Oh, and you could fit very large numbers in a very small space, as long as you use the correct notation.
That works only for very few numbers; you would have to be extraordinarily lucky for this trick to work with the starting index of Wikipedia in the digit sequence of pi.
Also, (I could be wrong on this, but) since pi is irrational, it can't have a pattern.
Irrational numbers can't have a repeating pattern such as 0.123012301230123..., but they can still have a pattern, for instance 0.1230123001230001230000123...
I'm sure you could find some pretty small program that would compute pi to some very large number of digits, and find the wikipedia excerpt in the results, but It would take a very long time to run.
In all likelihood, that trick won't work: your program would need to know the start index of the Wikipedia text in the digit sequence of pi, and that index would be so astronomically huge that writing it down would be about as long as writing down Wikipedia itself. As a little example of the effect, think about finding the first occurrence of '0000' in the digit sequence of pi, and ask yourself how far out that is likely to happen.
but the fact remains that the wikipedia model is fundamentally incompatible with most (but not all) meaningful scholarly activity.
Scholarly activity? What are you talking about? Original research is explicitly forbidden in Wikipedia. It's a general reference work, without doubt the most useful one ever devised. Yes, I said "useful", not "reliable", because the two concepts are independent. A resource is useful, by definition, if many people use it without being forced to do so. We're talking about a top 20 website, serving over 2000 articles every second.
I think it would help Wikipedia editors a lot more if we could finally do search (and replace) in text areas. The bug was filed and fixed, yet somehow the code didn't find its way into production.
Drinking coke is associated with lower bone density in women. So if you don't like the prosprect of brittle bones in old age (osteoporosis), you may want to drink something else.
Part of my morning routine is following various comic strips at several sites. At one of them, three of the strips are displayed in Flash. Why?
They probably want to prevent that people download the strips with some script every morning. With Flash that's still possible of course but quite a bit harder.
You find me confused. First you say 6GB compression of all articles and pictures is "an achievement"; when pointed that it isn't that good, you claim that you can of course do better than that. So give us the numbers: how small do you get the full Wikipedia with all pictures?
You didn't compress well enough. The Wikipedia-on-TomeRaider project gets the English Wikipedia (January 2006) down to 2GB with "many images" and to 4GB with "all images". See here. Maybe you should look into producing an open source TomeRaider viewer that would work on your Linux OLPC; TomeRaider is by far the best e-book format around, so this would benefit the OLPC project in many ways.
And here's the link to Erik Zachte's Wikipedia-on-TomeRaider project. Works on Palm and Pocket PCs and requires the $38 TomeRaider shareware and a 2GB (if you want many images) or 4GB (if you want all images) memory card.
Last time I checked, you could set up your Google spreadsheets for collaboration, but there was no version control, no way to find out who changed what when, and to revert changes. Has that since been added? Without it, I find collaboration impossible.
Scientology would definitely let us know if he were one of them.
Is that all the evidence you have? With the same justification, one could say that he would definitely let us know that he isn't one of them if he weren't.
apparently, and per his recollections [...]
What's your source for this claim?
I'd think it rude[...] I'd cringe [...] But let it go [...] let it lie
Hu? I'm sure you don't mean to imply that merely asking the question is impermissible?
Is there any evidence for or against the claim that Neil Gaiman is a scientologist? The Wikipedia Discussion page talks about it, but no one seems to have any definite answers.
It's a private university. They can do what they want.
True and completely besides the point. The first question is "Should an institution dedicated to higher learning engage in censorship?" and the answer is "No"; the second question is "Do many institutions dedicated to higher learning engage in censorship?" and the answer is "No."
Yes, it was in Scientific Amcerican ("Buying Time in Suspended Animation" by Mark B. Roth and Todd Nystul, 06/01/2005) and was also reported by the BBC.
I think you mean (2^N)-1 steps. And no, there is no such finite-state machine. As Wikipedia correctly explains, a finite-state machine is fed an input string letter by letter from start to finish, and in each step, based on currently read letter and current internal state, the machine changes its internal state (and, optionally, outputs a result letter). Once the string is read in full, the computation is over. Thus the computation always takes linear time.
there are only a finite number of floppies in the universe
That's precisely the point. If you are willing to imagine that you have an unlimited supply of floppy disks, then P=NP becomes an interesting mathematical question. If you stick to the real world with a finite supply of floppy disks, every algorithm is linear and P=NP is uninteresting.
Yes, some things a finite-state machine does don't require linear time (e.g. checking whether a given input string is empty or not); nothing a finite-machine does ever requires more than linear time. Sorting cannot be done with a finite-state machine.
You're wrong. "Immortal" in this context is standard terminology for a solution that exists for all times. Your choice of "time-invariant" is not the same. "Three space dimensions" is much clearer than your "three dimensions", because the latter could be mistaken for one time and two space dimensions, a much simpler scenario.
This Navier-Stokes thing seems to be more of an applied-math problem
Not really. Actually solving Navier-Stokes for concretely given boundary conditions is very much an applied math problem, maybe the most important one of them all, and it is done with computers and algorithms from numerical analysis. But the paper we're discussing here is pure math: she proves that for a certain class of boundary conditions a solution must exist, without saying what it looks like or how to get it. It's of pure intellectual interest and won't help the engineers in any immediate way.
The question P=NP is thoroughly uninteresting when restricted to existing computers. Every existing computer has a finite and bounded amount of memory and storage, and hence a finite set of internal states, and is therefore a finite state machine. Everything a finite state machine does can be done in linear time.
it is conceivable that there exists a poly-time algorithm for an NP-complete problem, but there is no proof (within ZFC, say) that it is correct.
Yes, that's conceivable but seems unlikely. A more likely scenario (and in fact my money is on it) is that we can eventually prove that ZFC can neither prove nor disprove P=NP, and in that case we don't know whether your scenario above is correct, or if on the contrary no such algorithm exists but ZFC is simply too weak to establish that.
I still have the right to give away my personal information to whom I see fit.
Sure, but that person can only use them for the specified purpose and can not pass them on to others that you have not explictly agreed to. You cannot give them a blanket permission.
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I think it would help Wikipedia editors a lot more if we could finally do search (and replace) in text areas. The bug was filed and fixed, yet somehow the code didn't find its way into production.
Drinking coke is associated with lower bone density in women. So if you don't like the prosprect of brittle bones in old age (osteoporosis), you may want to drink something else.
You find me confused. First you say 6GB compression of all articles and pictures is "an achievement"; when pointed that it isn't that good, you claim that you can of course do better than that. So give us the numbers: how small do you get the full Wikipedia with all pictures?
And here's the link to Erik Zachte's Wikipedia-on-TomeRaider project. Works on Palm and Pocket PCs and requires the $38 TomeRaider shareware and a 2GB (if you want many images) or 4GB (if you want all images) memory card.
Last time I checked, you could set up your Google spreadsheets for collaboration, but there was no version control, no way to find out who changed what when, and to revert changes. Has that since been added? Without it, I find collaboration impossible.
Is there any evidence for or against the claim that Neil Gaiman is a scientologist? The Wikipedia Discussion page talks about it, but no one seems to have any definite answers.
Yes, it was in Scientific Amcerican ("Buying Time in Suspended Animation" by Mark B. Roth and Todd Nystul, 06/01/2005) and was also reported by the BBC.
I think you mean (2^N)-1 steps. And no, there is no such finite-state machine. As Wikipedia correctly explains, a finite-state machine is fed an input string letter by letter from start to finish, and in each step, based on currently read letter and current internal state, the machine changes its internal state (and, optionally, outputs a result letter). Once the string is read in full, the computation is over. Thus the computation always takes linear time.
Yes, some things a finite-state machine does don't require linear time (e.g. checking whether a given input string is empty or not); nothing a finite-machine does ever requires more than linear time. Sorting cannot be done with a finite-state machine.
You're wrong. "Immortal" in this context is standard terminology for a solution that exists for all times. Your choice of "time-invariant" is not the same. "Three space dimensions" is much clearer than your "three dimensions", because the latter could be mistaken for one time and two space dimensions, a much simpler scenario.