This is the best advice you'll find here. I love CFD and I think any high school student could understand a good share of the basic physical concepts, but when you put it all together there's simply too much going on to yield much insight for all of the setup involved. If all you want is geometry in and pretty pictures out, then people have already listed a number of excellent packages, but spare the kids the details. A panel method is a good alternative, but be careful nonetheless.
The interesting question, if you ask me, is how much traffic is devoted to porn. This is the result of a survey of four million URLs, but I could set up thousands of sites about pomegranates if I wanted, and it wouldn't have much to do with interest in pomegranates. (Don't ask why pomegranates. I just thought a pomegranate sounded good right now. Too much darn work though.) I suppose in large volume the quantity correlates with the size of the industry, but that still doesn't take into account the number of sites required to meet the needs of the people. Other people, that is, am I right?
You know, I read some of the comments on the story page and really agreed. When you throw a propeller in there this gets really counterintuitive! It's very clever, if not particularly useful. Then I contemplated or a moment whether or not to read the/. comments. "They'll only be negative," I said to myself. "It will just be a bunch of self-righteous posters, claiming they could have thought of it (but didn't!) or that it's nothing new and is an embarrassing waste of money." I didn't really anticipate all the boat comments, but the fact is that this is a very clever engineering accomplishment, even if it doesn't change the world. I guess something about sitting at a computer at 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning makes you cynical. I know I am, but I'm trying to fix that. So now it's my turn to be self-righteous. It's a big world out there. Bigger than/. stories would lead you to believe. This sun is shining. The sky is blue. Looks like another great week to unplug the internet. Try it sometime.
Someone actually bought something from Real Media? I thought the company was just something they made up to scare nerds.
They hid the free version pretty well, and I always had to go try and find it since I deleted it when its purpose was served. Kinda like Silverlight. Sometimes I need to install it and have to ask myself how badly I want to watch that video. So far, the answer is "Not badly enough."
I understand the goal of being able to fill in your own predictions, but this sounds like a *very* poor excuse for transparency. Why not mandate a clear explanation, in plain English (if there is such a thing in the financial world).
Furthermore, do you realize what "Python" means to 98% of American public? My dad has been an engineer who programs process control systems for darn near forty years and I certainly can't talk to him about programming languages! Do you really think investors have the knowledge required to install Python, modify a program, run it, and extract meaningful information from the result? Yeah, I know exactly how simple it is. That's why you're reading/.
If you want to go this route, you would basically need a scriptable calculator with a few basic financial functions. No frills, no black boxes that can be imported, all packaged in a simple Windows point-and-click program. Maybe a web interface. But that's still not to be confused with transparency.
then I wouldn't be thrilled, but I'd be glad to pay. I often pay (donate) for my NPR content because I enjoy it and hope they can continue to produce it. And because they ask. I'm not sure that model goes with the general philosophy of for-profit organizations, but they might have better luck asking nicely than they can expect to if they force it. The fact of the matter is that news takes resources to collect, analyze, and distribute, and I have no reservations about helping to make it possible.
But here I sit reading Slashdot...
on
YouTube Is Down
·
· Score: 1
It's like putting my thumb in a dam. It stops the dancing kitties, but hardly slows down the flood of mind-numbing, uh... internetish... stuff.
Here's a related question that I run into more often, being on the math/engineering end of things:
Are programming skills required for math-types?
At least in engineering, the view seems to be that if you know your basic math and engineering principles, then all you need is some basic declarative programming commands, and everything else will follow. Long story short, it ends with people solving optimization problems with exhaustive searches and letting programs run for a week or two that, done properly, should take a fraction of a second. Data structures are generally out of the question. It scares me to think that so many people don't realize the true status of their programming skills, but at the same time there generally isn't room in standard curricula for any more programming. Am I being unrealistic to think that people need these programming skills? Is it just survival of the fittest?
Fascinating, but I can only imagine this is a very expensive solution to implement since the sterilized males must be specially bred, and, well, it's not exactly a self-propagating solution. Of course, that's also a benefit since as far as solutions that tamper with biology go, self-limiting processes can't very well get out of control. The article doesn't discuss what effect one male has or any practical implications of the solution.
Although the technology certainly doesn't exist to implement it, I wonder what would happen if some sort of genetic time-bomb—something like the mechanism for the Hayflick Limit—were used to create a bug that reproduces for a while, then it's descendants become sterile. It would still be self-limiting, more potent than one bug, and still pesticide-free! Well the hard part of scientific discovery is done, now it'll only take fifty years of toil in the lab to achieve it...
I shouldn't have attacked like that. I apologize. Thank you for being so controlled in your response. I will debate better henceforth.
Wow. Thanks, guys (or possibly girls [but who are we kidding?]). I don't mean that sarcastically. Every time I read a comment online, my faith in humanity dips a little lower, but I do appreciate the civilized discourse. It's just not very often someone's response to a counter-argument is, "Yeah, I guess you're right. Sorry." I guess Obama does it every now and then, but there's plenty of political posturing involved. I should probably pay less attention to politics. Maybe mathematics, too.
In fact this whole situation makes me pretty sad. Mathematics by itself is such a beautiful thing, so it's too bad that the second it's comprehended by human minds it's subject to territorial disputes. I applaud people like Perelman who elevate the subject above opportunities for personal gain. I certainly don't think such things are better left undiscovered, but I only hope his turning down the prize—if that's what he should choose to do, and it sounds like he might—has a positive impact on people across all fields that encounter the story. I'm not in pure mathematics myself, but it makes me sad to see research so often used as a vehicle for personal gain rather than an end in itself.
Isn't the moral that you can take credit for anything you like? How about, "Sure, the kind Slashdotter who found it contributed a good thirty or thirty-five percent, but bookmarking and linking to it accounts for at least the other seventy-five percent. It was no small task."
Which costs more energy - carrying the extra O2, or overcoming the friction from having to accelerate in an atmosphere? Which imposes more design compromises?
Seems the best answer is likely somewhere between the two. I mean the idea behind scramjets is only to get you through part of the journey anyway. You'll still need a running start, and you'll still need to carry oxygen to get you up into space.
Which would be more economical in the long run? Bear in mind that there are 2 kinds of people that need to achieve very high velocities -- astronauts trying to make orbit and intercontinental travelers trying to get to the other side of the world.
What about people trying to get a few kilometers downrange and get blown to smithereens the other end? Missiles are people too, y'know.
It'll be like bananas. Since they're all genetically identical, they have very little resistance to disease. In fact, the Gros Michel bananas were all replaced a few years back with the Cavendish bananas we eat today. One genome for bananas, one OS for robots. Once they're sentient, everything from Military hardware to toasters will realize what's really going on. So I guess we'll be the bananas in the sense that we'll be very easy to crush... Of course by 'we', I mean deserving slashdotters...
Should I just stop already? I mean when our stuff made it onto slashdot, all we got was "no one can hear you scream..." jokes. Line up at the Slashdot Pinata factory so a bunch of nerds can give you a good thrashing...
Well, NO.
"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations â" then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation â" well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." â" Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
Slashdot Mirror
This is the best advice you'll find here. I love CFD and I think any high school student could understand a good share of the basic physical concepts, but when you put it all together there's simply too much going on to yield much insight for all of the setup involved. If all you want is geometry in and pretty pictures out, then people have already listed a number of excellent packages, but spare the kids the details. A panel method is a good alternative, but be careful nonetheless.
The interesting question, if you ask me, is how much traffic is devoted to porn. This is the result of a survey of four million URLs, but I could set up thousands of sites about pomegranates if I wanted, and it wouldn't have much to do with interest in pomegranates. (Don't ask why pomegranates. I just thought a pomegranate sounded good right now. Too much darn work though.) I suppose in large volume the quantity correlates with the size of the industry, but that still doesn't take into account the number of sites required to meet the needs of the people. Other people, that is, am I right?
You know, I read some of the comments on the story page and really agreed. When you throw a propeller in there this gets really counterintuitive! It's very clever, if not particularly useful. Then I contemplated or a moment whether or not to read the /. comments. "They'll only be negative," I said to myself. "It will just be a bunch of self-righteous posters, claiming they could have thought of it (but didn't!) or that it's nothing new and is an embarrassing waste of money." I didn't really anticipate all the boat comments, but the fact is that this is a very clever engineering accomplishment, even if it doesn't change the world. I guess something about sitting at a computer at 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning makes you cynical. I know I am, but I'm trying to fix that. So now it's my turn to be self-righteous. It's a big world out there. Bigger than /. stories would lead you to believe. This sun is shining. The sky is blue. Looks like another great week to unplug the internet. Try it sometime.
Goodbye, cruel (/.) world.
$ echo "127.0.0.1 slashdot.org" >> /etc/hosts
It's a good thing you weren't geoHASHing. Try explaining that one!
Someone actually bought something from Real Media? I thought the company was just something they made up to scare nerds.
They hid the free version pretty well, and I always had to go try and find it since I deleted it when its purpose was served. Kinda like Silverlight. Sometimes I need to install it and have to ask myself how badly I want to watch that video. So far, the answer is "Not badly enough."
Try the Pirate dialect for setting up privacy options:
"Make ye parchment of ye mateys visible to arrrrvreyone?"
Let's see... um... "Arrrrr!" or "Walk the plank!"...
Is that a question.
I understand the goal of being able to fill in your own predictions, but this sounds like a *very* poor excuse for transparency. Why not mandate a clear explanation, in plain English (if there is such a thing in the financial world).
Furthermore, do you realize what "Python" means to 98% of American public? My dad has been an engineer who programs process control systems for darn near forty years and I certainly can't talk to him about programming languages! Do you really think investors have the knowledge required to install Python, modify a program, run it, and extract meaningful information from the result? Yeah, I know exactly how simple it is. That's why you're reading /.
If you want to go this route, you would basically need a scriptable calculator with a few basic financial functions. No frills, no black boxes that can be imported, all packaged in a simple Windows point-and-click program. Maybe a web interface. But that's still not to be confused with transparency.
...
then I wouldn't be thrilled, but I'd be glad to pay. I often pay (donate) for my NPR content because I enjoy it and hope they can continue to produce it. And because they ask. I'm not sure that model goes with the general philosophy of for-profit organizations, but they might have better luck asking nicely than they can expect to if they force it. The fact of the matter is that news takes resources to collect, analyze, and distribute, and I have no reservations about helping to make it possible.
It's like putting my thumb in a dam. It stops the dancing kitties, but hardly slows down the flood of mind-numbing, uh... internetish... stuff.
Here's a related question that I run into more often, being on the math/engineering end of things:
Are programming skills required for math-types?
At least in engineering, the view seems to be that if you know your basic math and engineering principles, then all you need is some basic declarative programming commands, and everything else will follow. Long story short, it ends with people solving optimization problems with exhaustive searches and letting programs run for a week or two that, done properly, should take a fraction of a second. Data structures are generally out of the question. It scares me to think that so many people don't realize the true status of their programming skills, but at the same time there generally isn't room in standard curricula for any more programming. Am I being unrealistic to think that people need these programming skills? Is it just survival of the fittest?
Yup.
Fascinating, but I can only imagine this is a very expensive solution to implement since the sterilized males must be specially bred, and, well, it's not exactly a self-propagating solution. Of course, that's also a benefit since as far as solutions that tamper with biology go, self-limiting processes can't very well get out of control. The article doesn't discuss what effect one male has or any practical implications of the solution.
Although the technology certainly doesn't exist to implement it, I wonder what would happen if some sort of genetic time-bomb—something like the mechanism for the Hayflick Limit—were used to create a bug that reproduces for a while, then it's descendants become sterile. It would still be self-limiting, more potent than one bug, and still pesticide-free! Well the hard part of scientific discovery is done, now it'll only take fifty years of toil in the lab to achieve it...
I shouldn't have attacked like that. I apologize. Thank you for being so controlled in your response. I will debate better henceforth.
Wow. Thanks, guys (or possibly girls [but who are we kidding?]). I don't mean that sarcastically. Every time I read a comment online, my faith in humanity dips a little lower, but I do appreciate the civilized discourse. It's just not very often someone's response to a counter-argument is, "Yeah, I guess you're right. Sorry." I guess Obama does it every now and then, but there's plenty of political posturing involved. I should probably pay less attention to politics. Maybe mathematics, too.
In fact this whole situation makes me pretty sad. Mathematics by itself is such a beautiful thing, so it's too bad that the second it's comprehended by human minds it's subject to territorial disputes. I applaud people like Perelman who elevate the subject above opportunities for personal gain. I certainly don't think such things are better left undiscovered, but I only hope his turning down the prize—if that's what he should choose to do, and it sounds like he might—has a positive impact on people across all fields that encounter the story. I'm not in pure mathematics myself, but it makes me sad to see research so often used as a vehicle for personal gain rather than an end in itself.
Isn't the moral that you can take credit for anything you like? How about, "Sure, the kind Slashdotter who found it contributed a good thirty or thirty-five percent, but bookmarking and linking to it accounts for at least the other seventy-five percent. It was no small task."
Supersonic? Keep in mind that in space, no one can hear you... oh, nevermind.
Since most vehicles, including aircraft, are named after girls, would this be considered a gay marriage?
No. Apparently it's gat.
But will this development be recognized outside of states like California and Massachusetts?
Don't ask, don't tell.
Which costs more energy - carrying the extra O2, or overcoming the friction from having to accelerate in an atmosphere? Which imposes more design compromises?
Seems the best answer is likely somewhere between the two. I mean the idea behind scramjets is only to get you through part of the journey anyway. You'll still need a running start, and you'll still need to carry oxygen to get you up into space.
Which would be more economical in the long run? Bear in mind that there are 2 kinds of people that need to achieve very high velocities -- astronauts trying to make orbit and intercontinental travelers trying to get to the other side of the world.
What about people trying to get a few kilometers downrange and get blown to smithereens the other end? Missiles are people too, y'know.
(though in general working outside of your assigned hours is discouraged except in emergency situations).
Really? In the grad student world, NOT working outside your assigned hours is discouraged except in emergency situations...
It'll be like bananas. Since they're all genetically identical, they have very little resistance to disease. In fact, the Gros Michel bananas were all replaced a few years back with the Cavendish bananas we eat today. One genome for bananas, one OS for robots. Once they're sentient, everything from Military hardware to toasters will realize what's really going on. So I guess we'll be the bananas in the sense that we'll be very easy to crush... Of course by 'we', I mean deserving slashdotters...
Should I just stop already? I mean when our stuff made it onto slashdot, all we got was "no one can hear you scream..." jokes. Line up at the Slashdot Pinata factory so a bunch of nerds can give you a good thrashing...
Or maybe I just need coffee.
Google trends don't lie. Firefox bounces up on the weekends while IE dips down. The difference between work and home? (See also sex/news. Hmm...) http://google.com/trends?q=firefox&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0 http://google.com/trends?q=ie&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0
Well, NO. "The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations â" then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation â" well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." â" Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)