If everyone is honorable and keeps their word, etc., as you imagine then any given economic system will work well whether it be capitalist or marxist. The great and abiding issue is how to yoke the baser impulses within humanity into a just, viable economic system. Quite simply, how do we encourage the honorable, and punish the thieves?
Because there are still enormous barriers to entry into physics for women, as compared with men. Endless studies indicate that math and science courses and teachers focus on boys from elementary school onward. Societal expectations push girls/women toward deference, valuing social interactions and their own physicality. Boys/men, conversely are pushed toward aggression, self-reliance and career success.
You comment that "India is a secular constitutional democracy." However as we speak the BJP is re-writing history to satisfy Hindu fundamentalists. The latest public school history books neglect certain dates that are of religious controversy (say 1500 BC), no longer mention the influence of the Aryan invasions on Hindu culture, etc.
Of course the same thing is going on here in the U.S., where research indicating that there is no link between abortion and cancer has been pulled down from HHS web pages as well as research indicating that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs.
Shall we just declare war on fundamentalism and get it over with?
And it's entertaining as hell (as a consultant) to head from Chicago down to places like Dallas & park in spaces no one down there could imagine a car fitting into. Off-topic, self-indulgent -- yeah, I know, but it makes me smile a bit.
i have to disagree with you on the paired programming front. you say that it only works with programmers of equal ability, however in my experience it's a phenomenal way to get a junior programmer a better perspective on how a more senior developer works. now mind you i'd never advocate doing this 40 hours/week, though in all honesty that's primarily for my own selfish sake. i simply don't want to work with a junior programmer 40 hours/week.
so a nice balance that i've found is to sit down with junior folk for 1/2 days of work at a time, something like once every week or two. this seems like a nice balance for me, particularly given the number of junior programmers in our shop.
From your comment that caste no longer matters in India we can only conclude that you are from a mid-to-upper caste. Correct me if I've errored in this assumption.
"Consider a compact 3-dimensional manifold V without boundary. Is it possible that the fundamental group of V could be trivial, even though V is not homeomorphic to the 3-dimensional sphere?"
A compact 3-dimensional manfold without boundary is a smooth 3-dimensional space (manifold=smooth space, i.e. there aren't any wierd kinks that can't be ironed out) without a boundary (i.e. you cannot fall off the edge of the universe) that is "compact". So the only hard word here is compact. In my opinion the most readily understood definition of compact is that every convergent sequence of points in the space ends in a point in the space. In other words, there are no points that you can get arbitrarily close to but never reach quite reach. For the positive real numbers such a point would be zero. The only such 1-dimensional space is the circle. The 2-dimensional spaces of this sort are the sphere, the torus (surface of a donut) and all of the possible siamese twin, triple, quadruple, etc. donuts.
Next "Is it possible that the fundamental group of V could be trivial". This means simply that any loop you could draw in this space can be contracted to a single point. In 2-dimensions the only such space is the sphere, on a donut you can draw a loop around the donut that cannot be contracted to a single point without jumping out of the donut to do it.
And finally "even though V is not homeomorphic to the 3-dimensional sphere?" simply means that we can't smoothly deform ("is not homeomorphic" = "we can't smoothly deform") any such space into the 3-sphere. What's a 3-sphere? It's like a circle or 2-sphere (the familiar sphere), except a dimension bigger. It's like a solid ball, except when you get to the edge it's only all the same single point. This is analogous to taking a line segment and fusing the ends together to get a circle or taking a solid 2-dimensional disk, gathering up the edge of it like a bag and fusing the edge of it all together to a single point to form a sphere.
It's actually not such a bad introductory analogy, speaking as a topologist. In essence topology is the study of spaces, however when most folk think of spaces and math their reference point is high school geometry. However, topology and geometry are not the same thing -- the principle distinction between them lies in the fact that geometry is concerned with distances (and often angles) where topology is not. So we can try to convey this topological focus on the global structure of spaces by explaining that to a topologist a torus' fundamental nature is independent of its particular "mug-like" or "donut-like" form.
I'm sorry to say that this would at best constitute a minor in mathematics. As first-year graduate work a student should be ready for serious coursework in:
Real/Complex Analysis (Rudin, for example)
Topology (Munkres)
Algebra (Herstein)
From the pre-requisites to these books (no need to buy them, just flip through the first few pages) you should get a realistic feel for your preparedness for a graduate program.
I'm sorry to say that this would at best constitute a minor in mathematics. As first-year graduate work a student should be ready for serious coursework in:
Real/Complex Analysis (Rudin, for example)
Topology (Munkres)
Algebra (Herstein)
From the pre-requisites to these books (no need to buy them, just flip through the first few pages) you should get a realistic feel for your preparedness for a graduate program.
If it really matters, 11i is currently available as 11.5.5 (11.5.6 out soon) and yes it's stable, and has been since about the 11.5.4 you mention. Do you have to patch it a good bit, hell yes. But if you have knowledgeable folk to set it up it is in fact stable enough to run in production. Now mind you that doesn't mean that 11.5.0 (initial 11i release) would even install fully, much less run, much less meet anyone's definition of stable...
Ok, your point that the US unduely meddles in other nations' business is spot-on. However you fail to note that pretty much every other nation engages in the same damn'd thing; the US is just more effective (not necessarily clever, "effective") at it because of its political, economic & military might.
As for Castro, the US never supported him. The States' policy certainly did push him toward communism in general and the USSR in particular, however.
As for Bin Ladin having been "high in the ranks" of the mujahadeen, he wasn't. Back in those days he was pretty much just a Saudi rich boy who was playing revolutionary dilettente. Please.
And finally, the fact that Pacifica (heavily biased) reports on a Palestinian (heavily biased) having found a piece of exploded munition (likely) that was labelled USA (unlikely) is a bit unlikely. While it's entirely possible that this all happened as reported, Palestinians have in large numbers proven themselves perfectly capable filling in details to make for a more compelling story (same goes for Israelis) and Pacifica is hardly the sort of media outlet to engage in a hard-hitting objective journalist in the face of just the sort of news that they prefer to report.
Never under-estimate the ability of most anyone who's not from the States to conflate the stupidity of one American with all US citizens. While that fellow's comments were clearly moronic and xenophobic, your knee-jerk America bashing isn't exactly the height of rational thought, regardless of how trendy it may be in your social circles.
I realize that I'm likely being a bit (perhaps even unduely) harsh, but this type of anti-American elitism so common.
I oh-so-clearly remember last summer as I was driving down the road listening to what used to be a good station here in Chicago, WXRT, but has now gone to corporate programming hell (and still it's about the best station in the city). So much to my delight the DJ puts on Iggy Pop & The Stooges "Search & Destroy". Before the song was 1/3 over dead air hits for about 2 seconds, followed by a generic "you're listening to WXRT..." message for 8-10 seconds, followed by bland corporate rock.
I've always wondered whether the DJ who actually spun that track was fired, though I'm almost certain that he was reprimanded.
Preliminary injunctions prior to trial requiring Microsoft to:
Distribute Sun's current, binary implementation of Java Plug-in as part of Windows XP and Internet Explorer. Stop the unlicensed distribution of Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine through separate web downloads, instead of incorporating within Windows XP and Internet Explorer, in accordance with Jan. 23, 2000 settlement agreement. Permanent injunction requiring Microsoft to:
Disclose and license proprietary interfaces, protocols and formats. Unbundle tied products like Internet Explorer, IIS and.NET framework.
The first Windows2000 cluster is at the Cornell Theory Center at #320 with 121 GF/s.
Re:The kicker's in the tail
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah, I just got XP Pro on my new 'puter as well. I agree with the first poster's complaints, but yours are pretty easily rectifiable. Under the properties (right-click) of the task bar is a check box to allow you to show the quick launch bar, which contains the "show desktop" icon. There's also a lock/unlock taskbar checkbox that will allow you to move it to another side of the screen, and perhaps more importantly allow your to resize the amount of task bar allocated to the quick launch bar.
Oh, and as for the little yellow duck, I use that for my sys admin account, which I titled "root".:) And it shouldn't be that hard to figure out what folder those images are in and add your own of a skull if you need to.
Well said. However, this academic definition (and no, I am not one who believes academic definitions are bad by definition) is conflated by our everyday understanding of "liberal" to mean free and "conservative" to mean the status quo.
Hence, liberal economic policy would dramaticly cut taxes to free up markets. This would be of greatest benefit to the wealthy, and since those with wealth rather prefer the status quo, these are most commonly conservatives.
As for your Al Gore, he ends up an environmental conservative, and social moderate-liberal, an economic moderate-conservative, and so on.
Ok, if I must, here's the problem with your assumption on point 4. Well first, a counter-example, the following number 0.101001000100001000001000000100000001... has an infinite decimal expansion and never repeats, yet fails to contain "2", much less any arbitrary decimal sequence.
What you're assuming is equivalent to what these people are trying to prove. In short, given a sequence of random digits the likelihood of finding a given specific digit in the sequence is 1 - (9/10)^N, where N is the number of digits in the sequence. Hence as N --> infinity, this likelihood approaches 1. This is painting in broad strokes, admittedly. Now further, given a random sequence of m-digit numbers and a specific m-digit number, the likelihood of finding out desired member in the sequence is 1 - ((10^m - 1)/10^m)^N for an N digit sequence. Thus as N --> infinity, once again our chances of finding our desired number approach 1, for any specific value of m. So your intuition is pretty good, in that if the digits of pi are "random" in their distribution, then your chance of finding a given sequence within them is 1.
In case anyone is curious how this was done with pictures amongst the surrealists, they would simply fold a sheet of paper into (usually horizontal) quarters and then draw a portion of the final image each. Typically, each artist was allowed to see the portion preceeding their own so that the pieces could at least line up.
There're some nice bits of this at the Chicago Art Institute.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone is honorable and keeps their word, etc., as you imagine then any given economic system will work well whether it be capitalist or marxist. The great and abiding issue is how to yoke the baser impulses within humanity into a just, viable economic system. Quite simply, how do we encourage the honorable, and punish the thieves?
Scott
Because there are still enormous barriers to entry into physics for women, as compared with men. Endless studies indicate that math and science courses and teachers focus on boys from elementary school onward. Societal expectations push girls/women toward deference, valuing social interactions and their own physicality. Boys/men, conversely are pushed toward aggression, self-reliance and career success.
Think about it for gods sake.
Scott
You comment that "India is a secular constitutional democracy." However as we speak the BJP is re-writing history to satisfy Hindu fundamentalists. The latest public school history books neglect certain dates that are of religious controversy (say 1500 BC), no longer mention the influence of the Aryan invasions on Hindu culture, etc.
Of course the same thing is going on here in the U.S., where research indicating that there is no link between abortion and cancer has been pulled down from HHS web pages as well as research indicating that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs.
Shall we just declare war on fundamentalism and get it over with?
Happy New Year,
Scott
And it's entertaining as hell (as a consultant) to head from Chicago down to places like Dallas & park in spaces no one down there could imagine a car fitting into. Off-topic, self-indulgent -- yeah, I know, but it makes me smile a bit.
i have to disagree with you on the paired programming front. you say that it only works with programmers of equal ability, however in my experience it's a phenomenal way to get a junior programmer a better perspective on how a more senior developer works. now mind you i'd never advocate doing this 40 hours/week, though in all honesty that's primarily for my own selfish sake. i simply don't want to work with a junior programmer 40 hours/week.
so a nice balance that i've found is to sit down with junior folk for 1/2 days of work at a time, something like once every week or two. this seems like a nice balance for me, particularly given the number of junior programmers in our shop.
cheers,
scott
"huger," didn't you mean to say "enormouser" or perhaps "giganticer"? :)
scott
From your comment that caste no longer matters in India we can only conclude that you are from a mid-to-upper caste. Correct me if I've errored in this assumption.
"Consider a compact 3-dimensional manifold V without boundary. Is it possible that the fundamental group of V could be trivial, even though V is not homeomorphic to the 3-dimensional sphere?"
A compact 3-dimensional manfold without boundary is a smooth 3-dimensional space (manifold=smooth space, i.e. there aren't any wierd kinks that can't be ironed out) without a boundary (i.e. you cannot fall off the edge of the universe) that is "compact". So the only hard word here is compact. In my opinion the most readily understood definition of compact is that every convergent sequence of points in the space ends in a point in the space. In other words, there are no points that you can get arbitrarily close to but never reach quite reach. For the positive real numbers such a point would be zero. The only such 1-dimensional space is the circle. The 2-dimensional spaces of this sort are the sphere, the torus (surface of a donut) and all of the possible siamese twin, triple, quadruple, etc. donuts.
Next "Is it possible that the fundamental group of V could be trivial". This means simply that any loop you could draw in this space can be contracted to a single point. In 2-dimensions the only such space is the sphere, on a donut you can draw a loop around the donut that cannot be contracted to a single point without jumping out of the donut to do it.
And finally "even though V is not homeomorphic to the 3-dimensional sphere?" simply means that we can't smoothly deform ("is not homeomorphic" = "we can't smoothly deform") any such space into the 3-sphere. What's a 3-sphere? It's like a circle or 2-sphere (the familiar sphere), except a dimension bigger. It's like a solid ball, except when you get to the edge it's only all the same single point. This is analogous to taking a line segment and fusing the ends together to get a circle or taking a solid 2-dimensional disk, gathering up the edge of it like a bag and fusing the edge of it all together to a single point to form a sphere.
Cheers,
Scott
It's actually not such a bad introductory analogy, speaking as a topologist. In essence topology is the study of spaces, however when most folk think of spaces and math their reference point is high school geometry. However, topology and geometry are not the same thing -- the principle distinction between them lies in the fact that geometry is concerned with distances (and often angles) where topology is not. So we can try to convey this topological focus on the global structure of spaces by explaining that to a topologist a torus' fundamental nature is independent of its particular "mug-like" or "donut-like" form.
Cheers,
Scott
Real/Complex Analysis (Rudin, for example)
Topology (Munkres)
Algebra (Herstein)
From the pre-requisites to these books (no need to buy them, just flip through the first few pages) you should get a realistic feel for your preparedness for a graduate program.
Have fun,
Scott
Real/Complex Analysis (Rudin, for example)
Topology (Munkres)
Algebra (Herstein)
From the pre-requisites to these books (no need to buy them, just flip through the first few pages) you should get a realistic feel for your preparedness for a graduate program.
Have fun,
Scott
If it really matters, 11i is currently available as 11.5.5 (11.5.6 out soon) and yes it's stable, and has been since about the 11.5.4 you mention. Do you have to patch it a good bit, hell yes. But if you have knowledgeable folk to set it up it is in fact stable enough to run in production. Now mind you that doesn't mean that 11.5.0 (initial 11i release) would even install fully, much less run, much less meet anyone's definition of stable...
Sigh.
Ok, your point that the US unduely meddles in other nations' business is spot-on. However you fail to note that pretty much every other nation engages in the same damn'd thing; the US is just more effective (not necessarily clever, "effective") at it because of its political, economic & military might.
As for Castro, the US never supported him. The States' policy certainly did push him toward communism in general and the USSR in particular, however.
As for Bin Ladin having been "high in the ranks" of the mujahadeen, he wasn't. Back in those days he was pretty much just a Saudi rich boy who was playing revolutionary dilettente. Please.
And finally, the fact that Pacifica (heavily biased) reports on a Palestinian (heavily biased) having found a piece of exploded munition (likely) that was labelled USA (unlikely) is a bit unlikely. While it's entirely possible that this all happened as reported, Palestinians have in large numbers proven themselves perfectly capable filling in details to make for a more compelling story (same goes for Israelis) and Pacifica is hardly the sort of media outlet to engage in a hard-hitting objective journalist in the face of just the sort of news that they prefer to report.
Never under-estimate the ability of most anyone who's not from the States to conflate the stupidity of one American with all US citizens. While that fellow's comments were clearly moronic and xenophobic, your knee-jerk America bashing isn't exactly the height of rational thought, regardless of how trendy it may be in your social circles.
I realize that I'm likely being a bit (perhaps even unduely) harsh, but this type of anti-American elitism so common.
I oh-so-clearly remember last summer as I was driving down the road listening to what used to be a good station here in Chicago, WXRT, but has now gone to corporate programming hell (and still it's about the best station in the city). So much to my delight the DJ puts on Iggy Pop & The Stooges "Search & Destroy". Before the song was 1/3 over dead air hits for about 2 seconds, followed by a generic "you're listening to WXRT..." message for 8-10 seconds, followed by bland corporate rock.
I've always wondered whether the DJ who actually spun that track was fired, though I'm almost certain that he was reprimanded.
Of course you neglect to mention that those were predominately wealthy older men "marrying" 13 year old girls. I'm still disturbed, you?
Not to mention the (I believe latest) novel by Thomas Pynchon, Mason-Dixon.
Perhaps he should run for Vice-President.
From www.sun.com/lawsuit/summary.html
.NET framework.
Sun is seeking remedies that include:
Preliminary injunctions prior to trial requiring Microsoft to:
Distribute Sun's current, binary implementation of Java Plug-in as part of Windows XP and Internet Explorer.
Stop the unlicensed distribution of Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine through separate web downloads, instead of incorporating within Windows XP and Internet Explorer, in accordance with Jan. 23, 2000 settlement agreement.
Permanent injunction requiring Microsoft to:
Disclose and license proprietary interfaces, protocols and formats.
Unbundle tied products like Internet Explorer, IIS and
Treble damages.
Attorneys' fees.
And the answer is: 1. From the above web-site,
The first Windows2000 cluster is at the Cornell Theory Center at #320 with 121 GF/s.
Yeah, I just got XP Pro on my new 'puter as well. I agree with the first poster's complaints, but yours are pretty easily rectifiable. Under the properties (right-click) of the task bar is a check box to allow you to show the quick launch bar, which contains the "show desktop" icon. There's also a lock/unlock taskbar checkbox that will allow you to move it to another side of the screen, and perhaps more importantly allow your to resize the amount of task bar allocated to the quick launch bar.
:) And it shouldn't be that hard to figure out what folder those images are in and add your own of a skull if you need to.
Oh, and as for the little yellow duck, I use that for my sys admin account, which I titled "root".
cheers,
Scott
Well said. However, this academic definition (and no, I am not one who believes academic definitions are bad by definition) is conflated by our everyday understanding of "liberal" to mean free and "conservative" to mean the status quo.
Hence, liberal economic policy would dramaticly cut taxes to free up markets. This would be of greatest benefit to the wealthy, and since those with wealth rather prefer the status quo, these are most commonly conservatives.
As for your Al Gore, he ends up an environmental conservative, and social moderate-liberal, an economic moderate-conservative, and so on.
cheers,
Scott
What you're assuming is equivalent to what these people are trying to prove. In short, given a sequence of random digits the likelihood of finding a given specific digit in the sequence is 1 - (9/10)^N, where N is the number of digits in the sequence. Hence as N --> infinity, this likelihood approaches 1. This is painting in broad strokes, admittedly. Now further, given a random sequence of m-digit numbers and a specific m-digit number, the likelihood of finding out desired member in the sequence is 1 - ((10^m - 1)/10^m)^N for an N digit sequence. Thus as N --> infinity, once again our chances of finding our desired number approach 1, for any specific value of m. So your intuition is pretty good, in that if the digits of pi are "random" in their distribution, then your chance of finding a given sequence within them is 1.
cheers, Scott
There're some nice bits of this at the Chicago Art Institute.
McKinney Middle Schools