I've often heard of Gauss being it but I've always admired Euler more than Gauss. Euler may have published more mathematics than anyone else as I read in a math textbook once plus he was rumored to have incredible mental calculating ability which would of course have come in handy since he lost sight in one and then the other eye as he grew older.
Most unmanned vehicles? This reminds me of the excellent scifi series "Lord of the Diamonds" by Jack L. Chalker. In the series the human government fights aliens from another galaxy using an array of unmanned remotely controlled war machines - great stuff!
So that explains why when I installed Win95 over my PC Tools enhanced Win3.1 setup that it didn't look any different. I was really surprised and thought that MS had completely ripped Central Point off but I guess they licensed it.
You make some valid points, but there are some problems with applying them to South Africa. There is virtually no market for AIDS drugs in South Africa at current prices. The vast majority of people with the disease would have to work for several weeks to afford one day's worth of treatment. The choice of being broke or dead is not even available to these people; they're already broke. The choice is being broke, dead, and not pissing off the drug companies, or being broke, alive, and irking large American corporations.
That is correct. Your average South African bloke cannot afford the treatment so they only have one option and that is to die.
In fact, many clinics/doctors/organizations in Africa cannot even afford to buy any significant amount of such drugs.
60 minutes presented an excellent review of what is currently happening in Africa with regards to the pharmaceutical industry. They noted that India has no patent law for drugs (because apparently the government in a fit of charity does not allow that to happen so that their people can afford drugs) and that a prominent drug company in India, which manufactures generic versions of the drugs that are made in America, is selling these low cost medicines to African countries. They also noted that the large pharma corps were trying to stop the Indian company from selling their drugs in Kenya among other places. They focused on "sleeping death" in the segment and how people were dying there but they had no money with which to buy the medicines. They later interviewed a spokeperson for the pharma industry who said that they are for profit entities and that the activists/doctors/patients should be talking to their government to foot the bill.
I do not disagree with the idea that the pharmaceutical industry should be able to turn a profit to enable their continued research into new medicines but really now it is awful for them to try to block the Indian company from selling these low cost alternatives. After all, they have no market in those countries in the first place.
Yes, I think you're right. I seem to recall Ebert reviewing it on his television show several months ago and it caught my attention because it was intriguing that of someone with no capacity to form new memories trying to track down his wife's killer. Yet it only showed up here in the U.S. last week.
One warning. The film is really short like an hour long.
Dr. Doug Lenat's Cycorpreleased a press release a couple of days ago indicating that they were going to release a new version of their knowledge-base and inference engine called OpenCyc in July 2001. They say that this is to support Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web. They also say that they are going to join the W3C.
I find it strange that this Scientific American article talks about the Semantic Web, AI, Agents and Ontologies and yet makes no mention whatsoever of the largest knowledge-base of commonsense information - Cyc.
The Cyc knowledge base was founded by Dr. Lenat in 1984 at the government funded consortium that was located in Texas to help U.S. companies compete with Japan. Lenat and his colleagues have spent the last 17 years creating a vast store of knowledge. I haven't really heard much of what has happened to Cycorp in the industry and have been expecting it to make it into products at some point so I was really happy to see the press release on Cyc.com but yet why didn't Tim at least give a passing mention to the ground-breaking research that Lenat has already done in this vein of AI?
Re:They did the same thing with Ulcers
on
Excess Heat
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· Score: 2
For years science scoffed at the idea that ulcers were bacteria induced. The guy that finally figured it out was ridiculed by his peers continually. Then he finally proved it.
Yeah he proved it (I believe he even drank a beaker of the bacteria just to prove his point) all right but does it make a difference? I understand that many doctors still don't believe that ulcers are caused by bacteria. Antibiotics are the cure. So his work is all for naught.
At the university I work at it is required to spent a significant portion of your budget on library fees.
I know what you mean. I found out that depts at my school have a limited budget and can only buy subscriptions to so many journals. If there is another journal out there that is very good but if they don't have the money for it then they don't get it because then they wouldn't be able to subscribe to another good journal.
It's a case of limited resources and it limits the amount of research that you're exposed to. They should be able to open it up or at least make getting a copy reasonable.
Some journals won't even let you buy a copy of a previous journal issue unless you already subscribe to it!
To me, things will get interesting once one of these languages actually starts delivering a non-trivial, high-performance native code compiler. I don't mean the kind of simple translation to C code that exists for Perl and Python, but something that actually genuinely increases performance and figures out stuff about data types. Will anybody be up to the challenge? That remains to be seen.
I am disappointed by the fact that Perl can not deliver compiled code. The help blurb on the Perl executable says that the compiler option is experimental! When will this not be experimental?
I often find that when I'm searching for something that the item(s) of interest are often located on the 5th, 6th, etc. page of whatever the search engine spits out.
It's really annoying.
Sometimes hotbot.com is useful because it has some additional functionality that allows you to search particular domains or subdomains for your regular run-of-the-mill boolean search.
Still it does seem like a lot of the pages that exist on a particular website are Not catalogued by search engines!
I understand that they all have databases of what is currently out there and they are constantly rechecking to make sure that those links are still valid. I imagine it would take too much memory to index all of the pages on each website but then why do search engines often have the same page come up as two or more different hits! I don't get that one.
I know how you feel. There is interlibrary loan though so if you know what the journal, title, author etc are and your university has interlibrary loan, I think that they can get a copy of the article for you if you are a student.
That's too bad. I remember first being exposed to the work of Seymour Cray in an article in Omni back in the 80's. It talked about how he was designing his next greatest supercomputer and it was going to be submerged in a very cold liquid.
Oh well...are there any other mavericks out there in supercomputer design?
When did this happen? The last thing I heard was that he was breaking off from Cray Research to start his own similarly named company to continue building the fastest possible supercomputers. Of course that was at least six years ago.
"Of course, I have no idea what Godel did in his younger years, I just
know he proved the incompleteness of formal systems, especially
Principia Mathematica."
Oh the horror! You spend ten years writing two volumes of mathematical logic to prove 1+1=2 and someone writes a short paper that says all of your work is worthless since any sufficiently complicated system is provably incomplete!
No wonder Bertrand Russell had nightmares that his books would be ignored in the future.
One reason why everyone cares about the Riemann Hypothesis (which, on the face of it, is not all that exciting) is that the zeta function is very closely related to the way the prime numbers are distributed. There's some deep magic behind this, to do with contour integration and generating functions and stuff.
The zeta function is supposed to show the distribution of primes approximately; however, I seem to recall reading that the prime numbers are shown to be distributed in a random manner and that the zeta function also predicts a somewhat random distribution. If the primes truly are distributed randomly then one would think that you could not predict them since they lie randomly about the natural numbers.
Well one might ask of what benefit is this? Well aren't some crypto systems based on large prime numbers? If you could predict which numbers are prime then some crypto systems would be easily breakable.
Also I seem to recall a New Scientist article that claimed that the universe is created from randomness and this randomness was also somehow inextricably linked to the randomness of prime numbers. So in some sense mathematics and physics may be linked together in their foundations.
Holy Cow! That was the best episode of The Next Generation IMHO!
I always wondered what happened with that line of the story and why they never further developed it, after all, at the end the worm creatures had managed to send a signal out into deep space before Riker and Picard could blow his host up.
I was eagerly awaiting a follow up with some sort of invasion force that was to do battle with the Federation.
That two part? episode had the best suspense of any of TNG episodes. Too bad people thought it was too dark and ruined it for the rest of us.
Besides people shouldn't say that Star Trek doesn't have it's dark side. The old series had dark moments like when Kirk was split in two with a good half and an evil half, or how about when innocent seeming kids killed their parents via a supernatural force and then tried to take over the Enterprise? Or how about "Cat's Paw" or the "Gamesters of Triskelion"? Two other very dark and medievalish episodes from the original series?
Since you mention the intermediate step, weather, it is interesting to take note of some accounts of a cause-effect relationship between sunspots and weather in this Wired Magazine article.
If sunspots do influence weather by heating the Earth in uneven ways then that might create certain patterns of pressure fronts. IIRC, sunspots are locations of hotter sun activity so presumably the Earth would get more high pressure zones? But if that were true how would this affect the spread of influenza? Isn't influenza spread during cold seasons and wouldn't this require low pressure zones as opposed to high ones?
Another thing to consider is that influenza seems to originate with birds in China, Australia and some other places that I can not recall at the moment. So somehow the way weather is affected by sunspots causes the migration of these disease infected birds to spread to more populous areas thus infecting more people?
1. A lunar spaceship (like the Eagle)
2. More fuel (a trip to the moon doesn't come cheap)
3. Wouldn't provide the ubiquitous zero-g environment to crystalize proteins and make novel compounds
4. Food shipments to the Moon (more expense)
5. Moonquakes
Could someone please explain the premise behind Space 1999? Like are they from earth? Is there some sort of earth empire or what not? Sorry, but I was a tiny tot at the time and I didn't have control of the remote...I do have some Space 1999 cards though.
I'm not surprised that I didn't really get a chance to watch it since it was only on for like two years.
As for its characters they do seem to have had Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. I do believe that they are married so that is probably good enough reason for them to be costarring in Mission Impossible as well as Space 1999.
IIRC the woman who played Princess Ardala was also a costar on the 80's TV show "Matt Houston".
Och! I managed to find her stats on imdb.com. Yep her name is Pamela Hensley. She was in her early 30's at that time. I recall her being a pretty good actress. She was delightfully evil in Buck Rogers but was very caring/friendly in Matt Houston.
It's too bad, it looks like her career pretty much ended after Matt Houston.
There is a much longer article on MIT's TechReview describing the discovery of the gene responsible for causing Alzheimer's and a little history on the guy (Dale Schenk) who found a vaccine for it.
Sounds like they have several drugs in the pipeline that may block some of the effects of the disease but the search is furious to find a drug that will safely block the function of the beta-amyloid peptide.
Software Written by a Single Programmer is Great..
on
Genetic Stone Soup
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· Score: 2
sometimes. Note the following statement from the NYTimes article. They found it hard to believe that a single programmer could do it. Is it not the case that a single programmer can often create a really good useable program in a short time where a large group might not do it as easily? I seem to recall that visicalc is viewed as one of those great programs written by the sole programmer.
"...if you had assigned a team to build this whole thing over several months it would have been a very difficult proposition. So what Jim has done is miraculous in many ways. No one expected anyone could come in and put this together in four weeks."
Slashdot Mirror
I've often heard of Gauss being it but I've always admired Euler more than Gauss. Euler may have published more mathematics than anyone else as I read in a math textbook once plus he was rumored to have incredible mental calculating ability which would of course have come in handy since he lost sight in one and then the other eye as he grew older.
Axioms are supposed to be obviously true. You have to start Mathematics from somewhere!
Most unmanned vehicles? This reminds me of the excellent scifi series "Lord of the Diamonds" by Jack L. Chalker. In the series the human government fights aliens from another galaxy using an array of unmanned remotely controlled war machines - great stuff!
So that explains why when I installed Win95 over my PC Tools enhanced Win3.1 setup that it didn't look any different. I was really surprised and thought that MS had completely ripped Central Point off but I guess they licensed it.
That is correct. Your average South African bloke cannot afford the treatment so they only have one option and that is to die.
In fact, many clinics/doctors/organizations in Africa cannot even afford to buy any significant amount of such drugs.
60 minutes presented an excellent review of what is currently happening in Africa with regards to the pharmaceutical industry. They noted that India has no patent law for drugs (because apparently the government in a fit of charity does not allow that to happen so that their people can afford drugs) and that a prominent drug company in India, which manufactures generic versions of the drugs that are made in America, is selling these low cost medicines to African countries. They also noted that the large pharma corps were trying to stop the Indian company from selling their drugs in Kenya among other places. They focused on "sleeping death" in the segment and how people were dying there but they had no money with which to buy the medicines. They later interviewed a spokeperson for the pharma industry who said that they are for profit entities and that the activists/doctors/patients should be talking to their government to foot the bill.
I do not disagree with the idea that the pharmaceutical industry should be able to turn a profit to enable their continued research into new medicines but really now it is awful for them to try to block the Indian company from selling these low cost alternatives. After all, they have no market in those countries in the first place.
One warning. The film is really short like an hour long.
I find it strange that this Scientific American article talks about the Semantic Web, AI, Agents and Ontologies and yet makes no mention whatsoever of the largest knowledge-base of commonsense information - Cyc.
The Cyc knowledge base was founded by Dr. Lenat in 1984 at the government funded consortium that was located in Texas to help U.S. companies compete with Japan. Lenat and his colleagues have spent the last 17 years creating a vast store of knowledge. I haven't really heard much of what has happened to Cycorp in the industry and have been expecting it to make it into products at some point so I was really happy to see the press release on Cyc.com but yet why didn't Tim at least give a passing mention to the ground-breaking research that Lenat has already done in this vein of AI?
Yeah he proved it (I believe he even drank a beaker of the bacteria just to prove his point) all right but does it make a difference? I understand that many doctors still don't believe that ulcers are caused by bacteria. Antibiotics are the cure. So his work is all for naught.
I know what you mean. I found out that depts at my school have a limited budget and can only buy subscriptions to so many journals. If there is another journal out there that is very good but if they don't have the money for it then they don't get it because then they wouldn't be able to subscribe to another good journal.
It's a case of limited resources and it limits the amount of research that you're exposed to. They should be able to open it up or at least make getting a copy reasonable.
Some journals won't even let you buy a copy of a previous journal issue unless you already subscribe to it!
I am disappointed by the fact that Perl can not deliver compiled code. The help blurb on the Perl executable says that the compiler option is experimental! When will this not be experimental?
It's really annoying.
Sometimes hotbot.com is useful because it has some additional functionality that allows you to search particular domains or subdomains for your regular run-of-the-mill boolean search.
Still it does seem like a lot of the pages that exist on a particular website are Not catalogued by search engines!
I understand that they all have databases of what is currently out there and they are constantly rechecking to make sure that those links are still valid. I imagine it would take too much memory to index all of the pages on each website but then why do search engines often have the same page come up as two or more different hits! I don't get that one.
http://slate.msn.com/Features/bushisms/bushisms.as p
Or you can use http://uncweb.carl.org/ which costs money.
Oh well...are there any other mavericks out there in supercomputer design?
Is there a history of Seymour Cray somewhere?
know he proved the incompleteness of formal systems, especially
Principia Mathematica."
Oh the horror! You spend ten years writing two volumes of mathematical logic to prove 1+1=2 and someone writes a short paper that says all of your work is worthless since any sufficiently complicated system is provably incomplete!
No wonder Bertrand Russell had nightmares that his books would be ignored in the future.
The zeta function is supposed to show the distribution of primes approximately; however, I seem to recall reading that the prime numbers are shown to be distributed in a random manner and that the zeta function also predicts a somewhat random distribution. If the primes truly are distributed randomly then one would think that you could not predict them since they lie randomly about the natural numbers.
Well one might ask of what benefit is this? Well aren't some crypto systems based on large prime numbers? If you could predict which numbers are prime then some crypto systems would be easily breakable.
Also I seem to recall a New Scientist article that claimed that the universe is created from randomness and this randomness was also somehow inextricably linked to the randomness of prime numbers. So in some sense mathematics and physics may be linked together in their foundations.
I always wondered what happened with that line of the story and why they never further developed it, after all, at the end the worm creatures had managed to send a signal out into deep space before Riker and Picard could blow his host up.
I was eagerly awaiting a follow up with some sort of invasion force that was to do battle with the Federation.
That two part? episode had the best suspense of any of TNG episodes. Too bad people thought it was too dark and ruined it for the rest of us.
Besides people shouldn't say that Star Trek doesn't have it's dark side. The old series had dark moments like when Kirk was split in two with a good half and an evil half, or how about when innocent seeming kids killed their parents via a supernatural force and then tried to take over the Enterprise? Or how about "Cat's Paw" or the "Gamesters of Triskelion"? Two other very dark and medievalish episodes from the original series?
I too would like to know how they're going to make the ships look - retro?
If sunspots do influence weather by heating the Earth in uneven ways then that might create certain patterns of pressure fronts. IIRC, sunspots are locations of hotter sun activity so presumably the Earth would get more high pressure zones? But if that were true how would this affect the spread of influenza? Isn't influenza spread during cold seasons and wouldn't this require low pressure zones as opposed to high ones?
Another thing to consider is that influenza seems to originate with birds in China, Australia and some other places that I can not recall at the moment. So somehow the way weather is affected by sunspots causes the migration of these disease infected birds to spread to more populous areas thus infecting more people?
1. A lunar spaceship (like the Eagle)
2. More fuel (a trip to the moon doesn't come cheap)
3. Wouldn't provide the ubiquitous zero-g environment to crystalize proteins and make novel compounds
4. Food shipments to the Moon (more expense)
5. Moonquakes
I'm not surprised that I didn't really get a chance to watch it since it was only on for like two years.
As for its characters they do seem to have had Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. I do believe that they are married so that is probably good enough reason for them to be costarring in Mission Impossible as well as Space 1999.
An interesting index of Space 1999 sites:
www.space1999.net
Och! I managed to find her stats on imdb.com. Yep her name is Pamela Hensley. She was in her early 30's at that time. I recall her being a pretty good actress. She was delightfully evil in Buck Rogers but was very caring/friendly in Matt Houston.
It's too bad, it looks like her career pretty much ended after Matt Houston.
Sounds like they have several drugs in the pipeline that may block some of the effects of the disease but the search is furious to find a drug that will safely block the function of the beta-amyloid peptide.
"...if you had assigned a team to build this whole thing over several months it would have been a very difficult proposition. So what Jim has done is miraculous in many ways. No one expected anyone could come in and put this together in four weeks."