Interesting idea. I've never heard that suggested before. I wonder how practical this is -- keep in mind that the earth's poles wobble slowly over time, like a gyroscope that's slowing down.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that a rescue would have been possible, but difficult:
Had the hole in the leading edge been seen, actions could have been taken to try to save the astronauts' lives. The first would have been simply to buy some time. Assuming a starting point on the fifth day of the flight, NASA engineers subsequently calculated that by requiring the crew to rest and sleep, the mission could have been extended to a full month, to February 15. During that time the Atlantis, which was already being prepared for a scheduled March 1 launch, could have been processed more quickly by ground crews working around the clock, and made ready to go by February 10. If all had proceeded perfectly, there would have been a five-day window in which to blast off, join up with the Columbia, and transfer the stranded astronauts one by one to safety, by means of tethered spacewalks.
The above quote from an excellent article in the Atlantic called "Columbia's Last Flight".
XML has even less entropy (number of keystrokes required per statement) than COBOL. It's the anti-Perl. Good luck to anyone who chooses to write a program in XML. (Those of you with experience in XSLT already know what I mean.)
What the heck are you talking about? I am arguing the concepts. I don't care if you buy anything or not. I'm pointing out that the most important rights in this country are the ones that come from being a citizen (e.g. free speech) rather than the ones that come from being a consumer (e.g. protection from fraud).
Please get a clue next time before you say that I'm insulting you.
He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles.
I think it's pretty ironic that this "mindless link propagation" is also exactly what Slashdot itself does. If you object to Piquepaille's journal, why not object to Slashdot as well?
I wholeheartedly agree. I cringe every time I hear about "consumer rights". It used to be that being a citizen is what mattered in this country, but now we're nothing but producers and consumers.
Why not try a much more approachable book about science, say Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and don't tell them they are going to learn about science?
I agree that some scientific topics will be more approachable than pure math. I limited myself to math books because that was the topic of the original post.
GEB is not approachable (to the average person).
True, but I did not find _Moby Dick_ or Shakespeare very approachable either. That didn't stop my high school English teachers from assigning them.
As long as they can push the right button on the cash register at McDonald' s I am ok.
I hope you're joking, because that's a very shortsighted view. If we head down that path, our society will split into a small group of elites with control over a large group of servants. The middle class will disappear and civil war will inevitably follow. You can see the beginnings of this trend now, but I hope we can turn it around before the vicious circle becomes unbreakable.
BTW, I think this is why Edwards' "Two Americas" rhetoric was so effective during the recent presidential campaign.
THERE IS A story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. "How can you know that?" was his query. "And what is this symbol here?" "Oh," said the statistician, "this is pi." "What is that?" "The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter." "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle."
I would define interest transitively. Thus, if I am interested in A, which depends on B, I think it's reasonable to say that I'm interested in (at least) the subset of B that is relevant to A.
Without such interest, no one could ever learn a complex topic like calculus.
Note that A can be something very practical (like graduating from high school) at the same time that B is very abstract (like calculus).
I just checked and the first five pages of GEB are about Bach. Nothing complex.
One of the great things about GEB is that it completely obliterates the standard humanities vs. sciences distinction.
I find the anti-science attitude particularly irritating because I've heard it a lot from otherwise intelligent "Liberal Arts" people.
Tell me, do you think the average lay person could understand the first five pages of _Moby Dick_, or a Shakespeare play, or an Emily Dickinson poem? I think not -- yet I don't hear anyone dissuading them from trying.
What's the practical benefit of, say, reading Jane Austen in high school? None. Yet the main complaint you hear is that "I don't want to learn algebra because I'll never use it in my real life".
Why are "average" people discourgaged from learning about science and math?
The lay person, on the other hand, is definately not going to be interested.
There's that assumption again. Your wife may not be interested in math, but fortunately there are other lay people who are. (And, frankly, anyone who is competent in calculus can't really be considered uninterested in math.)
This is an important issue because the future of our society depends on our ability to produce citizens who have the intellectual ability/curiosity to understand how the society actually works. Math is a big part of that understanding.
If we continue to marginalize "dorks" who read math books, then we're going to be in big trouble down the road.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting idea. I've never heard that suggested before. I wonder how practical this is -- keep in mind that the earth's poles wobble slowly over time, like a gyroscope that's slowing down.
Try the query yourself and check the source of the answer: clicky.
Needs some work, I think.
Truck driver on a CB radio.
Airplane pilot communicating with the tower (not to mention dealing with a cockpit full of switches and controls).
Train engineer on the phone with the station.
Bridge crew on a boat talking with each other and with other boats via radio.
Are these equally dangerous?
Right on. The NYT reporter might have a brain, but the person who titled this article obviously isn't too bright.
You didn't ask for an orbiter, you asked for a spacecraft. SpaceShipOne is a spacecraft.
How about SpaceShipOne? Looks like an aircraft to me.
God, wouldn't it be great if the galaxy is really like this? I like your metaphor.
XML has even less entropy (number of keystrokes required per statement) than COBOL. It's the anti-Perl. Good luck to anyone who chooses to write a program in XML. (Those of you with experience in XSLT already know what I mean.)
What the heck are you talking about? I am arguing the concepts. I don't care if you buy anything or not. I'm pointing out that the most important rights in this country are the ones that come from being a citizen (e.g. free speech) rather than the ones that come from being a consumer (e.g. protection from fraud).
Please get a clue next time before you say that I'm insulting you.
He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles.
I think it's pretty ironic that this "mindless link propagation" is also exactly what Slashdot itself does. If you object to Piquepaille's journal, why not object to Slashdot as well?
I wholeheartedly agree. I cringe every time I hear about "consumer rights". It used to be that being a citizen is what mattered in this country, but now we're nothing but producers and consumers.
Yeah, they're right next to the pockets of milk and honey.
Sorry, but it's all ice up there.
What an ironic "land-grab" this will turn out to be when it all melts out from under them.
As the cone kept closing, the probability of hitting earth grew, but it kept getting closer to the edge.
This tells us nothing, since it is true of every point inside the cone as it closes.
I agree with you. Without Exchange integration, an Outlook knockoff would be useless to me.
Sadly for you, the size of both files will always be 128 bits (since that's the size of an md5hash output).
Yeah, I think that's more "pure" and thus more interesting. I wonder why the original poster jumped over it to the two-file version.
Why not try a much more approachable book about science, say Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and don't tell them they are going to learn about science?
I agree that some scientific topics will be more approachable than pure math. I limited myself to math books because that was the topic of the original post.
GEB is not approachable (to the average person).
True, but I did not find _Moby Dick_ or Shakespeare very approachable either. That didn't stop my high school English teachers from assigning them.
As long as they can push the right button on the cash register at McDonald' s I am ok.
I hope you're joking, because that's a very shortsighted view. If we head down that path, our society will split into a small group of elites with control over a large group of servants. The middle class will disappear and civil war will inevitably follow. You can see the beginnings of this trend now, but I hope we can turn it around before the vicious circle becomes unbreakable.
BTW, I think this is why Edwards' "Two Americas" rhetoric was so effective during the recent presidential campaign.
I would define interest transitively. Thus, if I am interested in A, which depends on B, I think it's reasonable to say that I'm interested in (at least) the subset of B that is relevant to A.
Without such interest, no one could ever learn a complex topic like calculus.
Note that A can be something very practical (like graduating from high school) at the same time that B is very abstract (like calculus).
I just checked and the first five pages of GEB are about Bach. Nothing complex.
One of the great things about GEB is that it completely obliterates the standard humanities vs. sciences distinction.
I find the anti-science attitude particularly irritating because I've heard it a lot from otherwise intelligent "Liberal Arts" people.
Tell me, do you think the average lay person could understand the first five pages of _Moby Dick_, or a Shakespeare play, or an Emily Dickinson poem? I think not -- yet I don't hear anyone dissuading them from trying.
What's the practical benefit of, say, reading Jane Austen in high school? None. Yet the main complaint you hear is that "I don't want to learn algebra because I'll never use it in my real life".
Why are "average" people discourgaged from learning about science and math?
The lay person, on the other hand, is definately not going to be interested.
There's that assumption again. Your wife may not be interested in math, but fortunately there are other lay people who are. (And, frankly, anyone who is competent in calculus can't really be considered uninterested in math.)
This is an important issue because the future of our society depends on our ability to produce citizens who have the intellectual ability/curiosity to understand how the society actually works. Math is a big part of that understanding.
If we continue to marginalize "dorks" who read math books, then we're going to be in big trouble down the road.
What a sad, sad assumption: That lay-people have no interest in math.
Martin Gardner's series of Mathematical Games books certainly qualifies as classic.
I would put some of Douglas Hofstadter's books in there too. Certainly _Godel, Escher, Bach_ is highly (though not entirely) mathematical.
Richard Smullyan also has a number of very good math/puzzle books.
There are others, too, but you get the idea. I don't think you need to be professional mathematician to enjoy any of these.
In Windows, just create a public share on your C: drive. As long as you're not blocking port 445, you can trade files with the whole world that way.
I'm not saying this is a good idea, just pointing out that you don't need to write a program to do it.