Fair enough. Ok, all who could reasonably be placed in the *.gov domain, past, present and probably future, do more development in the military and in wartime for the aforestated reasons, although the apparent contempt for science in the public interest varies between governments and ranges from total to almost total. Japan spends something like (I don't have the exact figures) 2% of GDP on civilian research and 1% on military research - the only country I know of where the situation is reversed, but still an amazingly high military figure for a country forbidden under its constitution to have a standing army or any kind of military other than for purely defensive purposes.
The British government, on the other hand, is so underfuding science that numerous major research facilities are under threat of closure, with the government officials blaming the astronomers and physicists for not asking what they wanted in some right way or other. I don't know how you'd measure contempt, but Britain must surely be somewhere in the top 1% on the contemptitude scale.
If the US Navy's extra-powerful sonar is jamming long-distance whale communication and destroying whale hearing, as has been claimed, then maybe they DO need free speech protections.
DNA studies apparently show that the Right Whales around Australia and New Zealand are not a single species, as had been thought, but two genetically distinct species. This has been found to be the case of other cetaceans - Hector's Dolphin, I think, is another where they had to re-estimate populations because there were multiple species counted as a single one. I don't know if DNA studies have been carried out on the populations of Right Whales of the US coast. Because there are multiple species involved, though, the term "Right Whale" only refers to a physiological description, not a biological one, and should go the way of other dead labels. Problem is, labels are used to define what is protected, so doing that might be harmful by removing essential protections, even though it should be helpful by allowing an accurate description of what is in the sea.
TEMPEST-style detection works great on CRTs, not so hot on flat-panel LCD monitors, and not hot at all if anyone has added a metallic coating to windows and wall paints. But then, any lawyer booking a Faraday cage to talk with a terror suspect can expect the spooks to wheel in every listening device on the planet and then some.
One of Henry Lucas' alleged victims was not only alive but in the room when the confessions were being made. The Magna Carta prohibits the use of single witness accounts, I'd argue that confessions (even voluntary ones) are suspect and should not be admissable in court. (I see nothing wrong with evidence collected on the basis of a confession being submitted, or even being declared as collected on the basis of a confession, but psychological pressure on suspects is still not well-understood and as digital editing technology improves, even recorded interrogations become less reliable as pressure on police for results increases. In the same way that procedures back in the days of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were open to abuse and corruption, modern procedures have not kept up with the ability of the unscrupulous to deceive.)
...that any person who represents themselves has a fool for a client. Courts follow procedures that are highly complex and use a language that has become so seperate from English that if they used Latin it would probably be easier to follow. If lawyers, with countless years of study, notoriously hard examinations, and then countless more years of professional experience, with numerous assistants and paralegals for reference, can make error after error in a courtroom, it might just be a teensy bit harder for the layman to do as well.
One must also remember that the US, as with the UK, use the adversarial court system. This attempts to establish guilt. Other countries use the inquisitorial system, which attempts to ascertain the truth of the matter. Both systems produce questionable results and have giant catalogues of miscarriages of justice to their names, which leads me to conclude that you either want a blend of the two or neither, but purely one or the other is inadequate. However, that's not the system used anywhere, as far as I know.
Do I think Hans Reiser is guilty or innocent? I don't think I know enough to say, for the above reason. I don't think the system exists yet to establish that with any certainty. I think he's guilty of stupidity - you don't ask a SQL database engineer to do assembly code programming, he knows that, so he should have been quite capable of inferring that you don't ask a software engineer to do lawyering. Beyond that, I don't know.
Sadly, his stupidity isn't grounds for appeal. He can't claim that he misrepresented himself. That doesn't work. We shall probably never know what really happened or why - again, the US system doesn't really try to establish such things. We shall also never really know to what extent Hans Reisers' autism affected the trial. In the legal system as it exists, criminal insanity (not knowing right from wrong) is only sometimes recogized, other forms of insanity or mental abnormality are neither recognized nor considered mitigating factors in a person's actions or a person's evidence. I don't like that either, but again we have the system we have.
This case proves only one thing to me, and that is that we'd almost be better off with no system at all. Not quite, but almost.
The place to start might be a Most Recent Common Ancestor calculation. You then figure how recent the most recent common ancestor has to be before you consider the people related. Finally, you analyse established Y-DNA or mtDNA markers and look for both the number of markers different and the genetic distance. Scroll down the page for the info. From this, you can get the probability that those two individuals share a common ancestor within the designated timeframe.
A second, and probably more typical approach for archaeological DNA work, is to not bother with such details and just go for a handful of markers, just sufficient to identify the basic group of individuals the person belonged to. Ken Nordvedt has produced a nice set of diagramsshowing how different branches of the I haplogroup are related, with emphasis on the so-called "ultraNorse" group, which appear to have had two founding families.
If you can identify a specific set of genetic markers that is common to a set of verifiably related individuals that do not occur in verifiably unrelated individuals, then those markers can be used to identify a loosely-defined group. Loosely, because you're only using a few markers and therefore know only limited information about the general deep ancestory, you know very little about the specifics and certainly don't have enough information to get a timeframe. But it's enough to establish a relationship of sorts.
(A great many English people belong to genetic groups associated with the Anglo-Saxons, for example, but would not necessarily regard themselves as meaningfully related, even though if you go far enough back, they probably are.)
The Genography project uses 12 Y-DNA markers and Hyper Variable Region 1 from the Mitochondrial DNA. This will tell you something about relationships in the order of a thousand to ten thousand years past. I would not regard this as a good test for this aboriginal man who was only a few hundred years old. 67 markers would be considered adequate for genealogy on the same timeframe because almost all will be exactly the same. The differences over such small timeframes will be only just measurable on a 67-marker comparison.
The Famous DNA listings are probably not much better, mostly because they're often reconstructions. Pick N people believed to be descended from X, then find the markers all have in common. Those markers are then assumed to have also been present in X and so if you are a descendent of X. Well, all it actually tells you is if you belong to the same genetic grouping, but that group may be a thousand years prior to X, the common ancestor may have been X's brother/sister (depending on the DNA tested), etc. It can tell you if there's a rough match, but that's it.
In priciple, you could reverse desertification by using solar panels or solar heating panels, as you would alter the amount of energy reflected (and inded the amount absorbed by the ground) by converting it into electricity or hot water respectively. A few billion dollars worth of such technology would not only provide significant amounts of renewable energy, but would also reverse the loss of arable land. Sure, there's a lot of land used up in such a scheme, but I can't see any reason why you wouldn't end up reclaiming more than is used, and if you couldn't use what the panels used anyway, is it really lost?
Instead of bridges, how about a trillion dollars of dirgibles for carrying air freight? Compared to air or sea, you've next to no air pollution, next to no noise pollution, they'd be far cheaper to run, have much lower risk factors, and a lot of freight isn't time-sensitive enough to go faster.
How about a trillion dollars in better building materials? Half of Portland, Oregon, is currently being torn down and rebuilt, partly because the buildings were in a bad state of decay but also because it was cheaper to do that than anything else. This is the twenty-first century AD, not BC, but drystone walls were exceptionally good at being reconfigured on-the-fly. Remodelling without rebuilding was a fairly simple task. Slow, but simple. In an era of prefabricated sidings and meccano-style bolted metal frame buidings, you have to blow the thing up first. That's wasteful of raw materials and fuel reserves. There almost have to be superior ways to build and superior materials, such that it's cheap and easy to redesign as often as you like without having to replace everything.
People have done SQL Injection attacks on Apache servers and probably most other servers. It seems as though this flaw is made easier on a misconfigured server, but you can misconfigure any software that uses a configuration file. It's easiest when the configuration isn't validated correctly, or when it's impossible to determine all invalid cases, or when a case may be invalid only under certan circumstances. All of these are bound to crop up on something like Apache.
Besides, there must be bugs elsewhere, or the article writer wouldn't have repeated an already-corrected folly of confusing pages with servers.
Yay! We get a re-run of one of the more non-story events of recent times. The problem was spotted very quickly by IIS admins, as was noted before, and it's half a millon pages, not half a million sites. Well, unless all sites have one page and I've only been thinking they used hypertext links to more of their own content. It's unclear what percent of those sites were IIS, what were Apache (an easy server to misconfigure), and what were other web servers. Blaming it on IIS is easy, and there probably is some truth to the allegation that IIS has flaws when it comes to SQL support, but this time they almost (I said almost) have justification in crying foul when Microsoft gets blamed.
What I don't get, though, is not only does this dupe the earlier story, it dupes ALL OF THE ERRORS as well. Sheesh!
That tends to be because the military get substantial funding for research and for recruiting the best minds. If the US Government put a trillion or so a year into civilian road car development, Slashdot would look more like Automart. Likewise, if they boosted Linux development by that amount, you'd be able to download it as a neural implant by now. The reason development accelerates in wartime is because Governments underfund research whenever possible, but the military (as much as I distrust them) have a much better grasp of the importance of such work.
Well, if there are enough nuclei, then expect both, the ratio of the two being about equal to the probability of them being there. Even if the heavier element does not exist in the sample, there may be evidence of it having been there. This assumes the decay chain can be predicted. If the decay products (daughter isotopes) in the chain are present and in the expected ratios, then you can deduce that the prior isotope in the sequence must have been present at one point. How do you tell what is a decay product and what naturally occurs? You'd need a radiochemist to explain it better than I can, but one quick-n-dirty answer is that you can start by seeing if there's something that would be there if such-and-such a scenario is true but isn't. Say you're expecting a stable decay product and it's just not there. Well, it hasn't decayed - it's stable - and it didn't just walk off, so this would be strongly suggestive (in that case) that the parent radioisotope was never present.
(Actual radiochemisty tends to be rather more complex than this simplistic description. I only had to write an expert system and inference engine for isotope identification, I didn't need to know all of the nuances of the field, such as anti-aliasing AMS data or worrying about characteristic distributions of gamma ray energies. They told me the peak energies and the known isotopes present for a given sample, the software then tried different scenarios and listed those which fit the available data along with the corresponding probability.)
Some time back, Slashdot ran a story on a server that was the size of a Russian matchbox, although storage space was somewhat limited and it was Slashdotted even quicker than most. As for the server the Register is talking about, the speed is deceptive as the MIPS is a RISC architecture and runs faster than the pure clock rating would imply. I'm guessing it's a 32-bit MIPS, though. (I could look up the specs, but it was painful enough reading the article.)
Oh, and the physical world doesn't actually exist, it's a product of an informational matrix and probability, both of which are abstracts. These are the fundamental units of all that is real, which is why atoms can superimpose in a Bose-Einstein Condensate. It's also why matter isn't just interchangable with energy but IS energy held in a specific structure. Matter condensed out of raw energy in the early Universe, which is to say matter is secondary, energy is more fundamental. Does that mattr? You can't do modern cosmology and hold to the supremecy of the physical world. Quantum physics denies such an arcane reality. The need to hold onto solid things (wich aren't solid, that's just a field you experience) is mere religion at this point and as primitive as Thor as an explanation of lightning.
It does, because it defines sequence (an inventor pre-exists the invented, a discovered thing pre-exists the discovery), the fundamental units (the more complex is built from the simpler) and the simplicity of the model (a parallel would be the infinite complexity required to model the solar system accurately when Earth-centered, compared to the relatively trivial nature of the solar-centered model). That last one tells us not only whether we can get any useful work done with a given model, but it also tells us if the work is optimal for the effort put in. The other two then tell us a great deal about how to optimize the work and what sort of solution we should be looking for.
Calculate the number of people likely to turn up. Add half that number again. This is the number of branches and areas of mathematics you want to think of. These needn't be "textbook" areas, just areas geeks might be interested in. The obvious ones would be differential calculus, linear algebra, galois fields, group theory, set theory, euclidian geometry, chaos theory, the prize-winning unproven conjectures, games theory, signals theory, 1-way and 2-way encryption, information theory, fractal geometry, cellular automata, data compression, data error correction, and so on.
Put that list somewhere where people can anonymously select an area. This is important. It has to be anonymous. That person must then produce something themed on that area. It can be a costume, a game, food, doesn't matter. But it must be categorically about that area, it can't be something generic and it can't be something too ordinary. However, not everything brought needs to be themed. In fact, some things must not, though there must be some sort of clue as to which is which.
The party would then be on multiple levels. You have the top level of the party itself, you have the next level of a massive detective game, hunting for clues to find out what is red herring and what is theme, then further detection to determine what the theme is. Finally, you've the showdown between the master detectives (those who guessed the most themes correctly) and the master mathematicians (those who represented their theme the best in the eyes of those at the party). Those nominally on both teams have to pick. I don't know what the final shootout game would be, but pick something suitable.
This is the very essence of X-Ray crystallography, only here you'd be designing crystals with a specific shape such that the seperation is extremely narrow. It'd be stressed, but it'd be very doable.
Check prior Slashdot stories and most of the Internet for stories on Alex the African Grey. That's the start of the chain, the story that got people looking. You'll find other examples from there.
A quantum is a one. It is the definitive unit. A quantum of what? It doesn't matter, I'm not concerned with the thing, only with the abstract. At the most fundamental level, the universe is just an information matrix, at which point there is no "what", there is only the information which describes it. You don't need a "what', any more than light in space needs an aether. Those who ascribe mathematics as an invention are merely adopting the logic of the aether believers. They are also adopting the mindset of the Intelligent Design folks, insisting that intelligence must form the building blocks of maths/life, rather than maths/life being the building blocks of intelligence.
Given the number of highly intelligent folk claiming Intelligent Design for mathematics, it is little wonder that I despair of humanity progressing into a new Age of Enlightenment.
A subset cannot be its own superset. Ergo, if the superset contains constants on which all can agree by independent observation, it cannot be a property of the subset. QED.
....that the abstract must be connected to, as per the Platonic ideas of, say, circleness or triangularness. This is fundamentally flawed, in that it assumes a property is inherited from somewhere. This defies common experience, where things can be approximate, or can even hold multiple characteristics. In other words, things are far more fluid than either pure Platonists or these anti-Platonists would have you believe. Things do not have a single, fixed, unit, discrete value. Well, some things do, and it's nothing to do with humans ascribing the value. Pi would hold the value of Pi had humans never evolved.
They also assume mathemtics is uniquely human. We know of animals that can perform basic arithmetic and even have a notion of zero. Ergo, mathematics is not uniquely human. Coincidental inventions happen, usually when the basic idea has been around for a while and the invention is "ready" to be invented, but this clearly does not apply to cross-species discoveries of things like zero, as there is no connection whatsoever between those discoveries.
I don't have any URLs for you, but there ARE a great many programs that work through the LADSPA mechanism for Linux to produce (or distort) sound through patch panels you plug together on the screen. This gives a great introduction to waveforms, how sound works, etc, through practical experiments, although that's probably not the original intent of such programs.
CFD programs like ChannelFlow graphically show how things like water change course and create all kinds of currents when you add obstructions.
For more adventuresome kids, there's the Mars Simulation Project. History? There are simulators of many early computers, including those used on the Apollo spacecraft. Keen programmers? Pose this little problem: When should you use these programming languages? MUMPS, D, Tcl/Tk, Forth, Erlang.
Slashdot Mirror
The British government, on the other hand, is so underfuding science that numerous major research facilities are under threat of closure, with the government officials blaming the astronomers and physicists for not asking what they wanted in some right way or other. I don't know how you'd measure contempt, but Britain must surely be somewhere in the top 1% on the contemptitude scale.
If the US Navy's extra-powerful sonar is jamming long-distance whale communication and destroying whale hearing, as has been claimed, then maybe they DO need free speech protections.
DNA studies apparently show that the Right Whales around Australia and New Zealand are not a single species, as had been thought, but two genetically distinct species. This has been found to be the case of other cetaceans - Hector's Dolphin, I think, is another where they had to re-estimate populations because there were multiple species counted as a single one. I don't know if DNA studies have been carried out on the populations of Right Whales of the US coast. Because there are multiple species involved, though, the term "Right Whale" only refers to a physiological description, not a biological one, and should go the way of other dead labels. Problem is, labels are used to define what is protected, so doing that might be harmful by removing essential protections, even though it should be helpful by allowing an accurate description of what is in the sea.
TEMPEST-style detection works great on CRTs, not so hot on flat-panel LCD monitors, and not hot at all if anyone has added a metallic coating to windows and wall paints. But then, any lawyer booking a Faraday cage to talk with a terror suspect can expect the spooks to wheel in every listening device on the planet and then some.
One of Henry Lucas' alleged victims was not only alive but in the room when the confessions were being made. The Magna Carta prohibits the use of single witness accounts, I'd argue that confessions (even voluntary ones) are suspect and should not be admissable in court. (I see nothing wrong with evidence collected on the basis of a confession being submitted, or even being declared as collected on the basis of a confession, but psychological pressure on suspects is still not well-understood and as digital editing technology improves, even recorded interrogations become less reliable as pressure on police for results increases. In the same way that procedures back in the days of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were open to abuse and corruption, modern procedures have not kept up with the ability of the unscrupulous to deceive.)
The defense attorney was fresh out of tranquilizer darts. Besides, Hans' mouth had journalled the transaction.
One must also remember that the US, as with the UK, use the adversarial court system. This attempts to establish guilt. Other countries use the inquisitorial system, which attempts to ascertain the truth of the matter. Both systems produce questionable results and have giant catalogues of miscarriages of justice to their names, which leads me to conclude that you either want a blend of the two or neither, but purely one or the other is inadequate. However, that's not the system used anywhere, as far as I know.
Do I think Hans Reiser is guilty or innocent? I don't think I know enough to say, for the above reason. I don't think the system exists yet to establish that with any certainty. I think he's guilty of stupidity - you don't ask a SQL database engineer to do assembly code programming, he knows that, so he should have been quite capable of inferring that you don't ask a software engineer to do lawyering. Beyond that, I don't know.
Sadly, his stupidity isn't grounds for appeal. He can't claim that he misrepresented himself. That doesn't work. We shall probably never know what really happened or why - again, the US system doesn't really try to establish such things. We shall also never really know to what extent Hans Reisers' autism affected the trial. In the legal system as it exists, criminal insanity (not knowing right from wrong) is only sometimes recogized, other forms of insanity or mental abnormality are neither recognized nor considered mitigating factors in a person's actions or a person's evidence. I don't like that either, but again we have the system we have.
This case proves only one thing to me, and that is that we'd almost be better off with no system at all. Not quite, but almost.
A second, and probably more typical approach for archaeological DNA work, is to not bother with such details and just go for a handful of markers, just sufficient to identify the basic group of individuals the person belonged to. Ken Nordvedt has produced a nice set of diagrams showing how different branches of the I haplogroup are related, with emphasis on the so-called "ultraNorse" group, which appear to have had two founding families.
If you can identify a specific set of genetic markers that is common to a set of verifiably related individuals that do not occur in verifiably unrelated individuals, then those markers can be used to identify a loosely-defined group. Loosely, because you're only using a few markers and therefore know only limited information about the general deep ancestory, you know very little about the specifics and certainly don't have enough information to get a timeframe. But it's enough to establish a relationship of sorts.
(A great many English people belong to genetic groups associated with the Anglo-Saxons, for example, but would not necessarily regard themselves as meaningfully related, even though if you go far enough back, they probably are.)
The Genography project uses 12 Y-DNA markers and Hyper Variable Region 1 from the Mitochondrial DNA. This will tell you something about relationships in the order of a thousand to ten thousand years past. I would not regard this as a good test for this aboriginal man who was only a few hundred years old. 67 markers would be considered adequate for genealogy on the same timeframe because almost all will be exactly the same. The differences over such small timeframes will be only just measurable on a 67-marker comparison.
The Famous DNA listings are probably not much better, mostly because they're often reconstructions. Pick N people believed to be descended from X, then find the markers all have in common. Those markers are then assumed to have also been present in X and so if you are a descendent of X. Well, all it actually tells you is if you belong to the same genetic grouping, but that group may be a thousand years prior to X, the common ancestor may have been X's brother/sister (depending on the DNA tested), etc. It can tell you if there's a rough match, but that's it.
Instead of bridges, how about a trillion dollars of dirgibles for carrying air freight? Compared to air or sea, you've next to no air pollution, next to no noise pollution, they'd be far cheaper to run, have much lower risk factors, and a lot of freight isn't time-sensitive enough to go faster.
How about a trillion dollars in better building materials? Half of Portland, Oregon, is currently being torn down and rebuilt, partly because the buildings were in a bad state of decay but also because it was cheaper to do that than anything else. This is the twenty-first century AD, not BC, but drystone walls were exceptionally good at being reconfigured on-the-fly. Remodelling without rebuilding was a fairly simple task. Slow, but simple. In an era of prefabricated sidings and meccano-style bolted metal frame buidings, you have to blow the thing up first. That's wasteful of raw materials and fuel reserves. There almost have to be superior ways to build and superior materials, such that it's cheap and easy to redesign as often as you like without having to replace everything.
Besides, there must be bugs elsewhere, or the article writer wouldn't have repeated an already-corrected folly of confusing pages with servers.
What I don't get, though, is not only does this dupe the earlier story, it dupes ALL OF THE ERRORS as well. Sheesh!
That tends to be because the military get substantial funding for research and for recruiting the best minds. If the US Government put a trillion or so a year into civilian road car development, Slashdot would look more like Automart. Likewise, if they boosted Linux development by that amount, you'd be able to download it as a neural implant by now. The reason development accelerates in wartime is because Governments underfund research whenever possible, but the military (as much as I distrust them) have a much better grasp of the importance of such work.
(Actual radiochemisty tends to be rather more complex than this simplistic description. I only had to write an expert system and inference engine for isotope identification, I didn't need to know all of the nuances of the field, such as anti-aliasing AMS data or worrying about characteristic distributions of gamma ray energies. They told me the peak energies and the known isotopes present for a given sample, the software then tried different scenarios and listed those which fit the available data along with the corresponding probability.)
Nononono. When it's shoeboxes, the correct clustering term is an Imelda Marcos.
Some time back, Slashdot ran a story on a server that was the size of a Russian matchbox, although storage space was somewhat limited and it was Slashdotted even quicker than most. As for the server the Register is talking about, the speed is deceptive as the MIPS is a RISC architecture and runs faster than the pure clock rating would imply. I'm guessing it's a 32-bit MIPS, though. (I could look up the specs, but it was painful enough reading the article.)
Oh, and the physical world doesn't actually exist, it's a product of an informational matrix and probability, both of which are abstracts. These are the fundamental units of all that is real, which is why atoms can superimpose in a Bose-Einstein Condensate. It's also why matter isn't just interchangable with energy but IS energy held in a specific structure. Matter condensed out of raw energy in the early Universe, which is to say matter is secondary, energy is more fundamental. Does that mattr? You can't do modern cosmology and hold to the supremecy of the physical world. Quantum physics denies such an arcane reality. The need to hold onto solid things (wich aren't solid, that's just a field you experience) is mere religion at this point and as primitive as Thor as an explanation of lightning.
It does, because it defines sequence (an inventor pre-exists the invented, a discovered thing pre-exists the discovery), the fundamental units (the more complex is built from the simpler) and the simplicity of the model (a parallel would be the infinite complexity required to model the solar system accurately when Earth-centered, compared to the relatively trivial nature of the solar-centered model). That last one tells us not only whether we can get any useful work done with a given model, but it also tells us if the work is optimal for the effort put in. The other two then tell us a great deal about how to optimize the work and what sort of solution we should be looking for.
...in HTML 5 is the ability to generate negative clicks. Negative clicking an ad-ridden site would give them negative numbers of viewers.
Put that list somewhere where people can anonymously select an area. This is important. It has to be anonymous. That person must then produce something themed on that area. It can be a costume, a game, food, doesn't matter. But it must be categorically about that area, it can't be something generic and it can't be something too ordinary. However, not everything brought needs to be themed. In fact, some things must not, though there must be some sort of clue as to which is which.
The party would then be on multiple levels. You have the top level of the party itself, you have the next level of a massive detective game, hunting for clues to find out what is red herring and what is theme, then further detection to determine what the theme is. Finally, you've the showdown between the master detectives (those who guessed the most themes correctly) and the master mathematicians (those who represented their theme the best in the eyes of those at the party). Those nominally on both teams have to pick. I don't know what the final shootout game would be, but pick something suitable.
How would that sound?
This is the very essence of X-Ray crystallography, only here you'd be designing crystals with a specific shape such that the seperation is extremely narrow. It'd be stressed, but it'd be very doable.
Check prior Slashdot stories and most of the Internet for stories on Alex the African Grey. That's the start of the chain, the story that got people looking. You'll find other examples from there.
A quantum is a one. It is the definitive unit. A quantum of what? It doesn't matter, I'm not concerned with the thing, only with the abstract. At the most fundamental level, the universe is just an information matrix, at which point there is no "what", there is only the information which describes it. You don't need a "what', any more than light in space needs an aether. Those who ascribe mathematics as an invention are merely adopting the logic of the aether believers. They are also adopting the mindset of the Intelligent Design folks, insisting that intelligence must form the building blocks of maths/life, rather than maths/life being the building blocks of intelligence.
Given the number of highly intelligent folk claiming Intelligent Design for mathematics, it is little wonder that I despair of humanity progressing into a new Age of Enlightenment.
A subset cannot be its own superset. Ergo, if the superset contains constants on which all can agree by independent observation, it cannot be a property of the subset. QED.
They also assume mathemtics is uniquely human. We know of animals that can perform basic arithmetic and even have a notion of zero. Ergo, mathematics is not uniquely human. Coincidental inventions happen, usually when the basic idea has been around for a while and the invention is "ready" to be invented, but this clearly does not apply to cross-species discoveries of things like zero, as there is no connection whatsoever between those discoveries.
CFD programs like ChannelFlow graphically show how things like water change course and create all kinds of currents when you add obstructions.
For more adventuresome kids, there's the Mars Simulation Project. History? There are simulators of many early computers, including those used on the Apollo spacecraft. Keen programmers? Pose this little problem: When should you use these programming languages? MUMPS, D, Tcl/Tk, Forth, Erlang.