The MOA's main audience is elementary school children on field trips, and they felt they would face opposition from parents if they showed the statue.
The work in question is one of my favorites, and I, and every factuly member of the department to whom I spoke, were very offended by this.
Let's see...they figured that, since children would be looking, they'd keep the artwork at an appropriate level. And you were offended by this? Are you for real?
You really need to re-think your priorities, you know that?
Nah, but Mormons believe that Jee-zuuus visited their cult's founder in the 1800s. Which, suprisingly, is just as likely as the earth being 6000 years old.
Show me that mathematically. Make sure you state all your assumptions. Good luck.
To make a long story short, the company screws over everybody they do business with, including their employees. Ethics apparently meant nothing to these guys.
I've worked for four companies in Utah. One was slightly rotten, and the rest were quite honest. My anecdotal evidence can beat up your anecdotal evidence.
And yes, you were generalizing about Utah (your "real explanation as an insider"), so don't try to weasel your way out of it.
Sorry, I should clarify. That's "to teach religion as an occupation, paid by the Church." We do have some people who are paid to do it, such as BYU religion professors and Institute of Religion teachers.
BYU doesn't offer a theology degree. *Every* student is required to take religion courses, since the church doesn't have professional clergy it would be redundant.
Exactly right.
To officially teach religion you need either a BS or MS (can't remember which) in something - doesn't matter what. (Yes! Even biology! Just to head that off...) To teach religion at a Church-run university you need a PhD. I have a friend who is getting a PhD in CS just so he can teach religion at BYU.
(No, it's not strange. He happens to be very good at both but finds ancient languages more interesting.)
On a more serious note - they should rethink their prize. Not everyone drinks beer, and there are plenty of talented programmers who avoid it completely. In fact, the ones who do probably have more working brain cells to throw at the problem.
Yes, I know that must come as a shock, and most people here probably won't believe me...yet it's true.
(And just to head off the inevitable nutcase looking for a Score:5, Funny: no, replacing the prize with free pr0n isn't going to cut it.:p)
Most of my extended family are hard line Catholic republicans, they not only voted for Bush, but did so with joy in their hearts.
What devilry could have caused them to commit such a deed? What vile, underhanded trick could have persuaded them to take such a course? Not only did they vote for Satan Himself and His Terrifying Cadre of Evil Minions, but they were giddy with glee as they put him back in power!
Maybe it was that horrid conservative media who filled their minds with images of purple-fingered Iraqis. Or it was those vile priests who told them abortion is wrong AND bad public policy. Or maybe it was that filthy lucre that corrupted their souls and caused them to vote for tax breaks.
The shame you must feel!
But hark! In yonder silver screen is a beacon of hope! Clothed in utter humility itself - a sweatshop-animated, 22-minute television sitcom - is God's own shining truth, come to brighten our homes with its glory! It WILL prevail!
Ahem.
...they not only voted for Bush, but did so with joy in their hearts.
You know you're on Slashdot when this kind of trash is valued.
Or maybe you're on democraticunderground.com. Whatever. I'm nearly sick of this place, just from snarky, flamebait comments like that.
Not really. If you know exactly how the camera's flawed, then you can correct them on the returned data and get a perfect image, as if wasn't broken. Thing is, we don't, and deconvoluting uses an approximate model - which works good, but it's not as good as the real thing. In that sense, you're right, but information gathered with this process is still useable.
Still useable, but not complete. Even if you know exactly how the camera is flawed, your inverse process still doesn't have a unique solution. It can't.
Imagine, just for fun, you've got a camera that superimposes the left and right sides of an image. You get a picture of a purple square. Was that a wall painted red and blue you took a picture of, or a purple one? Think harder, and you'll realize that the possibilities are infinite.
Just how big that infinite is depends on the complexity of the image and the type of flaw. In general, it's way, way too big to consider. Discretization helps, but it's still exponentially huge.
And you say it's possible to pick one and declare that it's correct?
Why not AC? Just because that such a solution is currently inferior doesn't mean it shouldn't be researched and tested and later refined as technology progresses.
It would always be inferior. You can't restore lost information through post-processing.
I'm not sure if it was a photoshop plugin or a standalone filter, but the filter was able to derive sharp pictures from the bokeh of photographs....and it's really not all that breakthrough-ish. Nearly anyone who's taken a signal processing class will have done this. The simplest version is an unsharp mask.
Here's the basic idea: you assume some "spreading" of the data happened, and you assume its shape. Then you try to undo what happened - perform the inverse.
There are two problems with this. First, the original convolution you assumed (that "spreading") is destructive to information. There exists no unique inverse mapping. You have to pick one, and hope that what it yields looks right.
Second, without making some major assumptions (that signal processing people aren't usually keen to make) there is no way to differentiate between true signal and noise. The noise, along with the blurry edges, also get sharpened. You can mitigate this somewhat with your choice of inverse mapping. Again, you pick something that looks right.
They do have some prior information going into this - they know the equipment that took the pictures - but pretty much nothing they do will exactly restore the information that was lost. Math isn't magical enough to do that.
While a computer using this new technology is at least a decade away
It's always "a decade away" for these people, just like it's always 30 years for the AI people. Estimates like that seem less an informed guess and more an expression of confidence.
By the way, your sig:
Vader:You're either with me, or my enemy/Bush:You're either with or against us/Obi-Wan:Only the Sith deal in absolutes
So you caught Lucas's sorry attempt at political commentary?
I'm a lot more worried about people believing things that are provably untrue, like, say, that the Earth is only 6000 years old...
You should be careful with the word "prove" in all its conjugations. You can only ever prove something in an abstract system, given a set of initial, abstract premises. I can invent plenty of premises in which "the Earth is millions of years old" is untrue. Likewise, I can disagree with any of your premises and honestly not be convinced by your argument.
Like it or not, any "proof" of the Earth's age is built using an abstract representation of reality and based on premises that every convinced person has to accept.
"Overwhelming evidence," though, I can accept. I do. (And I'm devoutly religious! Wow!) Just be careful with the word "proof." It gets abused.
(This post has been an Anal Retentive Word Usage post. Feel free to consider it over-the-top.)
There are lots of non-Christian Republicans out there, just like there are lots of Christian Democrats.
From TFA:
* People who are regular churchgoers are less-likely to believe in life on other planets compared to non-churchgoers, 46% vs. 70%
* No filibuster here -- given the margin of error, Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to believe in life on other planets
It seems to indicate balanced numbers in religion between both parties. You could also interpret it as saying that the non-religious Republicans are more likely to believe there is life on other planets than the non-religious Democrats, but that seems far-fetched.
Yep. Too bad it's so often abused by people who call the abuse "science." Crichton quote:
This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.
You mean deriving the factors of products of primes, right?
What in the crap is this, Slashdot? Moderators on...something much worse than crack?
So the grandparent states his honest opinion of quantum computing and gets modded down as flamebait, and the pedantic creep parent poster gets modded up as informative for pointing out a simple syntax error?
It's an easy one to make, too. I've said it, and that was after being immersed in the field for six months!
What the grandparent says is mostly correct. There aren't any good standalone quantum algorithms besides Shor's algorithm. (You cite Grover's O(sqrt(n)) search? I dare you to find a practical application of it. Who knows? You might turn up something good in ten years or so.) It's hard to keep a quantum system coherent long enough to make it useful. Quantum computing does get improperly used to squeeze money from the feds. It's a tough, esoteric subject with few practitioners and a sexy name, and if you can wedge the word "quantum" into your research somehow, you magnify your chances of getting published or getting funding fourfold.
I don't share the grandparent's cynicism, because I do think it has a chance of working. His position isn't entirely unreasonable, though, just looking at the facts.
Not a drug deal - this was an illegal exchange of human embryonic stem cells.
This is a fine example of a joke that is only funny to the ignorant and willfully stupid.
How many times do you need it pointed out that the only "limitation" on embryonic stem cell research is that it can't be federally funded? That's it. Nothing's illegal. It makes sense to not fund something with taxpayers' money that a significant portion of the taxpayers have severe moral issues with.
I'm offtopic, sure. Mods: make sure you mod down the parent poster as well.
One sort of grows up realising theres a special mythological England with bizarre Ye Olde customs and behaviour that exists in films and the one you actually live in.
There's also a special Old West America populated with gun-totin', arrogant, loud-mouthed cowboys that exist in the minds of Europeans...and the one Americans actually live in. Given that, I'm not sure Hollywood is to blame, specifically. It seems every country has two faces: the real one and the two-thousand-miles-away one.
It's a wonderful strategy. Oppose the war? You oppose the troops. Share a file? You steal/sell the file. Oppose Bush? You oppose America. Want reproduction and birth control education in schools at an early age? You're for little-kid promiscuity. Oppose inserting religion into the government? Anti-Christian, probably satanistic, certainly anti-American.
Support the war? You're a bloodthirsty, brainless serf. Think "theft" applies well to people who steal guaranteed opportunity? You're part of a BS campaign. Support Bush? You support tyranny. Want kids in schools to learn about the advantages of abstinence, or think it ought to be the parents' job to educate them otherwise? You're old-school, stupid, don't know the facts, can't deal with realities of modern adolescence, etc. Think religious people's voices shouldn't be ignored just because they're religious? You're a theocratic nutcase.
Your side - or sides - isn't as holy as it makes itself out to be with regards to BS campaigns. FYI, I'm not necessarily opposite you on these issues, but I do think you do yourself and like-minded people a disservice with your utter myopia. Do yourself a favor and read the WSJ opinion pages once in a while. At very least, it'll cull out your ineffective arguments.
By the way, nice insertion of political/religious belief into an orthogonal discussion. Moderators, if you're fair, you'll mod him Offtopic if you do the same to me.
Unfortunately, reasoned and thoughtful doesn't generate the controversy that partisan and inflamed do. So Krugman and Brooks get talked about, and Kristof just keeps writing the smart copy.
What? You mean I'll have to pay to get my Krugman fix? Will Maureen Dowd also get placed behind the impenetrable wall?
Man, this sucks. How am I supposed to get my talking points now?
Graphics... X-Box:360 - 6 stunning cars on a track. PS3 - 12 stunning cars on a track.
AI... X-Box:360 - 6 cars fighting it out for their share of 3 PowerPCs. PS3 - 12 cars each running their AI on a separate sub processor that's optimized specifically for that task.
Explain to us how you know that all the algorithms that go into performing these tasks are O(n) in the number of cars.
I can tell you for certain that just the lighting and shading are not.
Slashdot Mirror
The MOA's main audience is elementary school children on field trips, and they felt they would face opposition from parents if they showed the statue.
The work in question is one of my favorites, and I, and every factuly member of the department to whom I spoke, were very offended by this.
Let's see...they figured that, since children would be looking, they'd keep the artwork at an appropriate level. And you were offended by this? Are you for real?
You really need to re-think your priorities, you know that?
Nah, but Mormons believe that Jee-zuuus visited their cult's founder in the 1800s. Which, suprisingly, is just as likely as the earth being 6000 years old.
Show me that mathematically. Make sure you state all your assumptions. Good luck.
To make a long story short, the company screws over everybody they do business with, including their employees. Ethics apparently meant nothing to these guys.
I've worked for four companies in Utah. One was slightly rotten, and the rest were quite honest. My anecdotal evidence can beat up your anecdotal evidence.
And yes, you were generalizing about Utah (your "real explanation as an insider"), so don't try to weasel your way out of it.
To officially teach religion...
Sorry, I should clarify. That's "to teach religion as an occupation, paid by the Church." We do have some people who are paid to do it, such as BYU religion professors and Institute of Religion teachers.
Non-disclaimer: I'm a BYU student.
BYU doesn't offer a theology degree. *Every* student is required to take religion courses, since the church doesn't have professional clergy it would be redundant.
Exactly right.
To officially teach religion you need either a BS or MS (can't remember which) in something - doesn't matter what. (Yes! Even biology! Just to head that off...) To teach religion at a Church-run university you need a PhD. I have a friend who is getting a PhD in CS just so he can teach religion at BYU.
(No, it's not strange. He happens to be very good at both but finds ancient languages more interesting.)
On a more serious note - they should rethink their prize. Not everyone drinks beer, and there are plenty of talented programmers who avoid it completely. In fact, the ones who do probably have more working brain cells to throw at the problem.
:p)
Yes, I know that must come as a shock, and most people here probably won't believe me...yet it's true.
(And just to head off the inevitable nutcase looking for a Score:5, Funny: no, replacing the prize with free pr0n isn't going to cut it.
What devilry could have caused them to commit such a deed? What vile, underhanded trick could have persuaded them to take such a course? Not only did they vote for Satan Himself and His Terrifying Cadre of Evil Minions, but they were giddy with glee as they put him back in power!
Maybe it was that horrid conservative media who filled their minds with images of purple-fingered Iraqis. Or it was those vile priests who told them abortion is wrong AND bad public policy. Or maybe it was that filthy lucre that corrupted their souls and caused them to vote for tax breaks.
The shame you must feel!
But hark! In yonder silver screen is a beacon of hope! Clothed in utter humility itself - a sweatshop-animated, 22-minute television sitcom - is God's own shining truth, come to brighten our homes with its glory! It WILL prevail!
Ahem.
You know you're on Slashdot when this kind of trash is valued.
Or maybe you're on democraticunderground.com. Whatever. I'm nearly sick of this place, just from snarky, flamebait comments like that.
Not really. If you know exactly how the camera's flawed, then you can correct them on the returned data and get a perfect image, as if wasn't broken. Thing is, we don't, and deconvoluting uses an approximate model - which works good, but it's not as good as the real thing. In that sense, you're right, but information gathered with this process is still useable.
Still useable, but not complete. Even if you know exactly how the camera is flawed, your inverse process still doesn't have a unique solution. It can't.
Imagine, just for fun, you've got a camera that superimposes the left and right sides of an image. You get a picture of a purple square. Was that a wall painted red and blue you took a picture of, or a purple one? Think harder, and you'll realize that the possibilities are infinite.
Just how big that infinite is depends on the complexity of the image and the type of flaw. In general, it's way, way too big to consider. Discretization helps, but it's still exponentially huge.
And you say it's possible to pick one and declare that it's correct?
Why not AC? Just because that such a solution is currently inferior doesn't mean it shouldn't be researched and tested and later refined as technology progresses.
It would always be inferior. You can't restore lost information through post-processing.
Politics on crystal meth!
(Oh, wait...that happens all the time around here...)
I'm not sure if it was a photoshop plugin or a standalone filter, but the filter was able to derive sharp pictures from the bokeh of photographs. ...and it's really not all that breakthrough-ish. Nearly anyone who's taken a signal processing class will have done this. The simplest version is an unsharp mask.
:)
Here's the basic idea: you assume some "spreading" of the data happened, and you assume its shape. Then you try to undo what happened - perform the inverse.
There are two problems with this. First, the original convolution you assumed (that "spreading") is destructive to information. There exists no unique inverse mapping. You have to pick one, and hope that what it yields looks right.
Second, without making some major assumptions (that signal processing people aren't usually keen to make) there is no way to differentiate between true signal and noise. The noise, along with the blurry edges, also get sharpened. You can mitigate this somewhat with your choice of inverse mapping. Again, you pick something that looks right.
They do have some prior information going into this - they know the equipment that took the pictures - but pretty much nothing they do will exactly restore the information that was lost. Math isn't magical enough to do that.
For the hardcore:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Deconvolution.html
and follow the links from there.
Be afraid, people...be very afraid. This tiny new world that is being ushered in will conspire to break into peoples houses and wreck up the place!
What I'm really worried about is the gray goo.
Or not.
While a computer using this new technology is at least a decade away
It's always "a decade away" for these people, just like it's always 30 years for the AI people. Estimates like that seem less an informed guess and more an expression of confidence.
By the way, your sig:
Vader:You're either with me, or my enemy/Bush:You're either with or against us/Obi-Wan:Only the Sith deal in absolutes
So you caught Lucas's sorry attempt at political commentary?
Yoda: Do, or do not. There is no try.
Huh.
I'm a lot more worried about people believing things that are provably untrue, like, say, that the Earth is only 6000 years old...
You should be careful with the word "prove" in all its conjugations. You can only ever prove something in an abstract system, given a set of initial, abstract premises. I can invent plenty of premises in which "the Earth is millions of years old" is untrue. Likewise, I can disagree with any of your premises and honestly not be convinced by your argument.
Like it or not, any "proof" of the Earth's age is built using an abstract representation of reality and based on premises that every convinced person has to accept.
"Overwhelming evidence," though, I can accept. I do. (And I'm devoutly religious! Wow!) Just be careful with the word "proof." It gets abused.
(This post has been an Anal Retentive Word Usage post. Feel free to consider it over-the-top.)
There are lots of non-Christian Republicans out there, just like there are lots of Christian Democrats.
From TFA:
* People who are regular churchgoers are less-likely to believe in life on other planets compared to non-churchgoers, 46% vs. 70%
* No filibuster here -- given the margin of error, Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to believe in life on other planets
It seems to indicate balanced numbers in religion between both parties. You could also interpret it as saying that the non-religious Republicans are more likely to believe there is life on other planets than the non-religious Democrats, but that seems far-fetched.
Stupid stereotypes.
anyone remember the good old drake equation?
Yep. Too bad it's so often abused by people who call the abuse "science." Crichton quote:
This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.
I can't disagree.
C++ long => 32 Bit
;)
a ndbolts/datatypes.html
E PT/data_types.html
/me ducks
Java long => 64 Bit
So you are comparing Apples with Melons
Using my mighty +1 Karma Bonus Power...
Can somebody please mod the parent up?? The grandparent poster is apparently too clueless to create Java vs. C++ benchmarks.
Java primitives:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/nuts
C primitives:
http://www.phim.unibe.ch/comp_doc/c_manual/C/CONC
Let's see the benchmark with either int vs. long or long vs., er, long long (or __int64 or whatever).
And then, can't we all just get along?
'factoring prime numbers'?
You mean deriving the factors of products of primes, right?
What in the crap is this, Slashdot? Moderators on...something much worse than crack?
So the grandparent states his honest opinion of quantum computing and gets modded down as flamebait, and the pedantic creep parent poster gets modded up as informative for pointing out a simple syntax error?
It's an easy one to make, too. I've said it, and that was after being immersed in the field for six months!
What the grandparent says is mostly correct. There aren't any good standalone quantum algorithms besides Shor's algorithm. (You cite Grover's O(sqrt(n)) search? I dare you to find a practical application of it. Who knows? You might turn up something good in ten years or so.) It's hard to keep a quantum system coherent long enough to make it useful. Quantum computing does get improperly used to squeeze money from the feds. It's a tough, esoteric subject with few practitioners and a sexy name, and if you can wedge the word "quantum" into your research somehow, you magnify your chances of getting published or getting funding fourfold.
I don't share the grandparent's cynicism, because I do think it has a chance of working. His position isn't entirely unreasonable, though, just looking at the facts.
Not a drug deal - this was an illegal exchange of human embryonic stem cells.
This is a fine example of a joke that is only funny to the ignorant and willfully stupid.
How many times do you need it pointed out that the only "limitation" on embryonic stem cell research is that it can't be federally funded? That's it. Nothing's illegal. It makes sense to not fund something with taxpayers' money that a significant portion of the taxpayers have severe moral issues with.
I'm offtopic, sure. Mods: make sure you mod down the parent poster as well.
One sort of grows up realising theres a special mythological England with bizarre Ye Olde customs and behaviour that exists in films and the one you actually live in.
There's also a special Old West America populated with gun-totin', arrogant, loud-mouthed cowboys that exist in the minds of Europeans...and the one Americans actually live in. Given that, I'm not sure Hollywood is to blame, specifically. It seems every country has two faces: the real one and the two-thousand-miles-away one.
Roit guvnah?
No amount of money will make a dolt a genius.
I know. I've tried.
What, to get paid more?
*ducks*
It's a wonderful strategy. Oppose the war? You oppose the troops. Share a file? You steal/sell the file. Oppose Bush? You oppose America. Want reproduction and birth control education in schools at an early age? You're for little-kid promiscuity. Oppose inserting religion into the government? Anti-Christian, probably satanistic, certainly anti-American.
Support the war? You're a bloodthirsty, brainless serf. Think "theft" applies well to people who steal guaranteed opportunity? You're part of a BS campaign. Support Bush? You support tyranny. Want kids in schools to learn about the advantages of abstinence, or think it ought to be the parents' job to educate them otherwise? You're old-school, stupid, don't know the facts, can't deal with realities of modern adolescence, etc. Think religious people's voices shouldn't be ignored just because they're religious? You're a theocratic nutcase.
Your side - or sides - isn't as holy as it makes itself out to be with regards to BS campaigns. FYI, I'm not necessarily opposite you on these issues, but I do think you do yourself and like-minded people a disservice with your utter myopia. Do yourself a favor and read the WSJ opinion pages once in a while. At very least, it'll cull out your ineffective arguments.
By the way, nice insertion of political/religious belief into an orthogonal discussion. Moderators, if you're fair, you'll mod him Offtopic if you do the same to me.
Unfortunately, reasoned and thoughtful doesn't generate the controversy that partisan and inflamed do. So Krugman and Brooks get talked about, and Kristof just keeps writing the smart copy.
What? You mean I'll have to pay to get my Krugman fix? Will Maureen Dowd also get placed behind the impenetrable wall?
Man, this sucks. How am I supposed to get my talking points now?
Graphics...
X-Box:360 - 6 stunning cars on a track.
PS3 - 12 stunning cars on a track.
AI...
X-Box:360 - 6 cars fighting it out for their share of 3 PowerPCs.
PS3 - 12 cars each running their AI on a separate sub processor that's optimized specifically for that task.
Explain to us how you know that all the algorithms that go into performing these tasks are O(n) in the number of cars.
I can tell you for certain that just the lighting and shading are not.
Looking at a picture of Maureen, I would never have believed it...
You mean this one?
Sheesh. That's scary. "Maureen," huh?