I'd put together a program to generate determinants of 3x3 matrices, and one of the questions was: "Calculate the determinant of this matrix."
That would be the DET function on an HP-28 or HP-48. I wrote a program for my HP-28 in college that showed a four-dimensional hypercube rotating on the little LCD screen in real time. The matrix functions came in quite handy for rotational transforms.
One of the things that surprised me was that the HP-28 was actually faster than the company's VAX for doing magnetic field calculations for a Hemholtz coil I had to design within a 5% field tolerance within a cylindrical volume in the center (this was in 1990). I used it to build a lookup table for getting definite integrals of some goofy function that came out of the Biot-Savart law. I tested the routines on my calculator before running them on the VAX before I realized the calculator was beating the pants off the VAX. They had that VAX in its own room with air conditioning and everything. I wonder what that was all about. Last I heard they were buying lots of HP calculators.
If I were given requirements as given by the author of the summary, I don't think I can figure out a way to screw it up so horribly, consistently, and intentionally. It boggles the mind how to implement this so incorrectly - treating 65536 as a hex (0x10000) and then a decimal (10,000) is off by a factor of 0x10, or 10 depending.
Someone left an "0x" off of a 100 somewhere. I'm trying to imagine the most likely scenario.
What's even stranger is this: Suppose the formula is in A1. =A1+1 returns 100001, which appears to show the formula is in fact 100000 and a very Serious problem. And if you multiply be say, 2 you get something else:
=A1*2 returns 131070, as if A1 had 65535. (which it should have been)
=A1*1 Keeps it at 100000.
=A1-1 returns 65534
=A1/1 is still 100000 =A1/2 retuns 32767.5
Using MAX() on a range appears not to see 100000.
Very Serious!
Makes it appear this is a rendering issue.
What's even stranger is this: Suppose the formula is in A1.
=A1+1 returns 100001, which appears to show the formula is in fact 100000 and a very Serious problem. And if you multiply be say, 2 you get something else:
=A1*2
returns 131070, as if A1 had 65535. (which it should have been)..
=A1-1 returns 65534...
Almost makes it appear some calculations use the.Text property rather than the.Value property of A1. If so, definitely a bug.
Kevin: I'd like to start off by saying that you look like a right guy. You look like a serious, straight-shooting guy. You're wearing a guy shirt. Why fashion? Dave: Well Darcy, it's just that I've always loved beautiful women. All my life I've loved them and I've loved the way that they, uh.... look. And I've always wanted to be a part of the beautiful woman in some way, an appendage to the beautiful woman. An arm or a leg to the beautiful woman in some way. So I think I should design clothes for the beautiful woman and in that way I can celebrate them and become a part of them because I love beautiful women. Kevin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Dave (vehemently): But I hate ugly women, Darcy! Oh, I hate ugly women with a passion you cannot begin to imagine! They are an abomination of everything that the beautiful woman stands for! Kevin: Hmm. So has this hatred for ugly women affected your work at all? Dave: Yes! Yes, yes, yes. In fact, my career has taken a bit of a turn in that direction. I'm now designing a line of clothes specifically for the ugly woman. Kevin: . . . Are you French? Dave: No. Kevin: Let's take a look at your sketches! Dave: Fine. (Holds up first card. It's a fashion sketch showing an ugly woman in a long, lumpy, pink dress.) Now Darcy, this first sketch is of an evening gown. It's a very tight fitting gown, and it's backless, designed to highlight the various ugly bulges that the ugly woman managed to grow on her body. And this gown is made entirely out of pink fiberglass foam insulation. Kevin: Now how would you accessorize this? Dave: Ah yes, Darcy. Well, what I've done for this dress is I've designed a hat that I call "The Spike in the Head." (Shows next sketch of an ugly, overweight woman with a large spike through her head.) Quite simply, it's a spike driven into the woman's head. Very simple. Very painful. But! The ugly woman deserves only the most painful. Kevin: I love hats, but I don't have a hat face. Dave: Well then Darcy, follow me on a journey from the head. Take an elevator ride down to the shoe, where we find the Boite de Verre Shoe. Translated, it is "The Box of Glass." (Shows the next sketch of an ugly woman who has a box of broken glass strapped to her feet. Blood pours out from each shoe.) What it is, is a box of broken glass with a thong to hold the foot firmly in the box so that you don't, you know, lose a shoe. Because you don't want to lose a shoe. Kevin: To me, Christian, half the battle is the cost. I mean, it's all fine to look pretty and nice and everything, but um... (she rifles through the sketches) how much is the Spike in the Head? Lou? Is this the camera? (A game of camera tag follows as Kevin waves the sketch around. As soon as the director cuts to an appropriate camera, Kevin yanks the sketch away and holds it up to a different camera.) Chris? Chris? Buddy? Lou? Dave: Well Darcy, it's very reasonably priced. The Spike in the Head is quite reasonably priced at about twelve hundred dollars. Kevin: What?! Dave: Twelve hundred dollars. Kevin: What?! Dave: Twelve hundred dollars. Kevin: What?! Dave: Twelve hundred dollars. Kevin: That's ridiculous! Why would anyone pay twelve hundred dollars for that? Dave: Well, they do. Well, they do. Kevin: Well I wouldn't. Dave: Well I assure you that people do. Kevin: Well I assure you I wouldn't. Let's open this up to the studio audience. Dave: Fine. Kevin: You! (Cut to the audience. There's only one guy there. It's Brad from the earlier vampire sketch.) Kevin: What do you think about this? Twelve hundred dollars? Scott: What? Oh . . . um, I just came in to get out of the rain, right? Kevin: Yeah, yeah, but what do you think about paying twelve hundred dollars for this?
I actually know someone who is a lecturer, and when he sets papers, goes on the relevant Wikipedia entries and inserts misinformation. Then, when this nonsense crops up in papers, marks them down in a "haha pwnt" sort of way. He says it's a way of teaching people not to rely on such sources.
Your friend sounds rather insecure. Tell him to stop pissing in a public resource to inflate his own value as a source of information.
However, we have, AFAIK, around 500 years of coal reserves at our current rate of usage. We just need to figure out a better way to mine it.
If by "better" you mean faster, then we've got that covered. This also saves us money on lunar exploration, because now the surface of the moon is in West Virginia. Look at the size of that thing- it's almost three miles across! We can dress up in moon suits and stick a flag in it. And if you pan around you'll see a lot more of them. We're going to need more flags. Modern open pit mines are fascinating monuments in their own right (warning: annoying narrator) and later generations and variants of humans- even the next technological species to populate the world (we're the first of probably several) are going to be really impressed! They will outlast most other artificial things.
This quibbling about two vs. seventeen cents an hour seems rather surreal. Two or three cents is really unbelievable. We like to comfort ourselves with blather about conservation and "green" crap but we really have no appreciation for how absurdly cheap energy is right now and the magnitude of the problem we are rapidly creating. Electricity itself improves the quality of our lives more than we can even imagine and has risen from being a luxury to a necessity. But the current prices we pay are still luxurious. We will eventually be quite willing to pay dearly for it once we're forced to, even as we cope with the global hangover created by the cheap electricity of today. I won't be alive to see it, but I suspect we will be trying to pull CO2 out of the air and bury it (as cellulose or peat I guess) so we can bury it again. This fiesta is not going to last 500 years. And the generations of people who are alive today will be cursed and despised for millenia. It must suck not to be born yet.
As for me, I'm planning ahead. The thought of a waterlogged grave doesn't sound appealing. I'm going to be cremated and reborn as CO2.
Yeah I read that too. Keep in mind this all took place in the timespan of a day. They looked at the video first before running around talking to people. (These two weren't exactly supercriminals- they left clues all over like you might expect from ten year old killers.) I'd probably do the same thing, but let's not pretend that this wouldn't have been solved if it hadn't been for cameras everywhere cluing police in to their initial false lead.
James's disappearance made the evening news and immediately calls poured in. Many believed they had seen the toddler in Walton. After one report that James was spotted by the canal, investigators planned to drag the water in the morning. The police interviewed Ralph and Denise Bulger, retracing her steps at the Bootle Strand. As with most child abductions, the parents are routinely considered suspects. But police had too many leads, which took the focus away from the Bulgers. After midnight on the day James disappeared, authorities watched the security videos taken at the shopping center, hoping to catch a glimpse of his abductor.
This case was solved relatively quickly. There were 38 witnesses. They were all called to the stand and vilified in the press as the "Liverpool 38". The police simply reached for the video first, for probably the same reason men prefer to use GPS rather than ask for directions.
I wonder what's up with those two brats. The were released six years ago and should be 24 by now. As Francis Urquhart might say, surely we can forgive a man a few youthful indiscretions...?
An RTG doesn't count. If they use plutonium, it's Pu-238 (alpha emitter) with a half life of less than 90 years, not Pu-239 which has a 90,000 year half life (fewer watts per gram) and can support a chain reaction (so it's needed for other things). There are lots of them scattered about the former Soviet Union so if you're doing any hiking there, avoid heat-emanating ceramic objects.
When not using solar panels (conspicuous and vulnerable) Americans like to power their satellites with RTGs. The Soviets put 35 reactor-powered satellites in orbit and only a few RTG-powered satellites. What was forbidden by the treaty was nuclear weapons, specifically including tests. An interstellar spacecraft powered by nuclear explosions would be a great way to sneakily test your weapons in full view of everyone.
That London has basically a Communist mayor (but Labour in name) and the self-proclaimed center of liberalism here in San Francisco is looking to add more of these cameras. Why is it the left-wing areas leading the way here?I thought the Republicans were the enemy of my rights.
It depends on whose friends are selling the cameras, and also the voting district where their employees live.
Here's the rub, though. They TOLD him why they tossed him out.
Aah, but was he able to quote their excuse without violating their intellectual property rights?
Pulling ISBN numbers under the rubric of IP for the purpose of ejecting a price-conscious customer from a bookstore is a genius idea, requiring intellect. I wouldn't have thought of it. The store should patent this new method they discovered so they have an intellectual property advantage over the other bookstores.
While some will dispute it (if my cousin is arrested, and you take his finger prints, you have him; if you take his DNA, you have me), the reality is that DNA is analogous to finger prints.
Since your entire argument is based on this assertion, you should really explain the reasoning behind it. DNA runs in families in a way that fingerprints do not.
Factually incorrect. Every parent has a couple of (different) chromosomes for every kind, so a couple of 1, a couple of 2, etc. and either XX or XY. Every gamete takes half of the parent chromosomes, choosen randomly, and it's coupled with its little random friend from the other parent. So in theory somebody can have a completely different DNA from his sibling (or a complete match) if the choromosomes contained in the gametes are different, and since it's random, we can't really determine it. Big chance obviously at least some if it it's shared...
Yes, there is a big chance that you are nitpicking. I suppose you can luck out and have a sibling with none of your genes at all, or an identical twin sibling older or younger than you, but it would be like flipping a coin and getting 23 heads or tails in a row- more than 23 even, because you're leaving out homologous recombination at the beginning of meiosis in each parent where the two versions of each chromosome trade chunks at a random subset of linkage points. Each linkage point is a coin flip, not just every chromosome. So most of your siblings have between 49 and 51 percent of your genes, with a calculable certainty close to 99.9999%.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd put together a program to generate determinants of 3x3 matrices, and one of the questions was: "Calculate the determinant of this matrix."
That would be the DET function on an HP-28 or HP-48. I wrote a program for my HP-28 in college that showed a four-dimensional hypercube rotating on the little LCD screen in real time. The matrix functions came in quite handy for rotational transforms.
One of the things that surprised me was that the HP-28 was actually faster than the company's VAX for doing magnetic field calculations for a Hemholtz coil I had to design within a 5% field tolerance within a cylindrical volume in the center (this was in 1990). I used it to build a lookup table for getting definite integrals of some goofy function that came out of the Biot-Savart law. I tested the routines on my calculator before running them on the VAX before I realized the calculator was beating the pants off the VAX. They had that VAX in its own room with air conditioning and everything. I wonder what that was all about. Last I heard they were buying lots of HP calculators.
He shows off thank-you letters he gets from grateful customers, all handwritten.
I would image you have a better chance of winning the lottery than encountering this problem in a way that actually affects you, much better.
LOL... Unfortunately for Microsoft people win the lottery every day!
Someone left an "0x" off of a 100 somewhere. I'm trying to imagine the most likely scenario.
Maybe this is a clue:
or other such near-limitless energy sources working.
Working cheaply. These things haven't taken off yet because they either can't produce enough power or they are not cheap.
But nice doomsday scenario nonetheless.
Doomsday? You'll be driving around on a scooter and putting up with rotating blackouts. Life goes on.
Kevin: I'd like to start off by saying that you look like a right guy. You look like a serious, straight-shooting guy. You're wearing a guy shirt. Why fashion? .... look. And I've always wanted to be a part of the beautiful woman in some way, an appendage to the beautiful woman. An arm or a leg to the beautiful woman in some way. So I think I should design clothes for the beautiful woman and in that way I can celebrate them and become a part of them because I love beautiful women.
Dave: Well Darcy, it's just that I've always loved beautiful women. All my life I've loved them and I've loved the way that they, uh
Kevin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Dave (vehemently): But I hate ugly women, Darcy! Oh, I hate ugly women with a passion you cannot begin to imagine! They are an abomination of everything that the beautiful woman stands for!
Kevin: Hmm. So has this hatred for ugly women affected your work at all?
Dave: Yes! Yes, yes, yes. In fact, my career has taken a bit of a turn in that direction. I'm now designing a line of clothes specifically for the ugly woman.
Kevin: . . . Are you French?
Dave: No.
Kevin: Let's take a look at your sketches!
Dave: Fine. (Holds up first card. It's a fashion sketch showing an ugly woman in a long, lumpy, pink dress.) Now Darcy, this first sketch is of an evening gown. It's a very tight fitting gown, and it's backless, designed to highlight the various ugly bulges that the ugly woman managed to grow on her body. And this gown is made entirely out of pink fiberglass foam insulation.
Kevin: Now how would you accessorize this?
Dave: Ah yes, Darcy. Well, what I've done for this dress is I've designed a hat that I call "The Spike in the Head." (Shows next sketch of an ugly, overweight woman with a large spike through her head.) Quite simply, it's a spike driven into the woman's head. Very simple. Very painful. But! The ugly woman deserves only the most painful.
Kevin: I love hats, but I don't have a hat face.
Dave: Well then Darcy, follow me on a journey from the head. Take an elevator ride down to the shoe, where we find the Boite de Verre Shoe. Translated, it is "The Box of Glass." (Shows the next sketch of an ugly woman who has a box of broken glass strapped to her feet. Blood pours out from each shoe.) What it is, is a box of broken glass with a thong to hold the foot firmly in the box so that you don't, you know, lose a shoe. Because you don't want to lose a shoe.
Kevin: To me, Christian, half the battle is the cost. I mean, it's all fine to look pretty and nice and everything, but um... (she rifles through the sketches) how much is the Spike in the Head? Lou? Is this the camera? (A game of camera tag follows as Kevin waves the sketch around. As soon as the director cuts to an appropriate camera, Kevin yanks the sketch away and holds it up to a different camera.) Chris? Chris? Buddy? Lou?
Dave: Well Darcy, it's very reasonably priced. The Spike in the Head is quite reasonably priced at about twelve hundred dollars.
Kevin: What?!
Dave: Twelve hundred dollars.
Kevin: What?!
Dave: Twelve hundred dollars.
Kevin: What?!
Dave: Twelve hundred dollars.
Kevin: That's ridiculous! Why would anyone pay twelve hundred dollars for that?
Dave: Well, they do. Well, they do.
Kevin: Well I wouldn't.
Dave: Well I assure you that people do.
Kevin: Well I assure you I wouldn't. Let's open this up to the studio audience.
Dave: Fine.
Kevin: You!
(Cut to the audience. There's only one guy there. It's Brad from the earlier vampire sketch.)
Kevin: What do you think about this? Twelve hundred dollars?
Scott: What? Oh . . . um, I just came in to get out of the rain, right?
Kevin: Yeah, yeah, but what do you think about paying twelve hundred dollars for this?
I actually know someone who is a lecturer, and when he sets papers, goes on the relevant Wikipedia entries and inserts misinformation. Then, when this nonsense crops up in papers, marks them down in a "haha pwnt" sort of way. He says it's a way of teaching people not to rely on such sources.
Your friend sounds rather insecure. Tell him to stop pissing in a public resource to inflate his own value as a source of information.
Does anyone else smell a bullshit cover story or is it just me? This big fuss over what, 470 million fingerprints? I could fit that on my laptop.
You can't fit 470 million fingerprints on an HD platter. There isn't enough clearance and the drive head plows into the fingerprint oil.
You have to admit, red spaceships are going to be pretty cool.
However, we have, AFAIK, around 500 years of coal reserves at our current rate of usage. We just need to figure out a better way to mine it.
If by "better" you mean faster, then we've got that covered. This also saves us money on lunar exploration, because now the surface of the moon is in West Virginia. Look at the size of that thing- it's almost three miles across! We can dress up in moon suits and stick a flag in it. And if you pan around you'll see a lot more of them. We're going to need more flags. Modern open pit mines are fascinating monuments in their own right (warning: annoying narrator) and later generations and variants of humans- even the next technological species to populate the world (we're the first of probably several) are going to be really impressed! They will outlast most other artificial things.
This quibbling about two vs. seventeen cents an hour seems rather surreal. Two or three cents is really unbelievable. We like to comfort ourselves with blather about conservation and "green" crap but we really have no appreciation for how absurdly cheap energy is right now and the magnitude of the problem we are rapidly creating. Electricity itself improves the quality of our lives more than we can even imagine and has risen from being a luxury to a necessity. But the current prices we pay are still luxurious. We will eventually be quite willing to pay dearly for it once we're forced to, even as we cope with the global hangover created by the cheap electricity of today. I won't be alive to see it, but I suspect we will be trying to pull CO2 out of the air and bury it (as cellulose or peat I guess) so we can bury it again. This fiesta is not going to last 500 years. And the generations of people who are alive today will be cursed and despised for millenia. It must suck not to be born yet.
As for me, I'm planning ahead. The thought of a waterlogged grave doesn't sound appealing. I'm going to be cremated and reborn as CO2.
She should have told them it was a taser.
Yeah I read that too. Keep in mind this all took place in the timespan of a day. They looked at the video first before running around talking to people. (These two weren't exactly supercriminals- they left clues all over like you might expect from ten year old killers.) I'd probably do the same thing, but let's not pretend that this wouldn't have been solved if it hadn't been for cameras everywhere cluing police in to their initial false lead.
Bullshit. This case was solved relatively quickly. There were 38 witnesses. They were all called to the stand and vilified in the press as the "Liverpool 38". The police simply reached for the video first, for probably the same reason men prefer to use GPS rather than ask for directions.
I wonder what's up with those two brats. The were released six years ago and should be 24 by now. As Francis Urquhart might say, surely we can forgive a man a few youthful indiscretions...?
An RTG doesn't count. If they use plutonium, it's Pu-238 (alpha emitter) with a half life of less than 90 years, not Pu-239 which has a 90,000 year half life (fewer watts per gram) and can support a chain reaction (so it's needed for other things). There are lots of them scattered about the former Soviet Union so if you're doing any hiking there, avoid heat-emanating ceramic objects.
When not using solar panels (conspicuous and vulnerable) Americans like to power their satellites with RTGs. The Soviets put 35 reactor-powered satellites in orbit and only a few RTG-powered satellites. What was forbidden by the treaty was nuclear weapons, specifically including tests. An interstellar spacecraft powered by nuclear explosions would be a great way to sneakily test your weapons in full view of everyone.
But an international treaty means nothing to the son.
Here in Singapore, we have quite a few hit-and-run incidents that were solved thanks to such cameras on our expressways.
And even if the drunks don't hit anybody, they'll forget to stop chewing their gum while driving past cameras on the expressway.
That London has basically a Communist mayor (but Labour in name) and the self-proclaimed center of liberalism here in San Francisco is looking to add more of these cameras. Why is it the left-wing areas leading the way here?I thought the Republicans were the enemy of my rights.
It depends on whose friends are selling the cameras, and also the voting district where their employees live.
No, but I might look at the video from the camera that was pointed at the yet-to-be-stolen car that night.
You can get the plate number!
No, this just means people must be stealing the cameras.
Sex Overlord!!!
I for one would welcome our new Sex Overlords.
Here's the rub, though. They TOLD him why they tossed him out.
Aah, but was he able to quote their excuse without violating their intellectual property rights?
Pulling ISBN numbers under the rubric of IP for the purpose of ejecting a price-conscious customer from a bookstore is a genius idea, requiring intellect. I wouldn't have thought of it. The store should patent this new method they discovered so they have an intellectual property advantage over the other bookstores.
+1 Sexy
Maybe we'll start seeing sexier posts.
(Friend) (Friend of Sex Partner) (Sex Partner of Foe)
Funny what people will give up so they can spend all day trying to find friends on the Internet to have sex with.
While some will dispute it (if my cousin is arrested, and you take his finger prints, you have him; if you take his DNA, you have me), the reality is that DNA is analogous to finger prints.
Since your entire argument is based on this assertion, you should really explain the reasoning behind it. DNA runs in families in a way that fingerprints do not.
Factually incorrect.
Every parent has a couple of (different) chromosomes for every kind, so a couple of 1, a couple of 2, etc. and either XX or XY.
Every gamete takes half of the parent chromosomes, choosen randomly, and it's coupled with its little random friend from the other parent. So in theory somebody can have a completely different DNA from his sibling (or a complete match) if the choromosomes contained in the gametes are different, and since it's random, we can't really determine it.
Big chance obviously at least some if it it's shared...
Yes, there is a big chance that you are nitpicking. I suppose you can luck out and have a sibling with none of your genes at all, or an identical twin sibling older or younger than you, but it would be like flipping a coin and getting 23 heads or tails in a row- more than 23 even, because you're leaving out homologous recombination at the beginning of meiosis in each parent where the two versions of each chromosome trade chunks at a random subset of linkage points. Each linkage point is a coin flip, not just every chromosome. So most of your siblings have between 49 and 51 percent of your genes, with a calculable certainty close to 99.9999%.