This is pretty nonsensical. At 7 Hz the wavelength for sound in water would be hundreds of meters and light would be many order of magnitude more. How would such an em field be involved in forming nanometer resolution structures in water?
This is yet another case of wild extrapolation from measurements that are at or beyond the limits of the tools being used.
I went through engineering at a major university and the critical thinking training was negligible. More damning than the training was the prevailing attitude of the future engineers, which was very much a "do I need to know this for the test" and "will I ever use this material in my career" approach, rather than the "how does the world work" perspective which we might prefer to inculcate.
This "tell me only what I need to know" style of approach is fundamentally incurious and easily hijacked by authoritarian schemes. It is certainly not true of every engineer, and definitely not true of the best engineers, but it is in my experience extremely common.
I honestly can't speak to the other commenter's statement regarding artists and relativistic ideas of truth.
The rigors of engineering training discourage fundamental questions of why and how in favor of rote mastery of rules of thumb which are known to work. To engineers the question of why gravity works is unimportant, their concern is in dealing with the consequences of gravity (and so forth for other physical laws). The analogy to faith based belief systems, wherein you accept rules handed down by authority and are discouraged from questioning that faith. or from seeking justifications for those rules, and are forbidden to consider revisions of those rules, is quite direct.
The kind of person who thrives under one set of these conditions has met many of the criteria to thrive under the other set of conditions.
You're missing the point. The oversight process in this bill permits spying to take place for thirty days to four months before being forced to stop. The govt can spy for thirty days (plus the 1 week before submission of certification) even if judicial oversight rejects their case the moment it is presented.
The timeline assuming the agency's goal is maximizing the spying time:
0 day - spying begins without any preamble 1 week - Gov must submit certification for review 1-30 days + 1 week - judge must returns review if judge objects
30 days after review- the govt must stop spying
unless they appeal to FISA
then they could have another 30 days
If the judges and courts have full queues that could push the whole thing to four months.
Assuming it gets rejected they presumably (IANAL) cannot use the evidence in court. Nonetheless they were legally empowered to look through your internet/telephone underwear drawer for over a month. How are you feeling about your 4th amendment rights now?
The article goes on to describe how the constraints make this law very easily abused to include spying upon americans for a wide variety of pretexts. That is the other half of the problem.
This is a terrible law even if you ignore autocracy being implemented by the telecom amnesty provisions.
Install some molecular dynamics simulation software, build a system to model a yeast cell in sugar solution. It would take a few thousand years in all atom mode, but you could do a coarse grained version faster.
Once done take your output files and animate them as the ultimate beer nerd film.
This is just the hardware normally known as abe.ncsa.uiuc.edu. They tried out Windows on it to get the benchmark, and whatever other experiments desired by whoever commissioned the study, then booted it back to linux so it could actually be useful.
How does Intel persuade people to buy new CPUs if there is no benefit delivered to the buyer?
How does Microsoft sell you new licenses if you don't buy a new computer?
Virtualization at the OS image level only allows you to run multiple different applications. Running more applications at once isn't the primary goal of the average user. They want the application which has the focus of their attention to be slick and fast.
Multicore CPUs do not allow you to run a single application faster. Intel's PC market and Microsoft's empire were built in a feedback loop based on the promise that you can buy a new machine every two years and your applications will run significantly faster. This held true until a few years ago when semiconductor technology hit the heat density wall on ramping up clock frequency. Now, and for the forseeable future, if you buy a new machine your single threaded application will run NO faster than it did on the old hardware.
That in a nutshell is the multicore problem. Most existing software is not written to exploit parallel processors. Most software developers cannot write a correct parallel code. The promise of "buy a new one, it is faster and better!" becomes a lie if the the software cannot exploit the extra cores.
No one has the solution to this in their pocket. Threads aren't the answer because they are a ridiculously hard to use correctly outside of very coarse grain contexts. Automatically parallelizing compilers have never delivered the goods in the general case. New languages face extremely slow adoption. The answer probably lies in languages, but the adoption problem is an extremely tough nut to crack. The recent successes here are Java (basically C++ with garbage collection) and Javascript+AJAX, which I don't think any heralds as a radical leap forward in language design.
I am involved in this research personally, so I'm not just pulling these assertions out of the air.
BlueGene/P will go online at Argonne this year. The NSF sustained petascale machine is targeted for 2011. We can safely assume that IBM won't get away with proposing to get $200 million to use today's technology for a machine 4 years in the future. Which means it is either BlueGene/Q or something from the IBM PERCS line.
One controversy is that the NSF has already created supercomputer centers across the country which have enabled NSF funded scientists to do significant research. But this solicitation was not confined to them. It allows for significant NSF grant funding to be diverted to institutions not beholden to NSF, and not aligned with the interests of NSF funded scientists, such as the DOE funded labs. This engenders suspicion that the resources might be diverted from NSF's fundamental research towards the DOE's much narrower agenda.
The article is just a spin on the original report written by eminent scientists. The report is mostly about the interesting challenges in condensed matter and materials science. Only two of the chapters discuss the current state of funding and publications, which cannot be ignored because these are immediately relevant to meeting those challenges. The challenges are fundamental research, not weaponizing known research, hence the lack of interest from our militarized administration.
See http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309109698 for a prepublication version of the report. Significant facets not addressed by slashdotters include: the previous tremendous impact of industrial labs, their current tremendously weakened state, and that government funding (static with respect to real dollars) is not commensurate with increases in actual costs. Effort spent writing grant proposals to compete for the shrinking grant dollar is effort that is not spent doing actual research. This is borne out by the relative number of publications in eminent journals.
Those who went on anti-nationalism rants are largely missing the point. Research drives the longer term future of industry. If the research happens elsewhere, so will the industry. If US taxpayers want their children to have good jobs, they would do well to fund basic research now.
Previous replies have covered the conceptual justifications. They make sense and can be summarized by the dictum: effective tool use is proportional to the depth of their user's knowledge of how and why they work.
In the land of high performance computing (HPC aka supercomputers) time quite literally is money. The longer it takes your application to solve a problem, the more it will cost in real dollars and in missed opportunities. 99.9% of your application code will be written in a higher level language, but if you want to find out why the compiled code is not getting peak performance you have to read the assembly code.
The more complicated a chip is, the more difficult it is to write a generally effective compiler for it. Itanium (and now the new multicore chips) are well publicized examples where maximum performance cannot be achieved without deep knowledge of the hardware and how the compiler interacts with it. This knowledge cannot be achieved by ignorance of assembly code.
Awards and accolades in the HPC community go to the people who can make all the hardware, right down to the bare metal, sing to their tune.
The real point of MSR isn't innovation. Its a way to keep the best and brightest happy and busy while providing no competition to Microsoft. If they happen to provide some innovation along the way, well thats just gravy.
Professional jewelers using man made carbon crystal.
Fulfills the "rock on her finger" requirement. Thereby solving the "admiring friends" dilemma.
Indistinguishable from high quality diamond. Which makes it higher in quality than the commercial grade stuff in the usual engagement ring case. Which means the actual rock looks better.
Prices are a lot more reasonable so you're not wasting cash on something worth 1/100th what you're spending.
No slave labor, smugglers, or terrorists were involved.
All that and you avoid being robbed by a conglomerate to perpetuate misery.
Here's a URL for ya. http://www.moissanite.com/
And hey, they're not the only game in town. Several other man made carbon crystal makers were mentioned in this thread. So competition will be working for you to maximize the value.
Unless the phenomenon is quite new there is little need to run your own double blind tests or do more than few hours of reading.
You can use meta-criticism.
Just search around to find critical commentary on the item. Read the critics and see how sound their arguments are. If the critics seem like flat earthers or can't be bothered to write clearly,t hen thats a plus for the item. If you can't poke holes in the arguments of the critics, then the item is probably hogwash. Study available dialogues or debates if still unsure.
If things are still unclear after that, then perhaps insufficient evidence is available to make a firm judgement. Try to avoid investing any serious money or health in the thing until more is learned.
Its a pretty straightforward process. The more you have riding on it (would you bet $10000 based on one of Aunt Rose's premonitions?) the more research you should put into it.
Accepted science tends to be right because scientists actually test their ideas before making big claims. But some of them choose poor test procedures. The critics will help you discern the good from the bad.
Slashdot Mirror
This is pretty nonsensical. At 7 Hz the wavelength for sound in water would be hundreds of meters and light would be many order of magnitude more. How would such an em field be involved in forming nanometer resolution structures in water?
This is yet another case of wild extrapolation from measurements that are at or beyond the limits of the tools being used.
I went through engineering at a major university and the critical thinking training was negligible. More damning than the training was the prevailing attitude of the future engineers, which was very much a "do I need to know this for the test" and "will I ever use this material in my career" approach, rather than the "how does the world work" perspective which we might prefer to inculcate.
This "tell me only what I need to know" style of approach is fundamentally incurious and easily hijacked by authoritarian schemes. It is certainly not true of every engineer, and definitely not true of the best engineers, but it is in my experience extremely common.
I honestly can't speak to the other commenter's statement regarding artists and relativistic ideas of truth.
The rigors of engineering training discourage fundamental questions of why and how in favor of rote mastery of rules of thumb which are known to work. To engineers the question of why gravity works is unimportant, their concern is in dealing with the consequences of gravity (and so forth for other physical laws). The analogy to faith based belief systems, wherein you accept rules handed down by authority and are discouraged from questioning that faith. or from seeking justifications for those rules, and are forbidden to consider revisions of those rules, is quite direct.
The kind of person who thrives under one set of these conditions has met many of the criteria to thrive under the other set of conditions.
You're missing the point. The oversight process in this bill permits spying to take place for thirty days to four months before being forced to stop. The govt can spy for thirty days (plus the 1 week before submission of certification) even if judicial oversight rejects their case the moment it is presented.
The timeline assuming the agency's goal is maximizing the spying time:
0 day - spying begins without any preamble
1 week - Gov must submit certification for review
1-30 days + 1 week - judge must returns review
if judge objects
30 days after review- the govt must stop spying
unless they appeal to FISA
then they could have another 30 days
If the judges and courts have full queues that could push the whole thing to four months.
Assuming it gets rejected they presumably (IANAL) cannot use the evidence in court. Nonetheless they were legally empowered to look through your internet/telephone underwear drawer for over a month. How are you feeling about your 4th amendment rights now?
The article goes on to describe how the constraints make this law very easily abused to include spying upon americans for a wide variety of pretexts. That is the other half of the problem.
This is a terrible law even if you ignore autocracy being implemented by the telecom amnesty provisions.
Install some molecular dynamics simulation software, build a system to model a yeast cell in sugar solution. It would take a few thousand years in all atom mode, but you could do a coarse grained version faster.
Once done take your output files and animate them as the ultimate beer nerd film.
This is just the hardware normally known as abe.ncsa.uiuc.edu. They tried out Windows on it to get the benchmark, and whatever other experiments desired by whoever commissioned the study, then booted it back to linux so it could actually be useful.
How does Intel persuade people to buy new CPUs if there is no benefit delivered to the buyer?
How does Microsoft sell you new licenses if you don't buy a new computer?
Virtualization at the OS image level only allows you to run multiple different applications. Running more applications at once isn't the primary goal of the average user. They want the application which has the focus of their attention to be slick and fast.
Multicore CPUs do not allow you to run a single application faster. Intel's PC market and Microsoft's empire were built in a feedback loop based on the promise that you can buy a new machine every two years and your applications will run significantly faster. This held true until a few years ago when semiconductor technology hit the heat density wall on ramping up clock frequency. Now, and for the forseeable future, if you buy a new machine your single threaded application will run NO faster than it did on the old hardware.
That in a nutshell is the multicore problem. Most existing software is not written to exploit parallel processors. Most software developers cannot write a correct parallel code. The promise of "buy a new one, it is faster and better!" becomes a lie if the the software cannot exploit the extra cores.
No one has the solution to this in their pocket. Threads aren't the answer because they are a ridiculously hard to use correctly outside of very coarse grain contexts. Automatically parallelizing compilers have never delivered the goods in the general case. New languages face extremely slow adoption. The answer probably lies in languages, but the adoption problem is an extremely tough nut to crack. The recent successes here are Java (basically C++ with garbage collection) and Javascript+AJAX, which I don't think any heralds as a radical leap forward in language design.
I am involved in this research personally, so I'm not just pulling these assertions out of the air.
It will not be BLueGene/P.
m l
BlueGene/P will go online at Argonne this year. The NSF sustained petascale machine is targeted for 2011. We can safely assume that IBM won't get away with proposing to get $200 million to use today's technology for a machine 4 years in the future. Which means it is either BlueGene/Q or something from the IBM PERCS line.
The NSF solicitation can be found here http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06573/nsf06573.ht
One controversy is that the NSF has already created supercomputer centers across the country which have enabled NSF funded scientists to do significant research. But this solicitation was not confined to them. It allows for significant NSF grant funding to be diverted to institutions not beholden to NSF, and not aligned with the interests of NSF funded scientists, such as the DOE funded labs. This engenders suspicion that the resources might be diverted from NSF's fundamental research towards the DOE's much narrower agenda.
The article is just a spin on the original report written by eminent scientists. The report is mostly about the interesting challenges in condensed matter and materials science. Only two of the chapters discuss the current state of funding and publications, which cannot be ignored because these are immediately relevant to meeting those challenges. The challenges are fundamental research, not weaponizing known research, hence the lack of interest from our militarized administration.
See http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309109698 for a prepublication version of the report. Significant facets not addressed by slashdotters include: the previous tremendous impact of industrial labs, their current tremendously weakened state, and that government funding (static with respect to real dollars) is not commensurate with increases in actual costs. Effort spent writing grant proposals to compete for the shrinking grant dollar is effort that is not spent doing actual research. This is borne out by the relative number of publications in eminent journals.
Those who went on anti-nationalism rants are largely missing the point. Research drives the longer term future of industry. If the research happens elsewhere, so will the industry. If US taxpayers want their children to have good jobs, they would do well to fund basic research now.
Previous replies have covered the conceptual justifications. They make sense and can be summarized by the dictum: effective tool use is proportional to the depth of their user's knowledge of how and why they work.
In the land of high performance computing (HPC aka supercomputers) time quite literally is money. The longer it takes your application to solve a problem, the more it will cost in real dollars and in missed opportunities. 99.9% of your application code will be written in a higher level language, but if you want to find out why the compiled code is not getting peak performance you have to read the assembly code.
The more complicated a chip is, the more difficult it is to write a generally effective compiler for it. Itanium (and now the new multicore chips) are well publicized examples where maximum performance cannot be achieved without deep knowledge of the hardware and how the compiler interacts with it. This knowledge cannot be achieved by ignorance of assembly code.
Awards and accolades in the HPC community go to the people who can make all the hardware, right down to the bare metal, sing to their tune.
The real point of MSR isn't innovation. Its a way to keep the best and brightest happy and busy while providing no competition to Microsoft. If they happen to provide some innovation along the way, well thats just gravy.
There is a GUI for postgres. Its a tcl/tk app called pgaccess. Its not chock full of features but it is handy for taking a quick look at things.
You can name any constraint and drop it using drop trigger. Why drop constraint isn't aliased to do that is a mystery to me.
The "aquatic ape" theory is not well supported by evidence and has few adherents. Most mammals can hold their breath and swim.
. ht ml
Cecil has a good summary:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/maquaticape
Professional jewelers using man made carbon crystal.
Fulfills the "rock on her finger" requirement. Thereby solving the "admiring friends" dilemma.
Indistinguishable from high quality diamond. Which makes it higher in quality than the commercial grade stuff in the usual engagement ring case. Which means the actual rock looks better.
Prices are a lot more reasonable so you're not wasting cash on something worth 1/100th what you're spending.
No slave labor, smugglers, or terrorists were involved.
All that and you avoid being robbed by a conglomerate to perpetuate misery.
Here's a URL for ya.
http://www.moissanite.com/
And hey, they're not the only game in town. Several other man made carbon crystal makers were mentioned in this thread. So competition will be working for you to maximize the value.
Unless the phenomenon is quite new there is little need to run your own double blind tests or do more than few hours of reading.
You can use meta-criticism.
Just search around to find critical commentary on the item. Read the critics and see how sound their arguments are. If the critics seem like flat earthers or can't be bothered to write clearly,t hen thats a plus for the item. If you can't poke holes in the arguments of the critics, then the item is probably hogwash. Study available dialogues or debates if still unsure.
If things are still unclear after that, then perhaps insufficient evidence is available to make a firm judgement. Try to avoid investing any serious money or health in the thing until more is learned.
Its a pretty straightforward process. The more you have riding on it (would you bet $10000 based on one of Aunt Rose's premonitions?) the more research you should put into it.
Accepted science tends to be right because scientists actually test their ideas before making big claims. But some of them choose poor test procedures. The critics will help you discern the good from the bad.