then please explain why science enrollment is going down and why we only see Asiatic, Indian or African good students anymore. The current remedy is to present pretty pictures of science to the youth, and it obviously does not work since it only appeals to the non-scientifically minded, the others smelling a rat in the material.
Since Galileo and Descartes, physics is mathematized. All the concepts that you explain to the layman "on the conceptual level" without equations do not hold water from a scientific point of view since you can just hammer them down and not demonstrate them ; electromagnetic waves were discovered after deep thinking by Maxwell about the mathematical form of electrostatics and magnetism. If you say "electromagnetic waves have this strange structure" and in the best case experimentally demonstrate it, isn't it normal that people ask, consciously or not, how you came to this counterintuitive postulate ? The only physical intuition we have is classical motion in a constant gravity field against air or rigid bodies.
"exploitation" in the sense that some people make a fortune selling books about it (Hawking, the Bogdanoff here in France) and in securing funding at the national and european level.
When you brutally explain to people that there are different kind of particles, you are just doing what I said : taxonomy.
About electricity and magnetism, people in general just understand Ohm's law in the best case, even induction is foreign to people without a scientific education, not speaking about the structure of electromagnetic waves.
To do anything useful with physics, you certainly do not need differential geometry, but at least highschool calculus and trigonometry, which is beyond the capability of many of our contemporaries.
This is a fact that in the Western world students nowadays prefer a career in computer science, management, law or medicine. The common view is that they buckle at the efforts necessary to gain full understanding of a mathematicized science like physics without an obvious and huge monetary return.
However I think that by teaching science in highschool and in popular science books only with pretty experiments and statement of facts, without real mathematization, we disgust scientifically minded people who see modern science as a joke as big as religion and prefer to turn to more rewarding and "serious" fields.
Could you read my whole comment before taking out the first sentence ?
My point is that astrophysicists, cosmologists and the like exploit the desire of a non-scientific public for dreams and answers about nature.
How can you honestly explain the standard model without explaining first quantum mechanics, second quantification and relativity ? And how can you do this without first explaining electromagnetism and classical mechanics ? And how can you this beyond (and including) Galileo's theories without elementary algebra, calculus, trigonometry, vector analysis ? 80% of humans never mastered these concepts in highschool, and never will. So you can explain modern science by transforming it into some kind of taxonomy and fairy tales, but the real beauty of it, which lies in its mathematization, hence its predictive power, can not really be transmitted in a general outreach conference nowadays since most people shy at any real mathematical or thought effort. On my opinion this is why science enrolment in universities is falling except for Chinese and Indians.
I am not making an argument against physics, which I love, but against contempory vulgarisation, PR of science, and so on. Read Jules Verne "from the Earth to the Moon" and you'll see that he was not shy for a SF and vulgarization book to recur to calculus and real Newtonian mechanics. Nowadays a SF book would never be published if it included so detailed equations and calculations.
thank you for your support ; but on the one hand I do not complain about MY lack of funding (everyone nowadays assumes one is automatically egoistic and self concerned), because I am also a theoretician albeit a numerical one, so have small needs besides my own salary, access to parallel computers, a conference under the sun, and a postdoc/PHD from time to time, and on the other hand I work in France where the situation of science funding is rather different than in the US although slowly converging.
you are right, I am actually disgusted by the quest of absolute and religiosity by the 80-90% of humans who actually do not have a scientific mind. And particle physicists and especially cosmologists exploit that shamefully. How can you explain standard model to someone whose mind blocks on the concept of electron spin ? By cheating.
I basically agree however with the rest of your post but remind persuaded that small is beautiful.
my original post made the following points :
small is beautiful (hence my rant about CERN and astrophysicists, when ideas need $10bn to be tested maybe they can be postponed until a smaller experiment is designed)
Experience is the judge (hence my rant against cosmologist and string theorists)
Eistein was working on his spare time when he discovered relativity, and there were immediate and simple verifications.
CERN does not work on quantum electrodynamics which was achieved by Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman even before CERN wa funded. Someone like Cohen-Tannoudji has more contributed to the field afterwards from his small lab than many members of those 1000+ collaborations.
The standard model doesn't have any practical applications I am aware of right now.
Sure, more powerful computers and detectors were developed there, as with the Web, but my point was that there are exciting intellectual challenges in physics besides those fields of particle physics and astrophysics and that in my opinion the public is not aware of that.
there is understanding and understanding. There is a difference in between aligning the correct buzzwords in approximately the correct order (as many string theorists do) and producing a grand unified theory of quantum gravitation and of the other forces -at nonzero temperature of course- , for which one should have the brains of the lovechild of Einstein, Newton, Poincaré and a good dozen of mathematicians.
Besides you actually defend my point : much research in physics on scales varying between the atom and the man can be made with relatively low budgets (a few M$ a year being already on the very confortable side), so with the budgets given on astrophysics or particle physics ( add manned space exploration to that) one could fund thousands of small groups working on interesting, open problems.
Quantum mechanics was developed by collaborations of a few persons without huge means, and gave immediatly verifiable predictions and realizations like the electronical microscope, the Stern-Gerlach experiment, NMR, EPR, the transistor as you mention (done on a tabletop) etc. Fermi had a budget equivalent to maybe 5000$ a year in fascist Italy and managed to get a nobel prize. I do not attack theoreticians at all, I just say that the one working on the real, interesting problems, often with extremely esoteric methods (and admittedly some coming from particle physics from 20 to 30 years ago like the renormalization group theory, bosonisation, C-star algebras, etc) do not get the recognition they deserve in the public as they are shadowed by Hawking-like celebrities.
I am sorry to remind you that science is about the "reality principle" and that some people tend to forget it nowadays but will be reminded about it soon or later. This is also true in politics as hopefully NeoCons will soon discover : myths and dreams only get you that far. In that regard, I am indeed totally against the ideas of Nietzsche. And there are intellectually exciting discoveries to be made in the subdisciplines I mentioned, like a nice explanation of high-TC superconductivity, turbulence, etc. I do not see how this is anti-intellectual.
Just compare the achievements of those two geniuses with the recent discussion about the crackpots speculating about the metrics of the universe.
Here we have a real, old-fashioned Nobel Prize : a simple and brilliant idea, an experimental demonstration, and practical applications, like in the 1900s were you had to demonstrate the effect in front of the Academy of Sciences in order to get the prize or even to get your paper published, look at the online lessons from the time (Lippman for instance).
As a professor of physics I was on the commitee of a conference aimed at high school teachers about modern days physics. I suggested the teachers in charge invited Fert but they answered that they do not understand a single thing about spin and ironically enough they wanted conferences about string theory and particle physics instead : there is definitely something wrong with public outreach of science, astrophysicists and particle physicists having built PR machines on the scale of their accelerators, observatories and budgets, and grabbing a huge part of the grants, when, with the same budget than the CERN spent on condensed matter physics or (relatively) small budget experiments maybe we would have a thousand of discoveries like the one of Fert. I bet that in CERN maybe a physicist in a thousand, with an IQ over 200, sees the big picture and understands what the wotk is really about. Atomic, molecular or condensed state physics, fluid mechanics, soft matter physics, are much more tractable and practical with real challenges (high-TC supraconductivity...)
Admiteddly the Web came out of CERN but still...
you are right about the Napoleonic wars (except that technically Napoleon won each and every battle in the defense of France but was forced to retreat until he abdicated) , but like I said in the 1850s we won the Crimea war and the war for Italian independence, not speaking of the many local colonial wars.
However you are in a very delusional state if you claim that the US are victors in Vietnam or Iraq ; unless you kill absolutely everyone (which is in progress, like the Wounded Knee you mention) the situation looks pretty dire to me, exactly like what we experienced before in Indochina or Algeria.
Quebec offers nice poutine and fun girls tough ; have you ever visited StCatherine street in Montreal ? I do not think that any city in the world can offer as much fun, especially not in North America.
About Vichy : in any country there are roughly 5 to 10% of opportunists and extremists on either side and 80% of indifferent people...once the war was lost most people just accepted the consequences, some chose collaboration, some chose Resistance.
You are mostly right about our military history (add Dien Bien Phu and Sedan), but do not forget that we conquered Algeria in 1830, beat the Austrians in Magenta in the 1850s, beat Russia along with England in Crimea, won WW1 (with allies), and won the battle of Algiers in 1959 although the situation (similar to Iraq...) made us pull out later. On the other hand the White House was burnt in 1812 by the British, the Seminoles killed a whole army in the 1820s, Custer lost ignominously in Little Big Horn, and may I mention Vietnam and now Iraq ? So we can also laugh since we warned you about those two wars...
I hope you are joking since you were moderated funny. For your information, I am French. A great-oncle on mine was killed in a last stand defending Marseilles on the last day of the war (17th june 1940), one of my grandfathers killed a bunch of 17-years old Germans in an ambush during the attack of May 1940 (and was forever ashamed of it, even trashing his medal one drunken evening, because he said they had no chance against him since he was a avid hunter and mountaineer), was captured, and escaped to fight in the Resistance and smuggling Jews to Spain across the Pyrenees mountains (admiteddly for a fee but he had lost everything he owned during his captivity). Another grandfather enrolled at 16 in 1944 to join the Free French and fight in the Battle of the Bulge. I can send you links if you want to French military archives proving all this.
On a less personal side, maybe 300 000 French military were killed in between May and June 1940 and killed half as many Germans, and stopped Italy at the borders. The Luftwaffe lost maybe 1000 planes and it was a deciding factor in the Battle of England. Sure, the French army was older than the German one due to the heavy losses in WW1, ill equipped, badly led, unmotivated. What would you do if you were mobilized at 38 years of age after having already fought a war, with job, wife and children back home, opposed to fanaticized youth with ultramodern equipment, and only given a manual repetition rifle with the wrong ammo ? But it is not true that the French Army surrendered without a fight.
there was an article on that in "computers in science and engineering" a few years ago. I do this experience every year with my students and it still holds. Just have a look at the generated assembler of a commercial Fortran compiler with optimization turned on and compare it to the same code in C and especially C++ and look at register use, number of FLOP generated, use of vectorized extensions, complex instructions and so. It is all the truer with all hardware optimization of nowadays. Of course if you spend 10 times as much time optimizing formulas and assigning variables to registers, your C code can be as fast as optimized Fortran ; we are speaking about straight-to-the point code. I know from hardware counters that my code runs at maybe 10% of theoretical machine efficiency ; but I do not have a few years to optimize everything.
Maybe it's because I was breastfed with BASIC from a very young age, but when I was forced to learn FORTRAN to work on legacy code I discovered after some initial, computer science taught disgust, that it was really the best way to express myself in code, better than with anything else, and I owe my present university position to FORTRAN because it made me so productive. I guess it was because the language was conceived by engineer, scientists oriented types, and not by formal logic adepts or grammar nazis.
I still teach FORTRAN to this day, using F90/F95 in all its power, and MATLAB-like exposed students tend to enjoy it because they can develop simple and efficient numerical codes much faster than with anything else; some of them found positions thanks to it. The trick is to use FORTRAN for what it's for (numerical arrays, heavy linear algebra, easily parallelizable scientific computing) and not strings or files manipulation, linked lists (LISP) , graphics or system : for that there is C(++), and tons of libraries. If the code grows larger than 10 000 lines, very strong discipline is necessary, and that's where true OO can be pertinent.
In scientific code FORTRAN tends to be 20% faster than the best possible C++ implementation because the grammar is so simple that compilers tend to understand better the code and can vectorize or optimize it much farther than C ; and there is much less overhead than with C++ because the objects are simpler to manipulate. Major code used in the industry (Star-CD, Gaussian for instance) is still written in FORTRAN for those (and legacy) reasons.
well, didn't you know that due to the lack of zero, the Roman empire collapsed because there was no way to indicate correct termination of C programs ?
Everyone knows that the language of supercomputing is Fortran, for historical (legacy code) as well as truly practical reasons such as braindead language (very good for compiler optimizations and automatic rewriting) efficient and predictible (loop unrolling, peephole optimization, optimal memory access without pointer indirections and heavy objects to pass between functions) linear algebra handling, which is the core of heavy numerical computing. What are they waiting to release a Fortran compiler for the GPU ? I think many chemical (Gaussian, GAMESS) physical (WIEN, VASP...) , biological or engineering packages (STAR-CD, math libraries (ScaLAPACK) are written in FORTRAN.
Don't forget to quote Hans Reiser in your dissertation, he obviously met the same issues than you and found some kind of definitive solution....
Joke apart it means that you need either infinite love for a relationship to work, or (and this is probably the same) very like-minded people who understand each other.
i had also the same pleasure during my PhD thesis. Nowadays everything is locked in the basement of the library and one has to ask for specific volumes when at the time it was possible to browse. What I could notice besides the extremely clear typesetting was that before 1850 everything was printed on velin (made from old rags) which hasn't aged a bit, it looks like it was printed yesterday. Quite fun to read weather reports from London in 1720..Math and physics papers are hard to read because of the notations we are not used to (e, pi, i and so forth did not appear before 1760 at least) and the extreme use of figures and geometrical constructions with more than 20 points to prove anything. However after 1850 they switched to cellulose, acid bleached paper which is now completely yellow and falling to pieces. Anyway I enjoyed going for the original papers when I had to teach something, like Thevenin and Norton theorems which are crystal clear to first year students when presented in their original form and mostly confusing the way they are now formally presented with matrix algebra in modern textbooks. I remember staring at the original Einstein 1905 paper, LSD discovery, and so forth. Until the 1950s or so it seemed possible to take a Physical Review volume, just read, and enjoy, just great names, great papers, and discoveries at each page or at least brilliant writing, very moving style and equations (like Bohm or Poincaré papers). After that just "publish or perish" trash to prove that people have done something with their grants, use of the computer compulsory to find the gems in the huge pile of dung produced everyday.
Re:Respect : there are two kinds of people in life
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 1
there are two kinds of people in life, those who laugh at death, and those who find comfort in religion...you won't convince any of the other kind, and it extends to everything else, with those categories always fighting, the bigots of anything (including Linux or Star Wars) against the clowns and the saboteurs. We see fine example in this discussion, "god bless his family and his soul" against "who would have guessed petting stingrays was dangerous".
Coming from the world of online poker : choose a nickname that will angry people, like "ILoveGWBush". That and a female avatar, and people will make plenty of dumb moves against you.
well, don't you know that one is supposed to always use bad car analogies in anything related to computers ?
More to the point, if you, like many of us can only afford, have a Ferrari that is more than 15 years old (say a Mondial) , it is better to use cheap oil (with characteristics appropriate to the car) than modern, expensive, synthetic oil, which is too fluid.
well, someone said that USA was the only example of a country going from barbarism to decadence without a civilization (or golden age as you call it) stage.
Slashdot Mirror
then please explain why science enrollment is going down and why we only see Asiatic, Indian or African good students anymore. The current remedy is to present pretty pictures of science to the youth, and it obviously does not work since it only appeals to the non-scientifically minded, the others smelling a rat in the material. Since Galileo and Descartes, physics is mathematized. All the concepts that you explain to the layman "on the conceptual level" without equations do not hold water from a scientific point of view since you can just hammer them down and not demonstrate them ; electromagnetic waves were discovered after deep thinking by Maxwell about the mathematical form of electrostatics and magnetism. If you say "electromagnetic waves have this strange structure" and in the best case experimentally demonstrate it, isn't it normal that people ask, consciously or not, how you came to this counterintuitive postulate ? The only physical intuition we have is classical motion in a constant gravity field against air or rigid bodies.
"exploitation" in the sense that some people make a fortune selling books about it (Hawking, the Bogdanoff here in France) and in securing funding at the national and european level. When you brutally explain to people that there are different kind of particles, you are just doing what I said : taxonomy. About electricity and magnetism, people in general just understand Ohm's law in the best case, even induction is foreign to people without a scientific education, not speaking about the structure of electromagnetic waves. To do anything useful with physics, you certainly do not need differential geometry, but at least highschool calculus and trigonometry, which is beyond the capability of many of our contemporaries. This is a fact that in the Western world students nowadays prefer a career in computer science, management, law or medicine. The common view is that they buckle at the efforts necessary to gain full understanding of a mathematicized science like physics without an obvious and huge monetary return. However I think that by teaching science in highschool and in popular science books only with pretty experiments and statement of facts, without real mathematization, we disgust scientifically minded people who see modern science as a joke as big as religion and prefer to turn to more rewarding and "serious" fields.
Could you read my whole comment before taking out the first sentence ?
My point is that astrophysicists, cosmologists and the like exploit the desire of a non-scientific public for dreams and answers about nature.
How can you honestly explain the standard model without explaining first quantum mechanics, second quantification and relativity ? And how can you do this without first explaining electromagnetism and classical mechanics ? And how can you this beyond (and including) Galileo's theories without elementary algebra, calculus, trigonometry, vector analysis ? 80% of humans never mastered these concepts in highschool, and never will. So you can explain modern science by transforming it into some kind of taxonomy and fairy tales, but the real beauty of it, which lies in its mathematization, hence its predictive power, can not really be transmitted in a general outreach conference nowadays since most people shy at any real mathematical or thought effort. On my opinion this is why science enrolment in universities is falling except for Chinese and Indians.
I am not making an argument against physics, which I love, but against contempory vulgarisation, PR of science, and so on. Read Jules Verne "from the Earth to the Moon" and you'll see that he was not shy for a SF and vulgarization book to recur to calculus and real Newtonian mechanics. Nowadays a SF book would never be published if it included so detailed equations and calculations.
thank you for your support ; but on the one hand I do not complain about MY lack of funding (everyone nowadays assumes one is automatically egoistic and self concerned), because I am also a theoretician albeit a numerical one, so have small needs besides my own salary, access to parallel computers, a conference under the sun, and a postdoc/PHD from time to time, and on the other hand I work in France where the situation of science funding is rather different than in the US although slowly converging.
you are right, I am actually disgusted by the quest of absolute and religiosity by the 80-90% of humans who actually do not have a scientific mind. And particle physicists and especially cosmologists exploit that shamefully. How can you explain standard model to someone whose mind blocks on the concept of electron spin ? By cheating. I basically agree however with the rest of your post but remind persuaded that small is beautiful.
my original post made the following points : small is beautiful (hence my rant about CERN and astrophysicists, when ideas need $10bn to be tested maybe they can be postponed until a smaller experiment is designed) Experience is the judge (hence my rant against cosmologist and string theorists) Eistein was working on his spare time when he discovered relativity, and there were immediate and simple verifications. CERN does not work on quantum electrodynamics which was achieved by Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman even before CERN wa funded. Someone like Cohen-Tannoudji has more contributed to the field afterwards from his small lab than many members of those 1000+ collaborations. The standard model doesn't have any practical applications I am aware of right now. Sure, more powerful computers and detectors were developed there, as with the Web, but my point was that there are exciting intellectual challenges in physics besides those fields of particle physics and astrophysics and that in my opinion the public is not aware of that.
there is understanding and understanding. There is a difference in between aligning the correct buzzwords in approximately the correct order (as many string theorists do) and producing a grand unified theory of quantum gravitation and of the other forces -at nonzero temperature of course- , for which one should have the brains of the lovechild of Einstein, Newton, Poincaré and a good dozen of mathematicians. Besides you actually defend my point : much research in physics on scales varying between the atom and the man can be made with relatively low budgets (a few M$ a year being already on the very confortable side), so with the budgets given on astrophysics or particle physics ( add manned space exploration to that) one could fund thousands of small groups working on interesting, open problems. Quantum mechanics was developed by collaborations of a few persons without huge means, and gave immediatly verifiable predictions and realizations like the electronical microscope, the Stern-Gerlach experiment, NMR, EPR, the transistor as you mention (done on a tabletop) etc. Fermi had a budget equivalent to maybe 5000$ a year in fascist Italy and managed to get a nobel prize. I do not attack theoreticians at all, I just say that the one working on the real, interesting problems, often with extremely esoteric methods (and admittedly some coming from particle physics from 20 to 30 years ago like the renormalization group theory, bosonisation, C-star algebras, etc) do not get the recognition they deserve in the public as they are shadowed by Hawking-like celebrities.
I am sorry to remind you that science is about the "reality principle" and that some people tend to forget it nowadays but will be reminded about it soon or later. This is also true in politics as hopefully NeoCons will soon discover : myths and dreams only get you that far. In that regard, I am indeed totally against the ideas of Nietzsche. And there are intellectually exciting discoveries to be made in the subdisciplines I mentioned, like a nice explanation of high-TC superconductivity, turbulence, etc. I do not see how this is anti-intellectual.
Just compare the achievements of those two geniuses with the recent discussion about the crackpots speculating about the metrics of the universe. Here we have a real, old-fashioned Nobel Prize : a simple and brilliant idea, an experimental demonstration, and practical applications, like in the 1900s were you had to demonstrate the effect in front of the Academy of Sciences in order to get the prize or even to get your paper published, look at the online lessons from the time (Lippman for instance). As a professor of physics I was on the commitee of a conference aimed at high school teachers about modern days physics. I suggested the teachers in charge invited Fert but they answered that they do not understand a single thing about spin and ironically enough they wanted conferences about string theory and particle physics instead : there is definitely something wrong with public outreach of science, astrophysicists and particle physicists having built PR machines on the scale of their accelerators, observatories and budgets, and grabbing a huge part of the grants, when, with the same budget than the CERN spent on condensed matter physics or (relatively) small budget experiments maybe we would have a thousand of discoveries like the one of Fert. I bet that in CERN maybe a physicist in a thousand, with an IQ over 200, sees the big picture and understands what the wotk is really about. Atomic, molecular or condensed state physics, fluid mechanics, soft matter physics, are much more tractable and practical with real challenges (high-TC supraconductivity...) Admiteddly the Web came out of CERN but still...
you are right about the Napoleonic wars (except that technically Napoleon won each and every battle in the defense of France but was forced to retreat until he abdicated) , but like I said in the 1850s we won the Crimea war and the war for Italian independence, not speaking of the many local colonial wars. However you are in a very delusional state if you claim that the US are victors in Vietnam or Iraq ; unless you kill absolutely everyone (which is in progress, like the Wounded Knee you mention) the situation looks pretty dire to me, exactly like what we experienced before in Indochina or Algeria. Quebec offers nice poutine and fun girls tough ; have you ever visited StCatherine street in Montreal ? I do not think that any city in the world can offer as much fun, especially not in North America.
About Vichy : in any country there are roughly 5 to 10% of opportunists and extremists on either side and 80% of indifferent people...once the war was lost most people just accepted the consequences, some chose collaboration, some chose Resistance. You are mostly right about our military history (add Dien Bien Phu and Sedan), but do not forget that we conquered Algeria in 1830, beat the Austrians in Magenta in the 1850s, beat Russia along with England in Crimea, won WW1 (with allies), and won the battle of Algiers in 1959 although the situation (similar to Iraq...) made us pull out later. On the other hand the White House was burnt in 1812 by the British, the Seminoles killed a whole army in the 1820s, Custer lost ignominously in Little Big Horn, and may I mention Vietnam and now Iraq ? So we can also laugh since we warned you about those two wars...
I hope you are joking since you were moderated funny. For your information, I am French. A great-oncle on mine was killed in a last stand defending Marseilles on the last day of the war (17th june 1940), one of my grandfathers killed a bunch of 17-years old Germans in an ambush during the attack of May 1940 (and was forever ashamed of it, even trashing his medal one drunken evening, because he said they had no chance against him since he was a avid hunter and mountaineer), was captured, and escaped to fight in the Resistance and smuggling Jews to Spain across the Pyrenees mountains (admiteddly for a fee but he had lost everything he owned during his captivity). Another grandfather enrolled at 16 in 1944 to join the Free French and fight in the Battle of the Bulge. I can send you links if you want to French military archives proving all this. On a less personal side, maybe 300 000 French military were killed in between May and June 1940 and killed half as many Germans, and stopped Italy at the borders. The Luftwaffe lost maybe 1000 planes and it was a deciding factor in the Battle of England. Sure, the French army was older than the German one due to the heavy losses in WW1, ill equipped, badly led, unmotivated. What would you do if you were mobilized at 38 years of age after having already fought a war, with job, wife and children back home, opposed to fanaticized youth with ultramodern equipment, and only given a manual repetition rifle with the wrong ammo ? But it is not true that the French Army surrendered without a fight.
Why doesn't this genius invert the propeller and add a sail in front of the bike ? It would surely be even more efficient...
there was an article on that in "computers in science and engineering" a few years ago. I do this experience every year with my students and it still holds. Just have a look at the generated assembler of a commercial Fortran compiler with optimization turned on and compare it to the same code in C and especially C++ and look at register use, number of FLOP generated, use of vectorized extensions, complex instructions and so. It is all the truer with all hardware optimization of nowadays. Of course if you spend 10 times as much time optimizing formulas and assigning variables to registers, your C code can be as fast as optimized Fortran ; we are speaking about straight-to-the point code. I know from hardware counters that my code runs at maybe 10% of theoretical machine efficiency ; but I do not have a few years to optimize everything.
Maybe it's because I was breastfed with BASIC from a very young age, but when I was forced to learn FORTRAN to work on legacy code I discovered after some initial, computer science taught disgust, that it was really the best way to express myself in code, better than with anything else, and I owe my present university position to FORTRAN because it made me so productive. I guess it was because the language was conceived by engineer, scientists oriented types, and not by formal logic adepts or grammar nazis. I still teach FORTRAN to this day, using F90/F95 in all its power, and MATLAB-like exposed students tend to enjoy it because they can develop simple and efficient numerical codes much faster than with anything else; some of them found positions thanks to it. The trick is to use FORTRAN for what it's for (numerical arrays, heavy linear algebra, easily parallelizable scientific computing) and not strings or files manipulation, linked lists (LISP) , graphics or system : for that there is C(++), and tons of libraries. If the code grows larger than 10 000 lines, very strong discipline is necessary, and that's where true OO can be pertinent. In scientific code FORTRAN tends to be 20% faster than the best possible C++ implementation because the grammar is so simple that compilers tend to understand better the code and can vectorize or optimize it much farther than C ; and there is much less overhead than with C++ because the objects are simpler to manipulate. Major code used in the industry (Star-CD, Gaussian for instance) is still written in FORTRAN for those (and legacy) reasons.
the kid probably watched "A Clockwork Orange" too often. Time to sue Kubrick and Burgess.
well, didn't you know that due to the lack of zero, the Roman empire collapsed because there was no way to indicate correct termination of C programs ?
Everyone knows that the language of supercomputing is Fortran, for historical (legacy code) as well as truly practical reasons such as braindead language (very good for compiler optimizations and automatic rewriting) efficient and predictible (loop unrolling, peephole optimization, optimal memory access without pointer indirections and heavy objects to pass between functions) linear algebra handling, which is the core of heavy numerical computing. What are they waiting to release a Fortran compiler for the GPU ? I think many chemical (Gaussian, GAMESS) physical (WIEN, VASP...) , biological or engineering packages (STAR-CD, math libraries (ScaLAPACK) are written in FORTRAN.
Don't forget to quote Hans Reiser in your dissertation, he obviously met the same issues than you and found some kind of definitive solution.... Joke apart it means that you need either infinite love for a relationship to work, or (and this is probably the same) very like-minded people who understand each other.
without Donald Knuth this list is *SO* incomplete.
i had also the same pleasure during my PhD thesis. Nowadays everything is locked in the basement of the library and one has to ask for specific volumes when at the time it was possible to browse. What I could notice besides the extremely clear typesetting was that before 1850 everything was printed on velin (made from old rags) which hasn't aged a bit, it looks like it was printed yesterday. Quite fun to read weather reports from London in 1720..Math and physics papers are hard to read because of the notations we are not used to (e, pi, i and so forth did not appear before 1760 at least) and the extreme use of figures and geometrical constructions with more than 20 points to prove anything. However after 1850 they switched to cellulose, acid bleached paper which is now completely yellow and falling to pieces. Anyway I enjoyed going for the original papers when I had to teach something, like Thevenin and Norton theorems which are crystal clear to first year students when presented in their original form and mostly confusing the way they are now formally presented with matrix algebra in modern textbooks. I remember staring at the original Einstein 1905 paper, LSD discovery, and so forth. Until the 1950s or so it seemed possible to take a Physical Review volume, just read, and enjoy, just great names, great papers, and discoveries at each page or at least brilliant writing, very moving style and equations (like Bohm or Poincaré papers). After that just "publish or perish" trash to prove that people have done something with their grants, use of the computer compulsory to find the gems in the huge pile of dung produced everyday.
there are two kinds of people in life, those who laugh at death, and those who find comfort in religion...you won't convince any of the other kind, and it extends to everything else, with those categories always fighting, the bigots of anything (including Linux or Star Wars) against the clowns and the saboteurs. We see fine example in this discussion, "god bless his family and his soul" against "who would have guessed petting stingrays was dangerous".
Coming from the world of online poker : choose a nickname that will angry people, like "ILoveGWBush". That and a female avatar, and people will make plenty of dumb moves against you.
well, don't you know that one is supposed to always use bad car analogies in anything related to computers ? More to the point, if you, like many of us can only afford, have a Ferrari that is more than 15 years old (say a Mondial) , it is better to use cheap oil (with characteristics appropriate to the car) than modern, expensive, synthetic oil, which is too fluid.
well, someone said that USA was the only example of a country going from barbarism to decadence without a civilization (or golden age as you call it) stage.