> The instant before the top of the ladder hits the floor, it has infinite velocity.
It has infinite velocity for an infinitesimal period of time. They multiply out nicely, and no one's head gets hurt. It's hardly a flaw in the calculus, just a quotidian application of cauchy sequences.
c is the limit of the velocity to which one can accellerate, relative to a given mass, because accellerating to c requires infinite energy. of course, this is c as observed by someone at your starting point. as observed from your own accellerated frame of reference, you can achieve arbitrarily high velocity, but then time dilation effects kick in so that if you return to your starting point, the amount of time that passed is the same as it would be if you never accellerated beyond c.
Why would anyone *want* to believe that a substantial proportion of subterranean petroleum was abiotic? I mean, it is or it isn't. There's no sustainable commercial value in oil that isn't there. I guess that if you suspected abiosis, and had a large investment in Dawar, you might want to *disbelieve*, and want others to disbelieve as well, but I don't see the case for willful mistaken positive belief.
Everyone loves a pedant. Notice that many people use FlOp to mean Floating-point Operation, that the English language does not conform to your personal preferences, and that the Cray-2 was referred to as "the gigaflop" 'way back in '91 -- so there's about 15 years of tradition behind the flexible use of this terminology.
The MDGRAPE-3 VPUs are optimized for moldyn, but could be easily applied to a wide range of problems. They do have a robust set of floating-point instructions. I have experience in adapting a wide range of scientific problems to similar architectures (in a previous generation of capability), and can assure you that while peak hardware utilization rates would be nigh impossible to achieve for the majority of applications, a respectable percentage of the theoretical capacity could be brought to bear on a wide range of problems.
No, this is nothing like a beowulf cluster. While the basic architectural outline is classical, using a general-purpose computer to feed instructions and manage I/O for a whopping big array processor, there are numerous small, critical innovations which contribute to the enormous flop count. BlueGene/L you might consider just a big flipping stack of workstations, but there is an order of magnitude difference in flops between that kind of commodity system and MDGRAPE-3.
Gig-E is a pretty sad sort of MPP interconnect, BTW. Infiniband is a big step up, and HyperTransport 3 is another hop skip jump beyond that. When the VPUs are talking over a direct interconnect, magic can happen.
Each of 5832 300-MHz execution units does 660 parallel floating-point operations per cycle, for 1.15 e 15 flops/sec. The Xeons do not contribute to the total; they essentially act as the microcode program that tells the vector units what to do next.
While optimized for moldyn, it would be readily repurposed for a wide range of large-scale computations, including solving massive ensembles of linear systems. Indeed, I would be quite pleased to write a Fortran-2005 compiler or a Matlab compiler for this beast, if anyone wanted to fund such an endeavor. I was the tech lead for the CM-5 C* and Fortran compilers about 8 years ago.
I speak a little Japanese and would enjoy the opportunity to gain full mastery.
Send offers to parallelcompilers (at) southoftheclouds (dot) net.
> The Swedish govermment was bilked about $60 million drilling into Swedish granite.
Interestingly, they found petroleum in the bedrock. If it was presumed to be a commercially viable enterprise, yes, Sweden would have been 'bilked', but since it was instead intended as a scientific experiment, I think you just made libelous aspersions against the investigators. It was a remarkable observation, and well worth the expense, in my view.
Every right, perhaps, but unless they positively do not want to know about kites, they should refrain from the excercise of that right. Once you introduce concepts like "right", you have removed the discussion from the proper domain of scientific methodology and turned it into a political wangle.
> The GP attempts however to level that as a failing of those attempting to reproduce > the experiments - when the fault is in reality on the other end of the stick.
Injecting deontic concepts such as fault removes the discussion from the realm of science and the description of empirical reality.
> (His last paragraph, invoking Big Business conspiracies tells you cleanly of his bias.)
His bias is quite irrelevant to the facts of the matter, to the relationship between explanatory model and observed events.
Whether neutrons were observed is objective. Whether the mechanism underlying their presence conformed to a model is an open question, until the model is tested. No subjectivity is involved.
I'm *guessing* the vast majority of people in the U.S. could tell you several stories about abuses of power under color of law that affected them personally, at the local level. Of course the abuses at the national level are so severe and persistent that most people believe that a faction of the current administration planned and executed mass-murders inside the U.S. -- regardless of the truth of the matter, which is probably unknowable by now, the fact that cynicism runs so deep is indicative of the harsh experience of the systems of justice and governance which are typical of the 21st century American experience.
It's difficult enough to get realistic crime statistics regarding the subject population, but to expect to get valid statistical information regarding the criminal deeds of their rulers who enjoy the power of those laws seems quixotic if not oxymoronic.
I don't think that's "the whole point" of chaos. There's probably a number of points, such as demonstrating that the limits of the knowable, while real, are not fixed, or providing a source of creative new combinations of matter or ideas, or making that fuzzy sound in a guitar chord, or giving me a cool job title.
Sure. A condition of confusion is inherent in being a pilot. You can become less confused by switching to another hobby, such as being a logician, or a gynecologist. Did that help?
There is a word for a language as used by a specific individual speaker, and that word is "idiolect". Wars are fought because particularly stupid people cannot accept the inescapable fact that words *intend* (meaning 1) precisely what their speaker intends, and regardless of what they *convey* (meaning 2) in the interpretation of a listener or *connote* (meaning 3) in the instantaneous context of the present evolutionary state of the dialect, which is in turn distinct from the canonical meaning that the same words *denote* (meaning 4) in the prescriptive collections of descriptive definitions forming the dominant norm of a given language.
Even if he doesn't need it, there are lots of other people who are literally dying for lack of money. I recommend amphetamines. I can pull down 80-120 highly productive hours per week when it is expedient; but more than a couple of weeks over 100 hours, even with rigorously enforced physical fitness breaks and careful diet, would push the limits of sanity at my age (45).
> However, if it is a good model of "reality", then it is good science. If it can predict, it is useful.
Only if it is open source. Otherwise, it belongs in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Unless I can reproduce the numerical experiment, the predictions are as meaningful as a call to the psychic friends network.
Slashdot Mirror
> The instant before the top of the ladder hits the floor, it has infinite velocity.
It has infinite velocity for an infinitesimal period of time. They multiply out nicely,
and no one's head gets hurt. It's hardly a flaw in the calculus, just a quotidian
application of cauchy sequences.
c is the limit of the velocity to which one can accellerate, relative to a given mass, because accellerating to c requires infinite energy. of course, this is c as observed by someone at your starting point. as observed from your own accellerated frame of reference, you can achieve arbitrarily high velocity, but then time dilation effects kick in so that if you return to your starting point, the amount of time that passed is the same as it would be if you never accellerated beyond c.
Why would anyone *want* to believe that a substantial proportion of subterranean petroleum was abiotic? I mean, it is or it isn't. There's no sustainable commercial value in oil that isn't there. I guess that if you suspected abiosis, and had a large investment in Dawar, you might want to *disbelieve*, and want others to disbelieve as well, but I don't see the case for willful mistaken positive belief.
> Why didn't RIM just play Scientology...
Why didn't they play Truman and nuke a few cities in Japan?
Because it's a bad idea, perhaps?
Everyone loves a pedant. Notice that many people use FlOp to mean Floating-point Operation, that the English language does not conform to your personal preferences, and that the Cray-2 was referred to as "the gigaflop" 'way back in '91 -- so there's about 15 years of tradition behind the flexible use of this terminology.
The MDGRAPE-3 VPUs are optimized for moldyn, but could be easily applied to a wide range of problems. They do have a robust set of floating-point instructions. I have experience in adapting a wide range of scientific problems to similar architectures (in a previous generation of capability), and can assure you that while peak hardware utilization rates would be nigh impossible to achieve for the majority of applications, a respectable percentage of the theoretical capacity could be brought to bear on a wide range of problems.
No, this is nothing like a beowulf cluster. While the basic architectural outline is classical, using a general-purpose computer to feed instructions and manage I/O for a whopping big array processor, there are numerous small, critical innovations which contribute to the enormous flop count. BlueGene/L you might consider just a big flipping stack of workstations, but there is an order of
magnitude difference in flops between that kind of commodity system and MDGRAPE-3.
Gig-E is a pretty sad sort of MPP interconnect, BTW. Infiniband is a big step up, and HyperTransport 3 is another hop skip jump beyond that. When the VPUs are talking over a direct interconnect, magic can happen.
The Xeons do not contribute to the flop rate. They act as instruction sequencers and I/O processors.
Each of 5832 300-MHz execution units does 660 parallel
floating-point operations per cycle, for 1.15 e 15 flops/sec.
The Xeons do not contribute to the total; they essentially
act as the microcode program that tells the vector units
what to do next.
While optimized for moldyn, it would be readily repurposed
for a wide range of large-scale computations, including
solving massive ensembles of linear systems. Indeed, I
would be quite pleased to write a Fortran-2005 compiler or
a Matlab compiler for this beast, if anyone wanted to fund
such an endeavor. I was the tech lead for the CM-5
C* and Fortran compilers about 8 years ago.
I speak a little Japanese and would enjoy the opportunity
to gain full mastery.
Send offers to parallelcompilers (at) southoftheclouds (dot) net.
That's utterly ludicrous, given that at least a quarter of the U.S. prison population is there for political crimes.
Silly urban legends enrich all of our lives, and form the fabric of a culture.
Please joint the crusade against crusades. Stamp out stamping out in our lifetime!
> The Swedish govermment was bilked about $60 million drilling into Swedish granite.
Interestingly, they found petroleum in the bedrock. If it was presumed to be a
commercially viable enterprise, yes, Sweden would have been 'bilked', but since it
was instead intended as a scientific experiment, I think you just made libelous
aspersions against the investigators. It was a remarkable observation, and well
worth the expense, in my view.
Every right, perhaps, but unless they positively do not want to know about kites, they should refrain from the excercise of that right. Once you introduce concepts like "right", you have removed the discussion from the proper domain of scientific methodology and turned it into a political wangle.
Such tales are best told only in the closet. Perhaps in another 100 years we can speak freely of these things.
> The GP attempts however to level that as a failing of those attempting to reproduce
> the experiments - when the fault is in reality on the other end of the stick.
Injecting deontic concepts such as fault removes the discussion from the realm of
science and the description of empirical reality.
> (His last paragraph, invoking Big Business conspiracies tells you cleanly of his bias.)
His bias is quite irrelevant to the facts of the matter, to the relationship between
explanatory model and observed events.
Whether neutrons were observed is objective. Whether the mechanism underlying their presence conformed to a model is an open question, until the model is tested. No subjectivity is involved.
I'm *guessing* the vast majority of people in the U.S. could tell you several stories about abuses of power under color of law that affected them personally, at the local level. Of course the abuses at the national level are so severe and persistent that most people believe that a faction of the current administration planned and executed mass-murders inside the U.S. -- regardless of the truth of the matter, which is probably unknowable by now, the fact that cynicism runs so deep is indicative of the harsh experience of the systems of justice and governance which are typical of the 21st century American experience.
It's difficult enough to get realistic crime statistics regarding the subject population, but to expect to get valid statistical information regarding the criminal deeds of their rulers who enjoy the power of those laws seems quixotic if not oxymoronic.
I don't think that's "the whole point" of chaos. There's probably a number of points, such as demonstrating that the limits of the knowable, while real, are not fixed, or providing a source of creative new combinations of matter or ideas, or making that fuzzy sound in a guitar chord, or giving me a cool job title.
And for every sunny day or light spring rain that it predicts, we expect you to take another antidepressant pill.
Sure. A condition of confusion is inherent in being a pilot. You can become less confused by switching to another hobby, such as being a logician, or a gynecologist. Did that help?
> "my particular dialect"
There is a word for a language as used by a specific individual
speaker, and that word is "idiolect". Wars are fought because
particularly stupid people cannot accept the inescapable fact
that words *intend* (meaning 1) precisely what their speaker intends,
and regardless of what they *convey* (meaning 2) in the interpretation
of a listener or *connote* (meaning 3) in the instantaneous context
of the present evolutionary state of the dialect, which is in turn
distinct from the canonical meaning that the same words *denote*
(meaning 4) in the prescriptive collections of descriptive definitions
forming the dominant norm of a given language.
Even if he doesn't need it, there are lots of other people who are literally dying for lack of money. I recommend amphetamines. I can pull down 80-120 highly productive hours per week when it is expedient; but more than a couple of weeks over 100 hours, even with rigorously enforced physical fitness breaks and careful diet, would push the limits of sanity at my age (45).
Because you are the slave, and he is the master.
I nominate Siouxsie Sioux!
> However, if it is a good model of "reality", then it is good science. If it can predict, it is useful.
Only if it is open source. Otherwise, it belongs in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Unless I can reproduce the numerical experiment, the predictions are as meaningful as a call to the psychic friends network.