An actor that made his millions staring in films about illegal street racing dies in a high speed car crash. Poetic justice I suppose. I wonder how many impressionable youths or their innocent victims have died trying to emulate him.
Are you kidding? An actor deserves to die because the character he played in movies was reckless? It's justice that he died in a car crash where he wasn't even driving?
These are the same forums who (rightly) criticize the media for ripping on violent video games after e.g. school shootings, but also mods a comment +5 insightful that alleges an actor is responsible for "impressionable youths" and "innocent victims" dying when trying to emulate his movie character. Absolutely incredible.
I've yet to see a competently written math book. Most of them are written by and for people with PhDs in mathematics. They'll show one example, fail miserably to explain what they did in any clear way, then later they will refer back to it as what they did in example 3. And the student is expected to be able to figure out what they did. Sure, given sufficient time, a student could reverse engineer the problem, but it's also trendy for teachers to hand out way too many problems as homework, without permitting the students time to understand.
I remember when I was in middle school and high school, the schools were using "integrated math." Which is to say we didn't have algebra, geometry or trig, we had all of them at once and we would start over again the next year. The problem is that just as we were beginning to grasp one of them, we'd move onto the next subject, and the next year, we'd have to start over as we hadn't mastered the material the last time we saw it.
I would guess that you are not approaching mathematical textbooks the way you should be. You don't just read the exposition. You don't simply read the proofs. You have to do the proofs yourself. That means you have to go step by step, making sure everything makes sense. When you see a theorem, try to prove it first before reading the solution. Do the exercises in the book. Try to think about the results and see if they make sense, given what you already know.
There are certainly many poor math books, but if you haven't found any good ones then you either haven't looked very hard or are not using them correctly. You don't learn math by simply reading about it. You learn math by doing math.
- One letter identifiers for everything. Algebra teaches you to always use x, y, z for variable names. Calculus teaches you to do it for function names. If you run out of those, use greek letters, or just start making up symbols.
Using verbose names in mathematics would be awful and make proofs, theorems, etc. impossible to read. It more than suffices to define a symbol before it is used. For example, what would we call Euler's totient function, phi(x)? numberOfIntegersFrom0ToNThatAreRelativelyPrimeWithNExclusive(x)? It doesn't work. How about the Zeta function? Or a Galois field? Good luck coming up with an intuitive way to refer to a Shimura variety.
Mathematics is so abstract that concise, English definitions usually do not exist. When something is first introduced it should definitely be defined, but it's up to the reader to internalize that. Furthermore, it's up the reader to invest the time necessary to learn (that nebulous "mathematical maturity"). Mathematics is hard, and there are things to criticize about modern education, but the usage of variables, naming conventions, etc. are not among them.
My bet is that the need for dark matter will disappear when relativistic effects are properly taken into account.
There seems to be the belief among astrophysicists that general relativity can be safely ignored when speeds are low. I'm not so sure.
The situation you are talking about, where speeds are low, concerns special relativity, and it's obvious that low speeds do not make much of a difference. This isn't some "guess" that astrophysicists are making. It's a direct result of what special (and therefore) general relativity says. And astrophysicists do use general relativity.
I think that definition of "syntactic sugar" is too strict, since it's used to describe any feature that is merely a syntactical one. E.g., $ is syntactic sugar in haskell for establishing precedence, such as "foo $ bar x" which here translates to foo (bar x). This is particularly useful for readability when combined with function composition.
That would be silly, but a rather fun fact is that the despite Java being promoted as simpler than C++ for so many years, the latest Java language spec (excluding libraries) is shorter than the latest C++ spec (excluding libraries).
Did you mean to say the Java spec is longer than the C++ spec? Because I would think Java having a shorter spec would be a point in favor of its relative simplicity.
I went to a state school, and it was pretty much the same. The CS faculty seemed to prefer macs as well; I remembering my software engineering professor saying, "It's important that you test your product because we do not want our users to have to test it for us. We are not Microsoft."
I love Mint (though I haven't used it in a while), but Mint had the highest numbers at one point on distrowatch iirc. I think that's based on page hits though, so it's not exactly representative of downloads. Gnome 2 Ubuntu probably had the highest ratio of users to total linux users; now with Unity and Gnome 3 I have no idea.
Hawking showed that when you combine quantum field theory with black hole physics then they will produce what is now called Hawking radiation. The black hole will eventually evaporate away through this process. What finally happens is the subject of recent controversy. The physics is well beyond me, but the idea of it is that several current assumptions concerning physics lead to contradictions when considered in the context of black holes (in particular, entanglement leads to subtle problems), leading some to posit the existence of firewalls.
long before the astronaut gets to the event horizon. Both can be correct.
Not for large (i.e., supermassive) black holes. You could pass the event horizon without noticing anything (other than possible effects on light, like lensing).
Linux Mint was the first distro I used, and I think it's superior to Ubuntu as a first linux fistro (especially now with Unity). On top of that, it's a great distro in general, so you might not want to switch from it! In any case, it's a great starting distro, and then later you can move onto Arch.
I'm guessing you're intelligent enough to be disingenuous here and don't actually believe that; though if you prefer to remain ignorant because it feels less threatening to you then that is your right.
Nobody wins, because feminism is in of itself, sexism at it's finest.
You have no idea what you are talking about, and it's comments like this that make people believe (rightfully so) that there exists a sexism issue in tech circles.
This is very high level mathematics, well beyond any elementary algebra (what most people think of when they hear "algebra"). This concerns number theory and abstract algebra. One would need several graduate math courses to fully understand the material.
I mean, if Pluto is not allowed to be a planet, then why should such a small object be labelled as one?
The defining characteristics of a planet are:
(1) Large enough for gravity to make it round.
(2) "Dominates" its orbit.
Pluto fails (2) because it's a Kuiper Belt Object and there are many other KBO's in its orbit. It's not gravitationally powerful enough to eject or capture them. This may seem arbitrary because pluto would be considered a planet simply if there weren't any other objects in its orbit, but that's the current definition.
I agree, it's a beautiful theory, like some of the Daoist tracts are beautiful writing, as are parts of the Bhagavad Gita, or even the Psalms of David. Beauty is worthess in science, things aren't *scientific theory* until the science has been done. The experiments say that dark matter is more than marginally wrong time and time again. Can I follow your logic and adopt your language and conclude that they don't have a model, and they're just making shit up?
What? Experiments don't say dark matter is "more than marginally wrong time and time again." What they say is that it hasn't been found, but there are more reasons to believe that dark matter exists than to think it doesn't. Neutrinos could be a candidate for dark matter, but they aren't massive enough. There isn't anything that rules out dark matter like, say, the aether was ruled out, and models that include dark matter make more sense than models that leave it out.
I doubt there is a single physicist that believes general relativity is complete since it says nothing about what happens at the quantum level, and it doesn't include other forces. No scientist holds GR in high regard solely because it's beautiful -- but rather because it's been verified to fantastic precision (like quantum electrodynamics) -- and your bizarre assertion that this is somehow a failing of science shows your misunderstanding of science and in particular, physics.
Knowing C, IMO, is a litmus test for someone who knows how computers work. Pointers, memory, file I/O, etc, aren't directly useful in higher level languages these days. But knowing they exist would help someone write smarter code.
I did an algorithms course a few years ago. The course was about how to write highly optimised searching/sorting/graph-traversin algorithms. Basically the kind of computation jobs that take a long time to complete and where optimisation that yields even a few percent increase in speed get you significant monetary savings. On day some students asked the teacher whether they could write assignments in Python rather than C/C++. The teacher just stood there without knowing what to say, then overcame the urge to humiliate the student and an long and awkward silence just said, NO. Scripting languages are nice but you can't solve everything with scripts.
What? Why would the programming language matter in an algorithms course? If you're talking about trying to squeeze efficiency out of everything, sure, but that doesn't sound like the focus of the course (and shouldn't be in algorithms course, anyway).
Srinivasa Ramanujan was given a brain, a brain that is not that different from the one we have in between our own ears.
The only difference between Srinivasa Ramanujan and 99.99999% of the human race is that he opted to use his brain power as much as it could be sustained.
If only the rest of 99.99999% of the human population can do the same - becoming a galaxy-roaming race wouldn't stay merely a dream for long.
Our brains may all have the same matter, but that doesn't mean we all have the same abilities or aptitudes. Trust me, I hate the misconception that high level mathematics is accessible only to geniuses, but it's also not as simple as "you can be Gauss if only you try." That's not true. Not everyone can come up with calculus; not everyone can come up with general relativity.
As for Ramanujan, the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, when ranking mathematicians based on talent from 1 to 100 placed himself at 25, David Hilbert at 85, and Ramanujan at 100. To get some perspective, Hilbert was an incredibly influential mathematician who almost beat Einstein to general relativity, and he wasn't even a physicist! That's how talented Ramanujan apparently was. So no, the difference between him and "99.99999% of the human race" is NOT that he "opted to use his brain power as much as it could be sustained."
There are even proposals to tie tuition payments to the popularity of courses: charge more for engineering courses and less for liberal arts (which is the opposite of the right way to influence it if you're trying to coax people into the sciences and into engineering).
I haven't heard anything like that, and in fact it seems to be the opposite:
Down in Florida, a task force commissioned by Governor Rick Scott is putting the finishing touches on a proposal that would allow the state's public universities to start charging undergraduates different tuition rates depending on their major. Students would get discounts for studying topics thought to be in high demand among Florida employers. Those would likely include science, technology, engineering, and math (aka, the STEM fields), among others.
link
Perhaps this is true in fringe cases, but it doesn't seem to be the norm.
James Cameron doesn't do what James Cameron does, for James Cameron.
James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is...James Cameron.
Slashdot Mirror
An actor that made his millions staring in films about illegal street racing dies in a high speed car crash. Poetic justice I suppose. I wonder how many impressionable youths or their innocent victims have died trying to emulate him.
Are you kidding? An actor deserves to die because the character he played in movies was reckless? It's justice that he died in a car crash where he wasn't even driving?
These are the same forums who (rightly) criticize the media for ripping on violent video games after e.g. school shootings, but also mods a comment +5 insightful that alleges an actor is responsible for "impressionable youths" and "innocent victims" dying when trying to emulate his movie character. Absolutely incredible.
I've yet to see a competently written math book. Most of them are written by and for people with PhDs in mathematics. They'll show one example, fail miserably to explain what they did in any clear way, then later they will refer back to it as what they did in example 3. And the student is expected to be able to figure out what they did. Sure, given sufficient time, a student could reverse engineer the problem, but it's also trendy for teachers to hand out way too many problems as homework, without permitting the students time to understand.
I remember when I was in middle school and high school, the schools were using "integrated math." Which is to say we didn't have algebra, geometry or trig, we had all of them at once and we would start over again the next year. The problem is that just as we were beginning to grasp one of them, we'd move onto the next subject, and the next year, we'd have to start over as we hadn't mastered the material the last time we saw it.
I would guess that you are not approaching mathematical textbooks the way you should be. You don't just read the exposition. You don't simply read the proofs. You have to do the proofs yourself. That means you have to go step by step, making sure everything makes sense. When you see a theorem, try to prove it first before reading the solution. Do the exercises in the book. Try to think about the results and see if they make sense, given what you already know.
There are certainly many poor math books, but if you haven't found any good ones then you either haven't looked very hard or are not using them correctly. You don't learn math by simply reading about it. You learn math by doing math.
- One letter identifiers for everything. Algebra teaches you to always use x, y, z for variable names. Calculus teaches you to do it for function names. If you run out of those, use greek letters, or just start making up symbols.
Using verbose names in mathematics would be awful and make proofs, theorems, etc. impossible to read. It more than suffices to define a symbol before it is used. For example, what would we call Euler's totient function, phi(x)? numberOfIntegersFrom0ToNThatAreRelativelyPrimeWithNExclusive(x)? It doesn't work. How about the Zeta function? Or a Galois field? Good luck coming up with an intuitive way to refer to a Shimura variety.
Mathematics is so abstract that concise, English definitions usually do not exist. When something is first introduced it should definitely be defined, but it's up to the reader to internalize that. Furthermore, it's up the reader to invest the time necessary to learn (that nebulous "mathematical maturity"). Mathematics is hard, and there are things to criticize about modern education, but the usage of variables, naming conventions, etc. are not among them.
My bet is that the need for dark matter will disappear when relativistic effects are properly taken into account.
There seems to be the belief among astrophysicists that general relativity can be safely ignored when speeds are low. I'm not so sure.
The situation you are talking about, where speeds are low, concerns special relativity, and it's obvious that low speeds do not make much of a difference. This isn't some "guess" that astrophysicists are making. It's a direct result of what special (and therefore) general relativity says. And astrophysicists do use general relativity.
I think that definition of "syntactic sugar" is too strict, since it's used to describe any feature that is merely a syntactical one. E.g., $ is syntactic sugar in haskell for establishing precedence, such as "foo $ bar x" which here translates to foo (bar x). This is particularly useful for readability when combined with function composition.
That would be silly, but a rather fun fact is that the despite Java being promoted as simpler than C++ for so many years, the latest Java language spec (excluding libraries) is shorter than the latest C++ spec (excluding libraries).
Did you mean to say the Java spec is longer than the C++ spec? Because I would think Java having a shorter spec would be a point in favor of its relative simplicity.
I went to a state school, and it was pretty much the same. The CS faculty seemed to prefer macs as well; I remembering my software engineering professor saying, "It's important that you test your product because we do not want our users to have to test it for us. We are not Microsoft."
I love Mint (though I haven't used it in a while), but Mint had the highest numbers at one point on distrowatch iirc. I think that's based on page hits though, so it's not exactly representative of downloads. Gnome 2 Ubuntu probably had the highest ratio of users to total linux users; now with Unity and Gnome 3 I have no idea.
Or I should say
For compiler design you will. Or for assembly as well. Once someone writes a C compiler for it you won't even need to know the name "Albert Einstein".
That's good, because Albert Einstein was not fond of quantum theory ;-).
Hawking showed that when you combine quantum field theory with black hole physics then they will produce what is now called Hawking radiation. The black hole will eventually evaporate away through this process. What finally happens is the subject of recent controversy. The physics is well beyond me, but the idea of it is that several current assumptions concerning physics lead to contradictions when considered in the context of black holes (in particular, entanglement leads to subtle problems), leading some to posit the existence of firewalls.
More info can be found here.
There aren't really atoms, particularly not in a Bose-Einstein condensate, just excitations of particular fields.
I remember reading on Lubos' blog (I know, I know) that Nima Arkani-Hamed doesn't like that characterization of particles (FWIW, Lubos didn't agree).
long before the astronaut gets to the event horizon. Both can be correct.
Not for large (i.e., supermassive) black holes. You could pass the event horizon without noticing anything (other than possible effects on light, like lensing).
Linux Mint 14
Linux Mint was the first distro I used, and I think it's superior to Ubuntu as a first linux fistro (especially now with Unity). On top of that, it's a great distro in general, so you might not want to switch from it! In any case, it's a great starting distro, and then later you can move onto Arch.
I'm guessing you're intelligent enough to be disingenuous here and don't actually believe that; though if you prefer to remain ignorant because it feels less threatening to you then that is your right.
Nobody wins, because feminism is in of itself, sexism at it's finest.
You have no idea what you are talking about, and it's comments like this that make people believe (rightfully so) that there exists a sexism issue in tech circles.
This is very high level mathematics, well beyond any elementary algebra (what most people think of when they hear "algebra"). This concerns number theory and abstract algebra. One would need several graduate math courses to fully understand the material.
A planet or a dwarf planet?
I mean, if Pluto is not allowed to be a planet, then why should such a small object be labelled as one?
The defining characteristics of a planet are:
(1) Large enough for gravity to make it round.
(2) "Dominates" its orbit.
Pluto fails (2) because it's a Kuiper Belt Object and there are many other KBO's in its orbit. It's not gravitationally powerful enough to eject or capture them. This may seem arbitrary because pluto would be considered a planet simply if there weren't any other objects in its orbit, but that's the current definition.
I agree, it's a beautiful theory, like some of the Daoist tracts are beautiful writing, as are parts of the Bhagavad Gita, or even the Psalms of David. Beauty is worthess in science, things aren't *scientific theory* until the science has been done. The experiments say that dark matter is more than marginally wrong time and time again. Can I follow your logic and adopt your language and conclude that they don't have a model, and they're just making shit up?
What? Experiments don't say dark matter is "more than marginally wrong time and time again." What they say is that it hasn't been found, but there are more reasons to believe that dark matter exists than to think it doesn't. Neutrinos could be a candidate for dark matter, but they aren't massive enough. There isn't anything that rules out dark matter like, say, the aether was ruled out, and models that include dark matter make more sense than models that leave it out.
I doubt there is a single physicist that believes general relativity is complete since it says nothing about what happens at the quantum level, and it doesn't include other forces. No scientist holds GR in high regard solely because it's beautiful -- but rather because it's been verified to fantastic precision (like quantum electrodynamics) -- and your bizarre assertion that this is somehow a failing of science shows your misunderstanding of science and in particular, physics.
Knowing C, IMO, is a litmus test for someone who knows how computers work. Pointers, memory, file I/O, etc, aren't directly useful in higher level languages these days. But knowing they exist would help someone write smarter code.
I did an algorithms course a few years ago. The course was about how to write highly optimised searching/sorting/graph-traversin algorithms. Basically the kind of computation jobs that take a long time to complete and where optimisation that yields even a few percent increase in speed get you significant monetary savings. On day some students asked the teacher whether they could write assignments in Python rather than C/C++. The teacher just stood there without knowing what to say, then overcame the urge to humiliate the student and an long and awkward silence just said, NO. Scripting languages are nice but you can't solve everything with scripts.
What? Why would the programming language matter in an algorithms course? If you're talking about trying to squeeze efficiency out of everything, sure, but that doesn't sound like the focus of the course (and shouldn't be in algorithms course, anyway).
Srinivasa Ramanujan was given a brain, a brain that is not that different from the one we have in between our own ears.
The only difference between Srinivasa Ramanujan and 99.99999% of the human race is that he opted to use his brain power as much as it could be sustained.
If only the rest of 99.99999% of the human population can do the same - becoming a galaxy-roaming race wouldn't stay merely a dream for long.
Our brains may all have the same matter, but that doesn't mean we all have the same abilities or aptitudes. Trust me, I hate the misconception that high level mathematics is accessible only to geniuses, but it's also not as simple as "you can be Gauss if only you try." That's not true. Not everyone can come up with calculus; not everyone can come up with general relativity.
As for Ramanujan, the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, when ranking mathematicians based on talent from 1 to 100 placed himself at 25, David Hilbert at 85, and Ramanujan at 100. To get some perspective, Hilbert was an incredibly influential mathematician who almost beat Einstein to general relativity, and he wasn't even a physicist! That's how talented Ramanujan apparently was. So no, the difference between him and "99.99999% of the human race" is NOT that he "opted to use his brain power as much as it could be sustained."
There are even proposals to tie tuition payments to the popularity of courses: charge more for engineering courses and less for liberal arts (which is the opposite of the right way to influence it if you're trying to coax people into the sciences and into engineering).
I haven't heard anything like that, and in fact it seems to be the opposite:
Down in Florida, a task force commissioned by Governor Rick Scott is putting the finishing touches on a proposal that would allow the state's public universities to start charging undergraduates different tuition rates depending on their major. Students would get discounts for studying topics thought to be in high demand among Florida employers. Those would likely include science, technology, engineering, and math (aka, the STEM fields), among others.
link Perhaps this is true in fringe cases, but it doesn't seem to be the norm.
"Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something." -- Feynman
Whoops, didn't see someone else had posted this. Sorry!
James Cameron doesn't do what James Cameron does, for James Cameron. James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is...James Cameron.
Here's a good article on violence in the NFL by Bill Simmons.