Re:I (guiltily) like macs for scientific computing
on
The Ultimate MacDate
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Go to any hard science meeting, and you will be immersed in a sea of mac laptops
During those scientific meetings, I take unscientific polls and count Macs vs. other laptops. Two years ago, the percentage was consistently less than 25%. Last meeting in July it was exactly 50% (and the wifi router was overloaded). Given all the people who come up to me and say "I'd like to get a powerbook but it's against policy" or "Dammit, IT is making everyone use Dell products, and they're taking away my powerbook", I suspect it would be even higher if it weren't for institutional policies forcing Windows on people. No one is making any of those folks use a Mac.
(Academics might get to pick and choose, but lots of scientists work at institutions that either make deals or whose IT people won't support Macs.)
12 pages, all of them slashdotted, the print command runs some MS-only WinOpen script that doesn't work in Safari, the email command runs some MS-only WinOpen script that doesn't work in Safari. Bah. Maybe he's got something useful to say, but I'll never get past the first page. At least it's not green on black like ArsTechnica.
This is why there have been so many completely falsified scientific papers that weren't found out until years later even though they were peer reviewed.
So many completely falsified scientific papers? How many? I would submit that 99.999% of all scientific papers are legit. The reason it's news when it happens is because it is so rare.
As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
And launching large amounts of mass out of the Earth's gravity well takes no energy at all. Sheesh.
Changing the wavelength slightly one way or the other doesn't change my point. We've 15 years of data from Hubble, uv, visible. It's a zero sum game, budget-wise. Money spent on keeping Hubble up is money not spent on JWST, TPF, LISA, BBO, you name it. Why not let Hubble go, and build something else?
This decision will mean that other things get postponed or not done at all.
Because the $1B you use to keep the Hubble up is the $1B that you now don't get to spend on the replacement.
I expect to hear that in the next few days, since the new fiscal year is coming up, that both of the future space science projects that I work on will have budget cuts, if not be mothballed entirely. This will be directly as a result of this Hubble decision.
In the real world, even if there's a car with all the doors open and the key in the ignition, it's still GTA if you take it.
In the real world, even if you leave your front door open, if someone walks in without your permission, it's B&E.
Are either of these wise things to do if it's your car or your house? Not necessarily, but you could still expect the person who took your car or entered your house to be prosecuted.
Sorry to piss in YOUR beer, Einstein, but space is kinda EMPTY, in case you hadn't noticed. It's a long way in between worthwhile places to visit. Much much longer than the distances between continents.
I know a bit about farm policy and rural lifestyles, thanks. I'll flip off the tractor driver if he doesn't pull over to let people pass, same as I did when I was roading the old Case 1270. I won't complain about the stink from the dairy farm, but I will complain about the stink of government subsidies to the dairy farm. I won't bitch about LA traffic if you won't bitch about the cost of broadband. Heck, my folks didn't even have more than three channels of TV until satellite became affordable (about five years ago). But they want to live in the country, so that's a choice they make.
We have a saying where I grew up: Don't try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
Good for you. But don't try to sell me on the benefits of the rural lifestyle. I grew up on a farm and ranch, and my folks still live in the sticks, and you can have it. I live in Los Angeles and love it. Seems like not many of the kids I grew up with want to live that lifestyle either - the population of the plains is shrinking.
They'll fail for other reasons anyway. Even cars here on earth don't run ten years without maintenance.
You can neither launch, land, nor propel an infinite amount of mass. If the RTG starts cutting into the cost of your science probes, then the Rover becomes a vehicle to carry around your RTGs, not a science probe. These missions are designed based on the science requirements, not on having a Rover that can wander around for ten years (unless that's the science requirement, but that's a pretty meaningless science requirement). If you figure that something is going to happen to the Rover to cause it to fail after 90, or 180, or 720 days (like lubricant failure on the wheels or antenna, or a simple tip over), then what's the point of having a power supply that lasts another 10 years after the instrument can no longer move, esp. since using the RTGs required you to not fly N science instruments?
I've long complained that they didn't use an RTG or SRG on the craft. It seems that the engineers did such a good job that it was unnecessary.
How about that. Do you suppose that there might be reasons why the engineers chose not to use them?
Do you know what one of those weighs? There are very good reasons not to use them. The usual reason is dry mass, and power per unit mass - solar cells are much more effective in both regards, so when designing spacecraft, solar usually wins out, if you have access to the sun.
RTGs are not the solution to every extraterrestrial power problem. Some, but not all, and apparently this wasn't one of them. How about that.
Maybe I'm just a tin-eared old goat, but the difference between a CD and a 128 kbps MP3 track doesn't leap out at me in casual listening.
It does to me. It doesn't matter most of the time because I'm listening to the iPod over not great earphones in the gym, or on the bike, or running, or through the cassette adapter in the car (why don't car audio manufacturers put an input jack on the front panel?). But when I listen through my good headphones at work, or through Klipsch speakers at home, it definitely makes a difference. There are a lot of songs I just can't listen to because the distortion is so pronounced.
A moon-based scope has many advantages and disadvantages which should be considered.
They have considered it, thanks. Also scopes on the Antartic high ice cap, and earth-trailing, and at 5 AU, and at L2.
Why is there always an assumption that the folks at NASA are idiots? Or is that just the usual/. assumption that anyone working in any field is an idiot? (Every/. story about any new device or invention leads with the usual "I wonder what they're going to do about X," where X is the blindingly obvious thing that any simian would have thought of first - yes, they've thought about it and actually done a calculation!).
It's incredibly expensive to softland devices on the moon, compared to orbiting them in space. There's no solar power for two weeks at a time, so you'd have to use nuclear, which limits the amount of power you can get (and nuclear power generators are heavy, so you can't just launch more). Assuming it's a visible wavelength telescope (IR just seems impossible with the temp variations), when you're in the shade, you have to keep things warmed up to room temp, and when you're in the sun, you have to shield them from the sun without blocking your aperture. Being on the moon severely limits pointing capabilities - you have to point where ever the moon is pointing (L2 satellites have to point anti-sun but that's less restrictive). In fact, when the sun is shining down your aperture, can you observe at all? There's no soft lander infrastructure in place (you can't call up Boeing and order a Delta IV with the moon soft landing option), so you'd have to develop that also. It would include landing a multi-ton very precise, irreplaceable mirror and deploying in a gravity field. Just seems like a design, cost, and risk nightmare. All this is robotic of course, unless you also want to pay for the infrastructure to put humans up there. Which would cost about the same as 5 or 10 Hubble equivalents. That would make the telescope the flea on the elephant's back and the first thing to be cut when the inevitable overruns happened.
Now where are the advantages? Or did you just say that because you think there are some but you really haven't thought about what they are, but hey, Hubble on the moon! That sounds cool! Right up there with "move the Hubble to the ISS" in terms of bad choices.
Some of the cops are worse than the local thugs. Not all of them, but as long as there are a few like this, I won't trust a cop, EVER.
Some of the XXXX people in the US are criminals and murderers. Not all of them, but as long as there are a few like this, I won't trust a XXXX man, EVER. (long list elided)
The difference being, of course, that none of those groups you listed above have the power given them by the government to carry firearms and arrest me under color of law.
It's true, it's not as easy to make discoveries as it used to be. This experiment for instance has 125 co-authors and finished in 1997, so it had to go on for years before that. And it's a small experiment by comparison. So perhaps it's not as easy for an individual to make contributions as it used to be in these fields. But you could probably still do a lot on a (relative) table-top with things like Bose-Einstein condensates, atom interferometry, etc.
That said, there's plenty we don't understand about the big issues. We don't know what most matter is. We don't know why the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should. We don't have any theory of quantum gravity. We don't know why galaxies formed, and why they formed so damn fast. We don't really seem to completely understand the strong force - and it's prying the lid off things like this that will get us there.
So, as a physicist, I'd say there's still cool stuff to be done. You just might have to work hard in a lab or behind a desk for years and years to do it.
Well, I have a friend who counted cards at the blackjack table for years and years. Made a living at it, travelled in high style all over the world, got kicked out of all the best casinos and countries, had many aliases and passports so he could get back in, got arrested a few times (in Vegas, they ask you to leave; in other places, they call their brother the chief of police).
It can be done. You can win a lot of money. It's work. It's a grind. It is done. Things haven't changed - my friend just got tired of not seeing the sun for days at a time and working 20 hour days waiting for the count to get right.
Re:There is little math in /playing/ poker
on
Geeks and Poker?
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· Score: 1
Revelation or revaluation, not only is it an epiphany about the complexity of playing, it also strikes me that it's only the starting point of not being stupid in the future. Gotta figure that all the good players have read it, implemented it, and are assuming that you have also and are adjusting their play accordingly.
Scary.
Re:There is little math in /playing/ poker
on
Geeks and Poker?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sure it does. Read Sklansky's Theory of Poker. Then you start playing meta-odds - how often does this opponent bluff, how often should I bluff, what are the pot odds versus optimal bluff percentage vs implied pot odds, etc. There's lots of calculation going on, and it includes the human factor and bluffing.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to any hard science meeting, and you will be immersed in a sea of mac laptops
During those scientific meetings, I take unscientific polls and count Macs vs. other laptops. Two years ago, the percentage was consistently less than 25%. Last meeting in July it was exactly 50% (and the wifi router was overloaded). Given all the people who come up to me and say "I'd like to get a powerbook but it's against policy" or "Dammit, IT is making everyone use Dell products, and they're taking away my powerbook", I suspect it would be even higher if it weren't for institutional policies forcing Windows on people. No one is making any of those folks use a Mac.
(Academics might get to pick and choose, but lots of scientists work at institutions that either make deals or whose IT people won't support Macs.)
12 pages, all of them slashdotted, the print command runs some MS-only WinOpen script that doesn't work in Safari, the email command runs some MS-only WinOpen script that doesn't work in Safari. Bah. Maybe he's got something useful to say, but I'll never get past the first page. At least it's not green on black like ArsTechnica.
http://www.fleshbot.com/
This is why there have been so many completely falsified scientific papers that weren't found out until years later even though they were peer reviewed.
So many completely falsified scientific papers? How many? I would submit that 99.999% of all scientific papers are legit. The reason it's news when it happens is because it is so rare.
As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
And launching large amounts of mass out of the Earth's gravity well takes no energy at all. Sheesh.
Changing the wavelength slightly one way or the other doesn't change my point. We've 15 years of data from Hubble, uv, visible. It's a zero sum game, budget-wise. Money spent on keeping Hubble up is money not spent on JWST, TPF, LISA, BBO, you name it. Why not let Hubble go, and build something else?
This decision will mean that other things get postponed or not done at all.
Don't be a visible wavelength bigot. Everything that gets sent back is bits. We can color them anyway you want for you to have pretty screensavers.
Why shouldn't we try to get some completely new information?
Because the $1B you use to keep the Hubble up is the $1B that you now don't get to spend on the replacement.
I expect to hear that in the next few days, since the new fiscal year is coming up, that both of the future space science projects that I work on will have budget cuts, if not be mothballed entirely. This will be directly as a result of this Hubble decision.
In the real world, even if there's a car with all the doors open and the key in the ignition, it's still GTA if you take it.
In the real world, even if you leave your front door open, if someone walks in without your permission, it's B&E.
Are either of these wise things to do if it's your car or your house? Not necessarily, but you could still expect the person who took your car or entered your house to be prosecuted.
Sorry to piss in YOUR beer, Einstein, but space is kinda EMPTY, in case you hadn't noticed. It's a long way in between worthwhile places to visit. Much much longer than the distances between continents.
That's why it's called "space."
I know a bit about farm policy and rural lifestyles, thanks. I'll flip off the tractor driver if he doesn't pull over to let people pass, same as I did when I was roading the old Case 1270. I won't complain about the stink from the dairy farm, but I will complain about the stink of government subsidies to the dairy farm. I won't bitch about LA traffic if you won't bitch about the cost of broadband. Heck, my folks didn't even have more than three channels of TV until satellite became affordable (about five years ago). But they want to live in the country, so that's a choice they make.
We have a saying where I grew up: Don't try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
Good for you. But don't try to sell me on the benefits of the rural lifestyle. I grew up on a farm and ranch, and my folks still live in the sticks, and you can have it. I live in Los Angeles and love it. Seems like not many of the kids I grew up with want to live that lifestyle either - the population of the plains is shrinking.
They'll fail for other reasons anyway. Even cars here on earth don't run ten years without maintenance.
You can neither launch, land, nor propel an infinite amount of mass. If the RTG starts cutting into the cost of your science probes, then the Rover becomes a vehicle to carry around your RTGs, not a science probe. These missions are designed based on the science requirements, not on having a Rover that can wander around for ten years (unless that's the science requirement, but that's a pretty meaningless science requirement). If you figure that something is going to happen to the Rover to cause it to fail after 90, or 180, or 720 days (like lubricant failure on the wheels or antenna, or a simple tip over), then what's the point of having a power supply that lasts another 10 years after the instrument can no longer move, esp. since using the RTGs required you to not fly N science instruments?
I've long complained that they didn't use an RTG or SRG on the craft. It seems that the engineers did such a good job that it was unnecessary.
How about that. Do you suppose that there might be reasons why the engineers chose not to use them?
Do you know what one of those weighs? There are very good reasons not to use them. The usual reason is dry mass, and power per unit mass - solar cells are much more effective in both regards, so when designing spacecraft, solar usually wins out, if you have access to the sun.
RTGs are not the solution to every extraterrestrial power problem. Some, but not all, and apparently this wasn't one of them. How about that.
I agree with your earlier points, but:
Maybe I'm just a tin-eared old goat, but the difference between a CD and a 128 kbps MP3 track doesn't leap out at me in casual listening.
It does to me. It doesn't matter most of the time because I'm listening to the iPod over not great earphones in the gym, or on the bike, or running, or through the cassette adapter in the car (why don't car audio manufacturers put an input jack on the front panel?). But when I listen through my good headphones at work, or through Klipsch speakers at home, it definitely makes a difference. There are a lot of songs I just can't listen to because the distortion is so pronounced.
A moon-based scope has many advantages and disadvantages which should be considered.
/. assumption that anyone working in any field is an idiot? (Every /. story about any new device or invention leads with the usual "I wonder what they're going to do about X," where X is the blindingly obvious thing that any simian would have thought of first - yes, they've thought about it and actually done a calculation!).
They have considered it, thanks. Also scopes on the Antartic high ice cap, and earth-trailing, and at 5 AU, and at L2.
Why is there always an assumption that the folks at NASA are idiots? Or is that just the usual
It's incredibly expensive to softland devices on the moon, compared to orbiting them in space. There's no solar power for two weeks at a time, so you'd have to use nuclear, which limits the amount of power you can get (and nuclear power generators are heavy, so you can't just launch more). Assuming it's a visible wavelength telescope (IR just seems impossible with the temp variations), when you're in the shade, you have to keep things warmed up to room temp, and when you're in the sun, you have to shield them from the sun without blocking your aperture. Being on the moon severely limits pointing capabilities - you have to point where ever the moon is pointing (L2 satellites have to point anti-sun but that's less restrictive). In fact, when the sun is shining down your aperture, can you observe at all? There's no soft lander infrastructure in place (you can't call up Boeing and order a Delta IV with the moon soft landing option), so you'd have to develop that also. It would include landing a multi-ton very precise, irreplaceable mirror and deploying in a gravity field. Just seems like a design, cost, and risk nightmare. All this is robotic of course, unless you also want to pay for the infrastructure to put humans up there. Which would cost about the same as 5 or 10 Hubble equivalents. That would make the telescope the flea on the elephant's back and the first thing to be cut when the inevitable overruns happened.
Now where are the advantages? Or did you just say that because you think there are some but you really haven't thought about what they are, but hey, Hubble on the moon! That sounds cool! Right up there with "move the Hubble to the ISS" in terms of bad choices.
Some of the cops are worse than the local thugs. Not all of them, but as long as there are a few like this, I won't trust a cop, EVER.
Some of the XXXX people in the US are criminals and murderers. Not all of them, but as long as there are a few like this, I won't trust a XXXX man, EVER. (long list elided)
The difference being, of course, that none of those groups you listed above have the power given them by the government to carry firearms and arrest me under color of law.
And that makes all the difference.
It's true, it's not as easy to make discoveries as it used to be. This experiment for instance has 125 co-authors and finished in 1997, so it had to go on for years before that. And it's a small experiment by comparison. So perhaps it's not as easy for an individual to make contributions as it used to be in these fields. But you could probably still do a lot on a (relative) table-top with things like Bose-Einstein condensates, atom interferometry, etc.
That said, there's plenty we don't understand about the big issues. We don't know what most matter is. We don't know why the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should. We don't have any theory of quantum gravity. We don't know why galaxies formed, and why they formed so damn fast. We don't really seem to completely understand the strong force - and it's prying the lid off things like this that will get us there.
So, as a physicist, I'd say there's still cool stuff to be done. You just might have to work hard in a lab or behind a desk for years and years to do it.
At least NPR hasn't been fawning over Reagan 24/7 for the last few days.
Are you kidding? Everytime I've turned NPR on since last Friday, they've been fawning over Reagan.
First, about our politicians being the "lying-est" ever known -- have you ever been to, say, South America? Russia? Africa?
Yay! Our politicians are better than Russian and African politicians!
Truly the bigotry of soft expectations.
Well, I have a friend who counted cards at the blackjack table for years and years. Made a living at it, travelled in high style all over the world, got kicked out of all the best casinos and countries, had many aliases and passports so he could get back in, got arrested a few times (in Vegas, they ask you to leave; in other places, they call their brother the chief of police).
It can be done. You can win a lot of money. It's work. It's a grind. It is done. Things haven't changed - my friend just got tired of not seeing the sun for days at a time and working 20 hour days waiting for the count to get right.
Revelation or revaluation, not only is it an epiphany about the complexity of playing, it also strikes me that it's only the starting point of not being stupid in the future. Gotta figure that all the good players have read it, implemented it, and are assuming that you have also and are adjusting their play accordingly.
Scary.
Sure it does. Read Sklansky's Theory of Poker. Then you start playing meta-odds - how often does this opponent bluff, how often should I bluff, what are the pot odds versus optimal bluff percentage vs implied pot odds, etc. There's lots of calculation going on, and it includes the human factor and bluffing.
There's a famous story about Harrison Ford and George Lucas. Ford told him, "George, you can write this shit, but you can't say it."
A beautiful blonde female of French decent would cost you $1000 per hour in New York.
In Montreal, it will run you $150.
That is the real bargain.
That's just the exchange rate working for you.