Did you know that 'vim' is a household name in India and its sales amount to...
Of course, vim is also just a plain old english word, though sadly it's not used much anymore. About the only time you ever hear it is in the phrase "vim and vigor", which doesn't come up that often.
I personally think "vim" is a great name for the editor, whether it was intended to be a play on the word or not. It's always fun in that aloof sort of way when somebody's looking over my shoulder as I code, marvelling at how quickly I jump around files editing things. I use Vim with a great deal of vim!
Here are some of the photos I took, if anyone's interested. These were shot with a Fujifilm S2 Pro and a Nikon 28-200mm lens. I was surprised how well they came out.
We've got a really nice Sony Network Camera on top of the building I work in, looking over at construction on a new genomics / bioinformatics lab. I've got a cron job that recenters the camera and grabs a frame a few times a day. Call me in about a year, and I'll have a video for you!
Not quite on that scale and not taken that seriously. I set up my Olympus E-10 on a tripod in my back seat and had it take a picture every five minutes during a straight 17.5 hour drive from Boston to Champaign, IL. It worked out pretty well, considering...
usually, but even then, not always, as plenty of missiles are "duds" for this reason
True. A relative of mine in the Nat'l Guard was trained in missile repair specifically for this reason. One of his duties, if he were deployed, would be to locate and retrieve missiles that failed to explode, then repair them and get them back into service. Scary! Anything that could make this job more automated helps...
I've ranted here before about the shoddy reporting that the New Scientist does. It's very curious to me that the only matches on Google for "Picard topology" are from this article. Can anyone shed some light on this situation? Picard groups are certainly well-known enough. If nothing else, it's something to be skeptical about. Is this really so new that nobody has ever mentioned in on the web, or is it just poor terminology? (Note that one of the scientists is quoted as using that term, but it's phrased in a way that makes it sound like the reporter put words in his mouth.)
You beat me to it. I think I paid about $25 from Amazon, including shipping, and with a small discount from one of their cute little systems, whereby a friend could send like three other friends a coupon for the same purchase. Granted, it was only cheap if you bought it right away, but still kudos to the stores for selling it cheap for at least some length of time. They didn't have to, you know?
Damn. I thought we had a missle shield or something like that. Was that all just a hoax, or what? Surely those billions of dollars are going somewhere, right? And don't we have some whole new department to make sure our homeland is secure, now that the military can't serve in that role?
</joke>
No, seriously. People really do seem to think that there's some functional difference between having 10,000 warheads compared to 1,000. Maybe there is, but it's definitely not as simple as "we're 10x as powerful!". Maybe we have some advantage in that we're geographically pretty spread out, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to hit all the sites. Check out this, for example.
Good call. That's much more useful than the links that people always post to circumvent the registration. I hope that catches on and replaces the other method. Spasibo bolshoye!
I think the interesting thing is that they have a plant now that collects salt in its seeds, which perhaps is new (I honestly don't know). The distinction, of course, is that one could harvest the seeds without necessarily destroying the entire plant. Further, the seeds may have significantly more salt per volume or be substantially easier to extract salt from than, for example, reducing the plant to ashes. Pity the article doesn't provide comparisons to other methods or any explanation of why this is interesting.
"Our interest in salicorni cultivation was mainly to reclaim salty soil," said JB Pandya, coordinator of the project. India has around eight to 10 million hectares of salt-affected soils of which Gujarat's share is nearly 25 per cent.
The article also mentions that the plant they're using is a "leafless shrub". I don't think they're exactly the same plant, though. The "salt bush" is apparently Atriplex halimus (or at least something in that genus, anyway), whereas these guys are dealing with Salicornia brachaita.
Ah... but consider this: In most formulations of this experiment, the monkeys are allowed unbounded time during which to type. So clearly the monkeys need sustinance. Also, lets assume we have a roughly 50/50 split between male and female in our million-monkey population. Given this, doesn't it seem possible, even likely, that these monkeys would evolve into something on par with a human? And why stop there? They've got an infinite amount of time! These monkeys will evolve into super-intelligent beings beyond our comprehension. They will create works of literature so profound that we are simply not able to grok them.
And I, for one, welcome our new super-monkey overlords! I'd like to
remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful
in rounding up others to toil on their banana plantations.
My friend got me into Gran Turismo about four years ago, and since then, I've put more time and effort into it than any other game, even Angband, in which I spent countless hours death-mold-farming for experience and demon-killing for special items. So yes, now I have Gran Turismo, and put countless hours into that instead. So what about real life? It turns out the skills I've learned in GT3 about how to handle cars do actually apply in real life. I took several second places and a couple of first places last year in local SCCAautocross events. And that's me driving my Saturn against a bunch of much more powerful, agile Eclipses and Hondas in my class (STSN). I wouldn't have had the skill necessary to do so well in the class if it hadn't been for learning how to find the limits of cars so well in GT3. I suppose my driving has also gotten somewhat more aggressive, but hey, I've put 63,000 miles on my car without a single accident, so I'm sure I'm still a decent driver.
That's interesting. I do a lot of ColdFusion at work, which means sometimes using a lot of hidden form parameters to do basic data validation. IE (at least version 6) fails to actually not render the hidden inputs; they render basically like a non-breaking space. It took me ages to figure out why things lined up properly in Moz but not in IE. (I think using CSS input[type="hidden"] { display: none; } might fix the layout, incidentally; not sure if IE supports CSS2 selectors like that.) Perhaps Microsoft needs to rethink its hidden form variable code, among other things. Many, many other things.
Err... I was referring to my hope being naive, not the hypothetical action on IBM's part. Sorry for the confusion! In the interest of profit in a fairly bleak market, it seems IBM is much more likely to take the short term "pay-off" of just buying the company than reap the longer term benefit of fending off the suit and letting the company fizzle away. Maybe that would send a message, but it's unlikely to be heard, considering how litigious companies can be these days.
To be honest, I don't know much about the issue. But given how large IBM is and how involved they are in the OSS community, I have some hope that they will spend the extra pocket change to crush them without buying them. Naive, perhaps, but reasonable at some level. I almost think that they're going after IBM first in hopes of getting money in a settlement (assuming IBM doesn't buy them), then using said money to hire even better lawyers and pursue other easier targets (e.g. RedHat and SuSE, as the story submitter suggested).
They include Valfrid Paulsson, a former director-general of the government's environmental protection agency, Soren Norrby, the former campaign manager for Keep Sweden Tidy, and the former managing directors of three waste-collection companies.
(Describing the people behind the campaign.) While I know nothing about Sweden politically, these titles are enough for me to at least be suspicious of their motives. I think it's always best to be a bit skeptical, at least enough to ask those kinds of questions. But I, too, would not immediately jump to the conclusion that this effort is being puppeteered by a group of men smoking in a dark room.
In any case, I think this particular question isn't very interesting. The motto for environmental friendliness has always been "reduce, reuse, recycle". These are roughly organized decreasing order of how much net energy can be saved by adopting the practice. Recycling has always been known to be an inefficient process.
If they do prove that space is grainy and can measure the size of the grain, will we finally be able to truncate Pi at some point and actually point to its last digit?
Interesting question, but I'm afraid not. Pi is a mathematical abstraction, defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. These are idealized, mathematical circles and lines. If you were looking at real circles and lines in practical applications, you would truncate after a few dozen decimal places at most. Given that we have computed billions of decimal places, the distinction between the abstract and practical is important to remember.
Will Zeno's Paradox [mathacademy.com] no longer be a paradox since it would no longer be about traveling an infinite series of infinitely small distances but rather traveling a large finite number of miniscule 'space grains'?
This was resolved when analysis (calculus) was formalized. Read more about it at MathWorld.
Could the relativity of time be more about different sizes of 'time grains' and a little less about where an observer might be standing? The rate of passage of 'time grains' being universally constant but the size of the grains dependant on local conditions?
There are some good books out there that are accessible to anyone with a bit of knowledge about relativity and quantum mechanics. See my tangentially related post for some reading references. I particularly enjoyed Smolin's book.
I guess we have have some sort of picture of what things were like at one plank time after "time zero". This is something like 10e-43 seconds. Which sounds extremely close to zero. Almost unimaginable close. But then I think, as long as you don't actually go back to the singularity, time is continuous, so there's just as much to be discovered between 10e-86 and 10e-43 seconds as there is between 10e-43 and 1 second (and between that and 10e+43, for that matter). But then I think that it's very naive to assume that time is continuous in the same sense that the real numbers are continuous. In fact, it seems like some theories actually imply that space and time are discrete. Check out Smolin's book, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity for a nice introduction to the topic.
One reason that some more "secular" people think they're on firmer philosophical ground than the more religious-minded is that they think their axioms are more fundamental. There's this concept of "first principles" in mathematics (which is what physics is based on, or maybe the other way around, whichever you like). I can't seem to find good information through Google, but I think the idea is that these principles are something you can "know" a priori. One problem I have with some religions is that they seem to be set up so that if you weren't raised in a society that already had all of the foundations of the religion documented, you would have no way of discovering it or coming to believe in it (consider the over-used "child growing up in the jungle away from civilization", as a thought experiment). From a sort of pragmatic perspective, the axiom of "use your hands to get food" is much more productive an axiom than "find words to praise your deity", and I guess the idea would be that these more pragmatic axioms are much more closely related to mathematical or physical axioms than the religious ones seem to be. Anyway, I don't want to go on about this, since it is pretty far off-topic (and I'm not exactly presenting it as a well-thought-out argument), but I hope that's some food for thought or discussion.
Generally, when we're trying to visualize space expanding, we think of something like a balloon filled with matter that's being blown up. So from that picture, yes, you'd intuitively think that there should be a "center" with some identifiable property (like being more dense, as you suggest).
Unfortunately, this picture isn't quite right. The problem comes from us trying to project this three-dimensional expansion (just think of spatial dimentions) into the two dimensions that we're used to dealing with. So to fix the analogy, think of the matter and energy as being distributed on the surface of the sphere (so draw dots on the balloon with a magic marker, for example). Then blow up the balloon as you did before. You will see that every dot moves away from other dots around it, and dots further away move away faster (this is what Hubble observed, the dots being galaxies). So the expansion isn't "away from a point", really. It's the space itself (the rubber of the balloon) that expands. The air inside the balloon is sort of meaningless here; it's just the surface that you observe.
There's a great anecdote in Richard Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". He tells how the theoreticians working on the physics of the fission bomb were kept strictly separate from the technical workers actually trying to implement the ideas. This was done for security purposes, so that no one person could have access to all of the knowledge needed to build a bomb.
Howerver, Feynman was able to work it out so that he got to tour one of the uranium refinement facilities once. On this tour, he noticed that the processed uranium was being stacked up in warehouse. It eventually dawned on him that this was a horrible idea, as a tight configuration of enriched uranium like that could easily start a sustained reaction!
Of course, since the groups were kept separate and not allowed to freely communicate, this had never occurred to the people producing the stockpiles of enriched uranium.
Anyway, just a sort of funny story. That could have been a disaster and could easily have changed history.
I'm going to go ahead and take your comment too seriously. I think the fact that it's called dark energy is just an analogy. Certainly the concept of "dark energy" as a sort of property of "empty space" has been around for quite a while (e.g. Einstein's cosmological constant). But perhaps "dark matter" got more attention in the media (maybe because it's easier to grasp, so to speak). So the phrase "dark matter" was coined first, even though the concept came about later. Then people eventually just started calling the intrinsic energy of space "dark energy" because it seems vaguely similar in concept.
You missed one of the best options for this kind of thing in a Java environment. See my previous post regarding BeanShell. It's an excellent piece of open-source software. Oh, and don't forget Ant.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for whistles, don't get me wrong, but without the bells, I'm just not convinced.
Of course, vim is also just a plain old english word, though sadly it's not used much anymore. About the only time you ever hear it is in the phrase "vim and vigor", which doesn't come up that often.
I personally think "vim" is a great name for the editor, whether it was intended to be a play on the word or not. It's always fun in that aloof sort of way when somebody's looking over my shoulder as I code, marvelling at how quickly I jump around files editing things. I use Vim with a great deal of vim!
Here are some of the photos I took, if anyone's interested. These were shot with a Fujifilm S2 Pro and a Nikon 28-200mm lens. I was surprised how well they came out.
We've got a really nice Sony Network Camera on top of the building I work in, looking over at construction on a new genomics / bioinformatics lab. I've got a cron job that recenters the camera and grabs a frame a few times a day. Call me in about a year, and I'll have a video for you!
Not quite on that scale and not taken that seriously. I set up my Olympus E-10 on a tripod in my back seat and had it take a picture every five minutes during a straight 17.5 hour drive from Boston to Champaign, IL. It worked out pretty well, considering...
True. A relative of mine in the Nat'l Guard was trained in missile repair specifically for this reason. One of his duties, if he were deployed, would be to locate and retrieve missiles that failed to explode, then repair them and get them back into service. Scary! Anything that could make this job more automated helps...
I've ranted here before about the shoddy reporting that the New Scientist does. It's very curious to me that the only matches on Google for "Picard topology" are from this article. Can anyone shed some light on this situation? Picard groups are certainly well-known enough. If nothing else, it's something to be skeptical about. Is this really so new that nobody has ever mentioned in on the web, or is it just poor terminology? (Note that one of the scientists is quoted as using that term, but it's phrased in a way that makes it sound like the reporter put words in his mouth.)
You beat me to it. I think I paid about $25 from Amazon, including shipping, and with a small discount from one of their cute little systems, whereby a friend could send like three other friends a coupon for the same purchase. Granted, it was only cheap if you bought it right away, but still kudos to the stores for selling it cheap for at least some length of time. They didn't have to, you know?
</joke>
No, seriously. People really do seem to think that there's some functional difference between having 10,000 warheads compared to 1,000. Maybe there is, but it's definitely not as simple as "we're 10x as powerful!". Maybe we have some advantage in that we're geographically pretty spread out, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to hit all the sites. Check out this, for example.
Good call. That's much more useful than the links that people always post to circumvent the registration. I hope that catches on and replaces the other method. Spasibo bolshoye!
I think the interesting thing is that they have a plant now that collects salt in its seeds, which perhaps is new (I honestly don't know). The distinction, of course, is that one could harvest the seeds without necessarily destroying the entire plant. Further, the seeds may have significantly more salt per volume or be substantially easier to extract salt from than, for example, reducing the plant to ashes. Pity the article doesn't provide comparisons to other methods or any explanation of why this is interesting.
And I, for one, welcome our new super-monkey overlords! I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil on their banana plantations.
My friend got me into Gran Turismo about four years ago, and since then, I've put more time and effort into it than any other game, even Angband, in which I spent countless hours death-mold-farming for experience and demon-killing for special items. So yes, now I have Gran Turismo, and put countless hours into that instead. So what about real life? It turns out the skills I've learned in GT3 about how to handle cars do actually apply in real life. I took several second places and a couple of first places last year in local SCCA autocross events. And that's me driving my Saturn against a bunch of much more powerful, agile Eclipses and Hondas in my class (STSN). I wouldn't have had the skill necessary to do so well in the class if it hadn't been for learning how to find the limits of cars so well in GT3. I suppose my driving has also gotten somewhat more aggressive, but hey, I've put 63,000 miles on my car without a single accident, so I'm sure I'm still a decent driver.
That's interesting. I do a lot of ColdFusion at work, which means sometimes using a lot of hidden form parameters to do basic data validation. IE (at least version 6) fails to actually not render the hidden inputs; they render basically like a non-breaking space. It took me ages to figure out why things lined up properly in Moz but not in IE. (I think using CSS input[type="hidden"] { display: none; } might fix the layout, incidentally; not sure if IE supports CSS2 selectors like that.) Perhaps Microsoft needs to rethink its hidden form variable code, among other things. Many, many other things.
Err... I was referring to my hope being naive, not the hypothetical action on IBM's part. Sorry for the confusion! In the interest of profit in a fairly bleak market, it seems IBM is much more likely to take the short term "pay-off" of just buying the company than reap the longer term benefit of fending off the suit and letting the company fizzle away. Maybe that would send a message, but it's unlikely to be heard, considering how litigious companies can be these days.
To be honest, I don't know much about the issue. But given how large IBM is and how involved they are in the OSS community, I have some hope that they will spend the extra pocket change to crush them without buying them. Naive, perhaps, but reasonable at some level. I almost think that they're going after IBM first in hopes of getting money in a settlement (assuming IBM doesn't buy them), then using said money to hire even better lawyers and pursue other easier targets (e.g. RedHat and SuSE, as the story submitter suggested).
In any case, I think this particular question isn't very interesting. The motto for environmental friendliness has always been "reduce, reuse, recycle". These are roughly organized decreasing order of how much net energy can be saved by adopting the practice. Recycling has always been known to be an inefficient process.
Interesting question, but I'm afraid not. Pi is a mathematical abstraction, defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. These are idealized, mathematical circles and lines. If you were looking at real circles and lines in practical applications, you would truncate after a few dozen decimal places at most. Given that we have computed billions of decimal places, the distinction between the abstract and practical is important to remember.
Will Zeno's Paradox [mathacademy.com] no longer be a paradox since it would no longer be about traveling an infinite series of infinitely small distances but rather traveling a large finite number of miniscule 'space grains'?
This was resolved when analysis (calculus) was formalized. Read more about it at MathWorld.
Could the relativity of time be more about different sizes of 'time grains' and a little less about where an observer might be standing? The rate of passage of 'time grains' being universally constant but the size of the grains dependant on local conditions?
There are some good books out there that are accessible to anyone with a bit of knowledge about relativity and quantum mechanics. See my tangentially related post for some reading references. I particularly enjoyed Smolin's book.
I guess we have have some sort of picture of what things were like at one plank time after "time zero". This is something like 10e-43 seconds. Which sounds extremely close to zero. Almost unimaginable close. But then I think, as long as you don't actually go back to the singularity, time is continuous, so there's just as much to be discovered between 10e-86 and 10e-43 seconds as there is between 10e-43 and 1 second (and between that and 10e+43, for that matter). But then I think that it's very naive to assume that time is continuous in the same sense that the real numbers are continuous. In fact, it seems like some theories actually imply that space and time are discrete. Check out Smolin's book, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity for a nice introduction to the topic.
One reason that some more "secular" people think they're on firmer philosophical ground than the more religious-minded is that they think their axioms are more fundamental. There's this concept of "first principles" in mathematics (which is what physics is based on, or maybe the other way around, whichever you like). I can't seem to find good information through Google, but I think the idea is that these principles are something you can "know" a priori. One problem I have with some religions is that they seem to be set up so that if you weren't raised in a society that already had all of the foundations of the religion documented, you would have no way of discovering it or coming to believe in it (consider the over-used "child growing up in the jungle away from civilization", as a thought experiment). From a sort of pragmatic perspective, the axiom of "use your hands to get food" is much more productive an axiom than "find words to praise your deity", and I guess the idea would be that these more pragmatic axioms are much more closely related to mathematical or physical axioms than the religious ones seem to be. Anyway, I don't want to go on about this, since it is pretty far off-topic (and I'm not exactly presenting it as a well-thought-out argument), but I hope that's some food for thought or discussion.
Unfortunately, this picture isn't quite right. The problem comes from us trying to project this three-dimensional expansion (just think of spatial dimentions) into the two dimensions that we're used to dealing with. So to fix the analogy, think of the matter and energy as being distributed on the surface of the sphere (so draw dots on the balloon with a magic marker, for example). Then blow up the balloon as you did before. You will see that every dot moves away from other dots around it, and dots further away move away faster (this is what Hubble observed, the dots being galaxies). So the expansion isn't "away from a point", really. It's the space itself (the rubber of the balloon) that expands. The air inside the balloon is sort of meaningless here; it's just the surface that you observe.
Howerver, Feynman was able to work it out so that he got to tour one of the uranium refinement facilities once. On this tour, he noticed that the processed uranium was being stacked up in warehouse. It eventually dawned on him that this was a horrible idea, as a tight configuration of enriched uranium like that could easily start a sustained reaction!
Of course, since the groups were kept separate and not allowed to freely communicate, this had never occurred to the people producing the stockpiles of enriched uranium.
Anyway, just a sort of funny story. That could have been a disaster and could easily have changed history.
I'm going to go ahead and take your comment too seriously. I think the fact that it's called dark energy is just an analogy. Certainly the concept of "dark energy" as a sort of property of "empty space" has been around for quite a while (e.g. Einstein's cosmological constant). But perhaps "dark matter" got more attention in the media (maybe because it's easier to grasp, so to speak). So the phrase "dark matter" was coined first, even though the concept came about later. Then people eventually just started calling the intrinsic energy of space "dark energy" because it seems vaguely similar in concept.