Such a coincidental arrangement of numbers would not be "proof" that there was a God, but it would certainly be suggestive. For proof, I'd want a whole bunch of such suggestive things.
And you'd have them. If pi has the properties mathematicians suspect it does, not only does every finite string of digits appear somewhere in it, but they each appear an infinite number of times.
The aliens are vague about the location of the message (it might be in pi) so the Foster character runs software to search for it. Right at the end of the book her program finds a pattern (A circle drawn in 1s and 0s in an 11 by 11 matrix). This pulls together the thread in the book about belief in god vs religion. It turns out that somebody made the universe after all, and the Christians had been (sort of) right all along, though the scientists were right to demand evidence.
If you're given a free hand at the decryption code, you can find any message you want. Presumably the infinite non-repeating sequence of digits is full of marvelous patterns when displayed on a grid as well.
Maybe *every* pattern on every grid size, but I'm not sure of that. (The digits aren't actually independent random numbers.)
It's just a matter of time until some charlatan claims to find a message in our DNA. In a society that can't grok what's the deal with The Bible Codes, people will believe him.
I had a long hiatus from Civ II to Civ IV, and when I finally tried the latter I found it dull. The updates don't seem to add anything interesting, and haven't been any more fun than the original, or FreeCiv.
Is there some reason we should expect more from V?
The "scam" here is the massive one where America thought the purpose of the market was to provide retirement savings- Thus people dumped all their money into the market in hopes of having big retirement payouts.
Various replies disagree with you, but it has certainly been marketed to the public as a "Make Money Fast" game for ordinary people.
Look at the surge in the DOW since the 90's- that's everyone's retirements going straight into the market. You know how many people nearing retirement in 2008 and 2009 watched their retirement plans go out the window?
And here's the real motivation for all those Republican politicians who want to "save" Social Security by moving the money to the stock market. A sudden two-trillion dollar flood of money inflates share prices, the savvy rich people cash out, the correction hits, and the savvy rich people use their inflated profits to cash back in. The people who will actually need Social Security when they retire get left holding the empty bag. This privatization plan, like all others, is just a scam to move ordinary people's money into rich people's pockets.
Any trade where your purpose is to make money out of money seems pretty pointless to me. But I'm an engineer, so I certainly don't see the world the same way as a business/finance geek would. But as long as the finance geeks and politicos are jerking each other around, they're presumably not bothering anyone else
Unfortunately, this lucrative circle jerk has almost entirely displaced traditional means of making big money in the USA, i.e. manufacturing.
As the parent said, the job of the stock market is to marry capital to seekers of capital.
Maybe 400 years ago. Now the stock market has become a way of making money in itself. And as you can see from this story, even straight "playing the market" is passé. We're now about eight removes from the original purpose of stock markets.
I've always sworn that I'd never become the old fart who's confused in the world of modern technology, but I really miss being able to walk into a record store and flip through the endless racks of LPs or CDs. I suppose I'm going to miss book stores too, when that day comes not too long from now.
I'm kind of partial to Baroque and Renaissance music
kmfa.org is a non-commercial Classical station that favors the early stuff more than any other that I've come across.
They're not NPR, so they play music around the clock, but they do have the regular NPR-style begathons to keep donations coming in.
I introduced myself to Beethoven in high school, and my interests have kept creeping earlier and earlier. I'm a big fan of Renaissance music now. Presumably Medieval is next...
If you mean a stable Iraq, where the terrorist groups have no political clout and our troops aren't being shot at anymore... yes, we got exactly what we wanted.
however, the political fear of americans coming home in bodybags was too much
I think the actual reason is that it was starting to look too much like shooting fish in a barrel. The pictures of the hundreds of military vehicles bombed out along the highway shocked the public.
So does this means the libs are admitting that the surge worked?
If by 'surge' you mean paying the Sunnis not to fight us and upping the air strikes by a factor of five so we could mostly disengage the ground troops.
But the media lost interest in it all and the public outcry over the ongoing casualties faded away, so the pro-war party got what it wanted.
Yeah, the question seemed a bit ill-formed. If you can program you *are* a techie, so it might sound like asking how a non-techie becomes a techie. But it was phrased as if the person in question would remain a non-techie.
entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching
It really doesn't take a leading researcher to teach undergraduate classes. They should hire people who are actually good at teaching for this job.
You certainly have a good point, but one of the most commonly encountered whinges about the university system is that more classes should be taught by tenured professors.
Of course, the same whinges usually complain about the mere existence of tenure. Seems to be some substantial cognitive dissonance invoved in the public attitude toward universities.
There are actually more ways of getting rid of a tenured professor than people realize. I know of cases such as:
forcibly retired due to encroaching senility
fired for trying to work a deal with a granting agency to keep the university from getting its cut
laid off when their entire department or college was closed down
Also, though I'm not aware of any cases, most universities can declare a state analogous to bankruptcy, which lets them lay off anyone they please.
I don't know whether there's a trick for getting rid of someone for "not working hard enough", but I encountered fewer slacker profs when I was in college than slacker managers or brown-nosers in the private sector, where people don't have anything like tenure to help them keep their jobs.
And you make some other good observations. A prof who elects to slack after getting tenure:
won't ever get promoted to full professor or emeritus status
will get shorted during annual merit raises (which is usually a competitive process)
will live on nine month's salary rather than twelve
I suspect there aren't many people willing to work themselves half to death for for pennies during 6-8 years of grad school, and then slave away for another 7 years while being evaluated for tenure, just for the chancy deferred gratification of getting to go slack thereafter.
Slashdot Mirror
Such a coincidental arrangement of numbers would not be "proof" that there was a God, but it would certainly be suggestive. For proof, I'd want a whole bunch of such suggestive things.
And you'd have them. If pi has the properties mathematicians suspect it does, not only does every finite string of digits appear somewhere in it, but they each appear an infinite number of times.
He is right. I do not like it, but he is right.
And it will keep all the honest people identified.
If he thinks crooks can't fabricate an alias, or steal yours, he's an idiot.
The aliens are vague about the location of the message (it might be in pi) so the Foster character runs software to search for it. Right at the end of the book her program finds a pattern (A circle drawn in 1s and 0s in an 11 by 11 matrix). This pulls together the thread in the book about belief in god vs religion. It turns out that somebody made the universe after all, and the Christians had been (sort of) right all along, though the scientists were right to demand evidence.
If you're given a free hand at the decryption code, you can find any message you want. Presumably the infinite non-repeating sequence of digits is full of marvelous patterns when displayed on a grid as well.
Maybe *every* pattern on every grid size, but I'm not sure of that. (The digits aren't actually independent random numbers.)
It's just a matter of time until some charlatan claims to find a message in our DNA. In a society that can't grok what's the deal with The Bible Codes, people will believe him.
I had a long hiatus from Civ II to Civ IV, and when I finally tried the latter I found it dull. The updates don't seem to add anything interesting, and haven't been any more fun than the original, or FreeCiv.
Is there some reason we should expect more from V?
Looks like all us 'little' sites are getting booted off the internet soon.
Oh well. It was a good run, right guys?
Disruptive technology. Doesn't preserve the existing power structure. The only marvel is that it has lasted this long.
The "scam" here is the massive one where America thought the purpose of the market was to provide retirement savings- Thus people dumped all their money into the market in hopes of having big retirement payouts.
Various replies disagree with you, but it has certainly been marketed to the public as a "Make Money Fast" game for ordinary people.
Look at the surge in the DOW since the 90's- that's everyone's retirements going straight into the market. You know how many people nearing retirement in 2008 and 2009 watched their retirement plans go out the window?
And here's the real motivation for all those Republican politicians who want to "save" Social Security by moving the money to the stock market. A sudden two-trillion dollar flood of money inflates share prices, the savvy rich people cash out, the correction hits, and the savvy rich people use their inflated profits to cash back in. The people who will actually need Social Security when they retire get left holding the empty bag. This privatization plan, like all others, is just a scam to move ordinary people's money into rich people's pockets.
Any trade where your purpose is to make money out of money seems pretty pointless to me. But I'm an engineer, so I certainly don't see the world the same way as a business/finance geek would. But as long as the finance geeks and politicos are jerking each other around, they're presumably not bothering anyone else
Unfortunately, this lucrative circle jerk has almost entirely displaced traditional means of making big money in the USA, i.e. manufacturing.
As the parent said, the job of the stock market is to marry capital to seekers of capital.
Maybe 400 years ago. Now the stock market has become a way of making money in itself. And as you can see from this story, even straight "playing the market" is passé. We're now about eight removes from the original purpose of stock markets.
Whose body were they storing when they scanned the images?
They may not be mortgage free; but everything helps. Well done.
OTOH, if not for the mortgage crisis they'd have been able to cash it in for $250K in fun money.
Could something like this have the same effect on electronics as an EMP?
Imagine the chaos if all the microprocessors on the planet burned out at once. Or just in one hemisphere.
in the latest Scientific American, by the same guy.
I bought a nook for Christmas this year.
Wow... you really do your Christmas shopping early.
I've always sworn that I'd never become the old fart who's confused in the world of modern technology, but I really miss being able to walk into a record store and flip through the endless racks of LPs or CDs. I suppose I'm going to miss book stores too, when that day comes not too long from now.
that does it for all the movies and TV shows that display the FBI seal.
Maybe they've been infiltrated by agents of the RIAA...
He says he has a girlfriend and uses Ubuntu. One is a lie. Geeks don't have girlfriends.
Maybe he met a girl who uses Ubuntu and is fantasizing about both.
I'm kind of partial to Baroque and Renaissance music
kmfa.org is a non-commercial Classical station that favors the early stuff more than any other that I've come across.
They're not NPR, so they play music around the clock, but they do have the regular NPR-style begathons to keep donations coming in.
I introduced myself to Beethoven in high school, and my interests have kept creeping earlier and earlier. I'm a big fan of Renaissance music now. Presumably Medieval is next...
Five billion dollars is still a lot of money.
If you mean a stable Iraq, where the terrorist groups have no political clout and our troops aren't being shot at anymore... yes, we got exactly what we wanted.
In the FOX News fantasy. In the real world, "Data compiled by the health, defense and interior ministries show a total of 535 people were killed in attacks across the country in July. 396 of them were civilians, 89 were policemen, and 50 were soldiers."
And that a mere nine years after the war purportedly ended.
Sadly, the US media has utterly lost interest in telling us what is going on in Iraq.
however, the political fear of americans coming home in bodybags was too much
I think the actual reason is that it was starting to look too much like shooting fish in a barrel. The pictures of the hundreds of military vehicles bombed out along the highway shocked the public.
So does this means the libs are admitting that the surge worked?
If by 'surge' you mean paying the Sunnis not to fight us and upping the air strikes by a factor of five so we could mostly disengage the ground troops.
But the media lost interest in it all and the public outcry over the ongoing casualties faded away, so the pro-war party got what it wanted.
They shouldn't .... small business owners dont feel pressured to learn plumbing - they hire a plumber.
Best response posted so far.
No, really... They shouldn't.
Yeah, the question seemed a bit ill-formed. If you can program you *are* a techie, so it might sound like asking how a non-techie becomes a techie. But it was phrased as if the person in question would remain a non-techie.
entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching
It really doesn't take a leading researcher to teach undergraduate classes. They should hire people who are actually good at teaching for this job.
You certainly have a good point, but one of the most commonly encountered whinges about the university system is that more classes should be taught by tenured professors.
Of course, the same whinges usually complain about the mere existence of tenure. Seems to be some substantial cognitive dissonance invoved in the public attitude toward universities.
despite tenure meaning they can't be fired
There are actually more ways of getting rid of a tenured professor than people realize. I know of cases such as:
Also, though I'm not aware of any cases, most universities can declare a state analogous to bankruptcy, which lets them lay off anyone they please.
I don't know whether there's a trick for getting rid of someone for "not working hard enough", but I encountered fewer slacker profs when I was in college than slacker managers or brown-nosers in the private sector, where people don't have anything like tenure to help them keep their jobs.
And you make some other good observations. A prof who elects to slack after getting tenure:
I suspect there aren't many people willing to work themselves half to death for for pennies during 6-8 years of grad school, and then slave away for another 7 years while being evaluated for tenure, just for the chancy deferred gratification of getting to go slack thereafter.