point you in the direction of the excellent Physics 2000, which is horribly patronising, but informative.
"Horribly patronizing" does not even begin to describe that site...
Any way, there is nothing there that says h has anything to do with the smallest amount of energy. It just says photons have E=hv. What stops me from picking v as small as I want?
Isn't Apple legally prohibited from becoming a content provider because of their agreement with the Beatles-type Apple music company? I know they "got in trouble" with iTunes for this, but I forget how it was all resolved...
I'd really like to get a portable MP3 player for use at work, on airplanes, etc. But I just haven't seen anything that even meets my bare minimum requirements:
1) Must play Oggs
2) Must work with Linux
3) Must be durable and reliable
4) Must have at least 20GB
Ideally, I'd like to have a player that has the following features:
5) Can upgrade hard drive to larger capacity, using a standard (laptop probably) hard drive, not an overpriced special-order one from the manufacturer
6) Can connect to home network by ethernet
7) Can connect to stereo with SPDIF and RCA jacks
8) Doesn't require funky, annoying software to transfer new files (though optional software for extra functionality is ok, as long as it runs on Linux). As an addendum to this, can be used as generic HDD storage device when connected via USB.
1-5 and kinda 8 are met by Neuros. I have a 40GB one 1st gen one and am quite happy (although if I waited a few months I could have gotten the 2nd gen one...). I use linux exclusively and all of my CDs are ripped to OGGs. I use ndbm to sync. I am 99% sure you need some kind of software to sync, but you can just mount the drive and put other files on it for the generic HDD part of 8.
I am a vegetarian and I am appalled that I am forced to pay taxes which subsidize people who eat meat! this is a MORAL issue for me.
Uh, okay...
I am not saying this is a good arguement. Obviously public funds are going to be used to fund activities that certain people disagree with. The grandparent post even states this. As a matter of fact, I think that is a point of the grandparent post, in addition to pointing out the inconsitency in the ACLU's arguement.
So, the point here is that IF one were going to be of the opinion that school vouchers are wrong because they use public money to fund activities opposed by a segment of the public, then for consitencies sake one must ALSO be opposed to public funding of abortion.
As you and others have pointed out, there are fundamental problems with the "no public funds if someone disagrees" position. I agree. That position is not realistic. Someone (maybe a nutcase, maybe not) is going to always have a problem with whatever you do, so nothing could get done.
The issue is not the validity of this position per se (which seems quite weak), but in its inconsistent application by the ACLU.
I think the big issue behind vouchers is that it will take money from already struggling school systems.
I wasn't trying to argue one way or the other. What you say is perfectly reasonable. The parent of the post I was replying to was talking about using money to fund things people oppose. The parent of my post said that didn't make sense because abortion is a choice. My response to that was to point out that both cases involve choice (to have an abortion or not and to use a voucher at a secular or religious school) and possible utilization of funds derived from groups opposed to those practices.
This may not be the biggest issue in each case. I think most people would agree it is for the abortion case (i.e., people against public funding of abortions are mostly against it because they oppose abortion), while in the case of school vouchers it may be one of may reasons (i.e., maybe people's biggest problem with vouchers is not the use of tax payer funds at religious schools but the abandonment of tradition public schools). In either case the parallel can still be drawn as far as both systems (funding abortion and school choice) require the use of moneies from people who may be opposed to the activity in question.
I think you're missing the fact that abortion involves a choice.
Huh? So do school vouchers. No one is forcing anybody to go to a religious school. They are just being forced to fund someone's choice to go to a religious school. Just like people against abortion are forced to fund someone's choice to have an abortion.
In the end, I think we agree. Personally, I aim for 80 characters, but if the statement cannot easily be broken up and can be understood easier on a longer line, so be it. In other words, as I said in my previous post, I'm okay with guidelines for line length, but I'm against hard limits.
Good. We totally agree.
By the way, what compilers do you use that have line length limitations? Seems pretty lame to me. '\n' is just another character.
I guess I was wrong. Most F77 compilers are limited to 72 characters. Others extended this to 132. I thought 132 was also the limit for F9x, but I was wrong. There is no limit.
HTML is not supposed to? Fine. I can accept that. CSS is supposed to though.
True.
a page that advocates an 80 column limit should not have its own text width unbounded.
Yes, yes. But that doesn't invalidate the point that your eyeballs don't like to go zippping from the right hand side of the screen all the way to the left again. That is why I said 105-132 columns seems reasonable, since you don't have to do all the way back to the left if there is indenting (which is one of the major typographic features that differs between code and prose).
Once again, show me the study that compares readability of code and not prose, and I will listen with both ears. Until that happens, you are making the ASSUMPTION that since prose is this way, code must be as well. I do not believe this assumption to automatically be true.
I don't think there is such a study. Until there is we have to use SOMETHING to create our guidelines with. There is evidence that the eyes don't like more than 80 characters per line. But code is not prose. One thing that leaps off the "page" about code is the indenting. So if we correct for a reasonable amount of indenting, we get 105 chars per line. Obviously that is a pretty soft number. Lets call it 132, since some compilers have a hard limit there. That's all I am saying.
Funny, I thought the whole point to HTML (and CSS) was to format information for display.
HTML does not guarantee how your page looks on different browsers.
All of those studies you referred to are speaking of prose. If anything, they speak to having 80 column multi-line comments. Show me a study that compares code at 50 columns, 80 columns, 132 columns, and 200 columns and you'll get my full attention.
This is true. But the REASON it is easier to read prose is that your eyes don't have to "carriage return" so far after each line. So a line of code really shouldn't be more than 70-80 characters wide for the same reason.
So lets say you are using 5 space indents and you want to be able to indent 5 levels comfortably (usually I have found that more than five levels means something is wrong with the code). That is 105 chars per line.
Fortran95 for example will only swallow upto 132 chars per line. So I could see a few lines hanging out there at a hundred-something. In practice (perl and fortran95), I have never felt the need to go over 132 characters in a line...
Also of note: the first link which advocated shorter line lengths is on a page with unlimited line length.
It is not up to HTML to tell you how to display the information per say. With a comfortably sized browser window everything should wrap.
Yeah, yeah. That would have been clearer. I was just mushing a bunch of stuff together. The point is it doesn't really matter if it is 7 kilos or 7 grams. They are many orders of magnitude away from blowing up the place.
since the area around the Sand Hill Road exit on I-280 in Menlo Park still exists, SLAC has *not* yet succeeded in bringing matter and amtimatter together.
Huh? SLAC's whole purpose in life is to fire electrons and positrons at each other. The resulting collisions create the deacys they study. Why would this make "the area around the Sand Hill Road exit on I-280 in Menlo Park" no longer exist?
If all of the energy of one positron and one electron were released in a collsion in the SLAC, something like 3 billionths of a Joule. Well, there could be a lot of particles... Hrm... digging around http://www.slac.stanford.edu/ and crunching their numbers... I get a total output on the order of 3000 kJ/s if all of their particles collide with each other. Gasoline has a heat of combustion of about 43MJ/kg, so that is the same amount as burning 7 thousandths of a kilo of gas per second.
I think Menlo Park and the surrounding are are quite safe.
Only the ground state can be fully described (I assume you write about the Kohn-Hohenberg theorem).
Well, yes. Not eveyone here needs all of that detail. There are a few other niggling "rules".
Anyway, I believe Levy has extended DFT (at least in the Kohn-Sham framework, but it should work without orbitals too...?) to excited states. PhysRevLett 1998 v83 p4361
How does counting citations become classified as "research".
Well, sure, it is not going to win this guy a Nobel prize, but it is interesting. Maybe not "research" by many definitions of the word, but definitely interesting.
For example, while I am quite familiar with DFT and have read most (if not all) of the Kohn papers mentioned in the article, I would not have guessed he would have placed so high. But that is the neat thing. This paper shows how much physics and chemistry interact. Many of the other paper in this top 100 list are probably more cited in the chemistry literature than in physics (e.g. Carr-Parinello)
pretty much every one of high energy particle physics papers published from Tevatron/FNAL and LEP/CERN data will cite those...
But you have a whole gaggle of condensed matter physics people doing DFT and another slew of chemists doing DFT, and even a few biologists are using DFT. So while Kohn's DFT papers may not have the most impact within physics, they have a lot of impact for science as a whole.
To me, all this tells us is that many other researchers spent alot of money either trying to prove or disprove Walter Kohn's theories. What this article doesn't tell us is whether or not Walter Kohn's theories are valid in the first place.
Neither. Lot's of people have been using Walter Kohn's theory. The reason why he is at the top of the list is because of the sucess of density functional theory (DFT) first in condensed matter physics and then in chemistry. A goodly portion of the unclassified CPU power used my scientists around the world is probably dedicated to examining systems with DFT.
Essentially, there are two neat things about DFT. The first is that it proves that it is possible to fully describe the state of a bunch of electrons with the 4 dimensional spin density, rather than the normal 4N coordinates (where N is the number of electrons, 3 cartestians an a spin per electron). This, combined with Kohn-Sham theory results in a method of calculating electronic structure that formally scales and N^4, but gives answers often as accurate as N^5 and higher methods. Hence, Nobel Prize:)
roulette with just picking the color gives your 50% odds of winning
Nope. You forgot the green 0 and maybe 00 on some wheels. They give the house that slight edge. ALL casino games in which you play against the house are designed to favor the house.
I read somewhere that a properly played craps game is the least skewed game in most casinos, but I can't back that up at the moment....
Beware of linear scaling algorithms. If n is small, you are actually going to do worse with an O(n) algorithm. I was so annoyed when a colleague of mine replaced all of the "normal" code with "linear scaling code". It made the cases I was interested in 10 times slower! And the code was harder to follow.
I feel your pain. As a computational chemist, I am often forced to work with f77 code and I hate it. But I love (well maybe not love, but compared to f77...) fortran95. Try it out. It is a superset of f77, so refactoring your code over to f95 shouldn't be a total disaster. And you get to use some of those "CS concepts developed over the past 30 years".
We might actually get some real, hard, law out of this case....Then we can finally learn what fair use is, whether your rights to confront an accuser include a computer accuser, and whether these sealed warrants are... warranted.
This is really sad. Legislatures make laws, not lawyers and judges. Legal precedent is not law. If a court rules one way or another on this, that does not make it the law of the land. Theoretically the next victim could appeal all the way back up to the Supreme Court and get a reversal. That won't get the first victim out of jail though. Why should it work in reverse?
For example, take the whole gay marriage thing. A particular couple can go to a judge and ask for a ruling on a no-gay marriage law. If that judge says they can be married, he can compel the state to give that couple a marriage license. The state does NOT have to give every one a marriage license though.
Now as I understand things, it is a bit different when a Supreme court (at the federal or state level) rules that a law is unconstitutional.
Well, anyway, IANAL, and you are. But it is disturbing that you seem to take it for granted that you and yours (i.e., lawyers and judges) are the ones making law.
Oh, and I totally agree that sealed warrants are bad, bad news.
It's freezing point however is -108 C so it could could be easily used at -30 or -40
What is going to get it that cold? An external refridgeration unit I guess, but that is complicated and loud, and power hungry... But I guess those crazies who do water-cooled over clocking don't care about that...
this stuff has a boiling point of 49.2C (120.6F). Processors burn hotter than that
Not if they are cooled. The real question is what is this stuff's heat capacity and thermal conductivity. (I.e., how much heat can I stuff in to a given mass of this substance, while staying below a certain temperature (like 49C) and how quickly can I suck it up and push it out?)
Slashdot Mirror
"Horribly patronizing" does not even begin to describe that site...
Any way, there is nothing there that says h has anything to do with the smallest amount of energy. It just says photons have E=hv. What stops me from picking v as small as I want?
Huh? The units of Planck's constant are energy times time (eg., J s).
Isn't Apple legally prohibited from becoming a content provider because of their agreement with the Beatles-type Apple music company? I know they "got in trouble" with iTunes for this, but I forget how it was all resolved...
I guess it hasn't been.
1-5 and kinda 8 are met by Neuros. I have a 40GB one 1st gen one and am quite happy (although if I waited a few months I could have gotten the 2nd gen one...). I use linux exclusively and all of my CDs are ripped to OGGs. I use ndbm to sync. I am 99% sure you need some kind of software to sync, but you can just mount the drive and put other files on it for the generic HDD part of 8.
This guy knows all about 5 and can do it for you.
I read that as "but alchohol got in the way... Poor drunken programmers...
Uh, okay...
I am not saying this is a good arguement. Obviously public funds are going to be used to fund activities that certain people disagree with. The grandparent post even states this. As a matter of fact, I think that is a point of the grandparent post, in addition to pointing out the inconsitency in the ACLU's arguement.
So, the point here is that IF one were going to be of the opinion that school vouchers are wrong because they use public money to fund activities opposed by a segment of the public, then for consitencies sake one must ALSO be opposed to public funding of abortion.
As you and others have pointed out, there are fundamental problems with the "no public funds if someone disagrees" position. I agree. That position is not realistic. Someone (maybe a nutcase, maybe not) is going to always have a problem with whatever you do, so nothing could get done.
The issue is not the validity of this position per se (which seems quite weak), but in its inconsistent application by the ACLU.
I wasn't trying to argue one way or the other. What you say is perfectly reasonable. The parent of the post I was replying to was talking about using money to fund things people oppose. The parent of my post said that didn't make sense because abortion is a choice. My response to that was to point out that both cases involve choice (to have an abortion or not and to use a voucher at a secular or religious school) and possible utilization of funds derived from groups opposed to those practices.
This may not be the biggest issue in each case. I think most people would agree it is for the abortion case (i.e., people against public funding of abortions are mostly against it because they oppose abortion), while in the case of school vouchers it may be one of may reasons (i.e., maybe people's biggest problem with vouchers is not the use of tax payer funds at religious schools but the abandonment of tradition public schools). In either case the parallel can still be drawn as far as both systems (funding abortion and school choice) require the use of moneies from people who may be opposed to the activity in question.
So how does my arguement not make sense?
Huh? So do school vouchers. No one is forcing anybody to go to a religious school. They are just being forced to fund someone's choice to go to a religious school. Just like people against abortion are forced to fund someone's choice to have an abortion.
Good. We totally agree.
I guess I was wrong. Most F77 compilers are limited to 72 characters. Others extended this to 132. I thought 132 was also the limit for F9x, but I was wrong. There is no limit.
True.
It is kinda silly, I'll admit.
Yes, yes. But that doesn't invalidate the point that your eyeballs don't like to go zippping from the right hand side of the screen all the way to the left again. That is why I said 105-132 columns seems reasonable, since you don't have to do all the way back to the left if there is indenting (which is one of the major typographic features that differs between code and prose).
I don't think there is such a study. Until there is we have to use SOMETHING to create our guidelines with. There is evidence that the eyes don't like more than 80 characters per line. But code is not prose. One thing that leaps off the "page" about code is the indenting. So if we correct for a reasonable amount of indenting, we get 105 chars per line. Obviously that is a pretty soft number. Lets call it 132, since some compilers have a hard limit there. That's all I am saying.
HTML does not guarantee how your page looks on different browsers.
This is true. But the REASON it is easier to read prose is that your eyes don't have to "carriage return" so far after each line. So a line of code really shouldn't be more than 70-80 characters wide for the same reason.
So lets say you are using 5 space indents and you want to be able to indent 5 levels comfortably (usually I have found that more than five levels means something is wrong with the code). That is 105 chars per line.
Fortran95 for example will only swallow upto 132 chars per line. So I could see a few lines hanging out there at a hundred-something. In practice (perl and fortran95), I have never felt the need to go over 132 characters in a line...
It is not up to HTML to tell you how to display the information per say. With a comfortably sized browser window everything should wrap.
Yeah, yeah. That would have been clearer. I was just mushing a bunch of stuff together. The point is it doesn't really matter if it is 7 kilos or 7 grams. They are many orders of magnitude away from blowing up the place.
What if your program isn't in "C, C++, C#, or Java"? How does this interact with CVS, SVN, or other source control systems?
Some random "web development" site
Scroll down a bit to get to the chars per line bit
All of these basically agree that more than 80 chars per line is quite hard to read.
Huh? SLAC's whole purpose in life is to fire electrons and positrons at each other. The resulting collisions create the deacys they study. Why would this make "the area around the Sand Hill Road exit on I-280 in Menlo Park" no longer exist?
If all of the energy of one positron and one electron were released in a collsion in the SLAC, something like 3 billionths of a Joule. Well, there could be a lot of particles... Hrm... digging around http://www.slac.stanford.edu/ and crunching their numbers... I get a total output on the order of 3000 kJ/s if all of their particles collide with each other. Gasoline has a heat of combustion of about 43MJ/kg, so that is the same amount as burning 7 thousandths of a kilo of gas per second.
I think Menlo Park and the surrounding are are quite safe.
Well, yes. Not eveyone here needs all of that detail. There are a few other niggling "rules".
Anyway, I believe Levy has extended DFT (at least in the Kohn-Sham framework, but it should work without orbitals too...?) to excited states. PhysRevLett 1998 v83 p4361
Well, sure, it is not going to win this guy a Nobel prize, but it is interesting. Maybe not "research" by many definitions of the word, but definitely interesting.
For example, while I am quite familiar with DFT and have read most (if not all) of the Kohn papers mentioned in the article, I would not have guessed he would have placed so high. But that is the neat thing. This paper shows how much physics and chemistry interact. Many of the other paper in this top 100 list are probably more cited in the chemistry literature than in physics (e.g. Carr-Parinello)
But you have a whole gaggle of condensed matter physics people doing DFT and another slew of chemists doing DFT, and even a few biologists are using DFT. So while Kohn's DFT papers may not have the most impact within physics, they have a lot of impact for science as a whole.
Neither. Lot's of people have been using Walter Kohn's theory. The reason why he is at the top of the list is because of the sucess of density functional theory (DFT) first in condensed matter physics and then in chemistry. A goodly portion of the unclassified CPU power used my scientists around the world is probably dedicated to examining systems with DFT.
Essentially, there are two neat things about DFT. The first is that it proves that it is possible to fully describe the state of a bunch of electrons with the 4 dimensional spin density, rather than the normal 4N coordinates (where N is the number of electrons, 3 cartestians an a spin per electron). This, combined with Kohn-Sham theory results in a method of calculating electronic structure that formally scales and N^4, but gives answers often as accurate as N^5 and higher methods. Hence, Nobel Prize :)
Nope. You forgot the green 0 and maybe 00 on some wheels. They give the house that slight edge. ALL casino games in which you play against the house are designed to favor the house.
I read somewhere that a properly played craps game is the least skewed game in most casinos, but I can't back that up at the moment....
Beware of linear scaling algorithms. If n is small, you are actually going to do worse with an O(n) algorithm. I was so annoyed when a colleague of mine replaced all of the "normal" code with "linear scaling code". It made the cases I was interested in 10 times slower! And the code was harder to follow.
I feel your pain. As a computational chemist, I am often forced to work with f77 code and I hate it. But I love (well maybe not love, but compared to f77...) fortran95. Try it out. It is a superset of f77, so refactoring your code over to f95 shouldn't be a total disaster. And you get to use some of those "CS concepts developed over the past 30 years".
This is really sad. Legislatures make laws, not lawyers and judges. Legal precedent is not law. If a court rules one way or another on this, that does not make it the law of the land. Theoretically the next victim could appeal all the way back up to the Supreme Court and get a reversal. That won't get the first victim out of jail though. Why should it work in reverse?
For example, take the whole gay marriage thing. A particular couple can go to a judge and ask for a ruling on a no-gay marriage law. If that judge says they can be married, he can compel the state to give that couple a marriage license. The state does NOT have to give every one a marriage license though.
Now as I understand things, it is a bit different when a Supreme court (at the federal or state level) rules that a law is unconstitutional.
Well, anyway, IANAL, and you are. But it is disturbing that you seem to take it for granted that you and yours (i.e., lawyers and judges) are the ones making law.
Oh, and I totally agree that sealed warrants are bad, bad news.
What is going to get it that cold? An external refridgeration unit I guess, but that is complicated and loud, and power hungry... But I guess those crazies who do water-cooled over clocking don't care about that...
Not if they are cooled. The real question is what is this stuff's heat capacity and thermal conductivity. (I.e., how much heat can I stuff in to a given mass of this substance, while staying below a certain temperature (like 49C) and how quickly can I suck it up and push it out?)