I first learned about chaos theory, from James Gleick's excellent book 'Chaos' about ten years ago. I've been hooked ever since.
The thing that stuck in my head was Fiegenbaum's number 4.669, which BTW is irrational. This ratio is everywhere and most profound of all, is visible in the architecture of our bodies. The main artery from the heart called the Aorta, is like the trunk of a tree, point being is, if you measure the distance between the heart and the first bifurcation, divide that distance by 4.669, it gives you the statistical length of the two branches from the first bifurcation. Now here is the kicker:- it is that ratio, all the way down to the smallest cappillary, to enable a blood supply for every cell in our bodies.
GM technology worries me, not because I'm scared of engineering. But because to my knowledge, we do not yet understand the mathematics of morphogenesis. DNA is a simple four bit code and yet somehow or other, nature manages to store a cellular doubling number in that four bit code.
We all start out as one cell, that doubles in a binary progression. Our body plan is formed by the x,y,z matrics of those doublings. The fractal like architecture of our bodies, gives us a hint to how, the miracle of storing our entire code base, in about four gig might be acomplished.
This new discovery excites me, who knows where it will lead, a new understanding of life maybe? New math? New electronics? The list is endless.
Bravo, if only I had mod points, your posting would get them all. The more people realize the truth in what you are saying, the less awkward that truth will be. Please have the courage of your convictions and be proud of them, hint hint.
There is one big difference between human beings and all other life forms on this planet. Other life forms on this planet are in the main adapted to their environment, giraffes, camels, frogs, whales etc etc. The way we differ, is we turn the equation around and adapt the environment to our needs. It could be said, that we have evolved the ability to change our environment, in doing so coincidently, we have evolved the ability to *create* an evironment.
Life is the universe's way of getting a look at itself, we are part of that process. Once we create self sustaining biospheres off planet, we will be fulfilling the destiny life has set out for us. Compared to other species we are a very young species, hopefully one day our species will grow up and give our mother earth her space back.
The earth has finite resources and all six billion of us are beginning to put a strain on those resources, the only way out is up. It is DNA's desire to go forth and multiply, we have evolved the ability to let DNA fill the universe with its lovelyness warts an all.
From the comments it seems like people are only seeing the comical side to all this. In countries with established broadband networks it would have an uphill fight getting established. Where it will probably make inroads, is in towns around the world that don't already have a cheap highcoverage broadband infrastructure. The cost per mile figure is the one to watch, point being is sewage companies all ready use robots to inspect sewers in many countries. If the muncipal sewerage companies see that they can increase their revenue by using this technology, without an enormouse outlay of capital they will pitch their prices to beneath the prices of existing methods and money talks.
I remember when they cabled my area, the cost must have run into millions, all those trenches, don't come cheap in terms of man hours. And is reflected in the price I pay for my broadband connection, those loans have to be paid back, plus interest.
There will obviously be technical problems but technology usually finds ways around such things, padlocked manholes and such. Also by doing this we might end up with a better system of sewers, less effluent escape in to ground water would be a good thing, by putting the cable laying robot into the sewer means you can inspect the sewer as well as lay the cable.
It will be price that will have the final say, especially in other countries that do not have a hangup about bodily functions
Many years ago I learned assembler, first on a Z80 then on a 6502. When I learned the power of zero page addressing, yes I thought, way to go. I left behind my computing hobby, to become an international truck driver, for about 10 years this is what I did, seven years ago, events occured leading me to take up my old hobby. I tried to learn the 86, gave up after a while, thinking what was the point in banging my head against such a mess.
What they should have done is kept the 6502 architecture and scaled it up. The architecture of the 6502 was wonderful. Sixteen bit address bus, eight bit data bus, same as the Z80, the clever bit with the 6502 was zero page addressing,which basicaly gave 256 registers as well the three GP registers. The idea being the CPU could access the bottom page in memory with just eight bits in the address field, zeropage could be used as index registers, I can't rightly remember all the operations that could be performed on zero page as opposed to the X Y and Z registers, but I remember it leading to good tight code. The same architecture in a 32 bit address space, ah the dreams
Human beings are the most intelligent species on the planet? Who says so? Why human beings do! That is a bit of a coincidence, isn't it. We say we are different to other animals, well in one way we are spectaculaly different, that is the degree to which we have evolved the ability to change our surroundings to suit ourselves, other mammals are the other way round, they are evolved to fit their environment. In evolving our ability to change our environment, we have coincidently evolved the ability to create an environment. Taking this to be a fact, leads me to the question, why if we evolved this fantastic ability, we are using it to steal an environment. All the raw materials are out there, all we lack is the imagination to put them together.... yet.
Seeing all those daft buggers playing marbles on ice, frenetically scrubbing away to get the stains out, roaring their commands gave me a lift. Ah the pottyness of it all and now this, can it get any better? Go/. go.
Good luck and congrats, maybe you will bring a new geek into existence.
I've been wondering, is it possible to make any file, a.wav or equivalent, pump the file out of line out, on the sound card. Then suck it in through the line in, on another sound card and thus regurgitate the bytes. Sound cards have d to a converters and visa versa. Kind of like changing a picture into a song and bunging it down the telling bone like. After all everything in memory is just ones and zeros isn't it. Basicaly converting a number into a frequency then back again.
Perhaps somebody could explain the difference between an ethernet card and a sound card 'cuz I'm a bit dim about these matters. I'm wondering what kind of thru put you could achieve especially if you pumed up the volume and applied judicious cooling.
You mean to tell me a beowolf cluster could not out route, a cisco router with an increasing redundancy, inversely propotional on the number of nodes. Tiz you forgetin yer packets.
He He, two moderator points left and I decide to give up that democratic right and post instead.
I'd put it down to the incomahole.
Lemme tell you what I mean.
Near on twenty years ago I started fiddling around with computers, and had much fun doing so. That was in the days when ones operating system was written in stone. In the days when the OS was burnt onto a rom and they had to get it right when they went for a burn 'coz it cost an awful amount of money when they got it wrong.
Then came along HD's and it was worked out,
one no longer had to give so much commitment to accuracy, one could issue the operating system in software, sort of flashupgrade on steroids, and charge in the process. Yeah big time, well clever keep em in the dark and suck em dry. Well the chickens are coming home to roost sorry.
Economics on its most real level, is about resource management and I think us homo saps are making a poor fist of it. Raping the present and mortgaging the future. Why? Maybe because of intellectual capitalism.
The understanding of how computers work should be shared, not hoarded. The proliferation of different computer languages demonstrates the antithesis to this idea. Almost as though kind of following the fat wallet and empty bollocks syndrome grows bigger antlers, irrelevant of the environment of ones children. They vainly try to delineate logoize encapsulate alienate obfuscate towards a fat wallet and empty bollocks as though that was the sum total of what life means. Capture the intellectual territory by beating the shit out people if they do not agree with your labels.
Well to end all this, I would like to say I think intellectual capitalism stinks and resource capitalism has a grain of sense.
Init nice to waste karma when you are that old and fucked up.
Best place to store hydrogen, is where it has always been stored that is in water. Then the problem becomes how do we get the hydrogen out of the water. This may sound silly until you realize that is just what photosynthesis achieves. Photosynthesis is not properly understood yet as for as I know. Once it is understood then we might be able to reproduce the effect with nanotechnology. What wattage per square metre could be achieved then as opposed to a photoelectric cell. It should be the holy grail of physics and chemistry to unravel this miracle and before you scoff it remains a miracle until it is unravelled. Should be worth a Nobel prize at least. So come on all you physics and chemistry graduates, how exactly does photosynthesis use sunlight to break the weak nuclear force binding oxygen to hydrogen.
An extention of the thought police maybe, a knee jerk reaction resulting in control freakery probably. Very silly certainly. Typical of a military mind set that seeks to control his enemy instead of understanding him, an enemy becomes more of a challenge, if he is understood and less of an enemy. The first thing to understand is how your enemy feels, once this is achieved with accuracy, then he becomes easier to defeat or at least nullify.
I consider my computer to be an extension of my brain, ergo the people who think that they can control my computer, aught to consider wether or not they can control my brain. If I can't control my brain how on earth can they control my brain. I can't control my brain because I am my brain. Would you want me to cut my brain in half so one half could control the other half?
I've always wondered what function of the dash is, obviously it is to be able to differentiate between email and e-mail I can see that quite well, what baffles me is what that distinction is, at a guess I would think it is a class distinction, but arguing with myself I would state class distinction is a purely British phenomena, so I'm still unable to understand this nuance of internet ettiquette. On further reflection I suppose it is akin to the difference between viruses and virii.
You say there are only four ISP's in Mozambique, you are thinking like a geek. How many telephones are there in Mozambique? Is there any infrastructure at all? If there is any infrastructue, can it be hacked in some way to carry a signal. Power lines and such things. If you can set up a hub close to the South African border, is there anyway to cheaply ship in some more bandwidth. Even a telephone extension line would give at the least a 56k link to the South African telephone system. Cringely did a piece about line of site radio links. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010712. html
How many ISP's are there in South Africa. Anyone know any philanthropic millionares in SA. Money without local knowledge will probably be wasted. Are there any mountains?
How do you create an infrastructure, is a chicken and egg question.
Try and stay in touch, I'm fairly sure most Slashdotters would like to know how you got on.
Why not have some industry-wide cooperative system to piggyback content payments on your ISP bill? Say that right now you are paying $20 a month for access. Raise that to $30 and let your ISP keep $20, leaving $10 for distributed payments. When you visit a site that recieves payments under this new system, it tracks how much you have used it and sends this information back to your ISP. Your ISP keeps track of what you have visited and how much, and at the end of the month divides up the $10 among all the pay sites according to these weights and sends that data to their ISPs, who then deduct that from the pay site's bill that month.
The important concept here is to make the payment completely transparent to the user; no one would use cable TV if they had to drop a quarter in their cable box every time they turned it on. The privacy problems could be avoided through heavy use of encryption ("100 hits to [unique ID corresponding to www.goatse.cx] for customer [unique ID consisting of encrypted account information understood only by the payment server] on [encrypted]/[encrypted], 2001").
This would make Slashdot very rich and the whole content of the web would be funded like the BBC is funded, but globably. How much spam do you see on the Beeb websites?
Politics at the end of the day is about economics.
Can anyone imagine what the state of play would have been, if Apple had of achieved the market penetration that the PC achieved, BTW PC means peoples computer. I've never owned an Apple Mac but it would not surprise me to find a sticker saying, 'opening this up' voids the warranty. I'm probably wrong about this, but the mentality that drives a lot of buisness, is the idea of taking over. Of building a commercial dictatorship.
I have been trying on and off for about eighteen months with different distro's, to get on the internet with Linux, finally two days ago I achieved liftoff. I'm fifty two years old, the older you get, the more difficult it gets to learn new stuff.
The relative speeds between the Apple Mac and the PC are not nearly as important, as the fact that Linux is the peoples operating system, written by the people, for the people. The whole idea that people can capitalize on ideas and not sweat, is deeply flawed.
The culture of science works because of the sharing of ideas, not so with Microsoft, you are not supposed to know how it works.
I used to code lots years ago, 6502 and Z80, as a hobby more than anything else, then because of circumstances I gave up my hobby for around ten years, then took it up again, starting with a 286, yeah when I started to learn about extended memory, expanded memory and protected mode I thought what a mess and gave up. Assembler is hard enough as it is, without added layers of complexity, then I learned about Linux.
Linux is what Dos should have been.
Yeah an Apple Mac is probably more stable than a PC running Microsoft (Not all Microsofts fault(there are some crap coders out there)) But I ask you, one company supplying the hardware and the software, might be ok for folks that use computers in a purely utensil fashion, but for the losers that want to understand how the hell a box of switches, could exhibit quite human characteristics, well I rest my case.
Then why does the bifurcation ratio of our arteries from our aortas down to the tiny capilary that feeds each cell, conform to Fiegenbaums ratio 4.669i.
Biology has not sussed the mathematics of morphogenesis yet. How is the 3d matrix of bone cell division, encoded in the four bit code of dna?
The thing that amazes me is the information compression ratio. Represented by the chromosomal library. There is a place to find congruences in math, the Mandlebrot set is a good example, basically the Mandlebrot works like it does because of the irrational fracton. Morphogenesis might be pulling the same trick. Biological mathematics work different to human mathematics.
Basically complexity arises because of the irrational fraction. The irrational fraction means some equations are unsolvable to absolute accuracy. Its kind of like if one set to sail the Atlantic, any tiny error in the course set at the begining would magnify, unless course corrections were applied as time went by.
Complex phenomena could be said to be, that which cannot be predicted with accuracy, like the weather, the stock market, history. Another example for complexity, is to measure the coast line of an island, the greater the accuracy of the measurement, the longer the coastline, sounds crazy I know, but if you look at the very edge of the shoreline with a microscope, you will see bazillions of little rivulets emerging from bazillions of little rivulets. A very good book I can reccomend is 'Chaos' by James Glieck.
Newton concieved his third law thinking that space was cartesian. Every acton has an equal and action works fine in cartesian space, in other words, the line that the equal and opposite reation takes is straight, not curved. Einstein's work suggests this line is not straight, but curved, taking this to its logical conclusion would suggest it is not equal and opposte, because it will eventually curve back on itself.
Einstein found one flaw in Newton's equations, that being time is relative to speed therefore not absolute. Who's to say there is not another flaw with Newton's equations.
There is no empirical evidence for dark matter, furthermore anomilies have been observed with the deep space probes, they did not behave as the math said they should have behaved, ergo there is something wrong with the equations.
Nasa is at the present investigating these anomilies.
Newton's work suggests that gravity is only a function of mass, not a function of how things move.
What I would like to know is, what does the mobius strip having one side really mean? Has anybody checked out if it has one side kinetically. Probably not, because the scientific establishment knows Newton's third law is gospel.
Peter.
ps. Yes I know I posted this before, but I posted it as a reply to another posting and it looked a bit lost way down in the list of postings, so here it is again just in case it gets missed.
Newton conceived his third law thinking that space was cartesian. Every acton has an equal and action works fine in cartesian space, in other words, the line that the equal and opposite reation takes is straight, not curved. Einstein's work suggests this line is not straight, but curved, taking this to its logical conclusion would suggest it is not equal and opposte, because it will eventually curve back on itself.
Einstein found one flaw in Newton's equations, that being time is relative to speed therefore not absolute. Who's to say there is not another flaw with Newton's equations.
There is no empirical evidence for dark matter, furthermore anomilies have been observed with the deep space probes, they did not behave as the math said they should have behaved, ergo there is something wrong with the equations.
Nasa is at the present investigating these anomilies.
Newton's work suggests that gravity is only a function of mass, not a function of how things move.
What I would like to know is, what does the mobius strip having one side really mean? Has anybody checked out if it has one side kinetically. Probably not, because everyone knows Newton's third law is gospel.
I've surfed the cornucopia of ikons on slashdot, Nowhere can I find an icon the lets me ask slashdot! So hence this posting. It's completely off topic I know, but I could not find a proficient icon for me to place this question in an appropriate context. So here goes:
What effect does slashdot have on politics? If any?
Well I've been through the lot on -1 and no where can I find mention of royalties:-). English is my first language and my last language. Not one post mentioned the *real* power of English, that being spoken English lends itself to accents very easily, the reason for this is, spoken English uses lips instead of throat. To understand this, observe the frequency of gestures with different languages. Using lips gives a more subtle nuancy of meaning, by virture of more control of sound, do you really want to talk as though you are spewing. However I do agree written English is a mess, and its spelling moreso
Peter.
Re:Runing an infernal combustion engine on water
on
Air-Powered Cars
·
· Score: 1
Forgot to say, retooling has an environmental overhead as well, put bluntly, if we have to trash our old chariots, and replace them with new air driven chariots, the amount of polution created in the process of recreation, defeats the object of the argument.
Slashdot Mirror
I first learned about chaos theory, from James Gleick's excellent book 'Chaos' about ten years ago. I've been hooked ever since.
The thing that stuck in my head was Fiegenbaum's number 4.669, which BTW is irrational. This ratio is everywhere and most profound of all, is visible in the architecture of our bodies. The main artery from the heart called the Aorta, is like the trunk of a tree, point being is, if you measure the distance between the heart and the first bifurcation, divide that distance by 4.669, it gives you the statistical length of the two branches from the first bifurcation. Now here is the kicker:- it is that ratio, all the way down to the smallest cappillary, to enable a blood supply for every cell in our bodies.
GM technology worries me, not because I'm scared of engineering. But because to my knowledge, we do not yet understand the mathematics of morphogenesis. DNA is a simple four bit code and yet somehow or other, nature manages to store a cellular doubling number in that four bit code.
We all start out as one cell, that doubles in a binary progression. Our body plan is formed by the x,y,z matrics of those doublings. The fractal like architecture of our bodies, gives us a hint to how, the miracle of storing our entire code base, in about four gig might be acomplished.
This new discovery excites me, who knows where it will lead, a new understanding of life maybe? New math? New electronics? The list is endless.
Cutting edge indeed.
Peter
Peter.
The earth has finite resources and all six billion of us are beginning to put a strain on those resources, the only way out is up. It is DNA's desire to go forth and multiply, we have evolved the ability to let DNA fill the universe with its lovelyness warts an all.
Merry Christmas everybody.
Peter.
Ps. BTW, things cost work, not money
From the comments it seems like people are only seeing the comical side to all this. In countries with established broadband networks it would have an uphill fight getting established. Where it will probably make inroads, is in towns around the world that don't already have a cheap highcoverage broadband infrastructure. The cost per mile figure is the one to watch, point being is sewage companies all ready use robots to inspect sewers in many countries. If the muncipal sewerage companies see that they can increase their revenue by using this technology, without an enormouse outlay of capital they will pitch their prices to beneath the prices of existing methods and money talks.
I remember when they cabled my area, the cost must have run into millions, all those trenches, don't come cheap in terms of man hours. And is reflected in the price I pay for my broadband connection, those loans have to be paid back, plus interest.
There will obviously be technical problems but technology usually finds ways around such things, padlocked manholes and such. Also by doing this we might end up with a better system of sewers, less effluent escape in to ground water would be a good thing, by putting the cable laying robot into the sewer means you can inspect the sewer as well as lay the cable.
It will be price that will have the final say, especially in other countries that do not have a hangup about bodily functions
Many years ago I learned assembler, first on a Z80 then on a 6502. When I learned the power of zero page addressing, yes I thought, way to go. I left behind my computing hobby, to become an international truck driver, for about 10 years this is what I did, seven years ago, events occured leading me to take up my old hobby. I tried to learn the 86, gave up after a while, thinking what was the point in banging my head against such a mess.
,which basicaly gave 256 registers as well the three GP registers. The idea being the CPU could access the bottom page in memory with just eight bits in the address field, zeropage could be used as index registers, I can't rightly remember all the operations that could be performed on zero page as opposed to the X Y and Z registers, but I remember it leading to good tight code. The same architecture in a 32 bit address space, ah the dreams
What they should have done is kept the 6502 architecture and scaled it up. The architecture of the 6502 was wonderful. Sixteen bit address bus, eight bit data bus, same as the Z80, the clever bit with the 6502 was zero page addressing
Human beings are the most intelligent species on the planet? Who says so? Why human beings do! That is a bit of a coincidence, isn't it. We say we are different to other animals, well in one way we are spectaculaly different, that is the degree to which we have evolved the ability to change our surroundings to suit ourselves, other mammals are the other way round, they are evolved to fit their environment. In evolving our ability to change our environment, we have coincidently evolved the ability to create an environment. Taking this to be a fact, leads me to the question, why if we evolved this fantastic ability, we are using it to steal an environment. All the raw materials are out there, all we lack is the imagination to put them together .... yet.
Peter.
Seeing all those daft buggers playing marbles on ice, frenetically scrubbing away to get the stains out, roaring their commands gave me a lift. Ah the pottyness of it all and now this, can it get any better? Go /. go.
Good luck and congrats, maybe you will bring a new geek into existence.
Peter.
I've been wondering, is it possible to make any file, a .wav or equivalent, pump the file out of line out, on the sound card. Then suck it in through the line in, on another sound card and thus regurgitate the bytes. Sound cards have d to a converters and visa versa. Kind of like changing a picture into a song and bunging it down the telling bone like. After all everything in memory is just ones and zeros isn't it. Basicaly converting a number into a frequency then back again.
Perhaps somebody could explain the difference between an ethernet card and a sound card 'cuz I'm a bit dim about these matters. I'm wondering what kind of thru put you could achieve especially if you pumed up the volume and applied judicious cooling.
Thanx Peter
Come come,
You mean to tell me a beowolf cluster could not out route, a cisco router with an increasing redundancy, inversely propotional on the number of nodes. Tiz you forgetin yer packets.
Peter.
He He, two moderator points left and I decide to give up that democratic right and post instead.
I'd put it down to the incomahole.
Lemme tell you what I mean.
Near on twenty years ago I started fiddling around with computers, and had much fun doing so. That was in the days when ones operating system was written in stone. In the days when the OS was burnt onto a rom and they had to get it right when they went for a burn 'coz it cost an awful amount of money when they got it wrong.
Then came along HD's and it was worked out,
one no longer had to give so much commitment to accuracy, one could issue the operating system in software, sort of flashupgrade on steroids, and charge in the process. Yeah big time, well clever keep em in the dark and suck em dry. Well the chickens are coming home to roost sorry.
Economics on its most real level, is about resource management and I think us homo saps are making a poor fist of it. Raping the present and mortgaging the future. Why? Maybe because of intellectual capitalism.
The understanding of how computers work should be shared, not hoarded. The proliferation of different computer languages demonstrates the antithesis to this idea. Almost as though kind of following the fat wallet and empty bollocks syndrome grows bigger antlers, irrelevant of the environment of ones children. They vainly try to delineate logoize encapsulate alienate obfuscate towards a fat wallet and empty bollocks as though that was the sum total of what life means. Capture the intellectual territory by beating the shit out people if they do not agree with your labels.
Well to end all this, I would like to say I think intellectual capitalism stinks and resource capitalism has a grain of sense.
Init nice to waste karma when you are that old and fucked up.
Peter
Best place to store hydrogen, is where it has always been stored that is in water. Then the problem becomes how do we get the hydrogen out of the water. This may sound silly until you realize that is just what photosynthesis achieves. Photosynthesis is not properly understood yet as for as I know. Once it is understood then we might be able to reproduce the effect with nanotechnology. What wattage per square metre could be achieved then as opposed to a photoelectric cell. It should be the holy grail of physics and chemistry to unravel this miracle and before you scoff it remains a miracle until it is unravelled. Should be worth a Nobel prize at least. So come on all you physics and chemistry graduates, how exactly does photosynthesis use sunlight to break the weak nuclear force binding oxygen to hydrogen.
I would guess at some kind of lensing effect.
Peter.
An extention of the thought police maybe, a knee jerk reaction resulting in control freakery probably. Very silly certainly. Typical of a military mind set that seeks to control his enemy instead of understanding him, an enemy becomes more of a challenge, if he is understood and less of an enemy. The first thing to understand is how your enemy feels, once this is achieved with accuracy, then he becomes easier to defeat or at least nullify.
I consider my computer to be an extension of my brain, ergo the people who think that they can control my computer, aught to consider wether or not they can control my brain. If I can't control my brain how on earth can they control my brain. I can't control my brain because I am my brain. Would you want me to cut my brain in half so one half could control the other half?
Peter
I've always wondered what function of the dash is, obviously it is to be able to differentiate between email and e-mail I can see that quite well, what baffles me is what that distinction is, at a guess I would think it is a class distinction, but arguing with myself I would state class distinction is a purely British phenomena, so I'm still unable to understand this nuance of internet ettiquette. On further reflection I suppose it is akin to the difference between viruses and virii.
You say there are only four ISP's in Mozambique, you are thinking like a geek. How many telephones are there in Mozambique? Is there any infrastructure at all? If there is any infrastructue, can it be hacked in some way to carry a signal. Power lines and such things. If you can set up a hub close to the South African border, is there anyway to cheaply ship in some more bandwidth. Even a telephone extension line would give at the least a 56k link to the South African telephone system. Cringely did a piece about line of site radio links. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010712. html
How many ISP's are there in South Africa. Anyone know any philanthropic millionares in SA. Money without local knowledge will probably be wasted. Are there any mountains?
How do you create an infrastructure, is a chicken and egg question.
Try and stay in touch, I'm fairly sure most Slashdotters would like to know how you got on.
Peter.
This would make Slashdot very rich and the whole content of the web would be funded like the BBC is funded, but globably. How much spam do you see on the Beeb websites?
Peter
This would make Slashdot very rich.
Peter.
Politics at the end of the day is about economics.
Can anyone imagine what the state of play would have been, if Apple had of achieved the market penetration that the PC achieved, BTW PC means peoples computer. I've never owned an Apple Mac but it would not surprise me to find a sticker saying, 'opening this up' voids the warranty. I'm probably wrong about this, but the mentality that drives a lot of buisness, is the idea of taking over. Of building a commercial dictatorship.
I have been trying on and off for about eighteen months with different distro's, to get on the internet with Linux, finally two days ago I achieved liftoff. I'm fifty two years old, the older you get, the more difficult it gets to learn new stuff.
The relative speeds between the Apple Mac and the PC are not nearly as important, as the fact that Linux is the peoples operating system, written by the people, for the people. The whole idea that people can capitalize on ideas and not sweat, is deeply flawed.
The culture of science works because of the sharing of ideas, not so with Microsoft, you are not supposed to know how it works.
I used to code lots years ago, 6502 and Z80, as a hobby more than anything else, then because of circumstances I gave up my hobby for around ten years, then took it up again, starting with a 286, yeah when I started to learn about extended memory, expanded memory and protected mode I thought what a mess and gave up. Assembler is hard enough as it is, without added layers of complexity, then I learned about Linux.
Linux is what Dos should have been.
Yeah an Apple Mac is probably more stable than a PC running Microsoft (Not all Microsofts fault(there are some crap coders out there)) But I ask you, one company supplying the hardware and the software, might be ok for folks that use computers in a purely utensil fashion, but for the losers that want to understand how the hell a box of switches, could exhibit quite human characteristics, well I rest my case.
Peter.
It was only last weekend I listened to a beautiful lecture by Douglas Adams, the man was a damn fine philosopher. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/av_converg ence.shtml
Just click on convergence, program 4.
Peter.
Then why does the bifurcation ratio of our arteries from our aortas down to the tiny capilary that feeds each cell, conform to Fiegenbaums ratio 4.669i.
Biology has not sussed the mathematics of morphogenesis yet. How is the 3d matrix of bone cell division, encoded in the four bit code of dna?
The thing that amazes me is the information compression ratio. Represented by the chromosomal library. There is a place to find congruences in math, the Mandlebrot set is a good example, basically the Mandlebrot works like it does because of the irrational fracton. Morphogenesis might be pulling the same trick. Biological mathematics work different to human mathematics.
Peter.
Basically complexity arises because of the irrational fraction. The irrational fraction means some equations are unsolvable to absolute accuracy. Its kind of like if one set to sail the Atlantic, any tiny error in the course set at the begining would magnify, unless course corrections were applied as time went by.
Complex phenomena could be said to be, that which cannot be predicted with accuracy, like the weather, the stock market, history. Another example for complexity, is to measure the coast line of an island, the greater the accuracy of the measurement, the longer the coastline, sounds crazy I know, but if you look at the very edge of the shoreline with a microscope, you will see bazillions of little rivulets emerging from bazillions of little rivulets. A very good book I can reccomend is 'Chaos' by James Glieck.
Peter.
Newton concieved his third law thinking that space was cartesian. Every acton has an equal and action works fine in cartesian space, in other words, the line that the equal and opposite reation takes is straight, not curved. Einstein's work suggests this line is not straight, but curved, taking this to its logical conclusion would suggest it is not equal and opposte, because it will eventually curve back on itself.
Einstein found one flaw in Newton's equations, that being time is relative to speed therefore not absolute. Who's to say there is not another flaw with Newton's equations.
There is no empirical evidence for dark matter, furthermore anomilies have been observed with the deep space probes, they did not behave as the math said they should have behaved, ergo there is something wrong with the equations.
Nasa is at the present investigating these anomilies.
Newton's work suggests that gravity is only a function of mass, not a function of how things move.
What I would like to know is, what does the mobius strip having one side really mean? Has anybody checked out if it has one side kinetically. Probably not, because the scientific establishment knows Newton's third law is gospel.
Peter.
ps. Yes I know I posted this before, but I posted it as a reply to another posting and it looked a bit lost way down in the list of postings, so here it is again just in case it gets missed.
Newton conceived his third law thinking that space was cartesian. Every acton has an equal and action works fine in cartesian space, in other words, the line that the equal and opposite reation takes is straight, not curved. Einstein's work suggests this line is not straight, but curved, taking this to its logical conclusion would suggest it is not equal and opposte, because it will eventually curve back on itself.
Einstein found one flaw in Newton's equations, that being time is relative to speed therefore not absolute. Who's to say there is not another flaw with Newton's equations.
There is no empirical evidence for dark matter, furthermore anomilies have been observed with the deep space probes, they did not behave as the math said they should have behaved, ergo there is something wrong with the equations.
Nasa is at the present investigating these anomilies.
Newton's work suggests that gravity is only a function of mass, not a function of how things move.
What I would like to know is, what does the mobius strip having one side really mean? Has anybody checked out if it has one side kinetically. Probably not, because everyone knows Newton's third law is gospel.
Peter.
I've surfed the cornucopia of ikons on slashdot, Nowhere can I find an icon the lets me ask slashdot! So hence this posting. It's completely off topic I know, but I could not find a proficient icon for me to place this question in an appropriate context. So here goes:
What effect does slashdot have on politics? If any?
Peter.
Well I've been through the lot on -1 and no where can I find mention of royalties :-). English is my first language and my last language. Not one post mentioned the *real* power of English, that being spoken English lends itself to accents very easily, the reason for this is, spoken English uses lips instead of throat. To understand this, observe the frequency of gestures with different languages. Using lips gives a more subtle nuancy of meaning, by virture of more control of sound, do you really want to talk as though you are spewing.
However I do agree written English is a mess, and its spelling moreso
Peter.
Forgot to say, retooling has an environmental overhead as well, put bluntly, if we have to trash our old chariots, and replace them with new air driven chariots, the amount of polution created in the process of recreation, defeats the object of the argument.
Peter.