Look at the space occupied by the Physical Review on the shelves of a library : went from less than 1 meter a year in the 1950's to maybe 20 meters nowadays...and the number of quality scientists has not increased 20fold ! At this time, it was enough to publish a paper once in a while, when a real discovery was made. When looking at the summary of a scientific journal of, say, the 30's, you see Fermi, Einstein, Brillouin, when nowadays articles are just a proof that someone did some work with the money he was given.
The review process has become a joke : either the paper goes to an indirect friend thanks to the editor (submit wisely !), and there is no actual review, or it goes to a concurrent, which makes irrelevant points (in one occurrence I know of, delaying the publication by more than a year making stupid points, and when all the objections were met, asking to change the units, and pointing minor misprints !). The referees usually do not understand the scope or actual point made in a paper, and make the stupidest comments possible (so one of my former bosses recommended to write papers in one afternoon, since the real mistakes would not be spotted anyways). This is also natural because they tend to be flooded by cut-and-paste papers from scientists who are in science only because there is some (ridicully small) money or career to be made, and they could not find a "real" job elsewhere. This is sadly true of the 3rd world, where scientists are underpaid (150$ a month anyone ?) and eagerly look for positions in developed countries, so need published papers, but their lack of money and bad education mean that they often submit utterly uninteresting papers.
This is also true from people under pressure from their supervisors because they are all on short-term contracts, so that they often resort to faking data to get the expected effect. A nice positive result created with the Gimp (or vi data | gnuplot ) is way nicer than a boring negative result and easier to publish, even if faked and wrong.
Sometimes the referees even resort to say " please cite this guy", meaning, "hi, it's me, hope you do not forget me when I need something or you refer my papers".
In my games, this pisses me off, because this means I won't get an higher score than Chamberlain despite the nights in front of the computer, so I just switch to Communism and nuke the hell out of the other nations !
I reckon the US has a problem with Barbarians right now.
about your drug dealer method : I remember a video game arcade opening next to my school. Since it was 1994, having not seen this in 10 years, we were very excited and promptly went there. There was a staff of three to five people, one MK2 machine, two pinballs hardly playable (one leg shorter than the other)... and that's all. Last time I drove by : it was still there, when major arcades (with one 70 years old employee) close their doors long ago. Obvious money-laundering business to me (it is very hard to check the actual number of coins going through the machines).
Same thing for a videoclub next to my university...which lasted about three weeks ! Maybe they were not as careful, or did not bribe the correct people.
I had a vision of Bin Laden in 1977, as a young, westernized bourgeois who went to see Episode IV...and had an inspiration of what the rest of his life would be, fighting against various evil empires (USSR then USA), living in caves and worshipping some bullshit religion...
Maybe Episodes 7,8,9 will show a larger and more powerful Empire (the USA) crushing the Rebels with daisy cutters, helped by the remains of the Empire of episodes 4,5,6 (the USSR actually), converted to the bright side !
If rules of reasoning can be expressed by 2D cellular automata, then can mathematics, language and logic, then our understanding of the universe based on the traditional PDEs of physics...even if these can not be solved excepted in textbook conditions and usually lead to chaotic behavior.
maybe Wolfram is wrong (and he's not the first one to be seduced by CAs, maybe only just because it's faster to iterate CAs than solving nonlinear coupled PDEs), but I feel physics of our time being in the same status as it was in 1894, just before Xrays, radioactivity,quanta, relativity, electrons, and so on. We are just humming along established equations,and the lack of interesting new theories or even applications (A,H bombs, rockets and computers are from the 40-50's) there is a general disinterest of the public and the ypung for the sciences excepted for biology.
Maybe wakeup calls like this one are needed, even if Wolfram ends up only being a millonaire crackpot. I just ordered the book however because the pictures are said to be beautiful, and I lack artbooks...
I wrote several 40-000 lines FORTRAN and C programs to solve physical problems (the equivalent of Mathematica...) and at the end, it was enough to type :
Then "they" see how much I am using Limewire...I hope they do not report TCP/IP connection statistics also !
considering the price of VMware and Windows
on
VMware and Games?
·
· Score: 1
why don't you just buy an used, two or three years old PC with W98 ? From my experience it's more than enough to play Civ3, and is less expensive than a VMware + Windows legal licence.
I am a (legal) VMWare user myself for several reasons : ease to cut and paste between Linux and Windows applications, and safety in running Windows 16 bits apps in a safe multitasking, multiuser environment : one per virtual machine, no risk of mutual contamination, exactly what VMs were made for on the first place on mainframes, not to mention the seconds only it takes to deploy a working, locally configured windows environment for temporary users.
To get the best of both worlds (including gaming) I find it easier nowadays to run Cygwin under W2K pro, which still hasn't given me the slightest problem.
Some say it's computer generated inside the ships to help the pilots understand what's going on....
in my opinion the propulsion system of the ships distorts the fabric of spacetime a little like the effects of gravity, and this creates corrsponding gravity waves which makes the vessels vibrate. When the ships explode the brutal disruption of those gravity-wave creating systems makes a shockwave appear.
who helped a lot, claiming to help an oppressed nation (when Great Britain of the time was way more democratic than France) just for the fun of fighting their hereditarian Nemesis just once more, eventually defeating the Rosbeefs (even at sea thanks to d'Estaing !), and contributed weapons (Beaumarchais) and money to turn a militia uprising into a full-blown independence war.
10 games and a console for $20 ! think about getting richer !
it's the same with MAME or P2P to get records from the 80's : my purchasing power has increased by millions, well beyond my wildest dreams of the time !
10's of consoles and computers for a few bucks, thousands of games and weeks of pop music...
funny how a 1981 Porsche in good shape still costs a lot... (think Risky Business here)
who needs a part in a trillion ?
on
Bomb-Detecting Bees
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
when we can make...MILLIONS !
More seriously : what if some terrorist shows up at the airport with a friend covered by pollen and sugar ? What would be the bee prefer ?
And how do the bee teach to each other the smell of TNT ? The dance they perform would be interesting to decode from the semantical point of view (I had read stuff about how they expressed "next left relative to sun after the tree 20 yards from the hive" )
the earthlings of the future will have sensory organs to warn them of radioactive areas!
I do not see why the retina could not become more sensitive to energetic rays, Marie Curie had reported that when holding a radium sample close to the eyes one saw kaleidoscopic figures.
We will as well develop spam-avoiding features, UVB opaque skin, and so on.
when developers have put years of work in PVM or MPI. I do not know if "mpi_allgather" and "mpi_allscatter" would stand an 2gb array like found on DVDs, but at least this would put several 1M$ beowulves I know of to a somewhat useful purpose (besides cracking/etc/passwd and SSL sniffs, of course), instead of boring quantum chemical computations or climate simulations.
at least this illustrates interesting points
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
as opposed, for instance, to Jon Katz who uses comics to push his "post 9/11" agenda and SW2 disappointment and discuss bullshit myths of nerds rejection (never saw that in Homer).
I never see the Fab 4 discussed ; Mr Stretch or the Invisible look indeed far-fetched, but about the torch, one can indeed fly with jetpacks (as seen in Thunderball or Duke Nukem), and for the Thing, Mike Tyson pops to mind.
I saw this piece on TV about the Ultima creator living in a medieval castle mockup, and now it's Cormack, after tuning the ubergeek Ferrari, trying to fly to space by himself on a budget...
when the stuff they sold us only keeps us in a virtual world, replacing all the REAL things the 60's scifi writers had promised.
Remember (at least, there were in my editions of Marvel, including the Fab 4 and the Silver Surfer, which I do not see discussed here, surely making good movies also),
those B&W ads for "Bullworker" like exercisers which would give you a superhero body in 20 minutes, seducing all the blonde teenagers in sweaters and plaid skirts around, or the ads for distant education kits which would make you a Bill Gates or W.Hewlett in weeks ? (electronics or computers included), turning your nerd powers in money ?
After 9/11 and the following war, the conclusion is that after all, the Empire
was right and Darth Vador was the good guy ! A rational, non-religious, technological military superpower trying to embrace the Universe, and some fanatics believing to some bullshit religion trying to fight them with inferior means, hidden in some remote location...
Maybe the morale of SW is entirely anti-American, and true patriots go to see Spidey instead.
(even if he could have put some web around certain towers in his native city, but even superheroes have weaknesses).
Slashdot Mirror
it's diameter that counts, not size !
Look at the space occupied by the Physical Review on the shelves of a library : went from less than 1 meter a year in the 1950's to maybe 20 meters nowadays...and the number of quality scientists has not increased 20fold ! At this time, it was enough to publish a paper once in a while, when a real discovery was made. When looking at the summary of a scientific journal of, say, the 30's, you see Fermi, Einstein, Brillouin, when nowadays articles are just a proof that someone did some work with the money he was given.
The review process has become a joke : either the paper goes to an indirect friend thanks to the editor (submit wisely !), and there is no actual review, or it goes to a concurrent, which makes irrelevant points (in one occurrence I know of, delaying the publication by more than a year making stupid points, and when all the objections were met, asking to change the units, and pointing minor misprints !). The referees usually do not understand the scope or actual point made in a paper, and make the stupidest comments possible (so one of my former bosses recommended to write papers in one afternoon, since the real mistakes would not be spotted anyways). This is also natural because they tend to be flooded by cut-and-paste papers from scientists who are in science only because there is some (ridicully small) money or career to be made, and they could not find a "real" job elsewhere. This is sadly true of the 3rd world, where scientists are underpaid (150$ a month anyone ?) and eagerly look for positions in developed countries, so need published papers, but their lack of money and bad education mean that they often submit utterly uninteresting papers.
This is also true from people under pressure from their supervisors because they are all on short-term contracts, so that they often resort to faking data to get the expected effect. A nice positive result created with the Gimp
(or vi data | gnuplot ) is way nicer than a boring negative result and easier to publish,
even if faked and wrong.
Sometimes the referees even resort to say "
please cite this guy", meaning, "hi, it's me,
hope you do not forget me when I need something or you refer my papers".
In my games, this pisses me off, because this means I won't get an higher score than Chamberlain despite the nights in front of the computer, so I just switch to Communism and nuke the hell out of the other nations !
I reckon the US has a problem with Barbarians
right now.
about your drug dealer method : I remember
a video game arcade opening next to my school.
Since it was 1994, having not seen this in 10
years, we were very excited and promptly went there. There was a staff of three to five
people, one MK2 machine, two pinballs hardly
playable (one leg shorter than the other)...
and that's all. Last time I drove by : it
was still there, when major arcades (with one
70 years old employee) close their doors long ago.
Obvious money-laundering business to me
(it is very hard to check the actual number
of coins going through the machines).
Same thing for a videoclub next to my university...which lasted about three weeks !
Maybe they were not as careful, or did
not bribe the correct people.
I had a vision of Bin Laden in 1977, as
a young, westernized bourgeois who went to
see Episode IV...and had an inspiration of
what the rest of his life would be,
fighting against various evil empires
(USSR then USA), living in caves and
worshipping some bullshit religion...
Maybe Episodes 7,8,9 will show a larger
and more powerful Empire (the USA) crushing
the Rebels with daisy cutters, helped
by the remains of the Empire of episodes
4,5,6 (the USSR actually), converted
to the bright side !
If rules of reasoning can be expressed by 2D cellular automata, then can mathematics, language and logic, then our understanding of the universe based on the traditional PDEs of physics...even if these can not be solved excepted in textbook conditions and usually lead to chaotic behavior.
maybe Wolfram is wrong (and he's not the first one to be seduced by CAs, maybe only just because it's faster to iterate CAs than solving nonlinear coupled PDEs), but I feel physics of our time being in the same status as it was in 1894, just before Xrays, radioactivity,quanta, relativity, electrons, and so on. We are just humming along established equations,and the lack of interesting new theories or even applications (A,H bombs, rockets and computers are from the 40-50's) there is a general disinterest of the public and the ypung for the sciences excepted for biology.
Maybe wakeup calls like this one are needed, even if Wolfram ends up only being a millonaire crackpot. I just ordered the book however because the pictures are said to be beautiful, and I lack artbooks...
I wrote several 40-000 lines FORTRAN and C
programs to solve physical problems (the
equivalent of Mathematica...) and at the
end, it was enough to type :
./a.out
to get the answer about my particular problem...
Then "they" see how much I am using
Limewire...I hope they do not report
TCP/IP connection statistics also !
why don't you just buy an used, two or three
years old PC with W98 ? From my experience
it's more than enough to play Civ3, and
is less expensive than a VMware + Windows legal
licence.
I am a (legal) VMWare user myself for several
reasons : ease to cut and paste between
Linux and Windows applications, and safety
in running Windows 16 bits apps in a safe multitasking, multiuser environment : one
per virtual machine, no risk of mutual contamination, exactly what VMs were made for
on the first place on mainframes, not
to mention the seconds only it takes to
deploy a working, locally configured windows
environment for temporary users.
To get the best of both worlds (including gaming)
I find it easier nowadays to run Cygwin
under W2K pro, which still hasn't given me
the slightest problem.
so, eventually, Microsoft would have been
"good" all along...
(writing this from W2K SP2 and IE6...)
Some say it's computer generated inside
the ships to help the pilots understand
what's going on....
in my opinion the propulsion system of the
ships distorts the fabric of spacetime
a little like the effects of gravity, and
this creates corrsponding gravity waves
which makes the vessels vibrate. When the
ships explode the brutal disruption of
those gravity-wave creating systems
makes a shockwave appear.
who helped a lot, claiming to help an oppressed
nation (when Great Britain of the time was way
more democratic than France) just for the fun of fighting their hereditarian Nemesis just once more, eventually defeating the Rosbeefs (even at sea thanks to d'Estaing !), and contributed weapons (Beaumarchais) and money to turn a militia uprising into a full-blown independence war.
I claim anteriority on that one !
And I did not even get 1 point !
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32292&cid=349
of course my piece was less developed and
more elliptic. Story of my life...
everyone in the world has heard about
your failings as a sysadmin, no wonder
you do not find anything...
I should also develop the more interesting ones
in books...
10 games and a console for $20 !
think about getting richer !
it's the same with MAME or P2P to get
records from the 80's : my purchasing power
has increased by millions, well beyond
my wildest dreams of the time !
10's of consoles and computers for a few bucks,
thousands of games and weeks of pop music...
funny how a 1981 Porsche in good shape
still costs a lot...
(think Risky Business here)
when we can make...MILLIONS !
More seriously : what if some terrorist
shows up at the airport with a friend
covered by pollen and sugar ? What
would be the bee prefer ?
And how do the bee teach to each other the smell
of TNT ? The dance they perform would be
interesting to decode from the semantical
point of view (I had read stuff about how
they expressed "next left relative to sun
after the tree 20 yards from the hive" )
the earthlings of the future will have
sensory organs to warn them of radioactive
areas!
I do not see why the retina could
not become more sensitive to energetic
rays, Marie Curie had reported that when
holding a radium sample close to the eyes
one saw kaleidoscopic figures.
We will as well develop spam-avoiding
features, UVB opaque skin, and so on.
when developers have put years of work /etc/passwd and SSL
in PVM or MPI. I do not know if
"mpi_allgather" and "mpi_allscatter"
would stand an 2gb array like found on DVDs,
but at least this would put several 1M$
beowulves I know of to a somewhat useful
purpose (besides cracking
sniffs, of course), instead of boring
quantum chemical computations or climate simulations.
as opposed, for instance, to Jon Katz who
uses comics to push his "post 9/11" agenda
and SW2 disappointment and discuss bullshit myths of nerds rejection (never saw that in Homer).
I never see the Fab 4 discussed ; Mr Stretch or the Invisible look indeed far-fetched,
but about the torch, one can indeed fly with jetpacks (as seen in Thunderball or Duke Nukem), and for the Thing, Mike Tyson pops to mind.
I saw this piece on TV about the Ultima
creator living in a medieval castle mockup,
and now it's Cormack, after tuning the
ubergeek Ferrari, trying to fly to space
by himself on a budget...
when the stuff they sold us only keeps us
in a virtual world, replacing all the REAL
things the 60's scifi writers had promised.
Remember (at least, there were in my editions of
Marvel, including the Fab 4 and the Silver Surfer,
which I do not see discussed here, surely making
good movies also),
those B&W ads for "Bullworker" like
exercisers which would give you a superhero
body in 20 minutes, seducing all the blonde
teenagers in sweaters and plaid skirts around,
or the ads for distant education kits
which would make you a Bill Gates or W.Hewlett
in weeks ? (electronics or computers included),
turning your nerd powers in money ?
thinking "frustrated teenage nerd" here ?
After 9/11 and the following war, the
conclusion is that after all, the Empire
was right and Darth Vador was the good guy !
A rational, non-religious, technological
military superpower trying to embrace the
Universe, and some fanatics believing
to some bullshit religion trying to
fight them with inferior means, hidden
in some remote location...
Maybe the morale of SW is entirely anti-American,
and true patriots go to see Spidey instead.
(even if he could have put some web around
certain towers in his native city, but
even superheroes have weaknesses).
To my knowledge, it was Coulomb and not Cavendish
who established the laws of electrostatics.
My nominees for the most beautiful experiments
would also include Oersted's, which I
did not see mentioned in the discussion.