.
Actually, wait a minute... wasn't that the way Macs were supposed to work? Apps like Skype, FireFox and even MS Office (!) can just be dragged to the Applications folder. No password needed.
So if Apple would finally follow its own guidelines and just let the user drag and drop apps like iWork to the application folder, this problem can be avoided in the future. But noooo... Apple apps almost always require an admin password to install, and quite often a restart too (for a music player?! Come on!)
I guess that means it's Apple's fault after all...
I love this part:
"Judge Dorsey ruled that Mr. Jordan was not denied equal protection because the city of New London applied the same standard to everyone: anyone who scored too high was rejected."
So I guess you can also "apply the same standard to anyone" and reject anyone with a black skin color, right?
You seriously know a pilot who still uses one of those on actual flights?
The only time I've ever used one was in the classroom during the theoretical courses before I started actually flying. And even there, I thought you were allowed to use the digital alternative nowadays.
Pilots used to carry around a "computer" consisting of a set of concentric rotating disks with markings on them. You could use it to multiply, divide, calculate square roots, sines and cosines, wind components, standard temperatures and density at altitude, etc... Only 15 years ago the use of this computer was still taught to new airline pilots, it was even part of my ATPL exam (even though nobody actually used them in the cockpit anymore)
Actually, Air France pilots speak French when talking to French controllers (so there's a mix of French and English on the frequency), and in Spain Spanish is spoken between Spanish pilots and controllers. Other pilots who don't speak the language don't have a clue what other airplanes around them are doing. This has already led to accidents, for example an airplane being cleared for take-off in French while another aircraft with non-French crew was crossing the runway.
They tried to get French pilots to speak English in France (like they do when flying through other countries) but this resulted in a complete mess with certain pilots refusing to speak English, not replying to messages, controllers confused about which language to speak to which plane, etc... So they gave it up after one day and still speak French over France today.
(Disclaimer: I am an Air France pilot)
Definitely prior art! And I like her design better, with the arrows and dial, I wonder how long it will take before someone makes a fully functioning copy of that.
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Explain how science is done please.
Well, like blueg3 pretty much explained, you do X, Y follows, you think maybe Y might have something to do with X, so you do more experiments that could prove you right but might also prove you wrong (This is important! The possibility for falsification must exist). You share your results with colleagues, who also do experiments of their own, preferably different ones, until enough evidence is gathered that your theory is probably correct. I could give a pill to 500 people suffering from a cold, and then go "after one week, 97% were cured, therefore my pill works". I hope you agree that that is NOT scientifically acceptable proof. To prove that a medical treatment works, for example, you need double blind tests on sufficiently large groups. Especially if the treatment is not a logical one from a medical point of view (like cracking a perfectly healthy spine to cure a bowel problem).
They carried out reproduction in space of sea urchins, fish, amphibians and birds, but no mice? If I were to study the effects of microgravity on pregnancy, I would put something similar to humans (at least a mammal) at the top of my list, instead of first trying a whole list of species that don't really resemble us. Why use centifuges to "simulate" zero G (?!) and not just send a few mice up to the ISS? OK, it might be difficult to get them to actually reproduce, maybe put them on a 1G centrifuge for the actual copulation bit and then let them float again.
Anyone familiar with The Big Bang Theory will not be surprised by this finding. I bet they did not find any traces of peanuts, though.
More than 50 years ago, my dad had a dog that would take the bus to the city, and come back home again the same way. In the beginning the drivers just thought the dog was with one of the passengers, but after a while they noticed the same dog over and over again with different passengers, or even boarding alone. Somehow the dog always managed to take the right bus home.
Me too! Truly amazing, the amount of freedom you had in that game. All 6 degrees, you don't even get that in an airplane. It did take a while to get used to the controls, I used a joystick and the keyboard but it still felt like I needed one more hand. Maybe I should have had pedals, too. It was really great, though, being able to choose how you were going to through a passage: straight, sideways, upside down (if such a thing exists, really), lowering yourself into it, anything went. The most unique game experience I've ever come across.
There are lots of interesting algorithms, that are probabilistic. The definition is, that if you run it long enough, the solution will be found.
Indeed, and such algorithms are widely used in practice, but they are not theoretically considered a "solution" because you might (in theory) have to wait forever to get a path, and you will never really be sure that no path exists (which is an important element of the Hamiltonian Path Problem). If a probabilistic algorithm is considered to be good enough, they should at least compare the bacteria against a computer running a probabilistic algorithm as well, and find that the computer is probably a lot faster.
Even worse, the colony does not even SOLVE the problem! If you let the bacteria grow enough, you have a pretty high probability of getting a solution. But no guarantee, because it's all probabilistic. If some of the bacteria happen to reach the correct solution, they turn the right color. Which is pretty easy to detect if you're just looking for a big patch of yellow bacteria, but not if there are millions of possibilities and only a few bacteria turned the specific color you are looking for. Sure, you could use resistance to antibiotics instead of colors, and kill off the bad solutions, but still, if no bacteria are left, that does not mean there's no solution. And since the number of possibilities grows exponentially with problem size, so will the required size of the bacterial colony. So forget about solving the HPP with 500 or so nodes. Then, on top of that, DNA is not exactly reliable. Already in this small and simple experiment, unexpected colors like pink etc. turned up.
Post-its are not the only problem. If people have to come up with a new password every time, many end up using a sequence of "strong" passwords like "june2009!", "aug2009!", etc...
In any case, a password is only as strong as the e-mail account that can be used to retrieve it. Or even worse, the secret question which is usually orders of magnitude easier. Or the IT help desk (just give them your name and they'll give you a new password)
Another pet pieve about passwords I have always had: if a system limits the amount of guesses to three (or some other number), PLEASE don't consider duplicate guesses as seperate attempts! If someone enters the same, incorrect password twice, you can be fairly sure this is not some evil attacker trying to guess a password by trying the same one over and over again until it works. A user will often enter the wrong password, think he made a typing error, enter the same wrong password again, and then be left with only one more attempt before his account is blocked. This happened to me once: my debit card was blocked because I used the same incorrect code twice, then tried to enter the correct code only to get a keyboard malfunction that registered the third digit twice, immediately accepting those four digits without requiring an "enter" key.
Plus, it launched on July 4th, not a particularly significant day for North Koreans... And while anybody could look it up, who here can say they know the dates of big Chinese holidays? Really?
Well, it's not like there's a big blockbuster Hollywood movie like "Born on the First of October", or a movie called "National Day" with aliens attacking Peking on the first of October, so thay might explain why fewer people know the big Chinese holidays
O, and the North Korean one is the 9th of September, by the way. Finding that out took a similar amount of effort, actually even less because I still had the Wikipedia window open.
If you're still not sure whether or not the North Koreans know about the fourth of July, the fact that they launched seven missiles on precisely that day this year must be a coincidence too? And the fact that they tested a long range missile on that day three years ago? And their nuclear test on U.S. Memorial Day?
Another, more common problem in optimization is floating point math. For example, "T = S+Y; C = (T - S) - Y;" may be "optimized" to "T = S+Y; C = 0;" while the whole point of the calculation was that C contained the rounding error!
Most programmers stopped "thinking about the code" long ago and just slap together a bunch of libraries. That's why my DVD/HD player takes about 30 seconds loading operating systems (I hope that last 's' is an exaggeration, but I fear it may even be correct) before it will even eject a disc. As for the supposedly huge performance improvement of 18% (that's all?!), I have regularly hand-optimised code that ran more than twice as fast.
My bank thought typing passwords on a keyboard was insecure, because of keyloggers and such. So they came up with a "solution": an on screen keyboard with numbers in a scrambled order, where you have to click the buttons to enter your password. So now anyone looking over my shoulder can see exactly which buttons I pushed in which order (a dot appears for each pressed button, so I can't even pretend to press different buttons in between). O, but the password is displayed as dots, just in case someone is looking over your shoulder...
Then there's a few banks that use key cards, with a grid of codes. "Enter the code from C4". I guess they're not aware yet that pretty much everyone has a small digital camera in their pockets... Who cares the card has a hundred codes on it, if you only need to take one picture of it?!
Wait... your password is fluffybunnies too?!
You would think there should be plenty of Apple fans more than willing to donate a part of their liver to Steve Jobs! Why did he have to wait 6 months on the queue?
Nope, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. They would get here at the same time as the light and other radiation from the supernova.
But sneaking in with a package... yep, if you allow users to install any software they like, you can't keep them from installing malware. Except if someone would finally make an OS that allowed non-trivial software to be installed without requiring root passwords.
Actually, wait a minute... wasn't that the way Macs were supposed to work? Apps like Skype, FireFox and even MS Office (!) can just be dragged to the Applications folder. No password needed.
So if Apple would finally follow its own guidelines and just let the user drag and drop apps like iWork to the application folder, this problem can be avoided in the future. But noooo... Apple apps almost always require an admin password to install, and quite often a restart too (for a music player?! Come on!) I guess that means it's Apple's fault after all...
I love this part: "Judge Dorsey ruled that Mr. Jordan was not denied equal protection because the city of New London applied the same standard to everyone: anyone who scored too high was rejected." So I guess you can also "apply the same standard to anyone" and reject anyone with a black skin color, right?
You seriously know a pilot who still uses one of those on actual flights? The only time I've ever used one was in the classroom during the theoretical courses before I started actually flying. And even there, I thought you were allowed to use the digital alternative nowadays.
Pilots used to carry around a "computer" consisting of a set of concentric rotating disks with markings on them. You could use it to multiply, divide, calculate square roots, sines and cosines, wind components, standard temperatures and density at altitude, etc... Only 15 years ago the use of this computer was still taught to new airline pilots, it was even part of my ATPL exam (even though nobody actually used them in the cockpit anymore)
But a 17 year old sexting her 19 year old boyfriend will still be jailed and branded a sex offender, right?
Actually, Air France pilots speak French when talking to French controllers (so there's a mix of French and English on the frequency), and in Spain Spanish is spoken between Spanish pilots and controllers. Other pilots who don't speak the language don't have a clue what other airplanes around them are doing. This has already led to accidents, for example an airplane being cleared for take-off in French while another aircraft with non-French crew was crossing the runway. They tried to get French pilots to speak English in France (like they do when flying through other countries) but this resulted in a complete mess with certain pilots refusing to speak English, not replying to messages, controllers confused about which language to speak to which plane, etc... So they gave it up after one day and still speak French over France today. (Disclaimer: I am an Air France pilot)
Texting - Sexting? Just a wild guess...
Actually, he may well have a shot at the igNobel prize!
So it can be re-posted here next year, ad the year after that, and...
Definitely prior art! And I like her design better, with the arrows and dial, I wonder how long it will take before someone makes a fully functioning copy of that.