It bothers me that so much money is spent on military technology having so many other issues that could be addressed.
This is why my sole criterion for voting in the next election is: who will cut the military budget the most?
You can buy a *lot* with $500 billion a year, or even 20% of $500 billion a year. Tax cuts, medical research, a massive shift away from fossil fuels ($100 billion buys a *lot* of nuclear plants), education, improved infrastructure, Third World aid, whatever. We can have the debate about *which* useful thing to do with the money, but, for fuck's sake, do *something* useful with it other than piss it down the hole of the Pentagon.
Also, one of them costs the American taxpayer billions of dollars. The other only costs millions.
Re:As a linux neophyte...
on
Hacking VIM
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· Score: 1
It's funny. He's an awk, perl, C, etc. whiz -- he can write code that looks like line noise and that does amazing amounts of regex magic. He writes code for some of the largest supercomputing projects in the country. The guy is frickin' brilliant, both at coding and at physics.
And yet he has to ask how to close a kwrite window.:)
If you're doing lattice simulations, you want the geometry of your supercomputer to match that of your lattice. QCD lattice supercomputers usually have nodes connected in some sort of 4-D geometry because the lattice of spacetime is 4-D.
So they're probably doing something on a lattice that has dimensions divisible by six.
I live in southern Arizona, in one of the sunniest deserts in the USA, so I'm a special case. I imagine our 24/7/365 average is more like 300.
I'm not saying that photovoltaics are the solution to our energy problems -- they're not. Maybe solar-thermal. Probably, though, unless we can ramp up solar-thermal on a very large scale, it's going to be nuclear. France has shown that it's economical and safe.
But the amount of panel it takes to drive a laptop is less than you might think.
No, that's with monitor set to mid brightness, HDD, and wifi. And this is a fairly power-hungry model, with a Geforce Go 7700 that -- even at low power -- uses more than an integrated video card.
Re:As a linux neophyte...
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 1
I use kwrite. It drives my advisor, who uses vi and grew up on punch cards, batty... but when you can use it (i.e. not over ssh) it's great and simple.
My grandfather's next door neighbor, actually, is a professional textbook writer (for elementary school, however). She does *quite* well for herself.
I imagine actual *good* books (you know, those legendary books that are known only by the author's name: Jackson, Goldstein, Griffiths, Sakurai, in physics; Piston in music theory) make their authors money.
The problem here is egotistical professors making you use their book because they have inflated ideas about how good it is. Those classes tend to be bad not because you've got a prof trying to make money, but because you have a prof centering the class on what he's done and what he thinks.
Gibbs' phenomenon is an interesting case. In the limit as the number of terms in the Fourier series goes to infinity, the *region* in which Gibbs' phenomenon takes place gets arbitrarily small, but the actual *amount* of the overshoot at the edge doesn't. So in the actual infinite limit, you've got a finite-sized error at the discontinuity happening over an infinitesimal range. Whether this "counts" as an error (since the integrated error over all points is zero; it's not like a Dirac delta) depends on your discipline, I think.
In physics (and I imagine engineering, etc.) we tend to ignore stuff like this, since "true square waves" don't really exist.
Mathematicians are all from another planet anyway, so who knows how they describe this.
As someone who tutors undergrads, I concur: a lot of the texts suck.:)
And, yes, while the Feynman Lectures were intended for undergrads, a whole lot of people use them to study for PhD quals.
Quantum physics makes a great deal of sense in the only way that physical theories can: it explains our observations, to an uncanny level. *Why* it should be this way we don't really know. Quantum mechanics really isn't terribly counterintuitive; it's just *different* than the rules that govern large collections of matter. Those rules -- macroscopic mechanics, classical electromagnetism, and so on -- are just what happens when you look at the limit of quantum mechanics when a great many particles act together.
I've had professors (PhD program in physics) say that they look stuff up on Wikipedia.
All the grad students look stuff up on it. There are lotsofpretty scholarlyphysics articles on Wikipedia, and it's a good place to go when you need to look something up or get guidance on a fundamental topic.
Of course, in physics, you're supposed to think about anything you read and confirm that it makes sense before you repeat it or believe it. This really should be true in all fields, but for some reason it's beaten into physicists' heads more than some others, I think.
Wikipedia is never the final authority on anything, but it's a good starting point. If you can't remember which one of Maxwell's equations has the minus sign, it's a quicker place than most (unless you have your copy of Jackson at hand.)
1) Because the 14th Amendment makes it a national issue, if you want a Constitutional justification.
2) I'm guessing that Clinton and Edwards only attend church and give lip service to religious beliefs because it would be political suicide not to, and while Obama appears to be sincere about his religion it's a less harmful brand (UCC).
He's against homosexual rights and reproductive rights, and he's more religious than his opponents. That right there is enough to make me never give him another thought.
There are also people who claim that feeding your kids only corn flakes is good for them. Should they be permitted to do so, claiming that there are significant risks associated with eating other foods?
Parents should and do have tremendous latitude in making decisions for their children.
I'm not allowed to whack my children with a hammer. I'm not allowed to not feed my children. I'm not allowed to put my children and others at risk of contracting nasty diseases like polio.
Our society doesn't really believe in punishing one person for the stupidity of another, even if they're stupid too. Getting drunk and punching someone in a bar is still battery even if the other guy is drunk too.
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It bothers me that so much money is spent on military technology having so many other issues that could be addressed.
This is why my sole criterion for voting in the next election is: who will cut the military budget the most?
You can buy a *lot* with $500 billion a year, or even 20% of $500 billion a year. Tax cuts, medical research, a massive shift away from fossil fuels ($100 billion buys a *lot* of nuclear plants), education, improved infrastructure, Third World aid, whatever. We can have the debate about *which* useful thing to do with the money, but, for fuck's sake, do *something* useful with it other than piss it down the hole of the Pentagon.
Also, one of them costs the American taxpayer billions of dollars. The other only costs millions.
It's funny. He's an awk, perl, C, etc. whiz -- he can write code that looks like line noise and that does amazing amounts of regex magic. He writes code for some of the largest supercomputing projects in the country. The guy is frickin' brilliant, both at coding and at physics.
:)
And yet he has to ask how to close a kwrite window.
Have you been paying attention to US policy lately?
Did you wander in from timecube?
Back in the 8th century Persia was a center of scholarship. :)
If you're doing lattice simulations, you want the geometry of your supercomputer to match that of your lattice. QCD lattice supercomputers usually have nodes connected in some sort of 4-D geometry because the lattice of spacetime is 4-D.
So they're probably doing something on a lattice that has dimensions divisible by six.
But they're running Linux.
... owait.
Now if we only had a Beowulf...
Thanks, I'll try that.
The world average is 150w/M^2, I think.
I live in southern Arizona, in one of the sunniest deserts in the USA, so I'm a special case. I imagine our 24/7/365 average is more like 300.
I'm not saying that photovoltaics are the solution to our energy problems -- they're not. Maybe solar-thermal. Probably, though, unless we can ramp up solar-thermal on a very large scale, it's going to be nuclear. France has shown that it's economical and safe.
But the amount of panel it takes to drive a laptop is less than you might think.
No, that's with monitor set to mid brightness, HDD, and wifi. And this is a fairly power-hungry model, with a Geforce Go 7700 that -- even at low power -- uses more than an integrated video card.
I use kwrite. It drives my advisor, who uses vi and grew up on punch cards, batty ... but when you can use it (i.e. not over ssh) it's great and simple.
Where I am, solar irradiance is about 700 W/m^2 during the day.
/proc/acpi), so that's a tenth of a square meter.
Solar panels are about 30% efficient, so that's 210 W/m^2 of actual power.
My laptop runs on about 20W (source:
You're right, of course. But...
Until the average undergraduate is capable of making that distinction
If you're not capable of making that decision, you shouldn't be an undergraduate.
Shouldn't we demand some basic critical thinking skills from our undergrads at all?
My grandfather's next door neighbor, actually, is a professional textbook writer (for elementary school, however). She does *quite* well for herself.
I imagine actual *good* books (you know, those legendary books that are known only by the author's name: Jackson, Goldstein, Griffiths, Sakurai, in physics; Piston in music theory) make their authors money.
The problem here is egotistical professors making you use their book because they have inflated ideas about how good it is. Those classes tend to be bad not because you've got a prof trying to make money, but because you have a prof centering the class on what he's done and what he thinks.
Gibbs' phenomenon is an interesting case. In the limit as the number of terms in the Fourier series goes to infinity, the *region* in which Gibbs' phenomenon takes place gets arbitrarily small, but the actual *amount* of the overshoot at the edge doesn't. So in the actual infinite limit, you've got a finite-sized error at the discontinuity happening over an infinitesimal range. Whether this "counts" as an error (since the integrated error over all points is zero; it's not like a Dirac delta) depends on your discipline, I think.
In physics (and I imagine engineering, etc.) we tend to ignore stuff like this, since "true square waves" don't really exist.
Mathematicians are all from another planet anyway, so who knows how they describe this.
As someone who tutors undergrads, I concur: a lot of the texts suck. :)
And, yes, while the Feynman Lectures were intended for undergrads, a whole lot of people use them to study for PhD quals.
Quantum physics makes a great deal of sense in the only way that physical theories can: it explains our observations, to an uncanny level. *Why* it should be this way we don't really know. Quantum mechanics really isn't terribly counterintuitive; it's just *different* than the rules that govern large collections of matter. Those rules -- macroscopic mechanics, classical electromagnetism, and so on -- are just what happens when you look at the limit of quantum mechanics when a great many particles act together.
I've had professors (PhD program in physics) say that they look stuff up on Wikipedia.
All the grad students look stuff up on it. There are lots of pretty scholarly physics articles on Wikipedia, and it's a good place to go when you need to look something up or get guidance on a fundamental topic.
Of course, in physics, you're supposed to think about anything you read and confirm that it makes sense before you repeat it or believe it. This really should be true in all fields, but for some reason it's beaten into physicists' heads more than some others, I think.
Wikipedia is never the final authority on anything, but it's a good starting point. If you can't remember which one of Maxwell's equations has the minus sign, it's a quicker place than most (unless you have your copy of Jackson at hand.)
1) Because the 14th Amendment makes it a national issue, if you want a Constitutional justification.
2) I'm guessing that Clinton and Edwards only attend church and give lip service to religious beliefs because it would be political suicide not to, and while Obama appears to be sincere about his religion it's a less harmful brand (UCC).
He's against homosexual rights and reproductive rights, and he's more religious than his opponents. That right there is enough to make me never give him another thought.
There are also people who claim that feeding your kids only corn flakes is good for them. Should they be permitted to do so, claiming that there are significant risks associated with eating other foods?
The rise in global temperatures is also directly [[linked|correlated]] to the decline in the number of pirates, too.
Parents should and do have tremendous latitude in making decisions for their children.
I'm not allowed to whack my children with a hammer.
I'm not allowed to not feed my children.
I'm not allowed to put my children and others at risk of contracting nasty diseases like polio.
These things are all pretty much the same.
Our society doesn't really believe in punishing one person for the stupidity of another, even if they're stupid too. Getting drunk and punching someone in a bar is still battery even if the other guy is drunk too.
Funny; I've seen evolution happen in the wild.
Apparently slashdot trolls still have some evolving to do.