Don't just simulate them. Let them work with real tools. For example, it's really easy to build a telegraph. This could make a fantastic class project. Divide them into small groups, and have each group build a working telegraph key. Connect them up in pairs, give them a Morse code chart, and have them try to send messages to each other. Now hook them up to a central switchboard and teach them the basic principles of networks and switching mechanisms. Finally, explain how "the internet" is doing exactly the same thing as the network they built, just automated and on a bigger scale.
You're confusing two completely different things: laws that take your age into account (which by definition is legal - it's the law), and illegal discrimination based on age (which is illegal because the law says it is). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... for example.
I'm pretty sure that at least in the U.S., deciding whether to give people a special offer based on their age is illegal. It's called age discrimination.
Girlfriend, in 16 years the only thing that is really likely to change is the color of the table counter-tops at the local Burger King and the name on the alcohol/caffeine combo drink sold at the Arco Mini-mart.
Let's see, 16 years ago was 1998. Smartphones didn't exist yet. Tablet computers didn't exist yet. Even the iPod wouldn't be released for three years. The very first hybrid car had just gone on sale in Japan, but none would be available in the rest of the world for a year or two. Mining of oil shale in the United States was nonexistent.
Not to comment on this particular prediction, but just as a general comment, a lot more can change in 16 years than you think.
I did follow the link. You're misinterpreting it. This is a data coverage map, that is, a map of how much data they have in different places. It has nothing to do with cell phone coverage.
I'm not sure what your point is. This isn't supposed to be a map of cell phone coverage. It's a map showing all the data points in their database. The goal of this project is to let people identify their location based on the visible networks, not to tell them what kind of network coverage they'll have in any location.
It's generally accepted that the Universe's history is best described by the Big Bang model, with General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory as the physical laws governing the underlying framework.
No no no. It's generally accepted that each one of these theories taken individually is the best currently known description within its particular domain. It is not generally accepted that you can just throw them together and get an accurate description of the fundamental nature of the universe! In fact, we know you can't do that because general relativity and quantum field theory are deeply incompatible with each other. People have been working for half a century to find a single consistent theory that can reproduce the predictions of both. They've made a lot of progress, but we're still a long way from having any confidence about what the true fundamental theory is.
The picture of eternal inflation described in this article is plausible based on what we know. But it's still very speculative. That's true of any discussion of cosmology. Our current knowledge is just way too limited to have any confidence about it.
(for example, most hidden variable theories have been ruled out).
Actually that's not true. Only some very limited classes of hidden variable theories have been excluded. Bell's theorem is based on a set of very doubtful assumptions that weren't well understood until decades after it was first introduced. For example, it requires locality (which is now widely suspected to be false) and no retrocausality (which, assuming CPT invariance really is an exact symmetry, is almost definitely false). It also requires a really wacky assumption that your choice of what measurement to perform is uncorrelated with the values of hidden variables at the place and time where you make the choice - basically treating the experimenter and/or experimental apparatus as not subject to the laws of physics.
How can a theory be more correct than an equivalent theory?
Yes, I simplified a bit to keep my post from getting too long. There are tons of interpretations of QM: dozens we know about, and probably lots of others that no one has thought of yet. Some are "pure interpretations", meaning they make no predictions beyond the ones made by QM itself. No experiment can ever distinguish between two pure interpretations. But a lot of them aren't pure interpretations. They still reproduce the prediction of QM to high accuracy, but in principle an experiment could distinguish between them.
If we ever learn which interpretation is correct, it will be based on evidence. But right now that evidence doesn't exist, which is why I said this is more philosophy than science. Occam's razor says we should prefer a simpler explanation over a more complicated one, but that doesn't prove the simpler explanation is actually correct. But maybe some day we'll know.
As far as we can tell, CPT invariance is an exact symmetry of the universe. So the details are slightly more complicated, but time, charge, and parity are elements of a single symmetry.
Here's a more familiar example of a weak measurement. QM says you can't measure the magnetic moment of a single particle along two perpendicular axes at the same time. And yet, you can easily measure the magnetic moment of a bar magnet along two perpendicular axes at the same time. How is that possible? The bar magnet's moment is just the sum of the ones from all the particles that make it up. So by measuring the total magnetic moment, aren't you measuring the moments of all the individual particles, and hence violating the uncertainty principle?
The answer is no. When you measure the total moment of a macroscopic magnet, you only need to interact very very weakly with any individual particle, so the experiment only has a tiny effect on the state of each one. The more particles you sum over, the less information you need about each one, so the less restrictive the uncertainty principle becomes.
But the mathematical details of the explanation are curious. Weak measurements were originally proposed based on time reversible interpretations of QM, in which the future can affect the past and it's basically arbitrary which direction you call "forward in time". It was later shown that other interpretations also predicted them - of course they must, since the interpretations are mathematically equivalent. But the explanations are very different. Other interpretations explain them through an incredibly complicated series of cancellations, whereas in time reversible QM the explanation is straightforward, almost obvious. So is this evidence that time reversible QM is correct? At the moment, that question is more philosophy than science, but it's interesting to think about.
Here are some examples of things you said that are totally false:
We are too dumb to understand climate.
Nonsense. We're entirely capable of understanding the climate.
Any one who calls themselves a climate expert is a huge liar
This is total BS.
That lack of relativity has lead to arrogance and away from science.
Climate researchers are doing fantastic science.
skeptics and supporters are opposite sides of the same coin of wrong headedness.
The two groups are about as unlike as you can get. Climate scientists are dedicating their lives to working really hard, trying to solve really hard problems and figure out how the real world actually works. So called "climate skeptics" are, as a rule, willfully ignorant of the state of knowledge. They've just decided what they want to believe, make no effort to actually study climatology, and just go around making claims that are simply false. LIke, "We're too stupid to understand the climate and anyone who claims to is a liar."
So how much time have you spent actually studying climatology? And no, I don't mean reading books and websites written by self-proclaimed climate skeptics out to expose the massive fraud being perpetuated on an unsuspecting public. I mean actual climate science. Studying basic physics, reading scientific papers, understanding the math behind climate models, studying the experiments used to parametrize and validate those models, and so on. Not so much? Then maybe you should assume that you know less about the subject than people who spend their entire lives doing that.
Stop making things up. It may make you feel smart, but you have no clue what you're talking about.
Yeah, the climate is really complicated. So is the human body, but we can now 3D print working organs and implant them into patients. So is rocket science, but we now have robotic rovers driving around on Mars. If a problem is hard, that doesn't mean we can't solve it. That just means we have to work really hard. And we've been working really hard at understanding the climate for half a century. You have no clue what amazing progress has been made and how deep an understanding we now have of some really complex processes.
So if you want to know what's going on with the climate, what do you do?
1. Learn all about it, recognizing that's a big task and it will take you years of study if you really want to become an expert.
2. Listen to the people who have spent years studying it and are experts on it.
3. Don't do either of the above. Just say, "No one understands this because it's too complicated." After all, if you don't understand it then obviously no one else does either.
That's one I've been hearing for years - that young people don't use email anymore. That it's not cool. That it's just something older people use. But it hasn't had any effect on the daily flood in my inbox. People don't use email to be cool, they use it because it's a really useful tool that lots of people depend on every day.
Facebook either will or won't survive in exactly the same way. If it's a valuable tool, people will keep using it and coolness will be irrelevant. If they decide other tools meet their needs better, they'll abandon it. Being cool is, at best, a short term way to bootstrap a service. It's not what matters long term.
so I don't know why anyone would use it if they knew other nicer programming languages.
"Nicer" is a matter of opinion, and also a matter of what you're using it for. Matlab/Octave is designed from the very start for numerical math, and if that's what you're doing, I'd say it's a slightly nicer language than Python/Numpy/Scipy. But for anything other than numerical math, Python is a much nicer language.
A sale is a type of contract. Once you agree to a contract, you're bound by it. You don't get to say, "Wait, I didn't really intend to give you that good a deal, I'm changing the terms I agreed to!"
If you're going to write a computer program to agree to contracts on your behalf, you'd better make darned sure that program works correctly. If it doesn't, you're stuck with the consequences.
"Now Mozilla claims that with some new improvements it is at worst only 1.5 times slower than single threaded, non-vectorized native code."
In other words, it's only 1.5 times slower than native code that you haven't made any serious effort to optimize. Hey, I think it's great they're improving the performance of Javascript. But this is still nowhere close to what you can do in native code when you actually care about performance.
Can't speak for his particular proposal (I haven't looked at it), but the idea of splitting up California has been around for years, and makes a lot of sense. It's far larger and more diverse than most other states, and that makes it really hard to govern. You basically have the SF bay megalopolis (with more population than most other states), the LA/San Diego megalopolis (ditto), the central valley (sparsely populated but with enormous agricultural wealth), and huge rural areas that in many cases don't want to have anything to do with the cities.
This also would gain California much more influence in the federal government (more senators, more electoral votes).
Winter, incandescent lamps approach 100% efficiency for me.
Not even close, unless all your electricity is locally generated from non-fossil sources. First because the power plant is not perfectly efficient at generating electricity from fossil fuel. And second because lots of energy is lost to resistance in transmitting that electricity to your house. Compared to a good gas powered furnace, the heat generated by your light bulbs is still a really inefficient heating source.
They argue that if the new ones really are so good, people will buy them on their own without being forced to do so.
If we had pollution and carbon taxes, that might be a valid argument. But we don't, and so people have no reason to take into account all the damage they're causing. With such massive externalities, any appeal to free market principles is a straw man.
It's great they're talking about reforms to prevent this happening again, but there's one critical element no one is talking about: prosecuting people for the crimes they already committed. The NSA has been breaking laws on a massive scale all over the world, but there hasn't been one single prosecution of anyone for any of them. Until they see the law applies to them too, they'll have no reason to not just keep ignoring it. And then all the reforms in the world will be nothing but paper, things to ignore just like everything else they find inconvenient.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't just simulate them. Let them work with real tools. For example, it's really easy to build a telegraph. This could make a fantastic class project. Divide them into small groups, and have each group build a working telegraph key. Connect them up in pairs, give them a Morse code chart, and have them try to send messages to each other. Now hook them up to a central switchboard and teach them the basic principles of networks and switching mechanisms. Finally, explain how "the internet" is doing exactly the same thing as the network they built, just automated and on a bigger scale.
You're confusing two completely different things: laws that take your age into account (which by definition is legal - it's the law), and illegal discrimination based on age (which is illegal because the law says it is). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... for example.
I'm pretty sure that at least in the U.S., deciding whether to give people a special offer based on their age is illegal. It's called age discrimination.
Girlfriend, in 16 years the only thing that is really likely to change is the color of the table counter-tops at the local Burger King and the name on the alcohol/caffeine combo drink sold at the Arco Mini-mart.
Let's see, 16 years ago was 1998. Smartphones didn't exist yet. Tablet computers didn't exist yet. Even the iPod wouldn't be released for three years. The very first hybrid car had just gone on sale in Japan, but none would be available in the rest of the world for a year or two. Mining of oil shale in the United States was nonexistent.
Not to comment on this particular prediction, but just as a general comment, a lot more can change in 16 years than you think.
With those two exceptions California is actually largely Republican.
Of course, the SF Bay Area and the greater LA area together contain half the population of the state, so that's not a very strong statement.
I did follow the link. You're misinterpreting it. This is a data coverage map, that is, a map of how much data they have in different places. It has nothing to do with cell phone coverage.
I'm not sure what your point is. This isn't supposed to be a map of cell phone coverage. It's a map showing all the data points in their database. The goal of this project is to let people identify their location based on the visible networks, not to tell them what kind of network coverage they'll have in any location.
It's generally accepted that the Universe's history is best described by the Big Bang model, with General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory as the physical laws governing the underlying framework.
No no no. It's generally accepted that each one of these theories taken individually is the best currently known description within its particular domain. It is not generally accepted that you can just throw them together and get an accurate description of the fundamental nature of the universe! In fact, we know you can't do that because general relativity and quantum field theory are deeply incompatible with each other. People have been working for half a century to find a single consistent theory that can reproduce the predictions of both. They've made a lot of progress, but we're still a long way from having any confidence about what the true fundamental theory is.
The picture of eternal inflation described in this article is plausible based on what we know. But it's still very speculative. That's true of any discussion of cosmology. Our current knowledge is just way too limited to have any confidence about it.
(for example, most hidden variable theories have been ruled out).
Actually that's not true. Only some very limited classes of hidden variable theories have been excluded. Bell's theorem is based on a set of very doubtful assumptions that weren't well understood until decades after it was first introduced. For example, it requires locality (which is now widely suspected to be false) and no retrocausality (which, assuming CPT invariance really is an exact symmetry, is almost definitely false). It also requires a really wacky assumption that your choice of what measurement to perform is uncorrelated with the values of hidden variables at the place and time where you make the choice - basically treating the experimenter and/or experimental apparatus as not subject to the laws of physics.
How can a theory be more correct than an equivalent theory?
Yes, I simplified a bit to keep my post from getting too long. There are tons of interpretations of QM: dozens we know about, and probably lots of others that no one has thought of yet. Some are "pure interpretations", meaning they make no predictions beyond the ones made by QM itself. No experiment can ever distinguish between two pure interpretations. But a lot of them aren't pure interpretations. They still reproduce the prediction of QM to high accuracy, but in principle an experiment could distinguish between them.
If we ever learn which interpretation is correct, it will be based on evidence. But right now that evidence doesn't exist, which is why I said this is more philosophy than science. Occam's razor says we should prefer a simpler explanation over a more complicated one, but that doesn't prove the simpler explanation is actually correct. But maybe some day we'll know.
As far as we can tell, CPT invariance is an exact symmetry of the universe. So the details are slightly more complicated, but time, charge, and parity are elements of a single symmetry.
Here's a more familiar example of a weak measurement. QM says you can't measure the magnetic moment of a single particle along two perpendicular axes at the same time. And yet, you can easily measure the magnetic moment of a bar magnet along two perpendicular axes at the same time. How is that possible? The bar magnet's moment is just the sum of the ones from all the particles that make it up. So by measuring the total magnetic moment, aren't you measuring the moments of all the individual particles, and hence violating the uncertainty principle?
The answer is no. When you measure the total moment of a macroscopic magnet, you only need to interact very very weakly with any individual particle, so the experiment only has a tiny effect on the state of each one. The more particles you sum over, the less information you need about each one, so the less restrictive the uncertainty principle becomes.
But the mathematical details of the explanation are curious. Weak measurements were originally proposed based on time reversible interpretations of QM, in which the future can affect the past and it's basically arbitrary which direction you call "forward in time". It was later shown that other interpretations also predicted them - of course they must, since the interpretations are mathematically equivalent. But the explanations are very different. Other interpretations explain them through an incredibly complicated series of cancellations, whereas in time reversible QM the explanation is straightforward, almost obvious. So is this evidence that time reversible QM is correct? At the moment, that question is more philosophy than science, but it's interesting to think about.
The Python version included with RHEL 6 (that's the very latest version): 2.6
The Python version included with RHEL 5 (still widely used): 2.4
Thank them for forcing us to keep supporting old versions.
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html
We're in the very early stages, but it's already happening.
Here are some examples of things you said that are totally false:
We are too dumb to understand climate.
Nonsense. We're entirely capable of understanding the climate.
Any one who calls themselves a climate expert is a huge liar
This is total BS.
That lack of relativity has lead to arrogance and away from science.
Climate researchers are doing fantastic science.
skeptics and supporters are opposite sides of the same coin of wrong headedness.
The two groups are about as unlike as you can get. Climate scientists are dedicating their lives to working really hard, trying to solve really hard problems and figure out how the real world actually works. So called "climate skeptics" are, as a rule, willfully ignorant of the state of knowledge. They've just decided what they want to believe, make no effort to actually study climatology, and just go around making claims that are simply false. LIke, "We're too stupid to understand the climate and anyone who claims to is a liar."
So how much time have you spent actually studying climatology? And no, I don't mean reading books and websites written by self-proclaimed climate skeptics out to expose the massive fraud being perpetuated on an unsuspecting public. I mean actual climate science. Studying basic physics, reading scientific papers, understanding the math behind climate models, studying the experiments used to parametrize and validate those models, and so on. Not so much? Then maybe you should assume that you know less about the subject than people who spend their entire lives doing that.
Stop making things up. It may make you feel smart, but you have no clue what you're talking about.
Yeah, the climate is really complicated. So is the human body, but we can now 3D print working organs and implant them into patients. So is rocket science, but we now have robotic rovers driving around on Mars. If a problem is hard, that doesn't mean we can't solve it. That just means we have to work really hard. And we've been working really hard at understanding the climate for half a century. You have no clue what amazing progress has been made and how deep an understanding we now have of some really complex processes.
So if you want to know what's going on with the climate, what do you do?
1. Learn all about it, recognizing that's a big task and it will take you years of study if you really want to become an expert.
2. Listen to the people who have spent years studying it and are experts on it.
3. Don't do either of the above. Just say, "No one understands this because it's too complicated." After all, if you don't understand it then obviously no one else does either.
Yeah. That's what I thought.
That's one I've been hearing for years - that young people don't use email anymore. That it's not cool. That it's just something older people use. But it hasn't had any effect on the daily flood in my inbox. People don't use email to be cool, they use it because it's a really useful tool that lots of people depend on every day.
Facebook either will or won't survive in exactly the same way. If it's a valuable tool, people will keep using it and coolness will be irrelevant. If they decide other tools meet their needs better, they'll abandon it. Being cool is, at best, a short term way to bootstrap a service. It's not what matters long term.
so I don't know why anyone would use it if they knew other nicer programming languages.
"Nicer" is a matter of opinion, and also a matter of what you're using it for. Matlab/Octave is designed from the very start for numerical math, and if that's what you're doing, I'd say it's a slightly nicer language than Python/Numpy/Scipy. But for anything other than numerical math, Python is a much nicer language.
A sale is a type of contract. Once you agree to a contract, you're bound by it. You don't get to say, "Wait, I didn't really intend to give you that good a deal, I'm changing the terms I agreed to!"
If you're going to write a computer program to agree to contracts on your behalf, you'd better make darned sure that program works correctly. If it doesn't, you're stuck with the consequences.
Let's correct that sentence:
"Now Mozilla claims that with some new improvements it is at worst only 1.5 times slower than single threaded, non-vectorized native code."
In other words, it's only 1.5 times slower than native code that you haven't made any serious effort to optimize. Hey, I think it's great they're improving the performance of Javascript. But this is still nowhere close to what you can do in native code when you actually care about performance.
Can't speak for his particular proposal (I haven't looked at it), but the idea of splitting up California has been around for years, and makes a lot of sense. It's far larger and more diverse than most other states, and that makes it really hard to govern. You basically have the SF bay megalopolis (with more population than most other states), the LA/San Diego megalopolis (ditto), the central valley (sparsely populated but with enormous agricultural wealth), and huge rural areas that in many cases don't want to have anything to do with the cities.
This also would gain California much more influence in the federal government (more senators, more electoral votes).
Winter, incandescent lamps approach 100% efficiency for me.
Not even close, unless all your electricity is locally generated from non-fossil sources. First because the power plant is not perfectly efficient at generating electricity from fossil fuel. And second because lots of energy is lost to resistance in transmitting that electricity to your house. Compared to a good gas powered furnace, the heat generated by your light bulbs is still a really inefficient heating source.
They argue that if the new ones really are so good, people will buy them on their own without being forced to do so.
If we had pollution and carbon taxes, that might be a valid argument. But we don't, and so people have no reason to take into account all the damage they're causing. With such massive externalities, any appeal to free market principles is a straw man.
It's great they're talking about reforms to prevent this happening again, but there's one critical element no one is talking about: prosecuting people for the crimes they already committed. The NSA has been breaking laws on a massive scale all over the world, but there hasn't been one single prosecution of anyone for any of them. Until they see the law applies to them too, they'll have no reason to not just keep ignoring it. And then all the reforms in the world will be nothing but paper, things to ignore just like everything else they find inconvenient.