If Donald in Mathmagic Land is not available on DVD or VHS, how do the teachers get copies? I seem to remember it was a movie reel. When I saw it in school there were no DVDs or VHS tapes (although Beta was around).
suggestion that any number of a truly fundamental significance besides 0 and 1 would be not only rational but an integer seems improbable
What about the Monster? This is the largest "simple" group which doesn't fit into any group category. What this means is rather hard to explain in simple terms, but this group has lots of mysterious connections to other maths. The order is 2^46 * 3^20 * 5^9 * 7^6 * 11^2 * 13^3 * 17 * 19 * 23 *29 *31*41*47*59*71.
Re:Mathematics not universal?
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Boolean Algebra was indeed "made up" but just happened by an amazing coincidence to be a perfect model for creating digital circuits. Or is it a coincidence? Math is a game of sorts, you start with a set of rules and see what develops from them. The trick is, if you choose the initial rules carefully, you get results with real-world use. Minkowski space was a math oddity for years until Einstein realized it was a perfect model for General Relativity. It appears that an even odder model called Geometric Algebra gives even better models of physics. Are these all coincidences?
A branch of math called group theory models all the possible kinds of symmetry. Any study of symmetry will eventually lead to the same ideas that group theory is based upon. Doesn't that make group theory universal?
I always thought that if there were aliens, they would probably be so vastly different from us that they would indeed have different notions completely.
For an example, read "Stories of your Life" in the collection Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. It tells of the difficulty communicating with aliens who perceive time as a whole, and as such understand physics in terms of overall effects and do not understand calculus-based physics such as we use. The rest of the stories are excellent as well.
and if you like one book you'll probably like the others. Alternatively, if you hate one book, you'll hate 'em all.
Not true, I really enjoyed Time, thought Space was excellent, and hated Origin. The first two explored the question "Are we alone?" and explained why either answer was really, really, bad. The third was a bunch of monkeys beating on each other pointlessly. What is it with the English and sadism anyway? (Iain Banks is even worse)
Sounds like you would like some Ted Sturgeon. Unlike many SF writers, he never forgot he was writing about humans for humans.
You're last bullet point was against "statements", if not for that I would recommend Ursula LeGuin, but she does get political at times. Octavia Butler is also good, but I confess I haven't read much of her work.
Some Spider Robinson is very good, avoid his recent stuff since he seems to have crawled up his own ass ("buy my new book! it features everything you liked about the last one!"). Try the Stardance series (also written with his wife) as a good starting place or the collection "By Any Other Name". Oh, I hope you don't mind puns.
None of these are "hard SF", which it sounds like you wouldn't like anyway. Some hard SF, notably Greg Egan, contains lots of ideas about how people will live after things like death and corporeality are history, but he is tough going if you don't like math and physics. Personally, he is my favorite author, but I don't expect most people to like his work.
Re:Its not Science Fiction!
on
Oryx and Crake
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· Score: 1
I don't know if the original is a quote, but this is:
When people think 'science-fiction' they usually think Star Trek, or they think Star Wars, or they think War of the Worlds - you know, talking squid... talking cannibalistic squid. And I saw a huge range of sci-fi B-movies in the 50s: the glory days, those low budget ones with names like The Creeping Eye, which was quite good until you actually saw it! You could see the tractor tied underneath as it crept along! So that's what people think of when they think 'science-fiction'.
The talking squid part prompted Stephen Baxter to reply: "Yikes, it's all my fault then". The Ansible collects all kinds of "this is good, so it isn't SF" quotes. Oddly, later Atwood says her books are "speculative fiction", which is a kind of catch-all phrase used for SF, fantasy and horror.
And it's exactly why I will never ever buy an iPod. Even if it's cool and I can get around the DRM without much effort, I'd rather vote with my wallet and tell apple to shove their DRM and get something that reads like a USB mass storage device.
The iPod does read like a USB mass storage device, the "DRM" consists of making the music folder hidden. That's all. On Windows, say Show Hidden and you'll never even know it was there. This is quite different than actual DRM with authorization checks.
The Chinese rings puzzle is also based on the binary numbers. I have a puzzle called "The Brain" with rods that slide in and out. These are all really the same puzzle and have the same solution:
Alternate moving the smallest ring and doing the only other move left.
The only problem is that you need to go in the correct direction at the beginning, otherwise you're moving an odd number instead of even or vice-versa. I got to where I could solve the Brain (8 sliders) in a few seconds with my eyes closed.
We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue. This is talking about 2018...Quantum computers anyone??
You are aware that Moore's Law is about the doubling of density of transistors and not "computing power" or some such undefinable quantity? Moore's law will be broken simply because physical entities cannot follow an exponential growth for very long. Computing power will still increase.
Also, you need the decimal point or other seperator to completely specify the address. When typing, you either need to show the seperator or hit enter or tab or something to get the next field. Therefore, the actual IPv4 is 12 digits + 3 spacers as opposed to 40 digits + 7 spacers. This is over three times as much, and worse it is much harder to remember 8 things (7 plus 2 is the oft-quoted memory capacity).
It might also help if the "first" world would stop overthowing democratic trends by installing and funding tirents
Hey, the U.S. decided to start overthrowing "tirents" and forcing "democracy" on them in order to open up their resources to private companies that ultimatly funnel money out of said country to spend on private jets, pointless capital projects and armies.
What was the last real original non-franchise piece of Sci-Fi you took up?
I'm currently reading the Cassandra Complex by Brian Stableford. I found an anthology by Dozois called "Supermen: Tales of the Posthumous Future" which gave me lots of leads on current, good, hard SF writers. Try Ted Chiang for some really hard to classify short stories.
Although I really enjoyed the early Callahan stories, Callahan's Key was a useless gosh-aren't-I-clever wankfest with a hacked on plot just to justify the book. I have yet to read Callhan's Con. If Spider thinks SF is dying, perhaps he should try looking for some instead of claiming "the sky is falling".
Further evidence: Egan, Baxter, Reynolds, McAuley,... personally I think there's more SF out there right now than there has been in years.
Re:Opera has been doing this for years
on
The Trilogy as One
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· Score: 1
Extended performances are not infrequent in the world of opera, Gotterdammerung the Wagener Ring Cycle runs about 18 hours total, this is usually over four days, but one of the operas runs six hours. There is a Phillip Glass opera (Einstein?) that usually ran over 3-4 days that had a marathon full day run. Some of the naysayers should consider LoTR as a slightly different kind of art form.
Oh, yeah, well there's a piece by John Cage called As Slow As Possible which will take 649 years to complete. An organ in Germany has started already, don't miss out!
I have yet to pick up one of his novels...any suggestions? Of what I've read it's excellent sci-fi...way way ahead of it's time
Time out of Joint and Eye in the Sky are two of his earlier novels and quite good. The main ones are probably Ubik and Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Later stuff such as Valis and Radio-Free Albemuth are also good, but are mostly concerned with Dick trying to figure out the really wierd visions he had in the early 70s. The short story collections are excellent, as well. Scanner Darkly I would also recommend.
He also has "lesser" books which still are full of great stuff: Simulacra, Galactic Pot-Healer and Counter-Clock World are ones I particularly enjoyed.
It's funny how different people see things. Every election. I've watch the Reps are "tough on crime" and they say the Dems are weak on it. They want more surveillance, more prisons, and fewer rights for individuals (aka criminals). They are also the ones leading the charge on "lawsuit reform", but they only care about lawsuits by the common man against companies. Yet they don't care about big companies suing little companies over IP and other monopolistic things.
It's the Democrats who come up with most of the IP legislation. Clinton was "tough on crime" and promised to double the police force. He also signed the CDA, COPA, CIPA, DMCA, and Digital Millenium act. Remember the Clipper chip?
The only difference is in what they say. I care more about what they do.
Ooops. we're already there. Gee, wonder why our economy is in the trash.
Yes, our economy is in the trash because we won't allow people, often fundamentally dishonest ones at that, to bother us at any time of the day, clog up all our communications (phone, mail, email) with useless crap, and sell pieces of our private lives.
People who lie to you when you ask if they're selling stuff. People who stick little pieces of paper on my car in the parking lot. People engaged in Ponzi schemes, multi-level marketing, and bogus "you have won a prize" con jobs.
The economy doesn't have anything to do with a governments riding a bubble and spending like mad, only to be replaced with a crash and a lot of unethical companies screwing everyone they can to try to maintain a little longer.
Yup, the problem is that I don't want advertising everywhere. The floors of the stores, bills, receipts, even my god-damn ATM statement have ads these days. I suppose when we acquire the ability to etch a giant Coke logo in the moon, you'll be right there proclaiming how stopping that would impinge on our freedoms.
Digital Master is defined as "copies of RIGHTS HOLDER Content in digital form, which CD BABY may sell or authorize Distributors to sell". The exclusive right given to CDBaby is to reproduce and convert into Digital Masters. The key thing here is that Digital Masters are copies to be sold. A copy which is not to be sold is not a Digital master and thus not part of the agreement. It does imply you cannot sell your stuff on your own webpage, which is reasonable (why would you?). They make it clear that you remain RIGHTS HOLDER.
I'm not sure what you mean by 8ai and 8aiii, but the synposis at the beginning says:
so we have to be the exclusive distributor of your digital music to these services (only) during the contract
that doesn't prevent you from doing anything else with your music! only the delivery to the music services like iTunes and Rhapsody.
you can stop at any time - with 30 days' notice. we don't want to restrict you from anything.
That seems pretty clear-cut to me. I don't see anything about three and a half years anywhere. Explicitly, yes, you can put the music on your own web page.
It's the same as if I wrote a book, and I assign to you the rights to distribute the first edition of it. I've assigned to you a limited right to make copies, but this does NOT make you the copyright owner.
What if you had a web page and gave a publisher rights to print an edition of the web page. Would you then be able to keep up your web page? Don't bet on it.
Does Matrix ripoff other movies like DarkCity Did Dark City rip off an old role-playing supplement called Flight 13? I know its a stretch, but if you ever play this GURPS adventure it is quite similar to Dark City, right down to the final twist. So, who did Flight 13 ripoff? Where does it end?
f there is a strong tradition of self-sacrifice for others as being foundational to being a good Buddhist, I'd appreciate being corrected The question of whether to sacrifice so that others may also follow the right path was the cause of the first schism in the Buddhist church: The mahayana and hinayana schools. Basically, the hinayana (small boat) thought that only certain enlightened souls made it to Nirvana. The mahayana (big boat) teaching is that the enlightened ones will remain here until they can elevate everyone. This is the foundation of most existing Buddhism. Note, I am not a Buddhist and this is a simplified version of a vast and complicated history, but I think it does answer your question.
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If Donald in Mathmagic Land is not available on DVD or VHS, how do the teachers get copies?
I seem to remember it was a movie reel. When I saw it in school there were no DVDs or VHS tapes (although Beta was around).
What about the Monster?
This is the largest "simple" group which doesn't fit into any group category. What this means is rather hard to explain in simple terms, but this group has lots of mysterious connections to other maths. The order is 2^46 * 3^20 * 5^9 * 7^6 * 11^2 * 13^3 * 17 * 19 * 23 *29 *31*41*47*59*71.
A branch of math called group theory models all the possible kinds of symmetry. Any study of symmetry will eventually lead to the same ideas that group theory is based upon. Doesn't that make group theory universal?
Yes, I'm a Platonist when it comes to math.
For an example, read "Stories of your Life" in the collection Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. It tells of the difficulty communicating with aliens who perceive time as a whole, and as such understand physics in terms of overall effects and do not understand calculus-based physics such as we use. The rest of the stories are excellent as well.
Yeah, that's what the Mob calls it, too.
Not true, I really enjoyed Time, thought Space was excellent, and hated Origin. The first two explored the question "Are we alone?" and explained why either answer was really, really, bad. The third was a bunch of monkeys beating on each other pointlessly. What is it with the English and sadism anyway? (Iain Banks is even worse)
You're last bullet point was against "statements", if not for that I would recommend Ursula LeGuin, but she does get political at times. Octavia Butler is also good, but I confess I haven't read much of her work.
Some Spider Robinson is very good, avoid his recent stuff since he seems to have crawled up his own ass ("buy my new book! it features everything you liked about the last one!"). Try the Stardance series (also written with his wife) as a good starting place or the collection "By Any Other Name". Oh, I hope you don't mind puns.
None of these are "hard SF", which it sounds like you wouldn't like anyway. Some hard SF, notably Greg Egan, contains lots of ideas about how people will live after things like death and corporeality are history, but he is tough going if you don't like math and physics. Personally, he is my favorite author, but I don't expect most people to like his work.
The talking squid part prompted Stephen Baxter to reply: "Yikes, it's all my fault then".
The Ansible collects all kinds of "this is good, so it isn't SF" quotes. Oddly, later Atwood says her books are "speculative fiction", which is a kind of catch-all phrase used for SF, fantasy and horror.
The iPod does read like a USB mass storage device, the "DRM" consists of making the music folder hidden. That's all. On Windows, say Show Hidden and you'll never even know it was there. This is quite different than actual DRM with authorization checks.
Alternate moving the smallest ring and doing the only other move left.
The only problem is that you need to go in the correct direction at the beginning, otherwise you're moving an odd number instead of even or vice-versa. I got to where I could solve the Brain (8 sliders) in a few seconds with my eyes closed.
This might help
You are aware that Moore's Law is about the doubling of density of transistors and not "computing power" or some such undefinable quantity? Moore's law will be broken simply because physical entities cannot follow an exponential growth for very long. Computing power will still increase.
128 bits requires 8 16bit (or 5 digit) numbers.
Also, you need the decimal point or other seperator to completely specify the address. When typing, you either need to show the seperator or hit enter or tab or something to get the next field. Therefore, the actual IPv4 is 12 digits + 3 spacers as opposed to 40 digits + 7 spacers. This is over three times as much, and worse it is much harder to remember 8 things (7 plus 2 is the oft-quoted memory capacity).
Hey, the U.S. decided to start overthrowing "tirents" and forcing "democracy" on them in order to open up their resources to private companies that ultimatly funnel money out of said country to spend on private jets, pointless capital projects and armies.
Get with the times, man!
Now we're all doomed, dooomed!
Aahhhhh! Hot potato, off his drawers, pluck to make amends. Ohhh!
What was the last real original non-franchise piece of Sci-Fi you took up?
... personally I think there's more SF out there right now than there has been in years.
I'm currently reading the Cassandra Complex by Brian Stableford. I found an anthology by Dozois called "Supermen: Tales of the Posthumous Future" which gave me lots of leads on current, good, hard SF writers. Try Ted Chiang for some really hard to classify short stories.
Although I really enjoyed the early Callahan stories, Callahan's Key was a useless gosh-aren't-I-clever wankfest with a hacked on plot just to justify the book. I have yet to read Callhan's Con. If Spider thinks SF is dying, perhaps he should try looking for some instead of claiming "the sky is falling".
Further evidence: Egan, Baxter, Reynolds, McAuley,
Oh, yeah, well there's a piece by John Cage called As Slow As Possible which will take 649 years to complete. An organ in Germany has started already, don't miss out!
Time out of Joint and Eye in the Sky are two of his earlier novels and quite good. The main ones are probably Ubik and Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Later stuff such as Valis and Radio-Free Albemuth are also good, but are mostly concerned with Dick trying to figure out the really wierd visions he had in the early 70s. The short story collections are excellent, as well. Scanner Darkly I would also recommend.
He also has "lesser" books which still are full of great stuff: Simulacra, Galactic Pot-Healer and Counter-Clock World are ones I particularly enjoyed.
It's the Democrats who come up with most of the IP legislation. Clinton was "tough on crime" and promised to double the police force. He also signed the CDA, COPA, CIPA, DMCA, and Digital Millenium act. Remember the Clipper chip?
The only difference is in what they say. I care more about what they do.
Yes, our economy is in the trash because we won't allow people, often fundamentally dishonest ones at that, to bother us at any time of the day, clog up all our communications (phone, mail, email) with useless crap, and sell pieces of our private lives.
People who lie to you when you ask if they're selling stuff. People who stick little pieces of paper on my car in the parking lot. People engaged in Ponzi schemes, multi-level marketing, and bogus "you have won a prize" con jobs.
The economy doesn't have anything to do with a governments riding a bubble and spending like mad, only to be replaced with a crash and a lot of unethical companies screwing everyone they can to try to maintain a little longer.
Yup, the problem is that I don't want advertising everywhere. The floors of the stores, bills, receipts, even my god-damn ATM statement have ads these days. I suppose when we acquire the ability to etch a giant Coke logo in the moon, you'll be right there proclaiming how stopping that would impinge on our freedoms.
Oddly enough, IANAL...
Digital Master is defined as "copies of RIGHTS HOLDER Content in digital form, which CD BABY may sell or authorize Distributors to sell". The exclusive right given to CDBaby is to reproduce and convert into Digital Masters. The key thing here is that Digital Masters are copies to be sold. A copy which is not to be sold is not a Digital master and thus not part of the agreement. It does imply you cannot sell your stuff on your own webpage, which is reasonable (why would you?). They make it clear that you remain RIGHTS HOLDER.
so we have to be the exclusive distributor of your digital music to these services (only) during the contract
that doesn't prevent you from doing anything else with your music! only the delivery to the music services like iTunes and Rhapsody.
you can stop at any time - with 30 days' notice. we don't want to restrict you from anything.
That seems pretty clear-cut to me. I don't see anything about three and a half years anywhere. Explicitly, yes, you can put the music on your own web page.
What if you had a web page and gave a publisher rights to print an edition of the web page. Would you then be able to keep up your web page? Don't bet on it.
Does Matrix ripoff other movies like DarkCity
Did Dark City rip off an old role-playing supplement called Flight 13? I know its a stretch, but if you ever play this GURPS adventure it is quite similar to Dark City, right down to the final twist. So, who did Flight 13 ripoff? Where does it end?
f there is a strong tradition of self-sacrifice for others as being foundational to being a good Buddhist, I'd appreciate being corrected
The question of whether to sacrifice so that others may also follow the right path was the cause of the first schism in the Buddhist church: The mahayana and hinayana schools. Basically, the hinayana (small boat) thought that only certain enlightened souls made it to Nirvana. The mahayana (big boat) teaching is that the enlightened ones will remain here until they can elevate everyone. This is the foundation of most existing Buddhism.
Note, I am not a Buddhist and this is a simplified version of a vast and complicated history, but I think it does answer your question.