The benefit to the author is that he can put the paper in his CV. The more big name journals you publish in, the more likely it is that you'll get grant funding and that all important tenure.
It's also more likely that someone will actually read your paper if it's in a big wide-circulation journal (e.g., Nature) instead of a hard-to-find low-circulation journal. This is particularly true for papers outside your own specialization where you won't necessarily have heard of them at a recent conference. The publication volume is just overwhelming — if you're going to stay current, you need someone else to filter most of the junk for you, and that's the service which selective journals like "Nature" (and review articles) ultimately provide.
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia
When you only reduce the top marginal rates, cut capital gains, and eliminate the estate tax, the tax benefits go to the rich, not because they pay more taxes, but because the poor didn't get a tax break!
And that, college economics professors, is how our tax system really works — those who have the gold make the rules because taxes are for the "little people!"
You want real tax relief, try raising the personal exemption. Of course then your top bar-tab-payer would get the same break as everyone else...
Were Unicorns mentioned in the Bible before Noah? (The Irish Rovers song doesn't count)
While unicorns aren't mentioned in any modern English-language translation of the bible, they are mentioned in the King James Version (a widely-read translation from around 1610). According to Wikipedia, unicorns are mentioned
in the following places: Job 39:9-12, Ps 22:21, 29:6, Num 23:22, 24:8, and Deut 33:17. Noah and the flood are in Genesis, so all of these would be post-flood references. The translation of re'em as unicorn, however, would seem to be specific to the KJV.
You still have to manage hundreds if not thousands of threads, right?
Don't think of these things as 2048-core CPU's sharing memory and disk space, think of them as clusters of 2048 separate [asnychronous!] PC's, each with its own memory and disk space. The actual architectures will vary, but this is usually the right paradigm (Crays and other big vector processors are the main exception to this rule). Think, then, of the program as if it were a bunch of network clients talking to each other over sockets. Because each CPU has its own memory, if you want to know what your neighbor is doing, you have to go ask him and get him to send you the data you're interested in over the network, so fast network interconnects are essential. Same goes for disk writes -- its a shared resource accessed over the network, so bandwidth and networking matter.
This is, in fact, how things like the MPI library are implemented (MPI is a very standard library for parallel programming, Apple's XGrid is a variation on this theme too). The library takes care of starting up processes on each node (using rsh/ssh) and all the network communications for you. It also implements primitives like scatter-gather, send-receive, broadcast, and barriers. The hard part is understanding parallel programming, the internal trade-offs of your hardware, and the available algorithms well enough to write a well-designed and efficient parallel implementation.
Having said that, you're right, these machines are not for the average user, nor should they be. The average user doesn't need a supercomputer, the average user (or web farm, for that matter) is best served by a computer designed for their needs, specifically, an off-the-shelf PC. Supercomputers are designed for solving large-scale computational problems that significantly exceed the capacity of a desktop computer and are properly matched to a given supercomputer architecture.
Weather modelling in yearly time scales suffers from the same flaw, in my view: unless you have a long enough set of possible inputs , it's not verifiable in reality.
Weather modeling (what the National Weather Service does) and climate modeling (what global warming folks do) are different problems.
Weather modeling has lots of data available (365 forecasts per year, per model pixel) and its easy to verify predictions against weather station measurements. The problem is that it's impossible to specify the current conditions with sufficient accuracy for more than a 3--5 day forecast [sensitive dependence on initial conditions].
Climate modeling, on the other hand, has much less historical data to work with, but since it deals with average temperatures instead of day-to-day weather changes its also much less sensitive to the initial conditions. That's how come we can talk about 10,000 year climate changes but still can't tell if it will rain next weekend or not.
In Boston, studio apartments begin at around $1000/mo. Add another $100/mo if you need parking. So, for just rent alone, we've topped 50% of your help-desk workers paycheck.
Also, I think $200/mo for food is too low unless you're planning on living off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, rice, beans, and pasta (and brown-bagging at work every day). $400/mo is probably more realistic for a normal diet.
So, I'm up to $1500/mo and I haven't spent anything on utilities, Internet, car, or cell phone yet. Add your $200/mo for gas, $300/mo for insurance, $100/mo for cell+internet and other misc utilities and we're now up to $2100/mo, which is $400/mo more than your hypothetical worker is making.
Its like a job interview - if you don't care about your own application enough to clean up your public image (and Facebook is public), then why should I take you seriously?
If your Facebook page makes you look like an idiot, then yes, I do question how seriously you intend to study here at ExampleU. A competitive college gets many more applicants than they can possibly accept, public information is a pretty good way to weed out the pile and discover who's likely a good student and who paid someone else to write their application essay. Furthermore, since graduation rate is one of the numbers that goes into US News and World Report's college rankings, the schools have a vested interest in favoring hard-working academic types over students who are likely to party themselves right out of the classroom.
It seems that more and more, doctors (like engineers, administrators, etc) are becoming specialists, rather than generalists.
Well, let's see. I can A) become a generalist (general practitioner), or I can B) become a specialized radiologist and work more regular hour and be paid twice as much. Seems like a no-brainer actually...
Is this blog post for real, or is it just a way to grab some traffic and ad revenue?
I can't find a likely looking original article on the astro-ph preprint server, nor on the Astrophysics Journal site [subscription required?]. Furthermore, the researchers who made this alleged disocovery aren't credited or even mentioned in the blog post, so there's no names to Google for ("hubble AND unknown" only comes up with the original article). Does anyone know the original source, or this just some blogger's idea of a joke?
I was always fascinated by particle physics but it's been a while since I studied it. Can someone explain how a proton-antiproton collision (u,u,d quarks and anti-u,anti-u,anti-d quarks) could produce strange quarks?
There are three fundamental forces that matter in a particle collider: the strong force, the weak force, and the electro-magnetic force. When the interactions are through the strong force (which is described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics [QCD]), the result is either things start to stick together or you create a pairs of quarks (a quark and its anti-quark, to conserve charge). These quark pairs can, in turn, either produce new pairs of quarks or they can stick and produce new particles. So, strong interactions can produce strange quarks out of nothing if you supply enough energy, but they'll always come in a strange/anti-strange pair. Given that the \omega_b has both a strange and an anti-strange quark in it, I'm guessing that it probably is coming out of a series of strong nuclear interactions.
At low energies, electro-magnetic forces deal with the interactions of particles and photons, which is important but kinda boring (at high enough energies life is more complicated and EM forces become a kind of weak force, but that's getting off track).
The final force, the weak force doesn't interact very strongly with particles (hence its name), so weak events are much less common than strong events. On the other hand, because they obey different symmetries, weak events can do some things that strong events can't do. In particular, weak events can change the flavor of quarks, for example, from a down quark to a strange quark. So, the second way you can get a strange quark from a bunch of up and down quarks is through a weak interaction that changes the flavor of one or more quarks.
Prior to Social Security, you worked until you died, pretty much.
Even during the early days of SS, the retirement age (65 years) was greater than the average life expectancy (for men, life expectancy at birth as late as 1950 was only 65.6 years, rising at about a year per decade after that). So, even in 1935 when Social Security was passed, the average person still worked until (s)he died. The high age cut-off is part of what kept the pay-outs down.
Either they choose to keep working, or they didn't put enough of THEIR OWN money away for retirement.
In 2006, 28% of US households earned
less than $25K per year
and 43% of US individuals made
less than $25K per year (that's gross income, not net, BTW).
You have to have money before you can put it away for retirement.
By and large, tax fraud is a crime of wealth because the poor simply don't have enough money to either accomplish it or seriously gain from it.
That and every penny I earn [salary, etc] gets reported to the IRS by my employer. Fraud's a lot harder when the IRS knows your real gross income (not that I would deliberately mis-report, but I seem to be the exception in that regard).
In 802.11b/g operate on the 2.4000-2.4835 GHz band (so saith wikipedia). That gives you 83.5 MHz of total bandwidth, for a theoretical maximum allowed data rate of 41.75 MBit/sec, or roughly 4 MByte/sec. It doesn't take too many torrents or video streams to suck up 4 MByte/sec (and that's the theoretical maximum, actual performance usually caps at at about half the theoretical max!).
The problem isn't switching, it's having enough non-interfering access points to deliver the bandwidth needed (desired) by the end-users. Unlike copper, with wireless you get to a point where you can't add any more access points in a given area because all the (non-overlapping) channels are already being used — there's simply no more bandwidth left to allocate.
So what is wrong with upgrading/extending the grid as the need from rooftop PV arises? - I'm sure the current grid has seen quite a bit of upgrading since 1958 and I would be surprised if any power plants from the 50's are still operating today, IIRC most plants have a planned lifetime of 30-40yrs.
What's wrong is energy deregulation.
Building infrastructure (i.e., generators and transmission lines) is expensive, ties up your capital, and ROI time-frame is 10+ years. Selling electricity, on the other hand, has no capital costs to speak of. All you do is buy power wholesale off the grid and re-sell it to your customers.
In the old days, utilities were regulated monopolies, and their profits were capped at a fixed percentage of income. This created financial incentives for the companies to re-invest their surpluses in capital projects and research. As a result, up until the 80's there was lots of investment in generation capacity and upgrades to the transmission infrastructure, because these long-term investments made financial sense (they maximized long-term profitability) as long as the utilities were regulated.
Now, in the era of deregulation, we have the opposite. Maintaining infrastructure is essentially a money-sink, because it ties up money that could otherwise be declared as net profit and used to boost share prices. Furthermore, since the real money is made in re-selling, you're better off if you can arrange to dump all the power generation on someone else. There is zero incentive for a reseller to increase power transmission capacity, and insufficient cash flow for a power generator to do so (hence the number of plants from the 50's operating beyond their design lifetime). Net result: no one is adding to the grid capacity and the power grid has been essentially static since deregulation, despite rising consumption.
I am planning their destruction, a VM that runs on Intel hardware but responds just like a mainframe, it is software that could be sold for nothing and then all the mainframe apps could be moved to it and IBM would be finished, dead toast.
And it'll run under Vista to guarantee 24-7 reliability!
There's a lot more to a mainframe than just software apps — reliability and massive I/O being the most obvious. Remember, this is a world where down-time is measured in millions of dollars per hour. Mainframes are specialized tools designed for specialized jobs and no PC will ever displace (regardless of what sexy VM you're trying to hype) them simply because PC's are designed for a broad consumer market and not for the 24-7 zero-downtime business world.
Another very famous example is the Church excommunication of Galileo for daring to suggest the earth orbits the sun.
Sigh, here we go again with the same Galileo foolishness. C'mon people, if you're going to keep invoking Galileo, at least read the Wikipedia page first, so you know what actually happened.
First point: Copernicus was the one who suggested that the earth orbits around the sun. He was also a Catholic priest.
Second point: Galileo provided the observational evidence to support Copernicus, but this isn't what got him in trouble.
What got Galileo in trouble is that he took his scientific ideas (including the wacky ones that no one ever hears about, like the tides being caused by the slowing down and speeding up of the earth's rotation every day) and was drawing theological conclusions from them. To talk about the earth going around the sun as a philosophical point was something the Church could live with (hence the good relations Copernicus enjoined). For an untrained layman to persist in making theological claims, however, is quite something else in the Church's mind (see Brodrick's biography of Galileo for more details concerning the theological controversy). Most of you get a up in arms when creationists insist that the earth is only 6000 years old, because that's an imposition of religion on to science, why shouldn't the Church get upset when scientists try to tell it about God?
That Galileo also had a habit of publicly ridiculing anyone who disagreed with him did not help matters. For example, his book "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" one of the three literary figures parrots the words of Pope Urban VIII. Because Urban was an Aristotlean, Galileo named his character "Simplicius"; understandably, the Pope was not impressed. This did not improve his standing in the eyes of the powers that be.
In short, the scientific debate was largely peripheral to the Galileo affair. What got Galileo in trouble is that he insisted on drawing theological conclusions from his scientific data.
Latin is certainly the language of the bible, despite the book being originally written in greek. And the bible and the church were the main motivation, and the main people for the renaissense to push latin as a language.
That's a comparatively "modern" development. Historically, the Latin scriptures were never much used outside of North Africa and Western Europe (not surprisingly, both places where Latin was used more than Greek). To this day, the original Greek text of the New Testament remains the standard in all of the Eastern Orthodox churches. Even in Rome itself, the liturgy itself was in Greek for the first century or two (see Wikipedia). The insistence on the Latin text is purely a Roman Catholic development (I say this as a Catholic myself), developing first when the knowledge of Greek had ceased to be common-place even among the educated populations (i.e., prior to the Renaissance) and then taking on new significance in the reaction to the Protestant Reformation (post-Trent).
-JS
Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam..
on
Spammers Choose GMail
·
· Score: 1
so if they can determine the language for the ads, then they should be able to use it for spam..
HTTP allows browsers to set a preferred language (actually, a prioritized list of preferred languages). Google is probably picking up on this to set a default, and then looking at your language settings in GMail as well. So, if you're getting your ads in English, is probably because you've "requested" them that way.
...If my plans are to one day be involved in research, is it worth my time to learn a foreign language? If so, which one?
Picking a language in this case is pretty simple, actually. First, look at the research journals you might want to read. Then, look at the journals cited by the different authors in those journals (to get some extra breadth). Whatever language you see lots of articles being printed in, that's the language you will want to learn.
Having said that, the language of science (physics, in my case) is overwhelmingly English, and I expect this will be true in most any science or engineering field. If everything you want to read is already in English, then your choice of language becomes fairly subjective.
If you have to pick a language at random, though, why not pick the language of a country you might want to live or work in? I'm spending the summer working in Italy, and I took a year-long course in Italian at the local U before coming over. I'm still not very good in Italian, but I can at least function on my own if I have to. Life in a foreign country is a lot more fun when you don't need a translator all the time!
If you're just an armchair critic who has never had to write serious multi-threaded code, it's very easy to say "do it in C".
Just use the MPI libraries. They're standardized, prortable, and your code will work with both clusters and SMP systems (or asymetric, for that matter). And MPI is fairly easy to use, if you need parallel operation.
Oh yeah, and you can "just do it in C" (or Fortran).
Slashdot Mirror
It's also more likely that someone will actually read your paper if it's in a big wide-circulation journal (e.g., Nature) instead of a hard-to-find low-circulation journal. This is particularly true for papers outside your own specialization where you won't necessarily have heard of them at a recent conference. The publication volume is just overwhelming — if you're going to stay current, you need someone else to filter most of the junk for you, and that's the service which selective journals like "Nature" (and review articles) ultimately provide.
-JS
When you only reduce the top marginal rates, cut capital gains, and eliminate the estate tax, the tax benefits go to the rich, not because they pay more taxes, but because the poor didn't get a tax break! And that, college economics professors, is how our tax system really works — those who have the gold make the rules because taxes are for the "little people!"
You want real tax relief, try raising the personal exemption. Of course then your top bar-tab-payer would get the same break as everyone else...
-JS
While unicorns aren't mentioned in any modern English-language translation of the bible, they are mentioned in the King James Version (a widely-read translation from around 1610). According to Wikipedia, unicorns are mentioned in the following places: Job 39:9-12, Ps 22:21, 29:6, Num 23:22, 24:8, and Deut 33:17. Noah and the flood are in Genesis, so all of these would be post-flood references. The translation of re'em as unicorn, however, would seem to be specific to the KJV.
-JS
Don't think of these things as 2048-core CPU's sharing memory and disk space, think of them as clusters of 2048 separate [asnychronous!] PC's, each with its own memory and disk space. The actual architectures will vary, but this is usually the right paradigm (Crays and other big vector processors are the main exception to this rule). Think, then, of the program as if it were a bunch of network clients talking to each other over sockets. Because each CPU has its own memory, if you want to know what your neighbor is doing, you have to go ask him and get him to send you the data you're interested in over the network, so fast network interconnects are essential. Same goes for disk writes -- its a shared resource accessed over the network, so bandwidth and networking matter.
This is, in fact, how things like the MPI library are implemented (MPI is a very standard library for parallel programming, Apple's XGrid is a variation on this theme too). The library takes care of starting up processes on each node (using rsh/ssh) and all the network communications for you. It also implements primitives like scatter-gather, send-receive, broadcast, and barriers. The hard part is understanding parallel programming, the internal trade-offs of your hardware, and the available algorithms well enough to write a well-designed and efficient parallel implementation.
Having said that, you're right, these machines are not for the average user, nor should they be. The average user doesn't need a supercomputer, the average user (or web farm, for that matter) is best served by a computer designed for their needs, specifically, an off-the-shelf PC. Supercomputers are designed for solving large-scale computational problems that significantly exceed the capacity of a desktop computer and are properly matched to a given supercomputer architecture.
-JS
Weather modeling (what the National Weather Service does) and climate modeling (what global warming folks do) are different problems.
Weather modeling has lots of data available (365 forecasts per year, per model pixel) and its easy to verify predictions against weather station measurements. The problem is that it's impossible to specify the current conditions with sufficient accuracy for more than a 3--5 day forecast [sensitive dependence on initial conditions].
Climate modeling, on the other hand, has much less historical data to work with, but since it deals with average temperatures instead of day-to-day weather changes its also much less sensitive to the initial conditions. That's how come we can talk about 10,000 year climate changes but still can't tell if it will rain next weekend or not.
-JS
But I thought that IT Workers Cushioned From US Economic Downturn. I mean, I read it on Slashdot just a few days ago!
-JS
In Boston, studio apartments begin at around $1000/mo. Add another $100/mo if you need parking. So, for just rent alone, we've topped 50% of your help-desk workers paycheck.
Also, I think $200/mo for food is too low unless you're planning on living off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, rice, beans, and pasta (and brown-bagging at work every day). $400/mo is probably more realistic for a normal diet.
So, I'm up to $1500/mo and I haven't spent anything on utilities, Internet, car, or cell phone yet. Add your $200/mo for gas, $300/mo for insurance, $100/mo for cell+internet and other misc utilities and we're now up to $2100/mo, which is $400/mo more than your hypothetical worker is making.
And this is assuming you don't have kids!
-JS
Its like a job interview - if you don't care about your own application enough to clean up your public image (and Facebook is public), then why should I take you seriously?
If your Facebook page makes you look like an idiot, then yes, I do question how seriously you intend to study here at ExampleU. A competitive college gets many more applicants than they can possibly accept, public information is a pretty good way to weed out the pile and discover who's likely a good student and who paid someone else to write their application essay. Furthermore, since graduation rate is one of the numbers that goes into US News and World Report's college rankings, the schools have a vested interest in favoring hard-working academic types over students who are likely to party themselves right out of the classroom.
-JS
Well, let's see. I can A) become a generalist (general practitioner), or I can B) become a specialized radiologist and work more regular hour and be paid twice as much. Seems like a no-brainer actually...
-JS
Is this blog post for real, or is it just a way to grab some traffic and ad revenue?
I can't find a likely looking original article on the astro-ph preprint server, nor on the Astrophysics Journal site [subscription required?]. Furthermore, the researchers who made this alleged disocovery aren't credited or even mentioned in the blog post, so there's no names to Google for ("hubble AND unknown" only comes up with the original article). Does anyone know the original source, or this just some blogger's idea of a joke?
-JS
That's not investing, that's gambling (aka speculation).
-JS
There are three fundamental forces that matter in a particle collider: the strong force, the weak force, and the electro-magnetic force. When the interactions are through the strong force (which is described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics [QCD]), the result is either things start to stick together or you create a pairs of quarks (a quark and its anti-quark, to conserve charge). These quark pairs can, in turn, either produce new pairs of quarks or they can stick and produce new particles. So, strong interactions can produce strange quarks out of nothing if you supply enough energy, but they'll always come in a strange/anti-strange pair. Given that the \omega_b has both a strange and an anti-strange quark in it, I'm guessing that it probably is coming out of a series of strong nuclear interactions.
At low energies, electro-magnetic forces deal with the interactions of particles and photons, which is important but kinda boring (at high enough energies life is more complicated and EM forces become a kind of weak force, but that's getting off track).
The final force, the weak force doesn't interact very strongly with particles (hence its name), so weak events are much less common than strong events. On the other hand, because they obey different symmetries, weak events can do some things that strong events can't do. In particular, weak events can change the flavor of quarks, for example, from a down quark to a strange quark. So, the second way you can get a strange quark from a bunch of up and down quarks is through a weak interaction that changes the flavor of one or more quarks.
-JS
Even during the early days of SS, the retirement age (65 years) was greater than the average life expectancy (for men, life expectancy at birth as late as 1950 was only 65.6 years, rising at about a year per decade after that). So, even in 1935 when Social Security was passed, the average person still worked until (s)he died. The high age cut-off is part of what kept the pay-outs down.
-JS
In 2006, 28% of US households earned less than $25K per year and 43% of US individuals made less than $25K per year (that's gross income, not net, BTW). You have to have money before you can put it away for retirement.
-JS
That and every penny I earn [salary, etc] gets reported to the IRS by my employer. Fraud's a lot harder when the IRS knows your real gross income (not that I would deliberately mis-report, but I seem to be the exception in that regard).
-JS
In 802.11b/g operate on the 2.4000-2.4835 GHz band (so saith wikipedia). That gives you 83.5 MHz of total bandwidth, for a theoretical maximum allowed data rate of 41.75 MBit/sec, or roughly 4 MByte/sec. It doesn't take too many torrents or video streams to suck up 4 MByte/sec (and that's the theoretical maximum, actual performance usually caps at at about half the theoretical max!).
The problem isn't switching, it's having enough non-interfering access points to deliver the bandwidth needed (desired) by the end-users. Unlike copper, with wireless you get to a point where you can't add any more access points in a given area because all the (non-overlapping) channels are already being used — there's simply no more bandwidth left to allocate.
-JS
Because AT+T/Bell and (pre-buyout) Lucent were US companies?
-JS
The universities, and then some of the lucky graduate students go and commercialize their doctoral dissertation as start-ups and small companies.
-JS (been there, got the piece of paper, but just not the business type myself)
What's wrong is energy deregulation.
Building infrastructure (i.e., generators and transmission lines) is expensive, ties up your capital, and ROI time-frame is 10+ years. Selling electricity, on the other hand, has no capital costs to speak of. All you do is buy power wholesale off the grid and re-sell it to your customers.
In the old days, utilities were regulated monopolies, and their profits were capped at a fixed percentage of income. This created financial incentives for the companies to re-invest their surpluses in capital projects and research. As a result, up until the 80's there was lots of investment in generation capacity and upgrades to the transmission infrastructure, because these long-term investments made financial sense (they maximized long-term profitability) as long as the utilities were regulated.
Now, in the era of deregulation, we have the opposite. Maintaining infrastructure is essentially a money-sink, because it ties up money that could otherwise be declared as net profit and used to boost share prices. Furthermore, since the real money is made in re-selling, you're better off if you can arrange to dump all the power generation on someone else. There is zero incentive for a reseller to increase power transmission capacity, and insufficient cash flow for a power generator to do so (hence the number of plants from the 50's operating beyond their design lifetime). Net result: no one is adding to the grid capacity and the power grid has been essentially static since deregulation, despite rising consumption.
-JS
And it'll run under Vista to guarantee 24-7 reliability!
There's a lot more to a mainframe than just software apps — reliability and massive I/O being the most obvious. Remember, this is a world where down-time is measured in millions of dollars per hour. Mainframes are specialized tools designed for specialized jobs and no PC will ever displace (regardless of what sexy VM you're trying to hype) them simply because PC's are designed for a broad consumer market and not for the 24-7 zero-downtime business world.
-JS
Sigh, here we go again with the same Galileo foolishness. C'mon people, if you're going to keep invoking Galileo, at least read the Wikipedia page first, so you know what actually happened.
First point: Copernicus was the one who suggested that the earth orbits around the sun. He was also a Catholic priest.
Second point: Galileo provided the observational evidence to support Copernicus, but this isn't what got him in trouble.
What got Galileo in trouble is that he took his scientific ideas (including the wacky ones that no one ever hears about, like the tides being caused by the slowing down and speeding up of the earth's rotation every day) and was drawing theological conclusions from them. To talk about the earth going around the sun as a philosophical point was something the Church could live with (hence the good relations Copernicus enjoined). For an untrained layman to persist in making theological claims, however, is quite something else in the Church's mind (see Brodrick's biography of Galileo for more details concerning the theological controversy). Most of you get a up in arms when creationists insist that the earth is only 6000 years old, because that's an imposition of religion on to science, why shouldn't the Church get upset when scientists try to tell it about God?
That Galileo also had a habit of publicly ridiculing anyone who disagreed with him did not help matters. For example, his book "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" one of the three literary figures parrots the words of Pope Urban VIII. Because Urban was an Aristotlean, Galileo named his character "Simplicius"; understandably, the Pope was not impressed. This did not improve his standing in the eyes of the powers that be.
In short, the scientific debate was largely peripheral to the Galileo affair. What got Galileo in trouble is that he insisted on drawing theological conclusions from his scientific data.
-JS
That's a comparatively "modern" development. Historically, the Latin scriptures were never much used outside of North Africa and Western Europe (not surprisingly, both places where Latin was used more than Greek). To this day, the original Greek text of the New Testament remains the standard in all of the Eastern Orthodox churches. Even in Rome itself, the liturgy itself was in Greek for the first century or two (see Wikipedia). The insistence on the Latin text is purely a Roman Catholic development (I say this as a Catholic myself), developing first when the knowledge of Greek had ceased to be common-place even among the educated populations (i.e., prior to the Renaissance) and then taking on new significance in the reaction to the Protestant Reformation (post-Trent).
-JS
HTTP allows browsers to set a preferred language (actually, a prioritized list of preferred languages). Google is probably picking up on this to set a default, and then looking at your language settings in GMail as well. So, if you're getting your ads in English, is probably because you've "requested" them that way.
-JS
Picking a language in this case is pretty simple, actually. First, look at the research journals you might want to read. Then, look at the journals cited by the different authors in those journals (to get some extra breadth). Whatever language you see lots of articles being printed in, that's the language you will want to learn.
Having said that, the language of science (physics, in my case) is overwhelmingly English, and I expect this will be true in most any science or engineering field. If everything you want to read is already in English, then your choice of language becomes fairly subjective.
If you have to pick a language at random, though, why not pick the language of a country you might want to live or work in? I'm spending the summer working in Italy, and I took a year-long course in Italian at the local U before coming over. I'm still not very good in Italian, but I can at least function on my own if I have to. Life in a foreign country is a lot more fun when you don't need a translator all the time!
-JS
Just use the MPI libraries. They're standardized, prortable, and your code will work with both clusters and SMP systems (or asymetric, for that matter). And MPI is fairly easy to use, if you need parallel operation.
Oh yeah, and you can "just do it in C" (or Fortran).
-JS