Those couldn't emit alpha particles. Changing the atomic number of an atom that's part of a DNA strand would be extremely bad. Unless that's the experiment you're conducting.
So you're talking about neutron emitters? Isotopes with the correct number of protons but (temporarily) extra neutrons?
Alpha particles can be breathed and actually is the most ionizing of all the ionizing radiation.
Alpha particles are bare helium nuclei. If they're moving slow enough to be affected by fluid dynamics in the air, something necessary to breathe them, then they're bouncing off other atoms and molecules, and stripping electrons (ionizing) from them in the process. In fact, they can't bounce until they have a shell around them, so they won't flow with the air unless they've already got electrons of their own.
So are you sure that you can breathe something that's classed as an alpha particle and hasn't just turned into a helium atom and one or two associated ionized oxygen or nitrogen or CO2 molecules?
And even if you do, DNA is buried pretty deep in a fluid encased in a couple of layers of lipoproteins and other fluids, i.e., it's got cell walls and plasma all around it. How is that bare helium nucleus going to reach a DNA molecule to ionize it in the way that makes ionization scary? Or is it a chain of ionizations from the helium to the O2 to the cell wall and so on, merely sucking net 1 electron away from the cell, which may result in ionization of the DNA? Sounds pretty fiddly to me, like it may never have happened in the history of lungs.
I think what I'm saying is, do you have any extraordinary evidence for that extraordinary claim?
I have no doubt about the more ordinary situation: the alpha particle is still moving nigh on relativistically and has a statistical chance of a free path right at a DNA molecule anywhere in your body, where it strips an electron and has a statistical chance of mutating into a cancer cell (or at least a precursor).
This is reason 1 why your average corporation has a mini-corporation inside it that does nothing but accept packages and perform testing on their contents to be sure that requirements are being met. Doesn't matter if it's a blade server or a box of pencils. Sleaze is an industry. So is acceptance testing. But if you do it right it doesn't just prevent fraud, it increases your reliability a ton, as it keeps you from stuffing parts that are merely statistical DOA.
(Reason 2 is that without that layer, there's no tracking of who got what, and embezzlement is an industry too.)
I blame Bill Clinton. If he hadn't been busy getting a blowjob from a fat chick he'd have been able to go to Afghanistan, climb up the side of a mountain with a bowie knife in his teeth, and gut that bin Laden sonofabitch while he slept.
I also blame W. Actually, I do really blame W. He did more to exacerbate the fear than he did to assuage it. And he did nothing but inflame antiamerican sentiment among Muslims and pretty much anyone else who was watching him start the Iraq war with lies. That made terrorist recruiting easy, and ended our chances of killing the terrorist threat through attrition and cultural ostracism.
So, to be clear, Bubba actually tried to get bin Laden and circumstance thwarted him. W benefitted from the ongoing fearmongering when bin Laden got away.
about border search being different from search inside the country.
What it says is
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Doesn't even say "citizens". Just says "people". I.e., this whole thing about warrantless border searches is and always has been unconstitutional.
But I don't expect the Alice in Wonderland court to overturn it. They'll just point to the turtles going all the way down and say that's what they've balanced the world on, therefore one more turtle will be fine.
I was going to say they left out Dr. Manhattan, but then they included Ozymandias.
(galactically huge spoilers here)
Hard choice there. They say Ozymandias out-smarted Manhattan, but really he merely got him out of the way long enough to succeed at his plan. And failed to kill him, which was part of his original plan. If Manhattan had known of the plan, and it had become a battle of wits, it's no question who'd win. But since by the time Manhattan knew of it it had already occurred, Manhattan merely had to accept it as logical. Which, in fact, he might have done anyway if Ozymandias had merely included him in on it. Manhattan wasn't emotional about humanity and didn't become concerned about humanity until Ozymandias displaced him, giving Laurie a reason to think Manhattan had to be convinced to come home.
So Ozymandias probably chose the wrong strategy with Manhattan. And not remembering that Manhattan was capable of reforming his intrinsic field was a massive joke.
Yup. Manhattan. If it's a matter of engineering, and not sneaky politics, he wins this whole thing without lifting a finger.
Space warfare is a lot more like submarine warfare than land or air warfare.
Gravity is virtually negated. It involves a large, completely enclosed ship with 6-degree-of-freedom navigability and zero-velocity capability. And if you so much as open the door you're screwed.
The biggest differences are the viscosity, the visibility, and how far your screams will carry.
Hi, no, you're not one of my moderators, unless you took the trouble to go to another IP address and log in under a different login then check the AC box. The system isn't stupid enough to let you moderate and then post because you clicked the AC box.
I don't doubt someone disagreed with me, but that's all they did. Even if they thought I was wrong doesn't mean I'm wrong, and to think so is to fall prey to the Fallacy of Appeal to Popularity. Doubly so, since "Overrated" was only one of three mod votes I got, and doesn't even therefore count as the popular choice.
If it was you who clicked "Overrated" and you thought I was wrong, you were wrong. If it wasn't you, then you get to sit there munching on your wasted life while I enjoy being right again.
I got modded up for being "insightful", down for being "overrated", and up for being "redundant", meaning I wasn't the only one who recognized something was wrong with the article.
You got modded up by people who agreed with your assessment of my post, which is not proof that anything was wrong with my post, and couldn't be, because there was nothing wrong with my post.
So if you somehow intended your observation about the mod points to mean you're right and I'm wrong, you still didn't get anything right.
You demonstrated nothing, you merely claimed something, and you were wrong about that.
I didn't say birds evolved into a boom/bust cycle. They evolved to survive boom/bust cycles, not to depend on them. It's irrelevant to them whether cicadas all appear on the same period or have mutually-prime periods of reproduction. And vice-versa. I also didn't say anything about whether the cycles were predator/prey-based or not. You're just making up things you didn't read in what I wrote.
When you find a nice set of pleated velvet curtains growing in the forest, then you can say they're natural. Otherwise you're playing childish semantic games with the word "natural".
Seamlessness of joining tiles does not rely on primeness. It only relies on having the same depth and slope of the curtain's fold on either side of the tile. What happens between those boundary conditions doesn't change that, no matter what you base the rest of the tile on.
They absolutely are using prime numbers to mimic randomness. They say so. Their goal is "when you notice a distinctive feature—for instance, a knot in some woodgrain—repeating at regular intervals, it really breaks the illusion of organic randomness. Maybe we borrow some ideas from cicadas to break that pattern?" Their illogical deduction about the cicadas and randomness aside, they use that to mimic the randomness they seek in their tiling. They could just use a random-number generator and not conflate cicadas' relative-prime cycles with randomness.
Frankly, I can't see anything you got right. So maybe when you realize you're not teaching a class so much as mouthing off from the corner with a dunce cap on, you'll apologize to the rest of us.
If this site isn't bookmarked, how did you get here?
No, he doesn't have to be "utterly correct". But being somewhere inside the ballpark on his basic premises would be a decent thing.
His attempt to make this look "positive, inspirational and beautiful" by falsely linking the reproductive cycles of a living thing to his webpage-background generator clanked. That's too bad. But, as it turns out, he clanked all over the page, so maybe it was only natural.
We've all seen capable examples of the nature-as-inspiration-for-mathematical-discovery trope (Hofstadter, Myers, Burke, Dewdney, etc. made a great genre out of them). Generally they're logical in themselves, and that's a beautiful thing. But when they're illogical it's not a beautiful thing, it's a self-conscious attempt to look like the people who can do it properly, or a failure to realize that the form is not the substance.
Have fun not reading/. I hear it's almost as enlightening as reading/.
The last time I discovered an "unwanted harmonic in pseudo-random patterns" I found that if you combine the return values from rand(3) in a certain way there's a consistent pattern to the final bit. But only in a certain way. You can't detect that periodicity just by doing a discrete fourier transform on its outputs.
Yes, a PRNG, particularly an LCRNG, depends inexorably on the lack of common factors in its coefficients. But that's an aside to what this article is implying (though if he'd gone any further he might have derived an LCRNG from his degenerate use of prime numbers; one with a strikingly low periodicity, but then he says the words "degenerate example" and I'm okay with it as an example, and reminded of Martin Gardner and Jearl Walker teaching us all how such things work back when SciAm was worth the paper it was printed on).
The fact is, using rand(3) produces a lot less periodicity than using the same 3 numbers in various combinations. And, as I said, the latter eliminates accidental periodic subpatterns that would make the output look more natural. Once you're getting to the point where your tiling algorithm is more complex than just "move right N places and place another copy of the tile" you might as well use the standard library you're given instead of reinventing the wheel (or the Monotonic Random Walk in this case).
Thing is, I do understand it, which is why I know it's wrong.
I'm not "one of those guys who tries to prove how smart they are by attempting to find fault with the article." I am smart. I found fault with the article. Several faults, upon review.
Not being smart when complaining about my complaining being not smart makes you a hypocrite, and doesn't reduce my smartitude one bit.
If cicadas were important to birds, then birds would have evolved a boom/bust cycle of 7, 13, or 17 years.
Cicadas emerging in prime-number cycles in fact gives birds a feast every couple of years, except when the cicada cycles tend to align, then it's a super-feast for a year or two.
But more importantly, it keeps cicada species from being out at the same time competing for mating time with mates they can't actually reproduce with. (Food isn't relevant, since they spent their time in the ground as grubs eating so they could expend their energy looking in the skies for a mate, then finding a nice spot to latch onto and die). Except, again, in those years when they overlap, then they encounter those stressors, but now there are twice as many cicadas and the birds can't eat them all so both species end up doing okay anyway.
And the leap from cicada prime-number cycling (which, despite what I said, may just be a coincidence) to arranging tiles in a pseudo-random pattern to mimic random patterns in "nature"? That makes me feel like I'm gorged on cicada pasta and want to throw up.
First, since when are curtains "nature". Second, random things look random because they are random. Third, using prime numbers to mimic randomness is not randomness, unless you use a random-number generator to help you pick which of the prime numbers in your range to use. But then there was no reason to limit yourself to prime numbers. Because there was no reason to do such a thing in the first place.
Fifth, nature does cyclical rather handily; not everything need be random to look natural. In fact, the lack of repetition in something generally random but capable of repetition is a dead giveaway that it's not actually random.
Ow. Ow, ow, ow.
So totally the Pauli Excuseme Principle: "That's not wrong, it's not even right."
That other one they mention, though, the "Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle"? Which any normal editor would shorten to "ECDCSV", but DARPA's uber-h4xx0rs turned into "XC2V"? That's the one I want to drive into the valley of the shadow of death and fuck some charlie up with. Virtually, of course. Because if I care about its fucking acronym I'm not the type to be putting my fleshy mass in harm's way for some shit like freedom and rights and shit.
That is exactly not the essence of experiment, and moots your complaint about my complaint.
A lead balloon has to be able to do all that a balloon does including during the times before and while it's constructed and filled with gas and attached to and given a payload. If you can't "make" one, because it can't tolerate the processes involved in making one, you fail the test. That is the essence of the test.
I can of course imagine a platinum-iridium balloon a parsec in diameter, with Jewel Staite in its gondola. I can't make one.
I can imagine making a lead balloon, and Jaime and Adam demonstrated suggestively that it might be doable, but they did not prove that it can be done.
That is the essence of experiment, and a little more rigor would have told them that.
If you have a need to do things with a large number of options in a large number of different ways (thus the need to use a large number of different configurations of the options), it's likely that your program is ill-designed, and what you really want is to make your data more object-oriented, so that you can say "datum.foo()" and it knows how to handle its particular case, instead of having to say "foo(datum,option1[data],option2[datum],option3[datum],..." To the point that the code to execute foo is actually different instructions, and easier to understand and maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
Labeled nucleotides
Those couldn't emit alpha particles. Changing the atomic number of an atom that's part of a DNA strand would be extremely bad. Unless that's the experiment you're conducting.
So you're talking about neutron emitters? Isotopes with the correct number of protons but (temporarily) extra neutrons?
Alpha particles can be breathed and actually is the most ionizing of all the ionizing radiation.
Alpha particles are bare helium nuclei. If they're moving slow enough to be affected by fluid dynamics in the air, something necessary to breathe them, then they're bouncing off other atoms and molecules, and stripping electrons (ionizing) from them in the process. In fact, they can't bounce until they have a shell around them, so they won't flow with the air unless they've already got electrons of their own.
So are you sure that you can breathe something that's classed as an alpha particle and hasn't just turned into a helium atom and one or two associated ionized oxygen or nitrogen or CO2 molecules?
And even if you do, DNA is buried pretty deep in a fluid encased in a couple of layers of lipoproteins and other fluids, i.e., it's got cell walls and plasma all around it. How is that bare helium nucleus going to reach a DNA molecule to ionize it in the way that makes ionization scary? Or is it a chain of ionizations from the helium to the O2 to the cell wall and so on, merely sucking net 1 electron away from the cell, which may result in ionization of the DNA? Sounds pretty fiddly to me, like it may never have happened in the history of lungs.
I think what I'm saying is, do you have any extraordinary evidence for that extraordinary claim?
I have no doubt about the more ordinary situation: the alpha particle is still moving nigh on relativistically and has a statistical chance of a free path right at a DNA molecule anywhere in your body, where it strips an electron and has a statistical chance of mutating into a cancer cell (or at least a precursor).
This is reason 1 why your average corporation has a mini-corporation inside it that does nothing but accept packages and perform testing on their contents to be sure that requirements are being met. Doesn't matter if it's a blade server or a box of pencils. Sleaze is an industry. So is acceptance testing. But if you do it right it doesn't just prevent fraud, it increases your reliability a ton, as it keeps you from stuffing parts that are merely statistical DOA.
(Reason 2 is that without that layer, there's no tracking of who got what, and embezzlement is an industry too.)
Huh.
Dude wrote a mess of code when a call to rand() would have done him solid. And then bragged about it.
Ow.
So now you have three computers on your desk? because you modded it Overrated first, then posted, then modded it offtopic, that makes three.
Being a cheater indicates you have no respect for the facts, as well as no acquaintance with them.
You're just getting that?
I blame Bill Clinton. If he hadn't been busy getting a blowjob from a fat chick he'd have been able to go to Afghanistan, climb up the side of a mountain with a bowie knife in his teeth, and gut that bin Laden sonofabitch while he slept.
I also blame W. Actually, I do really blame W. He did more to exacerbate the fear than he did to assuage it. And he did nothing but inflame antiamerican sentiment among Muslims and pretty much anyone else who was watching him start the Iraq war with lies. That made terrorist recruiting easy, and ended our chances of killing the terrorist threat through attrition and cultural ostracism.
So, to be clear, Bubba actually tried to get bin Laden and circumstance thwarted him. W benefitted from the ongoing fearmongering when bin Laden got away.
about border search being different from search inside the country.
What it says is
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Doesn't even say "citizens". Just says "people". I.e., this whole thing about warrantless border searches is and always has been unconstitutional.
But I don't expect the Alice in Wonderland court to overturn it. They'll just point to the turtles going all the way down and say that's what they've balanced the world on, therefore one more turtle will be fine.
I was going to say they left out Dr. Manhattan, but then they included Ozymandias.
(galactically huge spoilers here)
Hard choice there. They say Ozymandias out-smarted Manhattan, but really he merely got him out of the way long enough to succeed at his plan. And failed to kill him, which was part of his original plan. If Manhattan had known of the plan, and it had become a battle of wits, it's no question who'd win. But since by the time Manhattan knew of it it had already occurred, Manhattan merely had to accept it as logical. Which, in fact, he might have done anyway if Ozymandias had merely included him in on it. Manhattan wasn't emotional about humanity and didn't become concerned about humanity until Ozymandias displaced him, giving Laurie a reason to think Manhattan had to be convinced to come home.
So Ozymandias probably chose the wrong strategy with Manhattan. And not remembering that Manhattan was capable of reforming his intrinsic field was a massive joke.
Yup. Manhattan. If it's a matter of engineering, and not sneaky politics, he wins this whole thing without lifting a finger.
With stats like that, our next Republican President will be attacking Latveria before the bible is put away.
Space warfare is a lot more like submarine warfare than land or air warfare.
Gravity is virtually negated. It involves a large, completely enclosed ship with 6-degree-of-freedom navigability and zero-velocity capability. And if you so much as open the door you're screwed.
The biggest differences are the viscosity, the visibility, and how far your screams will carry.
Hi, no, you're not one of my moderators, unless you took the trouble to go to another IP address and log in under a different login then check the AC box. The system isn't stupid enough to let you moderate and then post because you clicked the AC box.
I don't doubt someone disagreed with me, but that's all they did. Even if they thought I was wrong doesn't mean I'm wrong, and to think so is to fall prey to the Fallacy of Appeal to Popularity. Doubly so, since "Overrated" was only one of three mod votes I got, and doesn't even therefore count as the popular choice.
If it was you who clicked "Overrated" and you thought I was wrong, you were wrong. If it wasn't you, then you get to sit there munching on your wasted life while I enjoy being right again.
Wait. I forgot one thing:
Yes, I got modded down and you got modded up.
I got modded up for being "insightful", down for being "overrated", and up for being "redundant", meaning I wasn't the only one who recognized something was wrong with the article.
You got modded up by people who agreed with your assessment of my post, which is not proof that anything was wrong with my post, and couldn't be, because there was nothing wrong with my post.
So if you somehow intended your observation about the mod points to mean you're right and I'm wrong, you still didn't get anything right.
There. All better. Now go play.
Now you're just trolling.
You demonstrated nothing, you merely claimed something, and you were wrong about that.
I didn't say birds evolved into a boom/bust cycle. They evolved to survive boom/bust cycles, not to depend on them. It's irrelevant to them whether cicadas all appear on the same period or have mutually-prime periods of reproduction. And vice-versa. I also didn't say anything about whether the cycles were predator/prey-based or not. You're just making up things you didn't read in what I wrote.
When you find a nice set of pleated velvet curtains growing in the forest, then you can say they're natural. Otherwise you're playing childish semantic games with the word "natural".
Seamlessness of joining tiles does not rely on primeness. It only relies on having the same depth and slope of the curtain's fold on either side of the tile. What happens between those boundary conditions doesn't change that, no matter what you base the rest of the tile on.
They absolutely are using prime numbers to mimic randomness. They say so. Their goal is "when you notice a distinctive feature—for instance, a knot in some woodgrain—repeating at regular intervals, it really breaks the illusion of organic randomness. Maybe we borrow some ideas from cicadas to break that pattern?" Their illogical deduction about the cicadas and randomness aside, they use that to mimic the randomness they seek in their tiling. They could just use a random-number generator and not conflate cicadas' relative-prime cycles with randomness.
Frankly, I can't see anything you got right. So maybe when you realize you're not teaching a class so much as mouthing off from the corner with a dunce cap on, you'll apologize to the rest of us.
"Kermit" and "stinky" leads to some Miss Piggy jokes you really don't want to hear.
If this site isn't bookmarked, how did you get here?
No, he doesn't have to be "utterly correct". But being somewhere inside the ballpark on his basic premises would be a decent thing.
His attempt to make this look "positive, inspirational and beautiful" by falsely linking the reproductive cycles of a living thing to his webpage-background generator clanked. That's too bad. But, as it turns out, he clanked all over the page, so maybe it was only natural.
We've all seen capable examples of the nature-as-inspiration-for-mathematical-discovery trope (Hofstadter, Myers, Burke, Dewdney, etc. made a great genre out of them). Generally they're logical in themselves, and that's a beautiful thing. But when they're illogical it's not a beautiful thing, it's a self-conscious attempt to look like the people who can do it properly, or a failure to realize that the form is not the substance.
Have fun not reading /. I hear it's almost as enlightening as reading /.
The last time I discovered an "unwanted harmonic in pseudo-random patterns" I found that if you combine the return values from rand(3) in a certain way there's a consistent pattern to the final bit. But only in a certain way. You can't detect that periodicity just by doing a discrete fourier transform on its outputs.
Yes, a PRNG, particularly an LCRNG, depends inexorably on the lack of common factors in its coefficients. But that's an aside to what this article is implying (though if he'd gone any further he might have derived an LCRNG from his degenerate use of prime numbers; one with a strikingly low periodicity, but then he says the words "degenerate example" and I'm okay with it as an example, and reminded of Martin Gardner and Jearl Walker teaching us all how such things work back when SciAm was worth the paper it was printed on).
The fact is, using rand(3) produces a lot less periodicity than using the same 3 numbers in various combinations. And, as I said, the latter eliminates accidental periodic subpatterns that would make the output look more natural. Once you're getting to the point where your tiling algorithm is more complex than just "move right N places and place another copy of the tile" you might as well use the standard library you're given instead of reinventing the wheel (or the Monotonic Random Walk in this case).
Thing is, I do understand it, which is why I know it's wrong.
I'm not "one of those guys who tries to prove how smart they are by attempting to find fault with the article." I am smart. I found fault with the article. Several faults, upon review.
Not being smart when complaining about my complaining being not smart makes you a hypocrite, and doesn't reduce my smartitude one bit.
And not in a good way.
If cicadas were important to birds, then birds would have evolved a boom/bust cycle of 7, 13, or 17 years.
Cicadas emerging in prime-number cycles in fact gives birds a feast every couple of years, except when the cicada cycles tend to align, then it's a super-feast for a year or two.
But more importantly, it keeps cicada species from being out at the same time competing for mating time with mates they can't actually reproduce with. (Food isn't relevant, since they spent their time in the ground as grubs eating so they could expend their energy looking in the skies for a mate, then finding a nice spot to latch onto and die). Except, again, in those years when they overlap, then they encounter those stressors, but now there are twice as many cicadas and the birds can't eat them all so both species end up doing okay anyway.
And the leap from cicada prime-number cycling (which, despite what I said, may just be a coincidence) to arranging tiles in a pseudo-random pattern to mimic random patterns in "nature"? That makes me feel like I'm gorged on cicada pasta and want to throw up.
First, since when are curtains "nature". Second, random things look random because they are random. Third, using prime numbers to mimic randomness is not randomness, unless you use a random-number generator to help you pick which of the prime numbers in your range to use. But then there was no reason to limit yourself to prime numbers. Because there was no reason to do such a thing in the first place.
Fifth, nature does cyclical rather handily; not everything need be random to look natural. In fact, the lack of repetition in something generally random but capable of repetition is a dead giveaway that it's not actually random.
Ow. Ow, ow, ow.
So totally the Pauli Excuseme Principle: "That's not wrong, it's not even right."
Or Ender Wiggin.
More likely it'll be
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/08/arts/09count600.jpg
The only way to win is to drain the tub.
No can do.
The acronym isn't l33t enough.
That other one they mention, though, the "Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle"? Which any normal editor would shorten to "ECDCSV", but DARPA's uber-h4xx0rs turned into "XC2V"? That's the one I want to drive into the valley of the shadow of death and fuck some charlie up with. Virtually, of course. Because if I care about its fucking acronym I'm not the type to be putting my fleshy mass in harm's way for some shit like freedom and rights and shit.
imagine some hypothetical giant machine
That is exactly not the essence of experiment, and moots your complaint about my complaint.
A lead balloon has to be able to do all that a balloon does including during the times before and while it's constructed and filled with gas and attached to and given a payload. If you can't "make" one, because it can't tolerate the processes involved in making one, you fail the test. That is the essence of the test.
I can of course imagine a platinum-iridium balloon a parsec in diameter, with Jewel Staite in its gondola. I can't make one.
I can imagine making a lead balloon, and Jaime and Adam demonstrated suggestively that it might be doable, but they did not prove that it can be done.
That is the essence of experiment, and a little more rigor would have told them that.
If you have a need to do things with a large number of options in a large number of different ways (thus the need to use a large number of different configurations of the options), it's likely that your program is ill-designed, and what you really want is to make your data more object-oriented, so that you can say "datum.foo()" and it knows how to handle its particular case, instead of having to say "foo(datum,option1[data],option2[datum],option3[datum],..." To the point that the code to execute foo is actually different instructions, and easier to understand and maintain.
That's kind of why we invented OO.