Yes, that's a great algorithm, I use it too sometimes. Michael Saunders was one of my dissertation readers. Wickedly smart man, and more importantly, his software *works*.
I agree with a previous poster who said it is unfair to compare this algorithm to Gaussian Elimination. Frankly, it seems to me that the poster has taken enough numerical analysis to know that GE is O(n^3), but is not familiar with the much wider body of research into efficient methods for solving structured linear systems.
Symmetric diagonally dominant linear systems are among the best conditioned systems you could possibly construct, which means that it is a rare case that you would ever use GE. Instead, you would use an iterative method, such as conjugate gradients or a stationary method like the Chebyshev method discussed in the paper. While it does seem that they are proposing a novel way to construct an efficient iterative method, the truth is that once you've entered the realm of iterative methods it's not likely there is going to be a single approach that works best in every instance. Even the paper's author agree that this is a "conceptually simple and possibly practical iterative solver." They rightly recognize that what works well on paper may not always prove useful in practice. So I think we should take the authors' own advice and wait for further research into this approach.
eldavojohn writes: "While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals..."
As evidence he provides a reference to: the statement by a single journal. Surely that is not "most journals", is it? Where is the evidence that most journals have even commented on the story, much less rendered a verdict as to its seriousness?
To be fair, the statement might well be true, in the sense that "most scientific journals" have not issued any statement on the matter. And even if they did so, in the short period of time that has transpired, it could only represent the views of the editors, not the body of researchers that contributes to it.
So what we have here seems to be the gross magnification of one statement to reflect a broad consensus.
The key point you've glossed over is the measurement "200CK". How much is 200CK? It means that the substance has undergone 200 100-to-1 dilutions. That means that the concentration has been reduced from full strength by a factor of 100^200. Yes, that's right---10^400. According to this article in Wikipedia, the number of observable atoms in the observable universe is approximately 10^80. Clearly, you will be the luckiest person alive, 10^40 or so times over, if even one atom of the active ingredient is left in your sugar pill.
Not until you linked to it, no. The idea that I would think that they should "stop giving awards to known anti-Bush partisans" is preposterous.
I genuinely believe Krugman deserves his award. I believe the work for which he earned it is great stuff, and so did those aformentioned economists with whom I once had the pleasure of meeting. And I believe that the way the OP phrases his post unnecessarily links that work with his political punditry.
That's what I believe, that's what I meant, and that's what I said. You clearly doubt my sincerity; that is your problem, not mine. But since I can't fight that, you win.
Now you see, this is the discussion we should have been having from the beginning. I am glad that you have finally chosen to explain your disagreement fully instead of limit yourself to a silly retort. I think I'm in a better position to explain myself now that you've explained yourself beyond partisan puffery.
I haven't exaggerated a bloody thing. Your quotes are your quotes, and they clearly imply that Krugman's political opinions discredit him, if not his work:
Playing up his anti-Bush sentiment only serves to diminish the value of this award.
In what universe? How does acknowledging Krugman's political opinions diminish the value of his award? How does pointing to Friedman's political opinions diminish the value of his award? If both men won their awards fair and square, based on peer judgement of the worth of each man's work as a useful finding or theoretical instrument, how would the value of an award recognizing the value of that work be diminished by pointing to the man's political opinions?
Because its value is dependent upon the award's reputation, that's why. And lately that reputation has been tarnished because of the apparent alleged political motivations behind the awarding of other Nobel Prizes.
I happen to be one of those people. I think the awarding Peace prize in particular to Al Gore and the IPCC and Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA damaged the reputation of the Peace Prize. The rhetorical contortions required to justify the 2007 award were particularly egregious. I think that more deserving candidates (my recent favorite being Muhammad Yunus in 2006 and Doctors Without Borders in 1999) are overshadowed, quite unfortunately, by these more questionable choices.
Now yes, this is where you might say "that's just what a bunch of kooks say" or whatever. The problem is that the awardee's supporters often end up supporting those very allegations of politicization. When fans of Al Gore talk about his award as a thumb in the eye of the Bush administration, they legitimize the suspicions of the so-called kooks. A similar phenomenon happened when the Oscar was awarded to Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11: the glee from the left and Michael Moore himself served to validate accusations that the award wasn't given on merit.
If your point is that nothing outside the work itself has any effect on the value of that work, then the value of awards recognizing that work can neither be enhanced nor diminished by information about things like their political opinions.
Well as you can see that is not my belief. I believe that the reputation of the award matters when determining its value.
IF he starts to link it to his political views, then he'll bring derision upon himself and the Nobel committee.
Krugman hasn't been stupid enough to claim he got the award for political reasons, and neither have I. It would be especially stupid to do so given that Friedman, whose political opinions couldn't be more different from Krugman's, has won the same award.
Agreed. My "if" above wasn't meant to imply that it was likely Krugman would do this, indeed I would expect him to defend himself against claims the award was politically motivated. But he is but one man (albeit a famous one) and he cannot control all the chatter.
What I have been saying all along is that, out of respect for Krugman's work one should be careful about bringing up his politics as if that had something to do with it. In particular, focusing in particular on his criticism of the Bush administration is irrelevant to the point that he is a critic on far more than economic policy, and it is somewhat limited in the fact that he also criticized the Clinton administration as well (though obviously somewhat less.
You're getting more incoherent by the post. Why in the world would I think that? Both men are regularly pilloried by their political adversaries (Friedman posthumously, of course). Recall the recent protest over the founding of a Milton Friedman Institute, for instance.
Krugman deserves his award, fair and square, and even economists who disagree with him politically recognize that. Your problem from the beginning is that you took my synthesized quote from those economists, exaggerated it for effect, and attributed it to me.
Idiot: I'm doing no such thing. I made no implication that his anti-Bush stance is fringe or laughable.
The point is that, rightly or wrongly, it is believed by many that the Nobel prize selections are unduly influenced by politics. But it is unwarranted in this case. The work for which his prize was awarded is genuinely worthy of recognition.
Bringing up Krugman's political views and notoriety, as the original poster did, only serves to feed the temptation to believe he did not deserve the award. I don't care whether is sentiment is the majority view or not.
only serves to diminish the value of this award. IF he starts to link it to his political views, then he'll bring derision upon himself and the Nobel committee. But he doesn't need to, because in his prior life as an full-time economist he did work that was genuinely worthy of recognition. I've spoken with several conservative economists who admire that work, even as they wondered "what happened to him?"
My mother in law uses broadband every time she comes to visit, which is reasonably often. She doesn't miss it when she goes home to dial-up. So yes, some people can "go there" and "go back".
All that has been released is a video demo-ing the game. If you go to the Demiforce web site you will see that the game itself has not yet been released.
Likewise, the fact that Stephen Wolfram is an arrogant blowhard should not prevent people from making a reasoned assessment of his work. And that is, in my view, what seems to be happening. Sure, Wolfram is hogging some undue spotlight right now. But his work is absolutely useless unless it can be reproduced, verified, built upon, and applied by others. Give it 20-50 years and we'll see what happens. My prediction is that Wolfram's claims about the work, in particular its wide applicability, will be proven to be wildly overstated. But my prediction is as valuable as the bandwidth it is transmitted upon.
That's not as much of a SNAP! As you think. The reason that "simple inspection" reveals that the formulas are not minimal is because, in an earlier paper, the same author demonstrates that 5 boolean operators are sufficient. So it actually took a bit more than "simple inspection" to get there.
If you go to the NKS Forum, you can find quite a few contributions by the author of this paper, and many of them are error corrections or other disputes with the content. To try it yourself, go to the search page and type in "Evangelos Georgiadis" into the "Search by Author" field, select "Show results as posts", and click "Perform Search."
I think if you read through the posts yourself you'll see his overall interest seems to be in improving the text, not tearing it down. In fact, one of the threads he created is called "Further Improvements and Errata."
The author of the article, Evangelos Georgiadis, has participated in two of the "New Kind of Science" summer schools (2003, 2005; the link above is from 2003). I must suspect, then, that he is somewhat sympathetic to Wolfram's work, and his papers are not intended to be hostile attacks. Indeed, his paper really doesn't read that way, from my perspective as an academic; it is simply a correction of errors. Indeed, if anything, this work tends to buttress Stephen Wolfram's basic point (whether it is true or not) because it further reduces the complexity of CA implementations.
It is completely unclear what actually finding alien Signals could be worth. If it is just generic greetings, probably not much. But if it is, sort of, Open Source knowledge of things we do not know yet, it could be incredibly valuable.
I doubt they are transmitting their own version of Wikipedia just for the sake of it---like our communications, theirs are likely to be purposeful and limited. So if we seek an answer to a particular question, we will most likely have to ask it first... and then wait for an answer... and wait, and wait, and wait, possibly thousands of years. I honestly figure we'll answer most of the answers for ourselves before we get word from them.
Now, having said that, it seems to me that a natural counterpart to SETI ought to be a program to continuously transmit some sort of knowledge base into space, including some sort of "interpretation manual" that assists the listeners on how to decipher our language. At least that way we can get ahead of the round-trip time issue. We'll still be waiting thousands of years though. If those on the other end went through the same thought process, then perhaps there is hope that if we ever intercept something intelligent it will contain similar content.
Harvesting of embryonic stem cells constitutes only a small part of the process. The stem cells undergo genetic processing and are then injected into other embryos (blastocysts), which are implanted into a mother and grow into chimeras. When the chimeras reproduce some of their offspring contain only genetic material from the affected stem cells. THAT is the end result that they are looking for. I really don't think this process is likely to ever be performed on humans, so the ethical issues of human stem cells are irrelevant.
They might be easier to measure, but again, one must establish that those measurements are sufficient to guarantee predictions of audibility. What complement of measurements are required to conclude definitively that the differences between cables are inaudible? Is there really a single number that can capture the audible "distance" between two signals? We have different sensitivities at different frequencies, for instance. It is easier for us to hear uncorrelated noise than correlated distortion.
Please don't misunderstand I am a firm objectivist and I think these cable claims are bunk. But the argument among cable fanatics is that we can't measure everything we can hear. The only way to refute that claim is to perform listening tests.
Shut the fuck up, asshole. His response didn't kill anyone; that person's failing organs did. Shit happens.
Organ donation must necessarily be a volutary process free from coercion. The time to convince people to donate theirs is before they die, while they are still of sound mind. So if you really feel the need to be an asshole and blame someone, blame the person that's already dead. At least they can take it.
That the ARC would insist on pestering family members after the fact is utterly indefensible.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's a great algorithm, I use it too sometimes. Michael Saunders was one of my dissertation readers. Wickedly smart man, and more importantly, his software *works*.
I agree with a previous poster who said it is unfair to compare this algorithm to Gaussian Elimination. Frankly, it seems to me that the poster has taken enough numerical analysis to know that GE is O(n^3), but is not familiar with the much wider body of research into efficient methods for solving structured linear systems.
Symmetric diagonally dominant linear systems are among the best conditioned systems you could possibly construct, which means that it is a rare case that you would ever use GE. Instead, you would use an iterative method, such as conjugate gradients or a stationary method like the Chebyshev method discussed in the paper. While it does seem that they are proposing a novel way to construct an efficient iterative method, the truth is that once you've entered the realm of iterative methods it's not likely there is going to be a single approach that works best in every instance. Even the paper's author agree that this is a "conceptually simple and possibly practical iterative solver." They rightly recognize that what works well on paper may not always prove useful in practice. So I think we should take the authors' own advice and wait for further research into this approach.
eldavojohn writes: "While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals..."
As evidence he provides a reference to: the statement by a single journal. Surely that is not "most journals", is it? Where is the evidence that most journals have even commented on the story, much less rendered a verdict as to its seriousness?
To be fair, the statement might well be true, in the sense that "most scientific journals" have not issued any statement on the matter. And even if they did so, in the short period of time that has transpired, it could only represent the views of the editors, not the body of researchers that contributes to it.
So what we have here seems to be the gross magnification of one statement to reflect a broad consensus.
I don't believe they found the first trillion congruent numbers; rather, they tested the first trillion whole numbers for congruency.
The key point you've glossed over is the measurement "200CK". How much is 200CK? It means that the substance has undergone 200 100-to-1 dilutions. That means that the concentration has been reduced from full strength by a factor of 100^200. Yes, that's right---10^400. According to this article in Wikipedia, the number of observable atoms in the observable universe is approximately 10^80. Clearly, you will be the luckiest person alive, 10^40 or so times over, if even one atom of the active ingredient is left in your sugar pill.
Not until you linked to it, no. The idea that I would think that they should "stop giving awards to known anti-Bush partisans" is preposterous.
I genuinely believe Krugman deserves his award. I believe the work for which he earned it is great stuff, and so did those aformentioned economists with whom I once had the pleasure of meeting. And I believe that the way the OP phrases his post unnecessarily links that work with his political punditry.
That's what I believe, that's what I meant, and that's what I said. You clearly doubt my sincerity; that is your problem, not mine. But since I can't fight that, you win.
Now you see, this is the discussion we should have been having from the beginning. I am glad that you have finally chosen to explain your disagreement fully instead of limit yourself to a silly retort. I think I'm in a better position to explain myself now that you've explained yourself beyond partisan puffery.
I haven't exaggerated a bloody thing. Your quotes are your quotes, and they clearly imply that Krugman's political opinions discredit him, if not his work:
In what universe? How does acknowledging Krugman's political opinions diminish the value of his award? How does pointing to Friedman's political opinions diminish the value of his award? If both men won their awards fair and square, based on peer judgement of the worth of each man's work as a useful finding or theoretical instrument, how would the value of an award recognizing the value of that work be diminished by pointing to the man's political opinions?
Because its value is dependent upon the award's reputation, that's why. And lately that reputation has been tarnished because of the apparent alleged political motivations behind the awarding of other Nobel Prizes.
I happen to be one of those people. I think the awarding Peace prize in particular to Al Gore and the IPCC and Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA damaged the reputation of the Peace Prize. The rhetorical contortions required to justify the 2007 award were particularly egregious. I think that more deserving candidates (my recent favorite being Muhammad Yunus in 2006 and Doctors Without Borders in 1999) are overshadowed, quite unfortunately, by these more questionable choices.
Now yes, this is where you might say "that's just what a bunch of kooks say" or whatever. The problem is that the awardee's supporters often end up supporting those very allegations of politicization. When fans of Al Gore talk about his award as a thumb in the eye of the Bush administration, they legitimize the suspicions of the so-called kooks. A similar phenomenon happened when the Oscar was awarded to Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11: the glee from the left and Michael Moore himself served to validate accusations that the award wasn't given on merit.
If your point is that nothing outside the work itself has any effect on the value of that work, then the value of awards recognizing that work can neither be enhanced nor diminished by information about things like their political opinions.
Well as you can see that is not my belief. I believe that the reputation of the award matters when determining its value.
Krugman hasn't been stupid enough to claim he got the award for political reasons, and neither have I. It would be especially stupid to do so given that Friedman, whose political opinions couldn't be more different from Krugman's, has won the same award.
Agreed. My "if" above wasn't meant to imply that it was likely Krugman would do this, indeed I would expect him to defend himself against claims the award was politically motivated. But he is but one man (albeit a famous one) and he cannot control all the chatter.
What I have been saying all along is that, out of respect for Krugman's work one should be careful about bringing up his politics as if that had something to do with it. In particular, focusing in particular on his criticism of the Bush administration is irrelevant to the point that he is a critic on far more than economic policy, and it is somewhat limited in the fact that he also criticized the Clinton administration as well (though obviously somewhat less.
What, precisely, constitutes a "full-time econo
You're getting more incoherent by the post. Why in the world would I think that? Both men are regularly pilloried by their political adversaries (Friedman posthumously, of course). Recall the recent protest over the founding of a Milton Friedman Institute, for instance.
Krugman deserves his award, fair and square, and even economists who disagree with him politically recognize that. Your problem from the beginning is that you took my synthesized quote from those economists, exaggerated it for effect, and attributed it to me.
Holy crap you're a dolt.
Yes they do! You might consider relying on that meaning instead of what you think I implied. Other readers understood quite well what I was saying.
Idiot: I'm doing no such thing. I made no implication that his anti-Bush stance is fringe or laughable.
The point is that, rightly or wrongly, it is believed by many that the Nobel prize selections are unduly influenced by politics. But it is unwarranted in this case. The work for which his prize was awarded is genuinely worthy of recognition.
Bringing up Krugman's political views and notoriety, as the original poster did, only serves to feed the temptation to believe he did not deserve the award. I don't care whether is sentiment is the majority view or not.
Hmm. Nice distortion of my point, "genius".
only serves to diminish the value of this award. IF he starts to link it to his political views, then he'll bring derision upon himself and the Nobel committee. But he doesn't need to, because in his prior life as an full-time economist he did work that was genuinely worthy of recognition. I've spoken with several conservative economists who admire that work, even as they wondered "what happened to him?"
My mother in law uses broadband every time she comes to visit, which is reasonably often. She doesn't miss it when she goes home to dial-up. So yes, some people can "go there" and "go back".
All that has been released is a video demo-ing the game. If you go to the Demiforce web site you will see that the game itself has not yet been released.
There are such devices that provide a similar energy storage/release benefit.
http://www.powerskip.de/photogallery.html
http://www.poweriser.cn/pictures.asp
As you can see, they are designed for entertainment; but it is entirely conceivable that they could be tuned to improve running speed.
Likewise, the fact that Stephen Wolfram is an arrogant blowhard should not prevent people from making a reasoned assessment of his work. And that is, in my view, what seems to be happening. Sure, Wolfram is hogging some undue spotlight right now. But his work is absolutely useless unless it can be reproduced, verified, built upon, and applied by others. Give it 20-50 years and we'll see what happens. My prediction is that Wolfram's claims about the work, in particular its wide applicability, will be proven to be wildly overstated. But my prediction is as valuable as the bandwidth it is transmitted upon.
That's not as much of a SNAP! As you think. The reason that "simple inspection" reveals that the formulas are not minimal is because, in an earlier paper, the same author demonstrates that 5 boolean operators are sufficient. So it actually took a bit more than "simple inspection" to get there.
If you go to the NKS Forum, you can find quite a few contributions by the author of this paper, and many of them are error corrections or other disputes with the content. To try it yourself, go to the search page and type in "Evangelos Georgiadis" into the "Search by Author" field, select "Show results as posts", and click "Perform Search."
I think if you read through the posts yourself you'll see his overall interest seems to be in improving the text, not tearing it down. In fact, one of the threads he created is called "Further Improvements and Errata."
The author of the article, Evangelos Georgiadis, has participated in two of the "New Kind of Science" summer schools (2003, 2005; the link above is from 2003). I must suspect, then, that he is somewhat sympathetic to Wolfram's work, and his papers are not intended to be hostile attacks. Indeed, his paper really doesn't read that way, from my perspective as an academic; it is simply a correction of errors. Indeed, if anything, this work tends to buttress Stephen Wolfram's basic point (whether it is true or not) because it further reduces the complexity of CA implementations.
is that posting this article in Slashdot is sure to produce a definitive solution to the mystery...
or rather, 100 of them.
It is completely unclear what actually finding alien Signals could be worth. If it is just generic greetings, probably not much. But if it is, sort of, Open Source knowledge of things we do not know yet, it could be incredibly valuable.
I doubt they are transmitting their own version of Wikipedia just for the sake of it---like our communications, theirs are likely to be purposeful and limited. So if we seek an answer to a particular question, we will most likely have to ask it first... and then wait for an answer... and wait, and wait, and wait, possibly thousands of years. I honestly figure we'll answer most of the answers for ourselves before we get word from them.
Now, having said that, it seems to me that a natural counterpart to SETI ought to be a program to continuously transmit some sort of knowledge base into space, including some sort of "interpretation manual" that assists the listeners on how to decipher our language. At least that way we can get ahead of the round-trip time issue. We'll still be waiting thousands of years though. If those on the other end went through the same thought process, then perhaps there is hope that if we ever intercept something intelligent it will contain similar content.
Harvesting of embryonic stem cells constitutes only a small part of the process. The stem cells undergo genetic processing and are then injected into other embryos (blastocysts), which are implanted into a mother and grow into chimeras. When the chimeras reproduce some of their offspring contain only genetic material from the affected stem cells. THAT is the end result that they are looking for. I really don't think this process is likely to ever be performed on humans, so the ethical issues of human stem cells are irrelevant.
They might be easier to measure, but again, one must establish that those measurements are sufficient to guarantee predictions of audibility. What complement of measurements are required to conclude definitively that the differences between cables are inaudible? Is there really a single number that can capture the audible "distance" between two signals? We have different sensitivities at different frequencies, for instance. It is easier for us to hear uncorrelated noise than correlated distortion.
Please don't misunderstand I am a firm objectivist and I think these cable claims are bunk. But the argument among cable fanatics is that we can't measure everything we can hear. The only way to refute that claim is to perform listening tests.
My point is that the level at which electrical properties can differ and be audibly detected ought to be a reasonably objective value,
Yes, but how do you suppose that objective value is established in the first place? Listening tests!
Shut the fuck up, asshole. His response didn't kill anyone; that person's failing organs did. Shit happens.
Organ donation must necessarily be a volutary process free from coercion. The time to convince people to donate theirs is before they die, while they are still of sound mind. So if you really feel the need to be an asshole and blame someone, blame the person that's already dead. At least they can take it.
That the ARC would insist on pestering family members after the fact is utterly indefensible.