you simply can't deny evolution any more than you can deny calculus.
This statement is completely erroneous. Evolution is science, and calculus is mathematics. Science is empirical, mathematics is not. Science has theories that are based on observations. Math has theorems, each of which has a proof. Science is developed in a top-down approach (observation -> hypothesis -> theory), while math is developed in a bottom-up approach (axioms -> conjecture -> theorem). Theories may have overwhelmingly convincing evidence, but they lack proof. Denying a theory only requires one to posit a different explanation of the observations. Mathematical theorems on the other hand have rock solid proof, and denying the validity of those proofs requires one to deny the validity of logic itself.
How many people do you know with non-Apple PowerPCs
Actually, quite a few people do if you count all the TiVos out there. I'm not familiar with the program that the original poster mentioned, but if it would run on any PPC running linux, it should run on a Tivo. Of course as the OP mentioned, this is not the easiest solution.
This seems about the silliest thing I have ever heard.... Changing a term does not ipso facto change the underlying discussion.
Well, it won't change the meaning of the argument, but it could very well change the way people think about it. Someone once said that if you control the language used by the masses, you control they way they think. Of course, this doens't apply to the informed individual, but society as a whole. Look no further than the words "hacker" and "pirate" to see how mere words can affect the way the public-at-large perceives things.
Id imagine these would be a hit at blockbuster... rent the dvd and dont return it. --just throw it away.
Well, the customers might like it, but I don't think that Blockbuster would want to adopt it. They collect a lot of revenue in late fees, and throw-away DVDs would eliminate that revenue stream.
Re:Everything can be related to math.
on
Origami and Math
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· Score: 1
Lo'pital's rule, for example, isn't very logical at all.... Doesn't make sense, but it works.
Since it has a proof, L'Hopital's rule is certainly logical. However, that logic is "hidden" within the proof. I think that you mean that that the rule is not intuitive.
Re:For highschool students I wouldn't worry...
on
FDL Math Textbooks?
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· Score: 1
The university system and the people currently making large money on these things will fight an opensource version as tooth and claw as their O/S counterparts.
I certainly agree that the textbook publishers would fight open courseware tooth and nail, but there are a lot of professors who would support it.
As an example, a new copy of one of the most widely-used calculus texts costs $136. (To be fair, this is a large (~1200 page) book, and can be used for 3 semesters of calculus, but I feel the price is excessive.) However, there are many, many students taking calculus, and each one needs a book. The inelastic demand for their product creates a windfall for the publishers.
This makes used books a very popular option for the students. The publshers don't like this, and try to stifle it by publishing new editions of their texts. Then, they send free copies to the faculty members hoping that they will adopt the new edition and force the next crop of students to buy new copies of a book that looks really similar to the old one.
Personally I don't like this, and I know many other professors (and hoards of students) who don't like it either. I would be very willing to use an open text for a class, and I believe that something like the FDL is a good plan.
The students would like it very much, although I can't really see the students downloading their own copies of the texts. If open textbooks become popular, I forsee campus printing services printing large numbers of plastic-ring bound copies to be sold at the bookstore.
I've rambled a lot here, but my point is that I think that this would have at least a fair amount of support from university faculty, especially in the geekier subjects
I'm not sure if you could find a mechanism that would fit, but I've always thought that it would be really cool to put an 8 track player in a 5.25" drive bay, and run the audio to one of the CD inputs on the sound card.
I wonder if I can find any perl scripts on the net to automate ripping 8-tracks to mp3...
I couldn't agree more. That's one of the reasons I really like Magma. It's really nice to be able to write up a Magma program in an editor and execute it with the command line.
When I was in grad school, I'd routinely leave magma programs running that searched for combinatorial objects. I'd redirect the output to a file, and have a cron job periodically copy the file to my public_html directory so that I could check the progress from anywhere.
I don't know why you would need to assign a 64-bit number to an element in a set of 64 elements- as other posters have pointed out, you'd only need a 6-bit set of numbers to label 64 things.
Representing each codon as a 64-bit word with a single nonzero bit would speed some operations up. Using this representation, permutation group operations can be programmed very efficiently using only loops and bitwise operations. Trying all possible permutations of a list of codons could be done really fast by blazing through them in Gray order. In this case, 64 bits is the minimum wordlength that you'd want, so that you can fit a whole codon into the CPU. As usual, the larger the wordlength, the better, since you could deal with more codons at a time.
I'm not the original poster, but I've been doing a similar thing for a while. Whenever I go on a trip, I map it out with my etrex, then upload the data into my computer using gpstrans (google should turn it up.) and a homemade cable.
Gpstrans can download tracks and waypoints. They are downloaded and stored as a tab-delimited ascii file. A really simple perl script turns then data into two columns of (x,y) coordinates that GnuPlot can display. You can even get GnuPlot to plot the tracks as pixel-sized points, and the waypoints as larger points on the graph.
Gpstrans and Gnuplot are both really simple, open source, and work great. I've had a lot of fun using this setup, and I've mapped a lot of highways in the southeast US.
This is something I've never seen addressed by the moon-hoax crowd.
That's because the vast majority of the "moon-hoax crowd" believe that the rest of the space program (shuttles and capsules in earth orbit, planetary probes, and unmanned moon missions) is completely legitimate, and that only the manned moon landings were hoaxed. This belief is largely based on the fact that the apollo missions involved both landing on the moon AND returning to earth. AFAIK, the apollo missions are the only missions where a craft has landed on another body and then returned to earth.
The real question in my mind is that if an NP problem can be adequately solved by some snot-nosed kid who doesn't realize that he's trying to solve an impossible problem, how many other NP problems have easy solutions that are simply being overlooked?
Your program didn't solve the NP problem - it impemented a heuristic for playing a good game. This is the approach taken everyday to get approximations of solutions to NP and NP-complete problems.
There has been talk about a HHGG movie for at least 10 years now in alt.fan.douglas-adams. I'm glad to see that it's finally happening. It's funny how similar the comments here on/. are to the 8 and 10 year old discussions on Usenet. Particularly, I remember how the who-should-play-who thread goes:
Someone gives their ideal cast, which includes some Yanks. This is immediately followed by someone demanding that the entire cast should be British. Then someone points out that Ford could be played by an Yank, since he was an alien, and not really true Brit...
Has anyone ever seen the PBS college course by that professor from MIT who is teaching a beginning physics class?
I take it that you are referring to "The Mechanical Universe". They do have some really great graphics for showing things like taking limits to find the slope of a tangent line, showing lines of magnetic flux, etc. I used to watch that show every day when I was in junior high school, and it got me really interested in physics and math.
The host of the show was Dr. David Goodstein, from Cal Tech.
The pure end of things is a bit more difficult to say, because at some point in the future it may end up with applications so, I dunno.
Pure math is in no way a science. Science is empirical - using observation of events to form and test hypotheses and develop theories about how the universe works. The scientific theories can be supported by lots of evidence, but are not proved, because of their empirical nature.
Pure math, on the other hand, is axiomatic. The axioms are the fundamental truths, and they induce all other behavior within the system. Granted, due to incompleteness, not all of the implications of the axioms are knowable, but when things are deduced within the system, they are rock-solid truths.
I see science as a top-down approach and mathematics as a bottom-up approach. I think it is arguable that applied math is a science because it is involves using mathematics to model some other system, and determining whether the model actually fits the physical system involves experimentation and observation.
I am not a scientist, but I know a few. My observations are that much new scientific programming is done in Perl.
Perl and FORTRAN are both useful languages for scientists, but they are useful for different tasks. Scientists largely use Perl for the same things everyone else uses Perl for - manipulating text files. A lot of scientific equipment uses RS232 ports to dump data to a computer as an ascii file. They then use Perl to format the data. FORTRAN and the like are used for the heavy-duty number crunching.
I wonder if there are Ctrl, Alt, and Del buttons on the F-22 cockpit console?
Maybe it has an square orange reset button recessed into the right side of the control panel's keyboard. At least in the plane you wouldn't have to worry about some jerk in your class pressing it after you spent twenty minutes typing in a program in TRS80 Basic.
Slashdot Mirror
you simply can't deny evolution any more than you can deny calculus.
This statement is completely erroneous. Evolution is science, and calculus is mathematics. Science is empirical, mathematics is not. Science has theories that are based on observations. Math has theorems, each of which has a proof. Science is developed in a top-down approach (observation -> hypothesis -> theory), while math is developed in a bottom-up approach (axioms -> conjecture -> theorem). Theories may have overwhelmingly convincing evidence, but they lack proof. Denying a theory
only requires one to posit a different explanation of the observations. Mathematical theorems on the other hand have rock solid proof, and denying the validity of those proofs requires one to deny the validity of logic itself.
How many people do you know with non-Apple PowerPCs
Actually, quite a few people do if you count all the TiVos out there. I'm not familiar with the program that the original poster mentioned, but if it would run on any PPC running linux, it should run on a Tivo. Of course as the OP mentioned, this is not the easiest solution.
This seems about the silliest thing I have ever heard. ... Changing a term does not ipso facto change the underlying discussion.
Well, it won't change the meaning of the argument, but it could very well change the way people think about it. Someone once said that if you control the language used by the masses, you control they way they think. Of course, this doens't apply to the informed individual, but society as a whole. Look no further than the words "hacker" and "pirate" to see how mere words can affect the way the public-at-large perceives things.
Id imagine these would be a hit at blockbuster... rent the dvd and dont return it. --just throw it away.
Well, the customers might like it, but I don't think that Blockbuster would want to adopt it. They collect a lot of revenue in late fees, and throw-away DVDs would eliminate that revenue stream.
Lo'pital's rule, for example, isn't very logical at all. ... Doesn't make sense, but it works.
Since it has a proof, L'Hopital's rule is certainly logical. However, that logic is "hidden" within the proof. I think that you mean that that the rule is not intuitive.
The university system and the people currently making large money on these things will fight an opensource version as tooth and claw as their O/S counterparts.
I certainly agree that the textbook publishers would fight open courseware tooth and nail, but there are a lot of professors who would support it.
As an example, a new copy of one of the most widely-used calculus texts costs $136. (To be fair, this is a large (~1200 page) book, and can be used for 3 semesters of calculus, but I feel the price is excessive.) However, there are many, many students taking calculus, and each one needs a book. The inelastic demand for their product creates a windfall for the publishers.
This makes used books a very popular option for the students. The publshers don't like this, and try to stifle it by publishing new editions of their texts. Then, they send free copies to the faculty members hoping that they will adopt the new edition and force the next crop of students to buy new copies of a book that looks really similar to the old one.
Personally I don't like this, and I know many other professors (and hoards of students) who don't like it either.
I would be very willing to use an open text for a class, and I believe that something like the FDL is a good plan.
The students would like it very much, although I can't really see the students downloading their own copies of the texts. If open textbooks become popular, I forsee campus printing services printing large numbers of plastic-ring bound copies to be sold at the bookstore.
I've rambled a lot here, but my point is that I think that this would have at least a fair amount of support from university faculty, especially in the geekier subjects
Its a 1 with 100 0's after it.
That's a googol, not a google.
from smartmobs.com:
An emblematic feature of the adapted dogs is placement of the webcams in the non-barking end of the dogs
I'm not sure if you could find a mechanism that would fit, but I've always thought that it would be really cool to put an 8 track player in a 5.25" drive bay, and run the audio to one of the CD inputs on the sound card.
I wonder if I can find any perl scripts on the net to automate ripping 8-tracks to mp3...
I've personally got my prefs set at +3 just to weed out the silly stuff.
:)
That's a silly thing to say in a comment with a score less than 3. I guess it's working.
it takes longer to figure the gui
I couldn't agree more. That's one of the reasons I really like Magma. It's really nice to be able to write up a Magma program in an editor and execute it with the command line.
When I was in grad school, I'd routinely leave magma programs running that searched for combinatorial objects. I'd redirect the output to a file, and have a cron job periodically copy the file to my public_html directory so that I could check the progress from anywhere.
Group theory, Lie Theory, Algebraic geometry, number theory.
Magma is also terrific for working with permutation groups and incidence structures.
My keyboard already has a Pause button!
Nitrogen is ... pressurized, inflammable gas
the word you mean here is non-flammable. Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing.
You make good points, but also one error. Breaking copyright law is not stealing - it is copyright infringement. There's a huge difference.
I don't know why you would need to assign a 64-bit number to an element in a set of 64 elements- as other posters have pointed out, you'd only need a 6-bit set of numbers to label 64 things.
Representing each codon as a 64-bit word with a single nonzero bit would speed some operations up. Using this representation, permutation group operations can be programmed very efficiently using only loops and bitwise operations. Trying all possible permutations of a list of codons could be done really fast by blazing through them in Gray order. In this case, 64 bits is the minimum wordlength that you'd want, so that you can fit a whole codon into the CPU. As usual, the larger the wordlength, the better, since you could deal with more codons at a time.
What mapmaking (GIS) software do you use?
I'm not the original poster, but I've been doing a similar thing for a while. Whenever I go on a trip, I map it out with my etrex, then upload the data into my computer using gpstrans (google should turn it up.) and a homemade cable.
Gpstrans can download tracks and waypoints. They are downloaded and stored as a tab-delimited ascii file. A really simple perl script turns then data into two columns of (x,y) coordinates that GnuPlot can display. You can even get GnuPlot to plot the tracks as pixel-sized points, and the waypoints as larger points on the graph.
Gpstrans and Gnuplot are both really simple, open source, and work great. I've had a lot of fun using this setup, and I've mapped a lot of highways in the southeast US.
This is something I've never seen addressed by the moon-hoax crowd.
That's because the vast majority of the "moon-hoax crowd" believe that the rest of the space program (shuttles and capsules in earth orbit, planetary probes, and unmanned moon missions) is completely legitimate, and that only the manned moon landings were hoaxed. This belief is largely based on the fact that the apollo missions involved both landing on the moon AND returning to earth. AFAIK, the apollo missions are the only missions where a craft has landed on another body and then returned to earth.
The real question in my mind is that if an NP problem can be adequately solved by some snot-nosed kid who doesn't realize that he's trying to solve an impossible problem, how many other NP problems have easy solutions that are simply being overlooked?
Your program didn't solve the NP problem - it impemented a heuristic for playing a good game. This is the approach taken everyday to get approximations of solutions to NP and NP-complete problems.
There has been talk about a HHGG movie for at least 10 years now in alt.fan.douglas-adams. I'm glad to see that it's finally happening. It's funny how similar the comments here on /. are to the 8 and 10 year old discussions on Usenet. Particularly, I remember how the who-should-play-who thread goes:
Someone gives their ideal cast, which includes some Yanks. This is immediately followed by someone demanding that the entire cast should be British. Then someone points out that Ford could be played by an Yank, since he was an alien, and not really true Brit...
Has anyone ever seen the PBS college course by that professor from MIT who is teaching a beginning physics class?
I take it that you are referring to "The Mechanical Universe". They do have some really great graphics for showing things like taking limits to find the slope of a tangent line, showing lines of magnetic flux, etc. I used to watch that show every day when I was in junior high school, and it got me really interested in physics and math.
The host of the show was Dr. David Goodstein, from Cal Tech.
The pure end of things is a bit more difficult to say, because at some point in the future it may end up with applications so, I dunno.
Pure math is in no way a science. Science is empirical - using observation of events to form and test hypotheses and develop theories about how the universe works. The scientific theories can be supported by lots of evidence, but are not proved, because of their empirical nature.
Pure math, on the other hand, is axiomatic. The axioms are the fundamental truths, and they induce all other behavior within the system. Granted, due to incompleteness, not all of the implications of the axioms are knowable, but when things are deduced within the system, they are rock-solid truths.
I see science as a top-down approach and mathematics as a bottom-up approach. I think it is arguable that applied math is a science because it is involves using mathematics to model some other system, and determining whether the model actually fits the physical system involves experimentation and observation.
I am not a scientist, but I know a few. My observations are that much new scientific programming is done in Perl.
Perl and FORTRAN are both useful languages for scientists, but they are useful for different tasks. Scientists largely use Perl for the same things everyone else uses Perl for - manipulating text files. A lot of scientific equipment uses RS232 ports to dump data to a computer as an ascii file. They then use Perl to format the data. FORTRAN and the like are used for the heavy-duty number crunching.
If I'm reading this correctly, we've got a nearly guaranteed winner of the Nobel Prize here.
This would be more in line for a Fields Medal than a Nobel Prize.
I wonder if there are Ctrl, Alt, and Del buttons on the F-22 cockpit console?
Maybe it has an square orange reset button recessed into the right side of the control panel's keyboard. At least in the plane you wouldn't have to worry about some jerk in your class pressing it after you spent twenty minutes typing in a program in TRS80 Basic.