Galaxy Quest is a true personal favorite, although it's about science fiction fandom, and not really a science fiction story.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Dark City and Strange Days were included, both underrated masterpieces and in my mind a lot more interesting than the contrived puzzles in any of the Matrix movies. The Alien movies deserve all the attention they can get.
Lord of the Rings was rightly excluded, it's not science fiction--and fantasy is just a totally different bag, as any fan knows. (LOTR is a reactionary myth, SF is generally progressive in its world views and morals.)
The first half of the review is just opinions repeated and stacked. The reviewer complains about poor interpretations and analyses, but once he gets to the examples they are all of typos, misspelled names, and misattributed quotes. None of the mistakes quoted are crucial to interpretation of the stories. In addition, the numerous references to the author's origin is a clear and unwarranted ad hominem. The reviewer even manages to make a joke at his own expense at one time:
"The book as a whole, particularly with its monotonous small text and a complete lack of the simplest illustrations or even eye-catching chapter header graphics..."
Well yes, in the UK they are known to read books without pictures from time to time.
Moreover, I suspect that the giving Dick's name as "Philip C. Dick" was actually the reviewer's mistake. Very few fans are likely to make it, and I doubt it would pass a very cursory proofing of a book on science fiction. If it occurs repeatedly in the book then that would be a sign that there is something very seriously wrong with it.
There are generally too many books on science fiction movies and hard to find one with some memorable content. But I'm not ready to dismiss this one after the review I've just read.
...is Deja News. It's not a product of the incredibly cool and creative working atmosphere at Google. They did a Microsoft: bought a product, changed its look and feel and rebranded it. I'm so sick of hearing how amazing Google is as a workplace. Their whole (bean) bag is so 1997.
What is this message about? Is there a point? How the hell did it get published on slashdot? I have some opinions about blogs, but since I don't have a clue what the "article" is trying to say, I have no idea if they are approriate, on topic, or what. In the future, don't start vetting until you've had you morning coffee, CmdrTaco...
I am in total awe over Google's unicycling, bean-baggy, non-conformist-business-cardy coolness. Everyone at Google has so much fun all day! Not like employees at ordinary companies. Those are boooring! It makes me want to be a cool web hacker! Hmm? What, it's not 1997?? Oops, my bad...
The original article is weird. They claim the simulation will be on the molecular level. That's insane, it would probably take hundreds of thousands of terrabytes just for representation, all of which must be processed in parallel to create a real-time simulation of the whole brain. The Swissinfo link is more reasonable, saying it's a simulation on the cellular level, and initially limited to the neocortex. I still think the article's claim that the processing power exists today to simulate a brain in realtime sounds more like a marketing slur from IBM than anything else.
Does anyone remember when MS claimed that Office 95 was going to use HTML as its standard document format? (People were ignorant enough about HTML to actually buy that.)
MS's monopoly isn't based on that Windows is easy to install or maintain or use. 95% percent of workplace users only click a handful of icons to start programs and use them. They would hardly know the difference between Windows and Linux/KDE. (For that matter, Windows isn't as easy as the hype has it and Linux isn't as hard as it used to be.)
No, the reason my mother _must_ use Windows at work and at home is that she _must_ be able to share Office documents with people. If it wasn't for that no non-MS software can open and save Office formats correctly, she could switch to a Linux-based solution any day.
And this is why the Office formats are such enormous mysteries. (Even though MS has claimed that they are "open" for years.) Come on, how complicated can formatting code be? Even with MS's "documentation," SUN has failed to decrypt that code!
The secrecy and proprietarity of the Office formats is MS's most valuable asset. The day people can share Word and Excel documents using any application of their choice, MS is just another competitor. And that's why this is as much b*llsh*t as when they claimed that HTML was going to be the new document standard.
Marketing departments exaggerate! Advertising doesn't always tell the truth! Someone should post this on the Slashdot first page immediately! Spread the word!!
I may be guilty of over-generalization. He was born in Iran and worked in Samarkand, so I guess that is not Arab territory. I don't know to what extent these cultures interacted and exchanged information at the time, but was under the impression that it was a significant amount.
Al-Kashi used the same method as the Greeks. He calculated the ratio of the radius of a circle to the circumference of a polygon (that's trivial, of course) that fit inside the circle, with an increasing number of sides on the polygon. The more sides on the polygon, the closer to the circle it gets, and the more precise value for pi you get.
I have a vague memory that the Chinese actually built a large circle that was so exactly round that they _measured_ pi to an impressive number of decimals. So there is obviously more than one way to do it.:-)
I suppose "randomness" might be the opposite of "order" in an information-theoretical sense. It is also a measure of the level of compressibility of a string. A chessboard pattern can be compressed a lot, white noise can't be compressed. So that would make white noise less ordered and more random. To me as a philosopher however, that looks fishy, because it puts a restriction on how a random sequence can look. It means that if order, or perhaps "correlation," is a property C, then supposedly random series always have the property ~C. But what causes them to have this property? They are supposed to be random! That is not what random is supposed to mean; there are no causes involved in randomness, so it seems to be nonsense to claim that all random series share a property. This information-theoretical notion also seems to jive poorly with cryptographic ideas, where as soon as you introduce a rule, you lose randomness. (In essence, the password gets easier to guess.) But, I'm not a mathematician, so I may have it all wrong.:-)
Randomness refers to statistical properties of the sequences. For ex. no correlation between conseq. digits, no corr. betweteen conseq. pairs of digits and so on brings a sequence closer to randomness.
Without asking what "correlation" means exactly (or at least while only implicitly doing so, and in a very roundabout way;-), what about "randomly appearing" correlation? Is there really a property that random series can't have? That can't appear "randomly"? So all random series have this predetermined (presumably uncaused) property?
Randomness probably means something very different to me (theoretical philosophy) than to you though.
In the first half of the 15th century the Persian mathematician Al-Kashi calculated pi to 14 places. It would be over a hundred years until a European calculated it to 9 places. But that's not what makes Al-Kashi cool, the Arabs where so much better at math in that period. What made him cool was that he stopped. He observed that, with his pi, the calculation of the circumference of a circle with a radius twice the size of Earth would have a margin of error smaller than a "horse hair" (a Persian unit). Problem solved, next problem. Meanwhile, people are still today using computers to get pi to _hundreds_of_billions_of_decimal_places!! As if there's something unique about pi because it's irrational and transcendental, when this is in fact true of the vast majority of all real numbers. Here's to Al-Kashi, a sane man and a pragmatic!
True. Another sequence that seems to have been "creatively edited" is the one where he says "I'm unarmed..." and then Mal answers "Good" and shoots (something, presumably him). It's obviously edited, so one wonders what Mal _really_ answered "Good" to.
Okay, stupidly cancelled then. No one has any idea how a show is going to do after 10 episodes. Most series mature after 2-3 years! Fact remains the series was good (and although the network has no responsibility to quality, only to the bottom line, I still feel that it matters on some level), and could have been moved to a better slot, and given a chance.
What I really want is the series back. The kind of character and story development you can do in movies is so limited compared to a TV series. There is no way it'll be the same. And anyway, I'd like to see the story continued from where the series left off.
And did anyone else think that the black bad guy in the trailer seemed a lot less impressive than the bad guy (on whom I suppose the movie one was based) from Objects In Space?
"This quote from chapter 9 ("Scripting") from Alan Monnox's Rapid J2EE Development applies not only to the choice of the programming language but to the whole array of software development activities thoroughly and eloquently covered in the book."
Slashdot Mirror
Galaxy Quest is a true personal favorite, although it's about science fiction fandom, and not really a science fiction story.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Dark City and Strange Days were included, both underrated masterpieces and in my mind a lot more interesting than the contrived puzzles in any of the Matrix movies. The Alien movies deserve all the attention they can get.
Lord of the Rings was rightly excluded, it's not science fiction--and fantasy is just a totally different bag, as any fan knows. (LOTR is a reactionary myth, SF is generally progressive in its world views and morals.)
The first half of the review is just opinions repeated and stacked. The reviewer complains about poor interpretations and analyses, but once he gets to the examples they are all of typos, misspelled names, and misattributed quotes. None of the mistakes quoted are crucial to interpretation of the stories. In addition, the numerous references to the author's origin is a clear and unwarranted ad hominem. The reviewer even manages to make a joke at his own expense at one time:
"The book as a whole, particularly with its monotonous small text and a complete lack of the simplest illustrations or even eye-catching chapter header graphics..."
Well yes, in the UK they are known to read books without pictures from time to time.
Moreover, I suspect that the giving Dick's name as "Philip C. Dick" was actually the reviewer's mistake. Very few fans are likely to make it, and I doubt it would pass a very cursory proofing of a book on science fiction. If it occurs repeatedly in the book then that would be a sign that there is something very seriously wrong with it.
There are generally too many books on science fiction movies and hard to find one with some memorable content. But I'm not ready to dismiss this one after the review I've just read.
...is Deja News. It's not a product of the incredibly cool and creative working atmosphere at Google. They did a Microsoft: bought a product, changed its look and feel and rebranded it. I'm so sick of hearing how amazing Google is as a workplace. Their whole (bean) bag is so 1997.
And maybe we'll call them "web diaries" or "homepages."
What is this message about? Is there a point? How the hell did it get published on slashdot? I have some opinions about blogs, but since I don't have a clue what the "article" is trying to say, I have no idea if they are approriate, on topic, or what. In the future, don't start vetting until you've had you morning coffee, CmdrTaco...
I am in total awe over Google's unicycling, bean-baggy, non-conformist-business-cardy coolness. Everyone at Google has so much fun all day! Not like employees at ordinary companies. Those are boooring! It makes me want to be a cool web hacker! Hmm? What, it's not 1997?? Oops, my bad...
Penrose is a silly git.
The original article is weird. They claim the simulation will be on the molecular level. That's insane, it would probably take hundreds of thousands of terrabytes just for representation, all of which must be processed in parallel to create a real-time simulation of the whole brain. The Swissinfo link is more reasonable, saying it's a simulation on the cellular level, and initially limited to the neocortex. I still think the article's claim that the processing power exists today to simulate a brain in realtime sounds more like a marketing slur from IBM than anything else.
...it ain't gonna happen.
Does anyone remember when MS claimed that Office 95 was going to use HTML as its standard document format? (People were ignorant enough about HTML to actually buy that.)
MS's monopoly isn't based on that Windows is easy to install or maintain or use. 95% percent of workplace users only click a handful of icons to start programs and use them. They would hardly know the difference between Windows and Linux/KDE. (For that matter, Windows isn't as easy as the hype has it and Linux isn't as hard as it used to be.)
No, the reason my mother _must_ use Windows at work and at home is that she _must_ be able to share Office documents with people. If it wasn't for that no non-MS software can open and save Office formats correctly, she could switch to a Linux-based solution any day.
And this is why the Office formats are such enormous mysteries. (Even though MS has claimed that they are "open" for years.) Come on, how complicated can formatting code be? Even with MS's "documentation," SUN has failed to decrypt that code!
The secrecy and proprietarity of the Office formats is MS's most valuable asset. The day people can share Word and Excel documents using any application of their choice, MS is just another competitor. And that's why this is as much b*llsh*t as when they claimed that HTML was going to be the new document standard.
Marketing departments exaggerate! Advertising doesn't always tell the truth! Someone should post this on the Slashdot first page immediately! Spread the word!!
Gullberg, 1997...
I read it in Mathematics -- From The Birth of Numbers (Gullberg, 2007), but Al-Kashi is very well-known and mentioned in most histories of pi.
I may be guilty of over-generalization. He was born in Iran and worked in Samarkand, so I guess that is not Arab territory. I don't know to what extent these cultures interacted and exchanged information at the time, but was under the impression that it was a significant amount.
Al-Kashi used the same method as the Greeks. He calculated the ratio of the radius of a circle to the circumference of a polygon (that's trivial, of course) that fit inside the circle, with an increasing number of sides on the polygon. The more sides on the polygon, the closer to the circle it gets, and the more precise value for pi you get.
:-)
I have a vague memory that the Chinese actually built a large circle that was so exactly round that they _measured_ pi to an impressive number of decimals. So there is obviously more than one way to do it.
I suppose "randomness" might be the opposite of "order" in an information-theoretical sense. It is also a measure of the level of compressibility of a string. A chessboard pattern can be compressed a lot, white noise can't be compressed. So that would make white noise less ordered and more random. To me as a philosopher however, that looks fishy, because it puts a restriction on how a random sequence can look. It means that if order, or perhaps "correlation," is a property C, then supposedly random series always have the property ~C. But what causes them to have this property? They are supposed to be random! That is not what random is supposed to mean; there are no causes involved in randomness, so it seems to be nonsense to claim that all random series share a property. This information-theoretical notion also seems to jive poorly with cryptographic ideas, where as soon as you introduce a rule, you lose randomness. (In essence, the password gets easier to guess.) But, I'm not a mathematician, so I may have it all wrong. :-)
"Given that Pi is an infinitely long sequence, it cannot help but repeat."
Infinite, non-random sequences does not seem to have to repeat. Just continue the series
10110111011110111110...
Is there a reason for your belief?
Without asking what "correlation" means exactly (or at least while only implicitly doing so, and in a very roundabout way
Randomness probably means something very different to me (theoretical philosophy) than to you though.
I must tell you a story.
In the first half of the 15th century the Persian mathematician Al-Kashi calculated pi to 14 places. It would be over a hundred years until a European calculated it to 9 places. But that's not what makes Al-Kashi cool, the Arabs where so much better at math in that period. What made him cool was that he stopped. He observed that, with his pi, the calculation of the circumference of a circle with a radius twice the size of Earth would have a margin of error smaller than a "horse hair" (a Persian unit). Problem solved, next problem. Meanwhile, people are still today using computers to get pi to _hundreds_of_billions_of_decimal_places!! As if there's something unique about pi because it's irrational and transcendental, when this is in fact true of the vast majority of all real numbers. Here's to Al-Kashi, a sane man and a pragmatic!
True. Another sequence that seems to have been "creatively edited" is the one where he says "I'm unarmed..." and then Mal answers "Good" and shoots (something, presumably him). It's obviously edited, so one wonders what Mal _really_ answered "Good" to.
Actually, a /; rm -rf *
cd
is much more fun.
Thanks, that's cool info!
My roomate just called to tell me the news. Apparently he was able to score 8 tickets for the Chicago showing.
Aaahh!! Hate... joo!!11oneoneeleven
Okay, stupidly cancelled then. No one has any idea how a show is going to do after 10 episodes. Most series mature after 2-3 years! Fact remains the series was good (and although the network has no responsibility to quality, only to the bottom line, I still feel that it matters on some level), and could have been moved to a better slot, and given a chance.
...at least according to IMDB.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0379786/
What I really want is the series back. The kind of character and story development you can do in movies is so limited compared to a TV series. There is no way it'll be the same. And anyway, I'd like to see the story continued from where the series left off.
And did anyone else think that the black bad guy in the trailer seemed a lot less impressive than the bad guy (on whom I suppose the movie one was based) from Objects In Space?
Also, it's stupid that it's in Latin. Almost no one understands Latin these days.
;-)
(That was a joke.
"This quote from chapter 9 ("Scripting") from Alan Monnox's Rapid J2EE Development applies not only to the choice of the programming language but to the whole array of software development activities thoroughly and eloquently covered in the book."
;-)
Actually, it applies to all tool use.