Are there any mathematicians who can explain how a non-prime is the third riemann moment in the string of riemann zeros?
Well the Riemann zeta function is an otherwise innocuous looking function where zeta(z) = 1 + 1/(2^z) + 1/(3^z) + 1/(4^z) +...
It has some surprising and intriguing properties however. One of the more interesting is that it ends up appearing inside a formula to approximate the prime number counting function (which counts the number of primes less than n). Because of the way it appears in the integral that provides the formula (as log(1/zeta(z))) and "poles" (essentially points where the function shoots of to infinity like asymptotes, except on the complex plane) of the function being integrated are vitally important for determining these particular kinds of integral (complex path integrals) it turns out that determining when the Riemann zeta funtion is zero has a lot to say about the distribution of prime numbers.
This means we've converted the problem from studying the distribution of prime numbers (very hard) to studying the distribution of the zeros of a particular function (hard, but a definite improvement). So what can we say about the distribution of zeros of the Riemann zeta funtion? Well without actually knowing where all the zeros are we can at least potentially talk about the moments of the distribution which is basically just a series of statistical measures. The first moment of a distribution is the mean, the second moment is the variance. What they have found is the third moment, the next step up from the variance, of the distribution of zeros of the Riemann zeta function - whih, as we've seen, in deeply connected to the distribution of prime numbers.
The third moment of ther distribution of zeros of the Riemann zeta function can thus be any number: it isn't required to be prime; it is simply a measure describing properties of the distribution. Exactly what that number is though, can actually say a lot about how prime numbers are distributed.
(1: Reference fossils and accuracy) If you want more detail on how dating is established you can try here for a summary, or go to your library and get "Relative age inference in paleontology. Lethaia, v.13, p.239-248" by Harper which contains the technical details. The methods are meticulous and well understood if you actually bother to check the references.
(2: Determining column correctness) Please see the above references for the details. Essentially it is a matter of cross referencing all the various dating methods against each other from a wide variety of sources. The technical details that ensure this works and is valid can be foudn in the article by Harper.
(3: Trees) The "phenomenon" is essentially the same and can be explained in much the same way. Is it really so hard to believe that a tree, particularly one with deep roots, may have remained standing and fossilised/petrified while layers were deposited around it? When we excavate ruins that have been buried do you expect all the buildings to be lying flat and in only one layer of deposition?
(4: New information) That's just a terrible misapplication and misinterpretation of thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics posit a closed system and total entropy. The system isn't closed - it gets plenty of energy input from elsewhere, and you are talking about local entropy not global entropy. The brief debunk is here, but seeing as you prefer detail you can try this fuller explanation of why you are misapplying things or this slightly different explanation.
(5: Different kinds) Again this seems to be a misinterpretation of evolutions claims. Changes can be subtle an allow interbreeding, but those changes can accumulate so that while interbreeding with those that are similar and possess most of the same accumulated changes is possible, interbredding with those who accunulated different changes from the outset is no impossible. For a practical example see Ring species which actually present exactly such a situation existing right now. Further your explanation is in complete contradiction to observed speciation which I gave several links to. In case you missed those, here they are again: Speciation, more observed speciation, yet more observed speciation. Feel free to check the references sections of those article for more detailed information on those observed speciation events.
(6: Macroevolution) The issue here is one of shifting goal posts. What constitutes a kind? Originally it was a species, but then after significant speciation was observed that was recanted and it was decided to be broader - how broad was generally left open so as to allow further restreats without having to recant anything. The question is "what actually constitutes a different kind?" I agree that unless we have an agreed definition that makes sense there's no point in arguing this one.
(7: Logic) Yes, false can imply true, but it most certainly doesn't follow by logical necessity anymore. Yes the final claim could be true, but given that all the claimed evidence for it isn't valid it isn't really worth arguing about.
Selection doesn't create new designs and new information, mutation does. Selection simply selects which new designs are successful and useful (for the current environment). Since you are repeating the argument I'll repeat the debunking of it
If you're already using LaTeX there really shouldn't be any need to use perl to mess things around unless you are generating input from a different source. If you want to have source code listings with line numbers then you ought to try the listings package which allows for all manner of nice features when including source code listing including optionally boxing/framing code listings, support for a large number of programming languages providing automatic syntax highlighting, excellent support for continued listsings, excellent and versatile line numbering support, automated code formatting (define your preferred formatting for C in the header, and then let LaTeX indent and format your source code for you) and all manner of other things including experimental hyperlink support from identifier names. Read or skim through the manual and find yourself immediately downloading the package.
How to manage referincing line numbers using the usual \label and \ref functionality of LaTeX in on page 51 in case you're curious.
Compilers are being held back by the programming languages chosen by developers. As hardware concurrency increases, the technology behind compilers for imperative and procedural languages (C, Pascal, Fortran, Java) shows just ill-suited it is take advantage of that power. Instead, we will need to move to new languages that will enable compilers to optimize for concurrency
Such languages exist and have been around for quite some time. Occam was originally designed for the transputer which was supposed to herald the arrival of seriosuly concurrent computing back in the 1980s. As it happened the transputer never took off and Occam has remained a largely fringe language (though it has continued to develop). If you want to have easy to write highly concurrent code with a compiler that can optimize well for concurrency then Occam might be a good place to look.
For a range of other experimental options there's JoCaml (based on OCaml), Pict, Acute (extending OCaml), and Cw (pronounced C-omega) (an extension of C#) which all make some use of Pi-calculus ideas. Some are more experimental than others.
And what besides gs/gv and xpdf allow you to view pdfs in *nix userland.. a shitty port of acrobat reader! Com'n.
Well let's see there's original gv (XAW3d), ggv (GNOME), Evince (GNOME), kpdf (KDE), ViewPDF (GNUStep), gPDF (GNOME), xpdf (Motif), GSpdf (GNUStep), Multivalent (SWING), Cenon (GNUStep), plus probably some I don't know of or forgot. If absolutely none of those happen to suit your needs then I guess, yes, you can use Acroread if you really really want.
The best way to learn is to do, the best notes are the ones NOT made in a rush in real-time, the best classes are the ones where students learn more than what is presented
For courses I had difficulty with, or where a large volume of mateial was being covered, I found the most effective way to understanding was to take handwritten notes during the class and then, in the evenings, transcribe them onto computer (in my case, as I was doing math courses, into LaTeX). The act of going through and transcribing, while it sounds like needless work, was actually when I learned the most. To translate scrawled notes into detailed LaTeX notes required thinking about and understanding each concept so I could translate it correctly.
The benefit of course was having a nice set of notes fully written up at the end of the course. It's a great way to learn if you're so inclined.
I remember when MacOS X 10.4 got released there were plenty of comments from MS people that Vista had similar but "better" things and would be out shortly. Now Vista has been pushed back to the point where we can expect to see MacOS X 10.5 first (scheduled for the end of this year apparently), so really all those comparisons pitting Vista against Tiger were vastly premature - the comparison is Vista with Leopard - and we don't know what that will come with yet.
In the meantime the Linux side of things continues to move along. At the present rate I would expect it reasonable to find Xgl or AIGLX along with Beagle and similar as standard in distributions released around the end of this year, along with a more Cairo-ised GTK and a steadily improving GNOME. I don't know anticipated release dates for KDE 4.0, but I don't believe it's too far away (compared the the Vista release), and certainly promises to be impressive. A lot of Vista's claims to superiority are going to be already present in Linux distros before Vista gets released.
Certainly this has to be a worrying trend for MS. The Linux desktop used to be well behind and playing catch-up. While it could still use some polish in some areas, as far as new features are concerned Linux has pulled up to level pegging - that implies that the Linux Desktop is improving much faster, and Linux pulling ahead is simply a matter of time. In the meantime Apple has been managing a much faster release cycle and doesn't seem to be having any problems staying ahead of MS.
It might be worth checking out Glom, it seems to provide an alternative to Base and looks, in general to be fairly elegant and easy to use. Still in development of course, and there are more nice features on the way, but it is definitely in the category of "projects to keep an eye on" as far as I am concerned.
With regard to something at least vaguely comparable to Access perhaps you should consider Glom which provides a nice simple easy to use front-end to a database (for now PostgreSQL, but MySQL support is expected to be forthcoming), and does all the nice things like report generated etc.
Pagemaker is a LOT better than Draw for, say, laying out a newsletter. Yes, yes, LaTeX... but why learn a complicated system when there's an easy one available?
LaTeX doesn't need to be complicated, it's just that few people have bothered to make it simple because it mostly suits their needs already. For an example of making LaTeX easier, consider the problem of laying out and designing a presentation in LaTeX. Hard to do right? Especially for a customised layout. It needn't be: you can draw what you want in inkscape and convert it into a LaTeX presentation layout. I admit that what is on offer there is still not as simple as it could be - but then I'm not really much of a programmer and a simply python script to do the conversion is more than adequate. I'm sure someone appropriately inclined would have no trouble putting a nice GUI with appropriate buttons to click on the whole thing.
Moreover, the simple process involved there can easily enough be converted into a system to design report layouts, newsletter layouts, whatever. If I ever get the time I'll convert it into a more generalised version that handles all of that.
Fishing around on that site I found this later article which covers the case and the briefs in far more detail, as well as including links to the actual briefs. It is also important to note that the blog author was one of the drafters of the brief filed by the "Intellectual Property Owner".
The statement that CO2 correlates well with temperature is incorrect. CO2 has been steadily increasing over the last 100 years, while temperatures rose from the 1880's to about 1940, cooled until about the 1970s, and has risen again of late.
The 30 year dip is potentially contributed to by a number of factors including solar variation and less solar energy reaching the surface due to greater cloud cover (partly due to particulate pollutants but for other reasons too). Yes it represents an abberation in the correlation, but that does not prevent the existence of generally good correlation otherwise (particulrly over things like rate of increase and the fact that the current warming trend stands out as anomolous - just as the current atmospheric carbon dioxide spike.
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is, in fact, the lifeblood of the planet, required for growth of vegetation. It is the cornerstone of the food chain.
And no one said carbon dioxide was, in and of itself, bad. The fact remains that there is a natural carbon cycle that has, for the last several million years, been keeping a great deal of carbon sequestered and out of the atmosphere. The problem is not carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the problem is dramatic abberation from the natural cycle caused by our release of the previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. We are providing a new forcing to the natural cycle - a new forcing to a complex system: it is reasonable to expect that this forcing, differing from the natural fluctuations, could introduce significant new changes in the behaviour of the system. While changes will have both positive and negative effects, the reality is that for humans in general rapid change is, in and of itself, a negative effect.
Water vapor is by far the primary contributor of the greenhouse effect, accounting for 96 to 99%.
I would like to know where you got that figure - I can't find any respectable sources that give a figure anywhere near that high. For example this paper on the subject gives a figure of 60% clear sky contribution for water vapour and 26% clear sky contribution for carbon dioxide. The 1990 IPCC report estimates around 60%-70% contribution from water vapour.
The fact that water vapour contributes significantly to the greenhouse effect is, at least, not in dispute. The point is not that the greenhouse effect is bad, but that humans are providing a forcing on the system that has the potential to destabilise it, or at the least create significant change: The water cycle, like the carbon cycle, is a natural process that maintins a rough equilibrium (there is, of course, some fluctation due to all manner of other causes and factors), and the introduction of massive amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is not a part of that natrual system, thus we can reasonably expect significant change.
During the current interglacial period, the Earth has been about 2C cooler (The "Little Ice Age" around 1600-1700, when the Thames regularly froze over)
Again I'll have to ask you for sources on that because all the reputable sources I can find put the little ice age as at most 1.2C colder than 2004 temperatures, while most studies (which the IPCC sumarises well) put the figure at less than 1C. More importantly, while there were local fluctuations, the actual degree of fluctuation in mean global temperature was a lot less. Certainly Europe experienced some cold years - that does not mean that everywhere did.
and it has also been about 2C warmer (The medieval warm period around 1000 - 1200, when Greenland was colonized by the Vikings and exported surplus crops.)
I've seen nothing claiming the medieval warm period was as warm as that! Greenland was indeed settled by the Norse around that time - they settled in a couple of fjords that offered some
"The last peak was in 1950, the next is in 2025," she adds. "We're only halfway up [the cycle] and we're already 50 percent worse [in terms of storms]. To me, that's a compelling issue that needs to be confronted."
Simple math shows that we are over 75%, rather than "half way up" and so we also should be 75%+ up on the storms.
I don't know exactly how you did your math - perhaps a little too "simply", but my rough calculations run like this:
Peaks are at 1950 and 2025 with 75 years between the peaks. Assuming the cycle is roughly symmetric the trough - low point of the cycle - should occur half way between in 1987. Half way up the next peak is half way between 1987 (the trough) and 2025 (the next peak). That works out to be... 2006.
We are 75% of the way through the cycle, but a cycle has troughs as well as peaks.
You are talking about the last spike in carbon dioxide. How big is that in relation to other spikes found in the ice record and what were their causes?
The current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is completely unprecedented in the last 650,000 years - the current spike is twice as large as any previous spike in the last 650,000 years and occurs over a shorter time frame than any previous significant spike. According to historical ice-core records the recent spike really is huge, and really is unprecedented in human history.
How does this record correlate with the fact that we find evidence warm climate life forms having flourished in now arctic places? Historical records tell of much warmer periods also.
That depends on exactly what you're talking about. Certainly in the distant past the earht has had much higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and much higher average global temperature - but that really is the distant past. How warm the planet was in the Jurassic certainly tells us the planet as a whole and life in general will deal with whatever happens, but it says very little about what the impacts will be for humans and other creatures currently adapted for the much narrower climate range of the last million years or so, nor what the impacts of the rapidity of the change occuring currently will be.
There is extremely good evidence that the process is substantially if not entirely natural.
And in practice there is a lot more damning evidence that a significant portion of the warming is anthropogenic. Here's a rief summary of some of the most quickly explained information:
Atmospheric carbox dioxide correlates very well with temperature. We know this by many methods, but the one with the longest historical record is that of ice-cores, which provide data on historical CO2 levels and historical temperature going back 650,000 years. Over that time span there is an extremely close correlation of atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature.
More recently there is, again, very good correlation between the recent rapid (and accelerating) rise in temperature and recent rises in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. By recent I mean the last 150 years or so.
Correlation, of course, does not prove causation. However we know from completely independent study that, based on its absorption spectra, atmospheric carbon dioxide will tend to trap heat. We therefore not only have very powerful correlations, we also have very good reasons to expect and anticipcate causation.
Further studies of the change in ratio of different carbon isotopes in atmospheric carbon dioxide shows that the recent (last 150 years) spike in carbon dioxide is almost entirely caused by humans.
Based on all of that we would certainly expect human carbox dioxide emissions to be a factor in recent global temperature increases. When models attempting to predict the rise based on historical data are run the expected warming trend is remarkably well accounted for.
The sun has gotten brighter and in particularly it has also been much more electrically active in the last few years.
Solar variation gets brought up often, and certainly there is solar variation and we can expect it to have some impact on global temperatures. The observed solar variation alone is, however, not sufficient to properly account for the observed warming. The IPCC claims that around 30% of the observed warming can be accounted for by solar variation, but the remaining warming is almost entirely accounted for by human factors, particularly human CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) emissions. So yes, solar variation most certainly matters. To the best of our knowledge however solar variation is not the primary factor - anthropogenic factors are.
I'm very impressed with MS research - they have some great people there doing amazing things. I'm depressed by MS corporate which, like a great many corporate divisions of companies, seems to fail to actually listen to the research department have to say. Sure you'll see them grab onto various bits and pieces of research work, but often the intent will get destroyed in the product development phase, or the item piked will be some small minr easily implementable thing. In the meantime the big, useful, significant ideas simply get ignored as inconvenient.
This is not a problem of MS, this is a problem generally - a lot of companies have a big well funded research team because it's good PR, but fail to really listen to anything that team has to say because it would mean (1) learning enough to understand some of their more complicated points (2) re-evaluating various key products.
The screenshots don't tell me a lot about the intereface and whether it is as dynamic and flexible as what the LowFat demo displayed. Perhaps it is, and the videos would tell me, but it rfuses to let me view them without quicktime 7, and then links me to a ownload page with MacOS X and Windows versions. Having Linux and Mplayer (which happily plays Quicktime 7) it won't work, so I guess I'll never know. In the meantime LowFat does have some impressive interactive interface features and a willingness to bring those to more interesting problems than just photos: his "near term goals" include integration with nautilus and beagle for general file management.
I don't think anyone is expecting MS to rewrite the kernel in C# or managed C++.
Interestingly the people at MS research are expecting just that - they are writing Singularity in what is essentially C# with extensions (extensions mostly in the form of formal specification semantics to allow more complete static checking). The upside to doing this is that, when combined with a better ground up approach to security as is being used in Singularity, you get a remarkably robust and secure kernel for an operating system.
Of course this is a project at MS research - I wouldn't expect it to ever see the light of day in an actual product released by MS. It's nice to know that some people set their expectations suitably high though.
From what was actually demoed he's aiming at something more interesting than a simple photo sorting application. Photo-sorting is the initial demonstration, but it's really all about the interface and ability to manipulate and sort objects with an easy to use interface in a very visual way. For instance, he talks about building a next generation file management tool out of it, which certainly could make a lot of sense. Based on what was demonstrated it certainly looks like it could provide very interesting and intuitive new file handling abilities.
The downside is what you don't get to see in the demonstration: how the interface actually works. You can see photos being grouped, changing layout schemes, being zoomed and rotated etc. which is great, but the real question of exactly what the interface to all those things is: how do you use keyboard and mouse to tell the computer to perform all those actions? How do you zoom instead of dragging the photo? How do you manipulate a group instead of an individual item from the group (and vice versa)? If it's an exclusive modal system switched by keyboard commands then it's clunky, but if it's based on modifier keys and buttons then, given the rnge of actions demonstrated, it may become equally clunky.
None the less it looks like an interesting idea, and if the demo actually shows fully implemented work (as opposed to being rendered and edited together) then it is indeed a promising project.
I'm sure they are, but their big problem is that we already explored all that five years ago. Time to catch up, Hollywood, and fast!
There are some interesting experiments going on, just not from Hollywood. Soderbergh with Bubble, and Winterbottom with The Road to Guantanamo, are demonstrating that simultaneous release on DVD and in cinemas (and on TV for Bubble, and the internet for Guantanamo) can be more effective than people anticipated. Sure neither release has set the world afire with its takings, but both are small arthouses films that were never expected to rake in the cash - they have performed remarkably well given the small niche market that they are aimed at.
Ask people to name some films that won "Best Film" at the Academy awards in the last 5 years or more. Most people manage to come out with Lord of the Rings, but will struggle to remember anything else. LotR may not have entered the culture in quite the way Star wars has, but it certainly had a much larger impact on collective conciousness and memory than I think you give it credit for.
Slashdot Mirror
Are there any mathematicians who can explain how a non-prime is the third riemann moment in the string of riemann zeros?
...
Well the Riemann zeta function is an otherwise innocuous looking function where zeta(z) = 1 + 1/(2^z) + 1/(3^z) + 1/(4^z) +
It has some surprising and intriguing properties however. One of the more interesting is that it ends up appearing inside a formula to approximate the prime number counting function (which counts the number of primes less than n). Because of the way it appears in the integral that provides the formula (as log(1/zeta(z))) and "poles" (essentially points where the function shoots of to infinity like asymptotes, except on the complex plane) of the function being integrated are vitally important for determining these particular kinds of integral (complex path integrals) it turns out that determining when the Riemann zeta funtion is zero has a lot to say about the distribution of prime numbers.
This means we've converted the problem from studying the distribution of prime numbers (very hard) to studying the distribution of the zeros of a particular function (hard, but a definite improvement). So what can we say about the distribution of zeros of the Riemann zeta funtion? Well without actually knowing where all the zeros are we can at least potentially talk about the moments of the distribution which is basically just a series of statistical measures. The first moment of a distribution is the mean, the second moment is the variance. What they have found is the third moment, the next step up from the variance, of the distribution of zeros of the Riemann zeta function - whih, as we've seen, in deeply connected to the distribution of prime numbers.
The third moment of ther distribution of zeros of the Riemann zeta function can thus be any number: it isn't required to be prime; it is simply a measure describing properties of the distribution. Exactly what that number is though, can actually say a lot about how prime numbers are distributed.
Jedidiah.
(1: Reference fossils and accuracy) If you want more detail on how dating is established you can try here for a summary, or go to your library and get "Relative age inference in paleontology. Lethaia, v.13, p.239-248" by Harper which contains the technical details. The methods are meticulous and well understood if you actually bother to check the references.
(2: Determining column correctness) Please see the above references for the details. Essentially it is a matter of cross referencing all the various dating methods against each other from a wide variety of sources. The technical details that ensure this works and is valid can be foudn in the article by Harper.
(3: Trees) The "phenomenon" is essentially the same and can be explained in much the same way. Is it really so hard to believe that a tree, particularly one with deep roots, may have remained standing and fossilised/petrified while layers were deposited around it? When we excavate ruins that have been buried do you expect all the buildings to be lying flat and in only one layer of deposition?
(4: New information) That's just a terrible misapplication and misinterpretation of thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics posit a closed system and total entropy. The system isn't closed - it gets plenty of energy input from elsewhere, and you are talking about local entropy not global entropy. The brief debunk is here, but seeing as you prefer detail you can try this fuller explanation of why you are misapplying things or this slightly different explanation.
(5: Different kinds) Again this seems to be a misinterpretation of evolutions claims. Changes can be subtle an allow interbreeding, but those changes can accumulate so that while interbreeding with those that are similar and possess most of the same accumulated changes is possible, interbredding with those who accunulated different changes from the outset is no impossible. For a practical example see Ring species which actually present exactly such a situation existing right now. Further your explanation is in complete contradiction to observed speciation which I gave several links to. In case you missed those, here they are again: Speciation, more observed speciation, yet more observed speciation. Feel free to check the references sections of those article for more detailed information on those observed speciation events.
(6: Macroevolution) The issue here is one of shifting goal posts. What constitutes a kind? Originally it was a species, but then after significant speciation was observed that was recanted and it was decided to be broader - how broad was generally left open so as to allow further restreats without having to recant anything. The question is "what actually constitutes a different kind?" I agree that unless we have an agreed definition that makes sense there's no point in arguing this one.
(7: Logic) Yes, false can imply true, but it most certainly doesn't follow by logical necessity anymore. Yes the final claim could be true, but given that all the claimed evidence for it isn't valid it isn't really worth arguing about.
Jedidiah.
If hat's not enough, here is a detailed debunking of all of Hovind's geological strata argments, referring specifically to him
All of these grand canyon arguments are standard creationist myths and have been well debunked.
Jedidiah.
If you're already using LaTeX there really shouldn't be any need to use perl to mess things around unless you are generating input from a different source. If you want to have source code listings with line numbers then you ought to try the listings package which allows for all manner of nice features when including source code listing including optionally boxing/framing code listings, support for a large number of programming languages providing automatic syntax highlighting, excellent support for continued listsings, excellent and versatile line numbering support, automated code formatting (define your preferred formatting for C in the header, and then let LaTeX indent and format your source code for you) and all manner of other things including experimental hyperlink support from identifier names. Read or skim through the manual and find yourself immediately downloading the package.
How to manage referincing line numbers using the usual \label and \ref functionality of LaTeX in on page 51 in case you're curious.
Jedidiah.
Compilers are being held back by the programming languages chosen by developers. As hardware concurrency increases, the technology behind compilers for imperative and procedural languages (C, Pascal, Fortran, Java) shows just ill-suited it is take advantage of that power. Instead, we will need to move to new languages that will enable compilers to optimize for concurrency
Such languages exist and have been around for quite some time. Occam was originally designed for the transputer which was supposed to herald the arrival of seriosuly concurrent computing back in the 1980s. As it happened the transputer never took off and Occam has remained a largely fringe language (though it has continued to develop). If you want to have easy to write highly concurrent code with a compiler that can optimize well for concurrency then Occam might be a good place to look.
For a range of other experimental options there's JoCaml (based on OCaml), Pict, Acute (extending OCaml), and Cw (pronounced C-omega) (an extension of C#) which all make some use of Pi-calculus ideas. Some are more experimental than others.
Jedidiah.
And what besides gs/gv and xpdf allow you to view pdfs in *nix userland.. a shitty port
of acrobat reader! Com'n.
Well let's see there's original gv (XAW3d), ggv (GNOME), Evince (GNOME), kpdf (KDE), ViewPDF (GNUStep), gPDF (GNOME), xpdf (Motif), GSpdf (GNUStep), Multivalent (SWING), Cenon (GNUStep), plus probably some I don't know of or forgot. If absolutely none of those happen to suit your needs then I guess, yes, you can use Acroread if you really really want.
Jedidiah.
The best way to learn is to do, the best notes are the ones NOT made in a rush in real-time, the best classes are the ones where students learn more than what is presented
For courses I had difficulty with, or where a large volume of mateial was being covered, I found the most effective way to understanding was to take handwritten notes during the class and then, in the evenings, transcribe them onto computer (in my case, as I was doing math courses, into LaTeX). The act of going through and transcribing, while it sounds like needless work, was actually when I learned the most. To translate scrawled notes into detailed LaTeX notes required thinking about and understanding each concept so I could translate it correctly.
The benefit of course was having a nice set of notes fully written up at the end of the course. It's a great way to learn if you're so inclined.
Jedidiah.
I remember when MacOS X 10.4 got released there were plenty of comments from MS people that Vista had similar but "better" things and would be out shortly. Now Vista has been pushed back to the point where we can expect to see MacOS X 10.5 first (scheduled for the end of this year apparently), so really all those comparisons pitting Vista against Tiger were vastly premature - the comparison is Vista with Leopard - and we don't know what that will come with yet.
In the meantime the Linux side of things continues to move along. At the present rate I would expect it reasonable to find Xgl or AIGLX along with Beagle and similar as standard in distributions released around the end of this year, along with a more Cairo-ised GTK and a steadily improving GNOME. I don't know anticipated release dates for KDE 4.0, but I don't believe it's too far away (compared the the Vista release), and certainly promises to be impressive. A lot of Vista's claims to superiority are going to be already present in Linux distros before Vista gets released.
Certainly this has to be a worrying trend for MS. The Linux desktop used to be well behind and playing catch-up. While it could still use some polish in some areas, as far as new features are concerned Linux has pulled up to level pegging - that implies that the Linux Desktop is improving much faster, and Linux pulling ahead is simply a matter of time. In the meantime Apple has been managing a much faster release cycle and doesn't seem to be having any problems staying ahead of MS.
Jedidiah.
It might be worth checking out Glom, it seems to provide an alternative to Base and looks, in general to be fairly elegant and easy to use. Still in development of course, and there are more nice features on the way, but it is definitely in the category of "projects to keep an eye on" as far as I am concerned.
Jedidiah.
With regard to something at least vaguely comparable to Access perhaps you should consider Glom which provides a nice simple easy to use front-end to a database (for now PostgreSQL, but MySQL support is expected to be forthcoming), and does all the nice things like report generated etc.
Jedidiah.
Pagemaker is a LOT better than Draw for, say, laying out a newsletter. Yes, yes, LaTeX... but why learn a complicated system when there's an easy one available?
LaTeX doesn't need to be complicated, it's just that few people have bothered to make it simple because it mostly suits their needs already. For an example of making LaTeX easier, consider the problem of laying out and designing a presentation in LaTeX. Hard to do right? Especially for a customised layout. It needn't be: you can draw what you want in inkscape and convert it into a LaTeX presentation layout. I admit that what is on offer there is still not as simple as it could be - but then I'm not really much of a programmer and a simply python script to do the conversion is more than adequate. I'm sure someone appropriately inclined would have no trouble putting a nice GUI with appropriate buttons to click on the whole thing.
Moreover, the simple process involved there can easily enough be converted into a system to design report layouts, newsletter layouts, whatever. If I ever get the time I'll convert it into a more generalised version that handles all of that.
Jedidiah.
BTW, the following article describes in a much more cogent way the issues with this particular case than the Crichton editorial.
r p_v_metab_1.html
http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2005/10/labco
Fishing around on that site I found this later article which covers the case and the briefs in far more detail, as well as including links to the actual briefs. It is also important to note that the blog author was one of the drafters of the brief filed by the "Intellectual Property Owner".
Jedidiah.
A lot of the data, particularly ice cores, is all publicly available. Look it, do your own analysis.
Solar variation data: http://sidc.oma.be/DATA/
Ice core data: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/
Detailed Greenland ice core Data: http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/pages/data.html
Jedidiah.
The statement that CO2 correlates well with temperature is incorrect. CO2 has been steadily increasing over the last 100 years, while temperatures rose from the 1880's to about 1940, cooled until about the 1970s, and has risen again of late.
The 30 year dip is potentially contributed to by a number of factors including solar variation and less solar energy reaching the surface due to greater cloud cover (partly due to particulate pollutants but for other reasons too). Yes it represents an abberation in the correlation, but that does not prevent the existence of generally good correlation otherwise (particulrly over things like rate of increase and the fact that the current warming trend stands out as anomolous - just as the current atmospheric carbon dioxide spike.
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is, in fact, the lifeblood of the planet, required for growth of vegetation. It is the cornerstone of the food chain.
And no one said carbon dioxide was, in and of itself, bad. The fact remains that there is a natural carbon cycle that has, for the last several million years, been keeping a great deal of carbon sequestered and out of the atmosphere. The problem is not carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the problem is dramatic abberation from the natural cycle caused by our release of the previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. We are providing a new forcing to the natural cycle - a new forcing to a complex system: it is reasonable to expect that this forcing, differing from the natural fluctuations, could introduce significant new changes in the behaviour of the system. While changes will have both positive and negative effects, the reality is that for humans in general rapid change is, in and of itself, a negative effect.
Water vapor is by far the primary contributor of the greenhouse effect, accounting for 96 to 99%.
I would like to know where you got that figure - I can't find any respectable sources that give a figure anywhere near that high. For example this paper on the subject gives a figure of 60% clear sky contribution for water vapour and 26% clear sky contribution for carbon dioxide. The 1990 IPCC report estimates around 60%-70% contribution from water vapour.
The fact that water vapour contributes significantly to the greenhouse effect is, at least, not in dispute. The point is not that the greenhouse effect is bad, but that humans are providing a forcing on the system that has the potential to destabilise it, or at the least create significant change: The water cycle, like the carbon cycle, is a natural process that maintins a rough equilibrium (there is, of course, some fluctation due to all manner of other causes and factors), and the introduction of massive amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is not a part of that natrual system, thus we can reasonably expect significant change.
During the current interglacial period, the Earth has been about 2C cooler (The "Little Ice Age" around 1600-1700, when the Thames regularly froze over)
Again I'll have to ask you for sources on that because all the reputable sources I can find put the little ice age as at most 1.2C colder than 2004 temperatures, while most studies (which the IPCC sumarises well) put the figure at less than 1C. More importantly, while there were local fluctuations, the actual degree of fluctuation in mean global temperature was a lot less. Certainly Europe experienced some cold years - that does not mean that everywhere did.
and it has also been about 2C warmer (The medieval warm period around 1000 - 1200, when Greenland was colonized by the Vikings and exported surplus crops.)
I've seen nothing claiming the medieval warm period was as warm as that! Greenland was indeed settled by the Norse around that time - they settled in a couple of fjords that offered some
"The last peak was in 1950, the next is in 2025," she adds. "We're only halfway up [the cycle] and we're already 50 percent worse [in terms of storms]. To me, that's a compelling issue that needs to be confronted."
... 2006.
Simple math shows that we are over 75%, rather than "half way up" and so we also should be 75%+ up on the storms.
I don't know exactly how you did your math - perhaps a little too "simply", but my rough calculations run like this:
Peaks are at 1950 and 2025 with 75 years between the peaks. Assuming the cycle is roughly symmetric the trough - low point of the cycle - should occur half way between in 1987. Half way up the next peak is half way between 1987 (the trough) and 2025 (the next peak). That works out to be
We are 75% of the way through the cycle, but a cycle has troughs as well as peaks.
Jedidiah.
You are talking about the last spike in carbon dioxide. How big is that in relation to other spikes found in the ice record and what were their causes?
The current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is completely unprecedented in the last 650,000 years - the current spike is twice as large as any previous spike in the last 650,000 years and occurs over a shorter time frame than any previous significant spike. According to historical ice-core records the recent spike really is huge, and really is unprecedented in human history.
How does this record correlate with the fact that we find evidence warm climate life forms having flourished in now arctic places? Historical records tell of much warmer periods also.
That depends on exactly what you're talking about. Certainly in the distant past the earht has had much higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and much higher average global temperature - but that really is the distant past. How warm the planet was in the Jurassic certainly tells us the planet as a whole and life in general will deal with whatever happens, but it says very little about what the impacts will be for humans and other creatures currently adapted for the much narrower climate range of the last million years or so, nor what the impacts of the rapidity of the change occuring currently will be.
Jedidiah.
There is extremely good evidence that the process is substantially if not entirely natural.
And in practice there is a lot more damning evidence that a significant portion of the warming is anthropogenic. Here's a rief summary of some of the most quickly explained information:
Atmospheric carbox dioxide correlates very well with temperature. We know this by many methods, but the one with the longest historical record is that of ice-cores, which provide data on historical CO2 levels and historical temperature going back 650,000 years. Over that time span there is an extremely close correlation of atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature.
More recently there is, again, very good correlation between the recent rapid (and accelerating) rise in temperature and recent rises in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. By recent I mean the last 150 years or so.
Correlation, of course, does not prove causation. However we know from completely independent study that, based on its absorption spectra, atmospheric carbon dioxide will tend to trap heat. We therefore not only have very powerful correlations, we also have very good reasons to expect and anticipcate causation.
Further studies of the change in ratio of different carbon isotopes in atmospheric carbon dioxide shows that the recent (last 150 years) spike in carbon dioxide is almost entirely caused by humans.
Based on all of that we would certainly expect human carbox dioxide emissions to be a factor in recent global temperature increases. When models attempting to predict the rise based on historical data are run the expected warming trend is remarkably well accounted for.
The sun has gotten brighter and in particularly it has also been much more electrically active in the last few years.
Solar variation gets brought up often, and certainly there is solar variation and we can expect it to have some impact on global temperatures. The observed solar variation alone is, however, not sufficient to properly account for the observed warming. The IPCC claims that around 30% of the observed warming can be accounted for by solar variation, but the remaining warming is almost entirely accounted for by human factors, particularly human CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) emissions. So yes, solar variation most certainly matters. To the best of our knowledge however solar variation is not the primary factor - anthropogenic factors are.
Jedidiah.
I suggest you consider the merits of Australian beer (and for reference Fosters is not an Australian beer, they just pretend that it is).
I'm very impressed with MS research - they have some great people there doing amazing things. I'm depressed by MS corporate which, like a great many corporate divisions of companies, seems to fail to actually listen to the research department have to say. Sure you'll see them grab onto various bits and pieces of research work, but often the intent will get destroyed in the product development phase, or the item piked will be some small minr easily implementable thing. In the meantime the big, useful, significant ideas simply get ignored as inconvenient.
This is not a problem of MS, this is a problem generally - a lot of companies have a big well funded research team because it's good PR, but fail to really listen to anything that team has to say because it would mean (1) learning enough to understand some of their more complicated points (2) re-evaluating various key products.
Jedidiah.
His LowFat demo videos, in a variety of formats played just fine. It was Apple's demonstration of Aperture's light table that refused to work.
Jedidiah.
The screenshots don't tell me a lot about the intereface and whether it is as dynamic and flexible as what the LowFat demo displayed. Perhaps it is, and the videos would tell me, but it rfuses to let me view them without quicktime 7, and then links me to a ownload page with MacOS X and Windows versions. Having Linux and Mplayer (which happily plays Quicktime 7) it won't work, so I guess I'll never know. In the meantime LowFat does have some impressive interactive interface features and a willingness to bring those to more interesting problems than just photos: his "near term goals" include integration with nautilus and beagle for general file management.
Jedidiah.
I don't think anyone is expecting MS to rewrite the kernel in C# or managed C++.
Interestingly the people at MS research are expecting just that - they are writing Singularity in what is essentially C# with extensions (extensions mostly in the form of formal specification semantics to allow more complete static checking). The upside to doing this is that, when combined with a better ground up approach to security as is being used in Singularity, you get a remarkably robust and secure kernel for an operating system.
Of course this is a project at MS research - I wouldn't expect it to ever see the light of day in an actual product released by MS. It's nice to know that some people set their expectations suitably high though.
Jedidiah.
From what was actually demoed he's aiming at something more interesting than a simple photo sorting application. Photo-sorting is the initial demonstration, but it's really all about the interface and ability to manipulate and sort objects with an easy to use interface in a very visual way. For instance, he talks about building a next generation file management tool out of it, which certainly could make a lot of sense. Based on what was demonstrated it certainly looks like it could provide very interesting and intuitive new file handling abilities.
The downside is what you don't get to see in the demonstration: how the interface actually works. You can see photos being grouped, changing layout schemes, being zoomed and rotated etc. which is great, but the real question of exactly what the interface to all those things is: how do you use keyboard and mouse to tell the computer to perform all those actions? How do you zoom instead of dragging the photo? How do you manipulate a group instead of an individual item from the group (and vice versa)? If it's an exclusive modal system switched by keyboard commands then it's clunky, but if it's based on modifier keys and buttons then, given the rnge of actions demonstrated, it may become equally clunky.
None the less it looks like an interesting idea, and if the demo actually shows fully implemented work (as opposed to being rendered and edited together) then it is indeed a promising project.
Jedidiah.
I'm sure they are, but their big problem is that we already explored all that five years ago. Time to catch up, Hollywood, and fast!
There are some interesting experiments going on, just not from Hollywood. Soderbergh with Bubble, and Winterbottom with The Road to Guantanamo, are demonstrating that simultaneous release on DVD and in cinemas (and on TV for Bubble, and the internet for Guantanamo) can be more effective than people anticipated. Sure neither release has set the world afire with its takings, but both are small arthouses films that were never expected to rake in the cash - they have performed remarkably well given the small niche market that they are aimed at.
Jedidiah.
Ask people to name some films that won "Best Film" at the Academy awards in the last 5 years or more. Most people manage to come out with Lord of the Rings, but will struggle to remember anything else. LotR may not have entered the culture in quite the way Star wars has, but it certainly had a much larger impact on collective conciousness and memory than I think you give it credit for.
Jedidiah.