One little factual error in your ideas about Lisp is that it's no longer used much in ivory-tower academia. The typed functional languages like ML and Haskell are much more prevalent, and Scheme (which is surprisingly different from Lisp) is the only Lisp-like language used for teaching.
The major uses for Lisp today seem to be in things like scientific application development, some financial applications, and things requiring seriously complex algorithms, like airplane travel routing systems.
BTW, have you ever wondered why you're so angry at Lisp? Does the condescension you're complaining about bug you because you secretly believe it's valid? Really, there's nothing to be afraid of. I recommending reading SICP (google for it) and opening your mind a little. It'll help your programming career.
Didn't come off too well? Perhaps you didn't mean to craft the ideal troll, cleverly using the subject line and first sentence to sucker people into completely missing the actual content of your message, but you did it, and you should revel in the results! I hereby declare you King of the Trolls for today!
If you're worrying about stack overflows because of recursion, you've been using the languages mentioned in this thread too much. Try a language which performs tail-call optimization, like ML, Haskell, Scheme, OCaml, and recurse to your heart's content -- forever, if the power holds out that long!
This possibility falsifies your claim in general, since the Earth's behavior would, for a while at least, be affected by something other than its orbital velocity.
ITYM 'something changing its orbital velocity'. And changes in velocity are permanent, unless something else acts to change it back. Newton, see?
What I mean is that the entire concept of "orbital velocity" is an emergent property of a system of masses and gravitational forces that's in equilibrium. You'd have to abandon *orbital* velocity as a way of determining anything, if a large enough third body was involved, although as you point out, Mars isn't big enough to have such an effect.
Re our imminent risk of being pushed out of orbit, you have failed to take into account the possibility that Mars could have its orbit changed because of NASA strategically placing mobile matter-to-antimatter converters on a track which circumnavigates Mars. A terrible software error could cause this system to malfunction, spewing out a stream of antimatter which would land back on the Martian surface in exactly the right pattern so that the resulting matter/antimatter explosions would accelerate Mars on an interception course towards Earth. The OP did ask about the worst that could happen, remember! (I forgot to mention that in this worst-case scenario, Earth being knocked out of orbit will be the least of our problems.)
But yeah, short of the above, I concede that we're probably fairly safe.;)
Actually, all else being equal, higher clock speed *does* mean higher temperatures, not just for Intel, but for everyone. IIRC, it's a linear relationship, too.
Not really.
Yes, really. It's basic physics - higher frequencies require higher energy, which means more power, which means more heat. The fact that laptops with power management slow their CPUs to save battery life ought to give you a clue: by saving power, they're also saving heat, and they do that by slowing down their CPU. Another place you see this effect is in CPU over-temperature safeguards - when the CPU temperature gets too high, the clock is slowed down to reduce the power consumption and therefore temperature.
There's some confirmation of this here: "Heat above spec can come from two areas: 1, Heat due to increased frequencies and 2, Heat due to increased voltage. Increasing bus speeds (frequencies) increases heat linearly"; and here: "There is a direct relationship between a processor's clock speed and the amount of power it consumes, and a similar relationship between power consumption and the amount of heat given off by a PC."
The clock speed is simply how fast a crystal vibrates.
Right, but that determines the frequency of the current pulses through the CPU and other chips. A higher frequency generates more energy, which creates more heat.
So in reality it is possible to build a CPU with high clockspeeds that runs really really slowly, for example one with a 6000 step pipeline.
You're correct that the frequency isn't a direct determinant of processor MIPS, for example, but that's besides the point. If the current flowing through the CPU is at a higher frequency, it generates more heat than would be the case at a lower frequency, simple as that.
You could probably make one of these run cool too because there would be few transistors to deal with in the chip. The real relationship is between transistors and heat. The more transistors there are producing heat the hotter the chip is going to run.
You're right, more transistors means hotter, but the temperature in each of those transistors is dependent on the frequency. If you figure out a way around that, you'd earn a Nobel prize and/or become a billionaire, because you'd be able to show Intel and AMD how to push their chips way past the 4GHz that's currently giving them a hard time (see the second article I linked above).
Higher clock speed does not mean higher temps(that's only in Intel land).
Actually, all else being equal, higher clock speed *does* mean higher temperatures, not just for Intel, but for everyone. IIRC, it's a linear relationship, too. However, as you say, there are some tricks, like reducing voltage, which can reduce power usage. There's a limit to that, though. The bottom line is that heat is a real limiting factor in speeding up computers by increasing clock speed.
You might be thinking of The servant problem, which was an obviously satirical piece about offshoring children, and (at least according to the linked blog) may have used Swift's "A modest proposal" as a title or subtitle. The piece I'm talking about was nothing like that. It discussed ways in which parents get preferential treatment in the workplace, and was basically arguing that the current situation was unfair to non-parents.
The Earth's average distance from the Sun is governed by it's orbital velocity and nothing else
That's only in the current equilibrium, which is a highly simplified version of the general case. A flyby of a massive body (like Mars) could certainly affect Earth's orbit. This possibility falsifies your claim in general, since the Earth's behavior would, for a while at least, be affected by something other than its orbital velocity.
As for whether we "couldn't affect the orbit of Mars", I think you mean that we're highly unlikely to affect it accidentally while actually trying to give it an atmosphere. I agree, but that misses the point.
I guess I should have included the smiley. Here's my followup explanation. Remember, the OP asked "what's the worst that could happen". Don't make me bring quantum theory into this...
Well, remember that NASA is likely to be involved here. A little confusion between megatons and gigatons, and blammo, Mars could be propelled inwards towards Earth's orbit.
Well, it wouldn't be easy, but if we somehow affected Mars' orbit, we could end up indirectly affecting Earth's orbit, which could make global warming look like a minor inconvenience as we move closer to or further away from the Sun...
No, it wasn't a joke article, but it was an opinion piece. My characterization was extrapolating from what the author was saying, which the article itself failed to do - if it had done that, it would indeed have run into the inconsistency you mention.
I responded because I mentally translated "center" to "moderate", and that didn't quite seem to capture the The Economist's particular brand of economic reductionism.
I'd agree that "they're more hyper-capitalist than 'far right'". That does translate to far right on some issues, though.
I remember an Economist article which, essentially, attacked parents for the drain on productivity that they caused: time off work, annoyances to more productive non-parents, etc. The article's argument was that highly productive single people shouldn't in any way have to share the costs of society's need to raise children, right down to not having to put up with children in public spaces.
I came away with the impression that the article's author would love it if all new children were banned, and we had one glorious generation of super-high productivity before the human race died out completely. The Economist's last issue would be a glowing analysis of this golden age, sort of like Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" meets Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities".
That all said, The Economist is often worth reading, but heaven's sake, all the impressionable kiddies out there (RCulpepper, this means you) should take it with large quantities of salt.
I remember mentioning this to a friend of mine at the time, and he claimed that he remembered a BYTE article about holographic storage from about 1985 in which the researchers (possibly also at IBM) claimed that production versions were five years away.
You'll also note that the linked BYTE article above mentions that the idea had been floating around for 30 years as of 1996.
In short, holographic storage is right up there with those flying cars they promised us...
The reason we have dictionaries is to document the consensus about correct language. The descriptive/prescriptive distinction is not as binary as you seem to think. Dictionaries and grammar texts are created using descriptive techniques, but nevertheless end up serving a largely prescriptive purpose, precisely because they document a broad-based consensus. If you violate the consensus which they document, most people are much more likely to think you are in error, because you are not using language in the way that other people use it.
Depending on exactly how you violate the consensus, what you say or write may not be considered to be correct English, even by a descriptive linguist. The point is that it's not you as an individual that gets to define the language, it's groups of people, and rather large groups at that. That's why what you wrote earlier, that as a native speaker you define English, is not correct, even in a descriptive context.
Certainly, all natural languages morph as people make it up, which is why linguistics is mainly treated as descriptive these days. However, that doesn't mean that any single English speaker gets to define what is correct usage, as the OP claimed. If you still don't understand that distinction, read this post.
Slashdot Mirror
One little factual error in your ideas about Lisp is that it's no longer used much in ivory-tower academia. The typed functional languages like ML and Haskell are much more prevalent, and Scheme (which is surprisingly different from Lisp) is the only Lisp-like language used for teaching.
The major uses for Lisp today seem to be in things like scientific application development, some financial applications, and things requiring seriously complex algorithms, like airplane travel routing systems.
BTW, have you ever wondered why you're so angry at Lisp? Does the condescension you're complaining about bug you because you secretly believe it's valid? Really, there's nothing to be afraid of. I recommending reading SICP (google for it) and opening your mind a little. It'll help your programming career.
Didn't come off too well? Perhaps you didn't mean to craft the ideal troll, cleverly using the subject line and first sentence to sucker people into completely missing the actual content of your message, but you did it, and you should revel in the results! I hereby declare you King of the Trolls for today!
If you're worrying about stack overflows because of recursion, you've been using the languages mentioned in this thread too much. Try a language which performs tail-call optimization, like ML, Haskell, Scheme, OCaml, and recurse to your heart's content -- forever, if the power holds out that long!
Try reading the "straight man's" post more carefully, beyond that first sentence... YHBT, HAND.
Thanks for the clarification & explanation.
What I mean is that the entire concept of "orbital velocity" is an emergent property of a system of masses and gravitational forces that's in equilibrium. You'd have to abandon *orbital* velocity as a way of determining anything, if a large enough third body was involved, although as you point out, Mars isn't big enough to have such an effect.
Re our imminent risk of being pushed out of orbit, you have failed to take into account the possibility that Mars could have its orbit changed because of NASA strategically placing mobile matter-to-antimatter converters on a track which circumnavigates Mars. A terrible software error could cause this system to malfunction, spewing out a stream of antimatter which would land back on the Martian surface in exactly the right pattern so that the resulting matter/antimatter explosions would accelerate Mars on an interception course towards Earth. The OP did ask about the worst that could happen, remember! (I forgot to mention that in this worst-case scenario, Earth being knocked out of orbit will be the least of our problems.)
But yeah, short of the above, I concede that we're probably fairly safe. ;)
Yes, really. It's basic physics - higher frequencies require higher energy, which means more power, which means more heat. The fact that laptops with power management slow their CPUs to save battery life ought to give you a clue: by saving power, they're also saving heat, and they do that by slowing down their CPU. Another place you see this effect is in CPU over-temperature safeguards - when the CPU temperature gets too high, the clock is slowed down to reduce the power consumption and therefore temperature.
There's some confirmation of this here: "Heat above spec can come from two areas: 1, Heat due to increased frequencies and 2, Heat due to increased voltage. Increasing bus speeds (frequencies) increases heat linearly"; and here: "There is a direct relationship between a processor's clock speed and the amount of power it consumes, and a similar relationship between power consumption and the amount of heat given off by a PC."
Right, but that determines the frequency of the current pulses through the CPU and other chips. A higher frequency generates more energy, which creates more heat. You're correct that the frequency isn't a direct determinant of processor MIPS, for example, but that's besides the point. If the current flowing through the CPU is at a higher frequency, it generates more heat than would be the case at a lower frequency, simple as that. You're right, more transistors means hotter, but the temperature in each of those transistors is dependent on the frequency. If you figure out a way around that, you'd earn a Nobel prize and/or become a billionaire, because you'd be able to show Intel and AMD how to push their chips way past the 4GHz that's currently giving them a hard time (see the second article I linked above).You might be thinking of The servant problem, which was an obviously satirical piece about offshoring children, and (at least according to the linked blog) may have used Swift's "A modest proposal" as a title or subtitle. The piece I'm talking about was nothing like that. It discussed ways in which parents get preferential treatment in the workplace, and was basically arguing that the current situation was unfair to non-parents.
That's only in the current equilibrium, which is a highly simplified version of the general case. A flyby of a massive body (like Mars) could certainly affect Earth's orbit. This possibility falsifies your claim in general, since the Earth's behavior would, for a while at least, be affected by something other than its orbital velocity.
As for whether we "couldn't affect the orbit of Mars", I think you mean that we're highly unlikely to affect it accidentally while actually trying to give it an atmosphere. I agree, but that misses the point.
If you really mean that we aren't capable of ever affect the orbit of a planet like Mars, then you'll need to refute the paper " Astronomical Engineering: A Strategy For Modifying Planetary Orbits". A plausible economic argument might be made against it...
I guess I should have included the smiley. Here's my followup explanation. Remember, the OP asked "what's the worst that could happen". Don't make me bring quantum theory into this...
Well, remember that NASA is likely to be involved here. A little confusion between megatons and gigatons, and blammo, Mars could be propelled inwards towards Earth's orbit.
No, it wasn't a joke article, but it was an opinion piece. My characterization was extrapolating from what the author was saying, which the article itself failed to do - if it had done that, it would indeed have run into the inconsistency you mention.
I responded because I mentally translated "center" to "moderate", and that didn't quite seem to capture the The Economist's particular brand of economic reductionism.
I'd agree that "they're more hyper-capitalist than 'far right'". That does translate to far right on some issues, though.
I remember an Economist article which, essentially, attacked parents for the drain on productivity that they caused: time off work, annoyances to more productive non-parents, etc. The article's argument was that highly productive single people shouldn't in any way have to share the costs of society's need to raise children, right down to not having to put up with children in public spaces.
I came away with the impression that the article's author would love it if all new children were banned, and we had one glorious generation of super-high productivity before the human race died out completely. The Economist's last issue would be a glowing analysis of this golden age, sort of like Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" meets Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities".
That all said, The Economist is often worth reading, but heaven's sake, all the impressionable kiddies out there (RCulpepper, this means you) should take it with large quantities of salt.
If you think you're going to be able to buy a DNA-based computer, that does anything useful, in 5 years time, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
In a 1996 Byte magazine article about holographic storage, an IBM researcher was quoted as saying "small desktop units [...] might be ready by about the year 2003."
I remember mentioning this to a friend of mine at the time, and he claimed that he remembered a BYTE article about holographic storage from about 1985 in which the researchers (possibly also at IBM) claimed that production versions were five years away.
You'll also note that the linked BYTE article above mentions that the idea had been floating around for 30 years as of 1996.
In short, holographic storage is right up there with those flying cars they promised us...
Yeah, but first we'll have to ship them edible ink cartridges, and you know HP's gonna rape us on that...
The reason we have dictionaries is to document the consensus about correct language. The descriptive/prescriptive distinction is not as binary as you seem to think. Dictionaries and grammar texts are created using descriptive techniques, but nevertheless end up serving a largely prescriptive purpose, precisely because they document a broad-based consensus. If you violate the consensus which they document, most people are much more likely to think you are in error, because you are not using language in the way that other people use it.
Depending on exactly how you violate the consensus, what you say or write may not be considered to be correct English, even by a descriptive linguist. The point is that it's not you as an individual that gets to define the language, it's groups of people, and rather large groups at that. That's why what you wrote earlier, that as a native speaker you define English, is not correct, even in a descriptive context.
Certainly, all natural languages morph as people make it up, which is why linguistics is mainly treated as descriptive these days. However, that doesn't mean that any single English speaker gets to define what is correct usage, as the OP claimed. If you still don't understand that distinction, read this post.