Interestingly, the proper name for polar bear is ursus maritimus. In any case the adjective polar in this case refers, as it often does, to that area of the Earth north of the arctic circle. There is of course an equivalent area south of the antarctic circle but alas there are no bears there.
Wasn't this all demonstrated 100 years ago by Francis Galton and an Ox? What's new is that there are more data points and better techniques to identify interesting correlations. Probably this is what we do internally anyway. All of our sensory input is correlated and the interesting bits are filtered out by specific algorithms trained by evolution. What is fascinating to many are the times when these algorithms are spectacularly wrong.
Convert from Java to Fortran (or C++) and your code will run an order of magnitude faster. I bet you can do even better than that. Seriously. You are wasting so much CPU time with Java. This way you can reduce the size of your cluster and save lots of money. Probably taxpayer dollars right? You have some responsibility to the funding agencies.
The particles have a high temperature (are moving quickly) but the particle density is low. Therefore the heat will be small. Heat is the flow of energy from a hotter body to a cooler body.
I'm pretty sure that the cat in the box thing is usually taken the wrong way. It was probably meant to show something was wrong with the interpretation rather than to suggest the cat was somehow both alive and dead. Cats are not both alive and dead.
This is an interesting idea. A recent paper has shown that by burning all of the fossil fuels that we can find (about 4000 Gt of carbon) we are going to delay, or skip lightly over, the onset of the next several ice ages.
No more ice ages.
Well said. My family of four uses a Honda Fit and we have only one car, another thing that seems uncommon these days. We seem to get by just fine. I hauled 250 blocks for a garden wall recently (several trips). Soccer games with the bag of balls etc. are fine too. My closest accident was something that driver altitude wouldn't have helped. A deer bolted in front of me from the bushes at dusk. I was going the speed limit (90 km/hr) and very narrowly missed the deer, braking hard and manoeuvring around it. My wife and son were in the car (the Fit) with me. Luckily it kept going and there was no oncoming traffic. I might not have had an outlet if it had been busier. An SUV might have helped absorb an impact like that but it wouldn't have helped seeing it coming. On another note it's truly amazing what goes through your mind in that three quarters of second while your foot is mashing on the brake pedal. I hope next time I make the right decision again because there's no time to try something different if the first thing you try goes badly.
It's funny that you have a nickname for people in enclosed vehicles. There is a good nickname for motorcyclists: spare parts. On the other hand I agree pretty much with the rest of your comment. People in general don't take driving seriously enough.
Fortran is not used by many people anymore. However, it is used in very important and influential codes. The primary example of this might be climate and weather forecasting models. These models are mostly written with Fortran and results of computations using this language are used to influence decision makers at the highest political levels.
You're absolutely right that latency matters. However for problems that don't parallelise well single processor computation rates (FLOPS) are still important too. Many important problems require a lot of calculation and a lot of communication between subdomains. This means that they can be parallelised but with diminishing returns for increasing numbers of cpus. Climate models are a good example of this. Running on fewer faster CPUs may be better than simply throwing more slower CPUs at the problem. Take a look at Amdahl's Law for more information about subdividing problems into ever smaller pieces.
Having a fast, high bandwidth switch fabric is great as long as the CPUs are also as fast as possible. Also, on cheap multicore machines, the available memory bandwidth is not sufficient to supply access to memory to all cores at the maximum rate. This means that computational processes running on the separate CPUs or cores compete with each other for access to memory slowing down the execution time of all so the processes on the machine. It is often useless to run multiple instances of computationally limited processes on a multi-CPU (cheap) linux computer. You get an overall increase in the wall-clock time. Internode latency and intranode memory access are certainly two reasons to spend more on real supercomputers".
Fortran has been dead for ages but we still use it everyday on a variety of architectures. I know we're not the only ones. Many scientists still use it.
Squirt has been a perfectly acceptable verb for hundreds of years. I don't understand your comment.
Mesh also seems fine. Perhaps you need to read more?
There is lots of evidence for lobsters so I think your example doesn't really work. You are simplifying too much. In this case your door can't literally be the aperture into your domicile. Rather it is some abstract aperture through which your observe the world with all sorts of sensors, physiological and technological. That abstract aperture has seen many lobsters pass through. No aliens though.
I've always wondered why it's considered good to ask "how high" if someone tells you to jump. Wouldn't the sign of a dedicated servant or slave be simply to jump? Furthermore, isn't it supposed to imply jumping off of a cliff? It's a stupid cliche anyway I suppose.
Ridiculous. It is easy to follow the rules. People really just need to stop following so closely. If the traffic density is high everyone must slow down. Stop changing lanes so much. That doesn't help significantly but adds to traffic irritation. There is one particular street in my town that is two lanes in each direction. It has many side streets with stop signs and driveways. Also bike paths and sidewalks. It's busy but would be perfectly manageable except for the bozos who think it's a freeway. They're the ones screwing it up for the rest. They think the left lane in each direction is a passing lane. They are idiots. Really traffic has probably always sucked. Selfish morons who think the road is a racetrack, that other vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles are obstacles are the real problem. Just chill out there. You'll save on fuel costs too!
As far as I know, when making a left turn you are supposed to enter the intersection and wait for an opportunity. Only one car should do this, any others should wait behind the stop line. If there is no opportunity to turn you simply wait for the light to turn red. Then, when traffic has finally decided that they should stop for the red, you have a chance to go. Those three cars that also turn left behind you are all running the red. They should have waited for the next cycle and by pushing through are delaying the cross-traffic's start on their green. Of course this behaviour, when witnessed by the cross-traffic, irritates them but also conditions them to bend or break the rules as well. Where I live we have a lot of advance left turn signals. These delayed turners in some cases prevent the use of the advance turn by the expected number of vehicles.
Blender, a niche application if ever there was one, used by a tiny fraction of computer users, is hardly a good example of anything relevant in a discussion on the future of mass market computing.
Scientists are a subset of all people. People use performance altering drugs. People always have done this and always will. This use is both (currently) legal and illegal. Focusing on the illegal use, we should think about what harm we are doing to our societies by artificially creating black markets for the things people want. The one obvious result is the awesome expense of policing this market and its consequences. Brief reflection on this topic results in the observation that perhaps freeing this market from the laws that create so many problems will eliminate these problems. Further reflection suggests new problems. I think (I am willing to concede that there is an element of hope) that these new problems would have a smaller overall impact on how we all live together. Therefore, remove all artificially imposed rules regarding such drugs and license and control their distribution. It's probably much cheaper to sweep the hopeless cases off the street than it is to fight the black market.
Devices like this will finally bring the industrial revolution to a close. The upheaval seen at the beginning of this revolution 200 years ago is going to be nothing compared to what we will see in a few more decades.
Don't forget to add in the massive, rapidly growing number of transistors available for processing. We've got some big changes coming.
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Interestingly, the proper name for polar bear is ursus maritimus. In any case the adjective polar in this case refers, as it often does, to that area of the Earth north of the arctic circle. There is of course an equivalent area south of the antarctic circle but alas there are no bears there.
Wasn't this all demonstrated 100 years ago by Francis Galton and an Ox? What's new is that there are more data points and better techniques to identify interesting correlations. Probably this is what we do internally anyway. All of our sensory input is correlated and the interesting bits are filtered out by specific algorithms trained by evolution. What is fascinating to many are the times when these algorithms are spectacularly wrong.
Convert from Java to Fortran (or C++) and your code will run an order of magnitude faster. I bet you can do even better than that. Seriously. You are wasting so much CPU time with Java. This way you can reduce the size of your cluster and save lots of money. Probably taxpayer dollars right? You have some responsibility to the funding agencies.
This doesn't sound like a grad student that I would like to have in my department. This sounds like a high school or undergraduate project.
The particles have a high temperature (are moving quickly) but the particle density is low. Therefore the heat will be small. Heat is the flow of energy from a hotter body to a cooler body.
I'm pretty sure that the cat in the box thing is usually taken the wrong way. It was probably meant to show something was wrong with the interpretation rather than to suggest the cat was somehow both alive and dead. Cats are not both alive and dead.
This is an interesting idea. A recent paper has shown that by burning all of the fossil fuels that we can find (about 4000 Gt of carbon) we are going to delay, or skip lightly over, the onset of the next several ice ages. No more ice ages.
Well said. My family of four uses a Honda Fit and we have only one car, another thing that seems uncommon these days. We seem to get by just fine. I hauled 250 blocks for a garden wall recently (several trips). Soccer games with the bag of balls etc. are fine too. My closest accident was something that driver altitude wouldn't have helped. A deer bolted in front of me from the bushes at dusk. I was going the speed limit (90 km/hr) and very narrowly missed the deer, braking hard and manoeuvring around it. My wife and son were in the car (the Fit) with me. Luckily it kept going and there was no oncoming traffic. I might not have had an outlet if it had been busier. An SUV might have helped absorb an impact like that but it wouldn't have helped seeing it coming. On another note it's truly amazing what goes through your mind in that three quarters of second while your foot is mashing on the brake pedal. I hope next time I make the right decision again because there's no time to try something different if the first thing you try goes badly.
It's funny that you have a nickname for people in enclosed vehicles. There is a good nickname for motorcyclists: spare parts. On the other hand I agree pretty much with the rest of your comment. People in general don't take driving seriously enough.
Apparently it is living longer that costs more to society. Prevention No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure
Fortran is not used by many people anymore. However, it is used in very important and influential codes. The primary example of this might be climate and weather forecasting models. These models are mostly written with Fortran and results of computations using this language are used to influence decision makers at the highest political levels.
You're absolutely right that latency matters. However for problems that don't parallelise well single processor computation rates (FLOPS) are still important too. Many important problems require a lot of calculation and a lot of communication between subdomains. This means that they can be parallelised but with diminishing returns for increasing numbers of cpus. Climate models are a good example of this. Running on fewer faster CPUs may be better than simply throwing more slower CPUs at the problem. Take a look at Amdahl's Law for more information about subdividing problems into ever smaller pieces. Having a fast, high bandwidth switch fabric is great as long as the CPUs are also as fast as possible. Also, on cheap multicore machines, the available memory bandwidth is not sufficient to supply access to memory to all cores at the maximum rate. This means that computational processes running on the separate CPUs or cores compete with each other for access to memory slowing down the execution time of all so the processes on the machine. It is often useless to run multiple instances of computationally limited processes on a multi-CPU (cheap) linux computer. You get an overall increase in the wall-clock time. Internode latency and intranode memory access are certainly two reasons to spend more on real supercomputers".
I don't know about your point number two. It's certainly far from true for the last half million years. Vostok Ice Core
Fortran has been dead for ages but we still use it everyday on a variety of architectures. I know we're not the only ones. Many scientists still use it.
Squirt has been a perfectly acceptable verb for hundreds of years. I don't understand your comment. Mesh also seems fine. Perhaps you need to read more?
There is lots of evidence for lobsters so I think your example doesn't really work. You are simplifying too much. In this case your door can't literally be the aperture into your domicile. Rather it is some abstract aperture through which your observe the world with all sorts of sensors, physiological and technological. That abstract aperture has seen many lobsters pass through. No aliens though.
I've always wondered why it's considered good to ask "how high" if someone tells you to jump. Wouldn't the sign of a dedicated servant or slave be simply to jump? Furthermore, isn't it supposed to imply jumping off of a cliff? It's a stupid cliche anyway I suppose.
Ridiculous. It is easy to follow the rules. People really just need to stop following so closely. If the traffic density is high everyone must slow down. Stop changing lanes so much. That doesn't help significantly but adds to traffic irritation. There is one particular street in my town that is two lanes in each direction. It has many side streets with stop signs and driveways. Also bike paths and sidewalks. It's busy but would be perfectly manageable except for the bozos who think it's a freeway. They're the ones screwing it up for the rest. They think the left lane in each direction is a passing lane. They are idiots. Really traffic has probably always sucked. Selfish morons who think the road is a racetrack, that other vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles are obstacles are the real problem. Just chill out there. You'll save on fuel costs too!
As far as I know, when making a left turn you are supposed to enter the intersection and wait for an opportunity. Only one car should do this, any others should wait behind the stop line. If there is no opportunity to turn you simply wait for the light to turn red. Then, when traffic has finally decided that they should stop for the red, you have a chance to go. Those three cars that also turn left behind you are all running the red. They should have waited for the next cycle and by pushing through are delaying the cross-traffic's start on their green. Of course this behaviour, when witnessed by the cross-traffic, irritates them but also conditions them to bend or break the rules as well. Where I live we have a lot of advance left turn signals. These delayed turners in some cases prevent the use of the advance turn by the expected number of vehicles.
Well said.
"Take the 3D application "Blender" for example."
Blender, a niche application if ever there was one, used by a tiny fraction of computer users, is hardly a good example of anything relevant in a discussion on the future of mass market computing.
Scientists are a subset of all people. People use performance altering drugs. People always have done this and always will. This use is both (currently) legal and illegal. Focusing on the illegal use, we should think about what harm we are doing to our societies by artificially creating black markets for the things people want. The one obvious result is the awesome expense of policing this market and its consequences. Brief reflection on this topic results in the observation that perhaps freeing this market from the laws that create so many problems will eliminate these problems. Further reflection suggests new problems. I think (I am willing to concede that there is an element of hope) that these new problems would have a smaller overall impact on how we all live together. Therefore, remove all artificially imposed rules regarding such drugs and license and control their distribution. It's probably much cheaper to sweep the hopeless cases off the street than it is to fight the black market.
Devices like this will finally bring the industrial revolution to a close. The upheaval seen at the beginning of this revolution 200 years ago is going to be nothing compared to what we will see in a few more decades. Don't forget to add in the massive, rapidly growing number of transistors available for processing. We've got some big changes coming.
"I just wonder what is to be gained by doing it again."
I would imagine that money is the item they hope to gain.
Did he teach you to talk to people too? You must be quite a pair.