Given an object, is there a mathematical test to ascertain whether it is an artifact or not? I think there is. If I take a few thousand characters of German Ultra or Russian Venona traffic it will appear completely random. Apply the smarts of Alan Turing, et al., and some very interesting facts can emerge. Conversely, looking out my window just now, i see a cloud that looks like a horse. Methinks Claude Shannon had something to say about the mathematics of distinguishing the two cases. The madness of John Nash illustrates the necessity thereof.
If "intelligent design" is nothing but gainsaying Charles Darwin, a crypto-Creationism, then I don't find it very interesting. I do think the mathematics implied by the last paragraph could be quite interesting.
I recall feeling skepticism when I heard the explanation that the putative perturbation of Uranus was due to erroneous observations and/or incorrect calculations. Perhaps it was a romantic attachment to the notion of Planet X. I also recall hearing that the perturbation was caused by some transcient event, something massive and unobserved just passin' thru. (A much more romantic notion.)
NOW I'd like to know whether this new planet's orbit is such that its gravity would contribute anything to the supposed purturbation of Uranus.
The poster apparently laments the fact that those at whom this pain-ray will be deployed will not be extended the courtesy of removing glasses and contact lenses. As snarkiness goes, that's a good line.
However, I believe that the device will be deployed against people who have been extended the courtesy of an invitation to depart. I believe standard procedure is to command rioters/protesters/whatever to disperse. If you're absent, the ray won't affect your eyewear.
Four students in Ohio in 1970 learned the hard way that leaving the scene of a riot/protest/whatever is the safer decision. Please don't misunderstand. I'm not condemning protest and/or civil disobedience. Civil disobedience has a long and honored history extending back to Socrates. But Socrates did not balk at the hemlock, but manfully drank it.
At Kent State, the National Guard had guns and tear gas to use against protesters. With deadly force being tossed around it's easy for a protester to miscalculate and be charged a much higher price of civil disobedience than s/he originally intended. There's a big step between tear gas and a bullet. If it's bad to hurt but-not-kill people, or maybe endanger their eyesight, is it better to shoot them? Or is it best to merely retreat s'il vous plait?
Throughout all of human history, when there's been a chokepoint, humans have found a way to seize control of it and deny it to competitors and exploit it to their advantage. Now that someone has pointed out that LaGrange Points may have a strategic significance that's a problem? As I see it the alternatives are:
1) cede control of the LaGrange points to an enlightened body of incorruptible superbeings more commonly known as the UN
2) keep our mits off the LaGrange points until some less-gullible entity seizes control thereof
3) don't worry about it until someone figures out how to turn a buck controlling the LaGrange points then buy out that someone
One of the lessons of Chaos Theory is that teeny deltas can goof the best simulations. Mindful of this, any scientist with an axe to grind can tweak the parameterization of his simulation to get any result he wants.
This is a limitation of Scientific Method. Modernity had this ideal of the disinterested scientist who went whereever the data led. Post-modernity recognizes the biases of the researcher slants the research.
In the old Soviet Union, you had Lysenko sending competing scientists to the gulag. Here and now you have to get funding. Let's suppose you had a cool simulation that showed that global warming would do nothing at all. How in the world would you get your grant-requests funded?
With a grant from the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy? OK. You're right. But that makes my point.
How about a poll to ascertain the truth of the Reimann Hypothesis? Or a poll to determine the score of the 2006 World Series?
My point is that voting may be the best way to elect politicians, but I think this poll about life on other planets is a complete waste of time. The only information it can uncover is about the people polled, not about the little green men. People hear stories about UFOs, etc. and people see a lot of fiction where little green men exist. These fictions color people's expectations. For instance, Orson Wells' prank presumed the existence of Martians. Now we know Mars appears to be a dead world, so all stories about ETs involve extrasolar beings and I presume the 60% of poll respondents assume little green men are extrasolar in origin.
Others have spoken of the coarseness of polls. Usually, when folks ask about life on other planets, the presumption is we're talking about intelligent life.
I said that Mars appears to be a dead world. We don't see canals thereon, but perhaps some microbe lurks under some rock awaiting a warm day and some liquid water to enable its growth. Given the recent evidence of liquid water on Mars, the likelihood of such microbial action is greatly increased. Focus on those microbes and it's easy to put yourself into that 60%.
Your answer depends upon what you're thinking about the pollster asks. If you're thinking of microbes you may say one thing, and if you're thinking of Marvin the Martian, you may say another thing. Your response will be skewed by the way the question is asked.
That's something a poll will tell you: what folks are thinking about when polled. I think most polls are often mere editorials, they say the most about the pollster.
The fact that "churchgoers" were identified in the sample says something about the pollster. Why'd they ask about "churchgoers"? Do churches send probes to other planets?
No, the pollster wants to say something about churchgoers. OK, say something about churchgoers, don't make a pretense of some poll.
After you finish reading about the Hilbert Problem solvers, you might want to pick up John Derbyshire's excellent _Prime Obsession_ that goes thru the Reimann hypothesis that neatly fuses calculus and number theory. If you've studied either, the notion of putting both under the same umbrella is truly psychodelic.
I make a lot of friends and keep track of their skillsets, thus I have generally recommended one or two names when I've left a smaller firm. Larger firms are on their own.
Moreover, I've made a point to keep things friendly with former employers. They have been the source of some lucrative moonlighting gigs.
If the top dog is acting oddly, just be patient and get out with minimum unpleasantness. He'll forget his displeasure if you give him no cause. Keep your promises and don't take him too seriously. After a while he'll calm down and you may find the relationship advantageous in the future.
This is going to sound like psychobabble, but it's true. The money and the work are secondary and your relationships are primary. Be true to your friends and treat people fairly, including insane bosses.
Elected legislators like to avoid responsibility for hard decisions.
In addition to the broadcast flag, politicians would like to avoid responsibility for voting for or against abortion or gay marriage, so they hide in the weeds and let unelected judges or bureaucrats take the heat.
Laws are often written in a vague enough way that responsibility for unpopular consequences can be dumped onto the bureaucrasy and sorted out by the judiciary.
If elected officials abdicate their responsibility, a tyranny of the judiciary or of the bureaucrasy is possible.
The bad thing about this broadcast flag matter is that neither the villains in the bureaucrasy nor the heroes in the judiciary were elected officials directly accountable to the electorate.
Let's see: The Register, a general tech info site located in another country. Versus: Groklaw, a legally focused site located in the US and run by PJ, a legal expert (not a lawyer, but any lawyer would do well to hire her to clerk).
And they disagree on a point of US law?
On the face of it, I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Ms. Jones.
I've heard that linguistically speaking, the speech that Pentacostals utter when they speak in Tongues, resembles the babbling of baby talk. If we could get a cooperative Pentacostal to take a PET scan while speaking in tongues, we could identify which area of the brain is active during this phenomenon. I suspect that this will correspond to the same bit of circuitry this research identifies.
Disclaimer: Even if we find a neurobiological basis for this religious phenomenon, it will neither confirm nor deny God is involved. Faith will merely assert that that deity is using this mechanism. I'm not Pentacostal, but I don't think speaking in tongues is "of the devil," either.
Take two words you can easily remember and concatenate them (that squares the size of the dictionary to exhaust).
Substitute a digit for a letter, i.e. 1 for l. (that increases the work factor by a few multiples depending upon the digit-letter combos and it guarantees neither word occurs in any dictionary.)
Intentionally mispell one of the words. I wonder how many times some geek type has used the password "sourceror"?
I have a friend whom i deeply respect who has been programming for over twenty years. He read Kent Beck's book and exclaimed that it "changed his life." I'm now working on a project and integrating my project with CppUnit. It's mega sexy cool. So, yeah, I think it's time for the Linux Kernel to embrace TDD. However, it may be a bit of a challenge. I have a cave-man grasp of the Linux Kernel. (Grog know kernel monolithic.) Thus devising effective unit tests could be a reel beech!
If some young Turk wants to earn his chops within the OSS community and snag a lifetime's worth of wiffie, he can create a "LinuxUnit" framework with a suite of tests that demonstrates key parts of the kernel are correct. With "LinuxUnit" in place, anybody with a kernel patch proposal could demonstrate his patch breaks nothing, and if it extends kernel functionality, demonstrate that it performs as promised. Moreover, if (heaven forfend) a bug is discovered in Linux, a "LinuxUnit" test case demonstrating the issue would serve as a point of focus.
Though I think this is a Real Good Idea, since I am neither young, nor Turkish, I place it before the Slashdot community as an unimplemented suggestion.
Presumably there's nobody on Mars to organize protest marches if we change it's climate and make it like some inhospitable hell-place like Holland, MI. Anything one might do to the climate of Mars would only complicate cleanup if we later found a better way to terraform it.
There is a side benefit of changing Mars' climate. It would provide an existence proof that it is indeed possible for humans to accomplish climate change and it would gauge how much human effort it takes to effect how much change. It would validate the atmospheric/climate models that predict global warming here on earth.
If you believe that only ninnies disbelieve in global warming, at least recognize a lot of those ninnies could not deny a "green Mars."
It is unfortunate that global warming FAITH is associated with one political party and global warming UNBELIEF is associated with its opponent. As fine as faith and skepticism are as ways of thinking of things like life-after-death, science works better when it is disinterested in politics and follows the data. (Google Lysenko.)
Mucking about with the Martian atmosphere would provide a plethora of data. That data could make the global warming debate here on earth a lot more "reality-based."
Over a decade back, my employer wrote this application that ran on a DOS platform. It did its thing and it was replaced with a Win3.1 application. Last year, I was cleaning out some old files and found the original DOS specs. They had some stuff that had been obsoleted, but the core calculations had not changed and they provided test cases that were pure gold for the current rewrite.
Mindful of this, I am careful to retain specs of even the deadest of projects, because 90% of the time someone with pointy hair will say, "Make this like that except..."
When I have the specs from some old project, I have a rigorous description of "that" that I'm not likely to get from the management types. I also get a different perspective on the problem that can be very useful if I can aggregate it.
I've found that a layer of reynolds aluminum foil (shiny side out) on all the walls, and over the windows works fairly well. Soldering the edges together put a lot of lead fumes in the air, but I ignored that.
Also, when I go outside, if i wear a hat made of tinfoil, it keeps the wardrivers out of my head. However, it doesn't stop the voices that tell me to kill.
Imagine the scene: Good guys have Bad guy cornered in an abandoned house. They yell, "Give up." He yells, "You'll never get me alive, coppers." He aims a HERF (high energy radio frequency) gun through the closed wooden doorway at the cop's smart-guns' brains.
He then steps out with an AK-47 and wreaks mayhem while the cops wave lobotomized smart-guns. Bad guy is finally clubbed to death after he runs out of ammo.
I happen to have studied enough mathematics for MSU to grant me a master's degree and I didn't find Derb's book the equivalent of "Shakespeare for Dummies."
It was more like the nuts and bolts of how the Bard lived while he was writing Hamlet and how various folks who have come after have interpreted the parts.
To be quite honest, after doing all those fun maths in school, my career has generally involved little more than algebra. It was a rare pleasure to solve an order 360 polynomial using a secant method gradient descent. Then, sadly, to hand the algorithm to another guy to code up. Something my high school senior daughter did last year in AP Calc.
Thus the popular math book provides a math-mitty (as in Walter) to remember when he ran with the big dogs.
To anyone familiar with calc and number theory, the notion of bringing the two together is a mind-boggling coolness. When mathematicians see such things the response is akin to worship.
The FCC says the broadcast bands are a common good owned by the public and vulgarities ought not corrupt it. The FCC says so, provided the antenna emitting those photons is located on the ground and those photons' frequency is HF or UHF.
But that's not true if the antenna is located in the heavens and the photons are in microwave bands. In such case, those considerations of a public good and civil discourse go to hell.
Sure, it all makes perfect sense.
If American culture is coarse and vulgar then broadcasts to the American public should reflect this on both terrestrial and satellite broadcasts. The FCC should be consistent, applying one standard to the AM & FM and satellite bands.
If the resultant content is coarse and vulgar, that reflects the marketplace's demand for corruption. Don't like it? Improve yourself and those around you. Not enough? It tells you you're failing at the job of being salt and light.
of course Indian doctors are as good as those you find here in the states. Many fine doctors I've run into here in Michigan were Indian. My oncologist is Filipino and he saved my life. A generation ago, the term "brain drain" was used to characterize the influx of smart guys to the USA.
If we really are in a post-geographic age, the notion of brain-drain or outsourcing fades in significance. There are only markets for talent. I'd rather be excellent than American, and I'm damned proud to be American. And I'm proud of my colleagues of foreign birth.
If my cancer comes back, I will want the absolute best treatments on the planet. If I have to goto Bombay for it, so be it. I believe in free markets and hope they will provide for my needs.
the republicans have been whining and crying about judicial nomination filibusters and threatening to change the Senate rules to allow simple majority votes (the nuclear option) for the last two years. what are they suggesting now that they didn't suggest then?
i'd like to see the filibusters like we saw Jimmy Stewart do in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington." Instead, someone just says, "i'm filibustering" and everybody stops. Going back to the old rules should have no problem with the Supremes declaring THAT illegal.
Of course, it would be interesting to see the Supremes reject nominations to the bench. That would be an interesting "separation of powers" matter. Or suppose Congress were to impeach a Supreme Court justice and then the Court rejected it.
Slashdot Mirror
Given an object, is there a mathematical test to ascertain whether it is an artifact or not? I think there is. If I take a few thousand characters of German Ultra or Russian Venona traffic it will appear completely random. Apply the smarts of Alan Turing, et al., and some very interesting facts can emerge. Conversely, looking out my window just now, i see a cloud that looks like a horse. Methinks Claude Shannon had something to say about the mathematics of distinguishing the two cases. The madness of John Nash illustrates the necessity thereof.
If "intelligent design" is nothing but gainsaying Charles Darwin, a crypto-Creationism, then I don't find it very interesting. I do think the mathematics implied by the last paragraph could be quite interesting.
I recall feeling skepticism when I heard the explanation that the putative perturbation of Uranus was due to erroneous observations and/or incorrect calculations. Perhaps it was a romantic attachment to the notion of Planet X. I also recall hearing that the perturbation was caused by some transcient event, something massive and unobserved just passin' thru. (A much more romantic notion.)
NOW I'd like to know whether this new planet's orbit is such that its gravity would contribute anything to the supposed purturbation of Uranus.
The poster apparently laments the fact that those at whom this pain-ray will be deployed will not be extended the courtesy of removing glasses and contact lenses. As snarkiness goes, that's a good line.
However, I believe that the device will be deployed against people who have been extended the courtesy of an invitation to depart. I believe standard procedure is to command rioters/protesters/whatever to disperse. If you're absent, the ray won't affect your eyewear.
Four students in Ohio in 1970 learned the hard way that leaving the scene of a riot/protest/whatever is the safer decision. Please don't misunderstand. I'm not condemning protest and/or civil disobedience. Civil disobedience has a long and honored history extending back to Socrates. But Socrates did not balk at the hemlock, but manfully drank it.
At Kent State, the National Guard had guns and tear gas to use against protesters. With deadly force being tossed around it's easy for a protester to miscalculate and be charged a much higher price of civil disobedience than s/he originally intended. There's a big step between tear gas and a bullet. If it's bad to hurt but-not-kill people, or maybe endanger their eyesight, is it better to shoot them? Or is it best to merely retreat s'il vous plait?
Throughout all of human history, when there's been a chokepoint, humans have found a way to seize control of it and deny it to competitors and exploit it to their advantage. Now that someone has pointed out that LaGrange Points may have a strategic significance that's a problem? As I see it the alternatives are:
1) cede control of the LaGrange points to an enlightened body of incorruptible superbeings more commonly known as the UN
2) keep our mits off the LaGrange points until some less-gullible entity seizes control thereof
3) don't worry about it until someone figures out how to turn a buck controlling the LaGrange points then buy out that someone
One of the lessons of Chaos Theory is that teeny deltas can goof the best simulations. Mindful of this, any scientist with an axe to grind can tweak the parameterization of his simulation to get any result he wants.
This is a limitation of Scientific Method. Modernity had this ideal of the disinterested scientist who went whereever the data led. Post-modernity recognizes the biases of the researcher slants the research.
In the old Soviet Union, you had Lysenko sending competing scientists to the gulag. Here and now you have to get funding. Let's suppose you had a cool simulation that showed that global warming would do nothing at all. How in the world would you get your grant-requests funded?
With a grant from the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy? OK. You're right. But that makes my point.
Funding pressures only END at falsifying results to satisfy patrons. It begins much more subtly.
Anybody will be more likely to propose studying X that he knows he can get a grant and not consider studying Y that he thinks nobody will fund.
OTOH, I'm probably just paranoid b/c I finally read Michael Crichton's _State Of Fear_ last weekend.
How about a poll to ascertain the truth of the Reimann Hypothesis? Or a poll to determine the score of the 2006 World Series?
My point is that voting may be the best way to elect politicians, but I think this poll about life on other planets is a complete waste of time. The only information it can uncover is about the people polled, not about the little green men. People hear stories about UFOs, etc. and people see a lot of fiction where little green men exist. These fictions color people's expectations. For instance, Orson Wells' prank presumed the existence of Martians. Now we know Mars appears to be a dead world, so all stories about ETs involve extrasolar beings and I presume the 60% of poll respondents assume little green men are extrasolar in origin.
Others have spoken of the coarseness of polls. Usually, when folks ask about life on other planets, the presumption is we're talking about intelligent life.
I said that Mars appears to be a dead world. We don't see canals thereon, but perhaps some microbe lurks under some rock awaiting a warm day and some liquid water to enable its growth. Given the recent evidence of liquid water on Mars, the likelihood of such microbial action is greatly increased. Focus on those microbes and it's easy to put yourself into that 60%.
Your answer depends upon what you're thinking about the pollster asks. If you're thinking of microbes you may say one thing, and if you're thinking of Marvin the Martian, you may say another thing. Your response will be skewed by the way the question is asked.
That's something a poll will tell you: what folks are thinking about when polled. I think most polls are often mere editorials, they say the most about the pollster.
The fact that "churchgoers" were identified in the sample says something about the pollster. Why'd they ask about "churchgoers"? Do churches send probes to other planets?
No, the pollster wants to say something about churchgoers. OK, say something about churchgoers, don't make a pretense of some poll.
Hey, let's add a circuit to the GPS-tracking clothing to check proximity to a subcutaneously implanted RFID chip.
That way you'll know both where your spouse goes and when she takes her clothes off!
Is this a great technology or what?
After you finish reading about the Hilbert Problem solvers, you might want to pick up John Derbyshire's excellent _Prime Obsession_ that goes thru the Reimann hypothesis that neatly fuses calculus and number theory. If you've studied either, the notion of putting both under the same umbrella is truly psychodelic.
I make a lot of friends and keep track of their skillsets, thus I have generally recommended one or two names when I've left a smaller firm. Larger firms are on their own.
Moreover, I've made a point to keep things friendly with former employers. They have been the source of some lucrative moonlighting gigs.
If the top dog is acting oddly, just be patient and get out with minimum unpleasantness. He'll forget his displeasure if you give him no cause. Keep your promises and don't take him too seriously. After a while he'll calm down and you may find the relationship advantageous in the future.
This is going to sound like psychobabble, but it's true. The money and the work are secondary and your relationships are primary. Be true to your friends and treat people fairly, including insane bosses.
Elected legislators like to avoid responsibility for hard decisions.
In addition to the broadcast flag, politicians would like to avoid responsibility for voting for or against abortion or gay marriage, so they hide in the weeds and let unelected judges or bureaucrats take the heat.
Laws are often written in a vague enough way that responsibility for unpopular consequences can be dumped onto the bureaucrasy and sorted out by the judiciary.
If elected officials abdicate their responsibility, a tyranny of the judiciary or of the bureaucrasy is possible.
The bad thing about this broadcast flag matter is that neither the villains in the bureaucrasy nor the heroes in the judiciary were elected officials directly accountable to the electorate.
Let's see: The Register, a general tech info site located in another country. Versus: Groklaw, a legally focused site located in the US and run by PJ, a legal expert (not a lawyer, but any lawyer would do well to hire her to clerk).
And they disagree on a point of US law?
On the face of it, I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Ms. Jones.
I've heard that linguistically speaking, the speech that Pentacostals utter when they speak in Tongues, resembles the babbling of baby talk. If we could get a cooperative Pentacostal to take a PET scan while speaking in tongues, we could identify which area of the brain is active during this phenomenon. I suspect that this will correspond to the same bit of circuitry this research identifies.
Disclaimer: Even if we find a neurobiological basis for this religious phenomenon, it will neither confirm nor deny God is involved. Faith will merely assert that that deity is using this mechanism. I'm not Pentacostal, but I don't think speaking in tongues is "of the devil," either.
Take two words you can easily remember and concatenate them (that squares the size of the dictionary to exhaust).
Substitute a digit for a letter, i.e. 1 for l. (that increases the work factor by a few multiples depending upon the digit-letter combos and it guarantees neither word occurs in any dictionary.)
Intentionally mispell one of the words. I wonder how many times some geek type has used the password "sourceror"?
I have a friend whom i deeply respect who has been programming for over twenty years. He read Kent Beck's book and exclaimed that it "changed his life." I'm now working on a project and integrating my project with CppUnit. It's mega sexy cool. So, yeah, I think it's time for the Linux Kernel to embrace TDD. However, it may be a bit of a challenge. I have a cave-man grasp of the Linux Kernel. (Grog know kernel monolithic.) Thus devising effective unit tests could be a reel beech!
If some young Turk wants to earn his chops within the OSS community and snag a lifetime's worth of wiffie, he can create a "LinuxUnit" framework with a suite of tests that demonstrates key parts of the kernel are correct. With "LinuxUnit" in place, anybody with a kernel patch proposal could demonstrate his patch breaks nothing, and if it extends kernel functionality, demonstrate that it performs as promised. Moreover, if (heaven forfend) a bug is discovered in Linux, a "LinuxUnit" test case demonstrating the issue would serve as a point of focus.
Though I think this is a Real Good Idea, since I am neither young, nor Turkish, I place it before the Slashdot community as an unimplemented suggestion.
does anyone else think the term 'plasmonics' sounds like something you'd see in the movie 'Barbarella?'
I think the Space Staton is scheduled to arrive about six months after my nuclear-powered flying car.
Presumably there's nobody on Mars to organize protest marches if we change it's climate and make it like some inhospitable hell-place like Holland, MI. Anything one might do to the climate of Mars would only complicate cleanup if we later found a better way to terraform it.
There is a side benefit of changing Mars' climate. It would provide an existence proof that it is indeed possible for humans to accomplish climate change and it would gauge how much human effort it takes to effect how much change. It would validate the atmospheric/climate models that predict global warming here on earth.
If you believe that only ninnies disbelieve in global warming, at least recognize a lot of those ninnies could not deny a "green Mars."
It is unfortunate that global warming FAITH is associated with one political party and global warming UNBELIEF is associated with its opponent. As fine as faith and skepticism are as ways of thinking of things like life-after-death, science works better when it is disinterested in politics and follows the data. (Google Lysenko.)
Mucking about with the Martian atmosphere would provide a plethora of data. That data could make the global warming debate here on earth a lot more "reality-based."
Over a decade back, my employer wrote this application that ran on a DOS platform. It did its thing and it was replaced with a Win3.1 application. Last year, I was cleaning out some old files and found the original DOS specs. They had some stuff that had been obsoleted, but the core calculations had not changed and they provided test cases that were pure gold for the current rewrite.
Mindful of this, I am careful to retain specs of even the deadest of projects, because 90% of the time someone with pointy hair will say, "Make this like that except..."
When I have the specs from some old project, I have a rigorous description of "that" that I'm not likely to get from the management types. I also get a different perspective on the problem that can be very useful if I can aggregate it.
I've found that a layer of reynolds aluminum foil (shiny side out) on all the walls, and over the windows works fairly well. Soldering the edges together put a lot of lead fumes in the air, but I ignored that.
Also, when I go outside, if i wear a hat made of tinfoil, it keeps the wardrivers out of my head. However, it doesn't stop the voices that tell me to kill.
Imagine the scene: Good guys have Bad guy cornered in an abandoned house. They yell, "Give up." He yells, "You'll never get me alive, coppers." He aims a HERF (high energy radio frequency) gun through the closed wooden doorway at the cop's smart-guns' brains.
He then steps out with an AK-47 and wreaks mayhem while the cops wave lobotomized smart-guns. Bad guy is finally clubbed to death after he runs out of ammo.
I happen to have studied enough mathematics for MSU to grant me a master's degree and I didn't find Derb's book the equivalent of "Shakespeare for Dummies."
It was more like the nuts and bolts of how the Bard lived while he was writing Hamlet and how various folks who have come after have interpreted the parts.
To be quite honest, after doing all those fun maths in school, my career has generally involved little more than algebra. It was a rare pleasure to solve an order 360 polynomial using a secant method gradient descent. Then, sadly, to hand the algorithm to another guy to code up. Something my high school senior daughter did last year in AP Calc.
Thus the popular math book provides a math-mitty (as in Walter) to remember when he ran with the big dogs.
To anyone familiar with calc and number theory, the notion of bringing the two together is a mind-boggling coolness. When mathematicians see such things the response is akin to worship.
The FCC says the broadcast bands are a common good owned by the public and vulgarities ought not corrupt it. The FCC says so, provided the antenna emitting those photons is located on the ground and those photons' frequency is HF or UHF.
But that's not true if the antenna is located in the heavens and the photons are in microwave bands. In such case, those considerations of a public good and civil discourse go to hell.
Sure, it all makes perfect sense.
If American culture is coarse and vulgar then broadcasts to the American public should reflect this on both terrestrial and satellite broadcasts. The FCC should be consistent, applying one standard to the AM & FM and satellite bands.
If the resultant content is coarse and vulgar, that reflects the marketplace's demand for corruption. Don't like it? Improve yourself and those around you. Not enough? It tells you you're failing at the job of being salt and light.
of course Indian doctors are as good as those you find here in the states. Many fine doctors I've run into here in Michigan were Indian. My oncologist is Filipino and he saved my life. A generation ago, the term "brain drain" was used to characterize the influx of smart guys to the USA.
If we really are in a post-geographic age, the notion of brain-drain or outsourcing fades in significance. There are only markets for talent. I'd rather be excellent than American, and I'm damned proud to be American. And I'm proud of my colleagues of foreign birth.
If my cancer comes back, I will want the absolute best treatments on the planet. If I have to goto Bombay for it, so be it. I believe in free markets and hope they will provide for my needs.
the republicans have been whining and crying about judicial nomination filibusters and threatening to change the Senate rules to allow simple majority votes (the nuclear option) for the last two years.
what are they suggesting now that they didn't suggest then?
i'd like to see the filibusters like we saw Jimmy Stewart do in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington." Instead, someone just says, "i'm filibustering" and everybody stops. Going back to the old rules should have no problem with the Supremes declaring THAT illegal.
Of course, it would be interesting to see the Supremes reject nominations to the bench. That would be an interesting "separation of powers" matter. Or suppose Congress were to impeach a Supreme Court justice and then the Court rejected it.