This is not a mathematical problem. It tries to pretend to be one, but it is not. Generally, once you know the constraints the solution is trivial.
The correct mathematical answer to all such sequences remains "The next number is whatever the hell it feels like being". I have better things to do with my time then try to second-guess somebody pretending to be clever and plucking some random thing out of the uncountably infinite set and demanding that I guess it. Thus, I don't do these puzzles; they're sophmoric in the literal sense of the term, created by people who think they are clever but don't seem to have a deep understanding of math.
People who "solve" the puzzle may impress Google, but I am not impressed by Google using this as a puzzle.
On the other hand, did Google ever claim that this was a math problem? It is a problem, sure, but it is obviously not a request for a proof of Goldbach's conjecture. Jerf critiques the problem as "sophomoric" but I think that Jerf's complaint is "beating up a strawman" --- he claims that Google posed a math problem and then declares the problem stupid. It is a stupid math problem... but it's a fun stupid problem.
And, after all, there is a specific set of correct answers, which are perfectly apparent to those who solve the suggested problems --- because they lead to recognition by somebody, perhaps Google --- of particular, quite reasonable answers. If you type in random responses, you're just incredibly unlikely to stumble into the "honeypot."
So (blush, gloat) I have to admit enjoying 45 minutes in the solution of the problems, when I should have been doing what I'm actually supposed to be doing. If only for providing me with 45 minutes of fun, I'm grateful for the problem --- math problem or no.
The quasi-mathematical nature of the problems requires one to either "cheat" by invoking search engines (which, as some have pointed out, may be a perfectly valid solution method as far as Google is concerned), or to demonstrate familiarity with computer tools that facilitate the discovery of the answers.
The very first problem is quite well posed, and if you can figure out how to generate the ten digit numbers, you don't have to look very far. A subsequent problem is very ill-posed (as jerf points out), but nevertheless a "human" is capable of inferring a kind of pattern with far less information than a "mathematician" would consider acceptable. Surely this is precisely the sort of thing that we hope search engines will do for us.
It was fun. Probably Google isn't going to offer me a job, but I had fun. Is that so bad?
Getting back to the topic, ID proponents are somewhat like James Van Allen; both assume that they already know all that is worthwhile or necessary, so there is no need to go further except for those things which particularly interest them (plasma physics or biblical exegesis, take your pick). Both are wrong.
Wait a minute, I think Van Allen is getting needlessly beat up here, and I'm wondering (silly me) how many of the people beating him up read the article, and read it carefully.
As a space scientist myself, it is obvious that unmanned probes are vastly less expensive than manned probes, and have returned far more data. The really dirty secret is that ground-based instruments do a remarkably good job, too, for a tiny fraction of the cost of space-based instruments. For the price of a *single* satellite (say $500M) you could endow NSF's aeronomy program in perpetuity! The amount of space science you could fund with a single satellite's price tag is breathtaking.
Breathtaking.
Obviously I'm a big proponent for ground-based observational space science!
But having said that, I'm *also* a proponent for manned space flight, as long as it's for the right reason. "Science" is *not* the right reason. Adventure is... and if you look at Van Allen's comments, which are clearly abridged in the article, you might read, as I do, that Adventure is the one good reason to send humans into space.
Actually, for an ideal gas (not a bad approximation for air), the speed of sound is purely a function of the temperature (a = sqrt(gamma * R * T)).
Almost. It also depends on the molecular weight of the gas. The speed of sound in H2 is four times the speed of sound in O2 at the same temperature. modulo constants and units,
I'm sort of puzzled by getting modded to "flamebait" on this. or perhaps honored, or something. Was what happened in Florida in 2000 good? Bad? Ugly?
Did a pack of Evil Republican Hackers descend upon Poor Hapless Inspector Lopez while the duck squeezing, tree hugging Green Party was out sampling organic, union label, hallucinogenic mushrooms with their same sex (possibly transgendered) companion (soul mate).
BTW, I just finished The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Incredible!
Of course! EAW is a pretty amazing writer. He stumbled onto something lovely with The Monkey Wrency Gang. If you'd like to read something troubling and brilliant, then you have to read his last complete novel, namely "The Fool's Progress (An Honest Novel)" which is unsparingly awful and wonderful all at once.
Abbey was most consistent as an essayist, including the hilarious sketch "God's Plan for the State of Utah: A Revelation" but he was obnoxious enough to write bizarre things like "Good News" as well as the weirdly wonderful "Black Sun."
Ed Abbey changed my world as a graduate student. I'm in his debt, probably to the horror of my family.
All the evidence I have seen is that Bush won the popular vote in Florida. EVERY recount, official (there were at least 2) and unofficial by the NYT (at least 1), Bush came out ahead by a very small amount.
Post proof and I will read it though:)
This is one of the standard arguments, and is, in a simplistic way, irrefutable.
There is little doubt that recounts show that Bush won Florida. However,
These flaws in the Florida ballot are, to the best of my knowledge, not in dispute. In both cases, these flaws were biased heavily in favor of Bush. Most of the disenfranchised voters were black, who strongly favored Gore; and the butterfly ballot could be misinterpreted to create votes for Buchanan rather than Gore, or if the mistake was noticed, spoiled by voting for Gore and Buchanan.
(I don't personally believe that the Republicans are clever enough to have designed the "butterfly ballot" to achieve the biased spoilage that occurred. For a picture of the "butterfly ballot" see the top of this WWW page.)
Thus, of the voters in Florida who attempted to register their preference, Gore won. Of those who were privileged enough to have their votes count, it would appear that Bush "won."
For an analysis of the Supreme Court's actions, see "None Dare Call It Treason" and for a (mostly ad hominem) rebuttal, see this.
The Democrats, meanwhile, caved in far too easily in the courts, and found it far easier to beat up Nader for "losing" Florida rather than to contemplate their own lame campaign (how could Gore lose Tennessee! Crikey!). This lameness is repeated again four years later. The press, by and large, has been pleased to kick Dean, and ignore Kucinich --- both of whom have injected far more interest into the campaign than has Kerry.
And now Michael Moore comes along, a provocative slob with a keen wit and an unblinking camera. The results are just fascinating; the only people who seem surprised by the public's response are the pundits. If any of them had bothered to go to the caucuses in Washington State last February, they would have been stunned by the huge reservoir of contempt for W that has built up inexorably over the past three years.
The article (interview) is over ten years old. Just a bit has happened in medical research since then. As it happens Duesberg hasn't changed his mind, at least not as of 1998
The article leans heavily on the respectability of a single expert as a proof mechanism. For example, I might cast doubt on the value of the article by observing that it was written by a notorious pornographer, Bob Guccione, the editor of Penthouse. But that would be just as invalid.
To return to the topic at hand, the fact that Michael Moore is a fat slob who dresses even worse than I do should not detract from the value of his documentary.
Despite howls of scorn from the Right to the tune of "get over it," there is ample evidence that Gore won the popular vote in Florida, too. Of course, the idiotic Gore campaign was so lame it couldn't even win Tennessee. However, the Bush administration should wear a scarlett A for its voting adultery in Florida in 2000.
mod parent up, and listen to the CarTalk "Puzzler" from yesterday, which presents a form of this problem.
One thing that is hard to do with finger prints is to leave someone else's at a crime scene. With DNA, however, it is not so difficult to imagine a whole new business starting up, which is the collection of DNA junk and bottling it.
So there you are, a smarter felon than usual, you commit some terrible crime, but you thoughtfully get out your DNA bomb, and set it off just like an insect fogger, painting the crime scene with the DNA of 100,000 individuals --- and in far greater quantity than what you left. If you've been a little careful, you'll generate a sufficient quantity of chaos to
bring the DNA lab to its knees, or
get some unfortunate schmuck tossed in your stead (remember the Portland OR lawyer whose fingerprints got mangled by the FBI for the Spanish bombing? Oops.), or
you just get an expert witness to point out that a DNA bomb has been set off, and that the crime scene DNA is effectively worthless, including...
... set off DNA bombs *elsewhere* which include your own DNA, thus presenting credible evidence that your own DNA has been captured for DNA bombs used by other fiendish folk
I guess the point is that we may be in a rather unique little window of time when DNA evidence is actually useful --- it just can't be that long before effective countermeasures are readily available to the thoughtful criminal. Go read some Phillip K Dick scifi to learn how to think about such things. "Minority Report" gives a perfectly entertaining presentation about the potential misuse of "indisputable" information.
So: if you wonder where could you get a bunch of junk DNA without working too hard... how about the dumpsters at McDonalds? How about the garbage cans in restrooms (where you'll get the DNA of those upstanding citizens who actually wash their hands after peeing)?
I'm feeling a bit foolish about actually describing a potentially lucrative business opportunity. I take it all back. Move along, move along, nothing to see here.
And the third [category of professors], well, they unfortunately seem the most common these days, and are at best baby-sitters in early education and a disgraceful waste of money when you hit college. Unfortunately, with the low salaries and prestige afforded teachers these days, them's what ya get.
By and large, the new faculty hired by my Department in the past 15 years have all been solid cat1 (teachers) or cat2 (researchers) and occasionally both. However, we do have some faculty who teach poorly and do little research. As far as I can tell, these get that way by simply wearing out, or being overwhelmed by the march of progress in their fields. Being a successful professor is extremely hard work. There is a widespread perception that faculty are on the gravy train --- but most of my colleagues work extremely hard. However, it is quite possible that students may see very little of the result of that work. This is tragic.
The market forces on R1 universities strongly dissuade faculty from investing time in teaching well. This means that if any of you have had a class that you thoroughly enjoyed, you might want to take a moment to thank that professor in person. They are doing what they do for pure love, and very likely paying a penalty in salary, promotion, and tangible respect from their colleagues.
People who teach well tend to have a certain minimum set of organizational skills, as well as a demonstrated sense of responsibility to "the system." Such folk get asked to do some of the more important administrative tasks --- which are largely invisible to students.
Thus, universities contain several powerful mechanisms for removing capable instructors from teaching roles. I have yet to see any powerful mechanisms to actually retain capable instructors, or create more of them.
The current situation is very robust to positive change, for reasons which include the following.
The faculty create and inflict promotion and tenure standards, and thus create a faculty which looks like themselves. Change a few words, in the previous sentence, and you've got a fine definition of racism.
Departments are frequently financially starved, and need big flows of ICR (indirect cost return) to keep operations up.
Many Departments have liberal policies permitting faculty to "buy out" of teaching. This removes faculty from the classroom, dulling their teaching skills, and annihilating one of the key selling points of R1 universities, "your son or daughter will be taught by the leading researchers!"
Many funding agencies (notoriously DARPA) engage in university funding practices which are poison to education. To pick on DARPA for a moment,
They permit academic year salary (teaching buyouts)
They permit a salary subterfuge which gives unreviewed raises to faculty and chews up funding that could be used to support students.
They are extremely volatile, and think nothing of giving a grant of $1M, and then pulling it six months later. This is a completely irresponsible way to fund university research --- as if you could put students and staff in refrigerators between funding!
The "production pressure" is very large with DARPA, so that DARPA-funded projects can easily have large professional staffs and small student complements. This is because professional staffs, which cost more, can nevertheless get more done by virtue of their experience. But what is the point in performing university research without student involvement?
the football team. Alumni and the families of alumni almost always care more about the football team than they care about the "university."
... and students are truly powerless. We do collect their opinions and teaching evaluations, and we even look at them at review time. However, I have yet to see anyone whose promotion was seriously endangered by poor teaching evaluations. It turns out that many students are perfectly responsible enough and capable enough to serve on promotion and tenure committees --- but I'll be Professor Emeritus before that ever happens.
Attention Earthling: We have been studying your culture and We find it... fascinating.
Your use of the expression "fucking comedian" leads Us to interpret this as a "profession" or line of work. Previous study has led Us to generate a rough understanding of "comedian." We have nothing really like "comedian" here on Betelgeuse IV; the nearest thing would be translated roughly as "dentist." We also have deduced a wealth of words referring to copulation (again no real equivalent exists here; the closest is "shovelling volcanic ash out of the commode")
However the confluence of the terms "fucking" and "comedian" has confounded even Our most famous dentists.
In objecting to paltemalte's assertion, I will stipulate that the author has the ability to levitate, and thus has no routine need for roads.
However, the local fire department is composed of conventional humans which must drive their fire engines over conventional roads. Should a wayward spark ignite the shingles of paltemalte's roof, the value of roads, of a telecom system, of FCC regulated spectrum used by emergency services, of performance standards (developed by or for government agencies)... these things will all become apparent to the thoughtful citizen.
It is naive to suggest that the infrastructure of society is a pure commodity which can be incrementally procured at the local hardware store.
Of course, it is inevitable that stupid excesses of tax law and enforcement will occur; I have (I think) been victim of a theft by the State of New York... but on the other hand, I live in a safe, wealthy, healthy, well-educated society. The quality of my society is not an accident; it has arisen through substantial public investment of taxes.
As long as CPUs are so fast, RAM is so cheap, and disks are big... and the net is relatively slow, thin clients will have only thin application.
I *do* remember the good old days of VT100s, and they worked great; the thing that displaced VT100s in our research group was *Macintosh* --- those wascally little SEs and the occasional MacII had such nice software onboard, they were a delight to use. The Macs were in turn partially displaced by DEC RISC machines, which cost more but brought a lot of horsepower to the desktop.
We used to use a Beowulf in our current project, but the blasted Pentia got so fast there was no point. Our real-time processor now relaxes on a single machine.
It's not so hard to imagine the pendulum swinging back to thin clients (perhaps in the guise of wireless PDAs, or in a more sinister form via.NET), but there is no need for a thin client to run a word processor or mail client or www browser. Religious wars aside, our desktop software is quite capable, and getting more so.
It's a great idea, and it won't work. What will happen is that a new kind of brokerage will come into being which holds stocks long enough to get the lower tax rates/higher loss exemptions.
It works like this. Some of you may have observed that it can be cheaper to buy two round trip plane tickets (each spanning a Saturday night), and use the interior half of each, rather than a single roundtrip that did *not* span a Saturday night.
This brokerage buys and sells "slowly" and its clients buy and sell as fast as they wish, bypassing the market force that the proposed regulation was attempting to create. Furthermore, the complexity of the scheme, and likely buy-in cost, would bring advantage only to the wealthy. Thus, you'd be pumping taxes out of hapless little people. As usual.
One might say "well, we'll just make such middlemen illegal!" That will simply drive such brokerages to the Bahamas.
A slightly simpler version of this scheme would be to simply tax every stock transaction. Then, you benefit from holding stocks for a long time by avoiding transaction taxes; specifically discouraging churning, and (somewhat indirectly) taxing insider trading.
To first order, the speed of sound does not depend upon the pressure at all; rather it depends primarily upon the mean mass density and the temperature.
The reduction of sound speed at altitude is due to the reduction of temperature. The temperature rises again in the upper stratosphere (ozone heating) and then drops down to its coldest temperature at the mesopause (around 120 K, at 85 km). However, the temperature increases rapidly above that, getting back to room temperature by 110 km, and heading for 1000k and beyond by the time you get to LEO.
At high altitudes the mass density is decreasing as you get more and more atomic species (e.g. O rather than O2) as well as larger fractions of light constituents (e.g. H2, H), so the speed of sound is quite high at LEO. At altitudes above the "turbopause" (somewhere around 105 km) the components of the atmosphere are no longer well-mixed, thus the different component gases stand at their own scale heights.
Remove the blast door and replace it with glass (it would probably have to be bulletproof to withstand the downward force from the snow in the winter).
Growing up Eastern Washington, I can say that you probably would need bulletproof glass, but not for the snow (it doesn't snow much at all at this missile site). Rather, you'd need bulletproof glass to keep the bullets out.
There's an astronomical observatory about an hour's drive from this silo. It has heavy steel shutters on the windows. The shutters are not there to keep the stray light away from the telescope --- but rather to keep the bullets out.
Eastern Washington has many charms, but it also has a robust population of people with guns. A noticable minority of these folks are remarkably generous in their application of these weapons.
... and an earlier SlashPost remarked that latency was inevitably large with these huge block codes. And that's true. However, the trellis codes --- which have their own problems for decoders, such as big memory requirements --- have relatively low intrinsic latency.
The trellis codes have less "beautiful math" supporting them than do the block codes (the Galois Fields are gorgeous, but the trellis codes are very very useful. Someone else mentioned that block codes are fine for long-haul comm in space; but I'm pretty certain that the error control coding for Galileo (of damaged antenna fame) were big trellis (convolutional) codes --- not block codes.
There was a rather interesting article in Nature. 'way back in 1988 or so, in which some physicists developed a class of codes which could approach the Shannon Limit even in low SNR. These codes were developed as analogs of Ising Spin Glass models.
Gotta love Google! Here's the citation---
N. Sourlas. Spin-glass models as error-correcting codes. Nature, 339:693a"695, 1989
For those of you with too much time on your hands, and wishing to explore the excellent possibilities of suing yourself, may I recommend to you "A Frolic of His Own" by the most excellent William Gaddis, alas recently deceased.
When you've gobbled that up, read "JR" --- but tape your ribs first, because you will laugh hard enough to break them.
Actually, there's no real mystery here. Any textbook on atmosphere will make this plain.
scale height --- the vertical distance over which the atmosphere pressure/density drops to 37% --- is usually somewhere around 6 km for solar system planets. 40 km is about 6 scale heights; 6 scale heights is a factor of 400.
adiabatic lapse rate. You all know that it gets cooler as you go higher. You may not know that it can't get cooler at too fast a rate, or the atmosphere will turn over (violently). At any rate, you'd expect the temperature at the bottom of a deep hole to be higher than that at the top.
One of the weird coincidences of the Solar System is that, on every planet, there is a place that is not too far from STP ("standard temperature and pressure --- more or less like sea level and 300 K). In the case of Mars, that place happens to be in a very deep hole in the ground, whereas on Venus and Jupiter, that place happens to be well above the "surface" (whatever that means on Jupiter). For you Mars colonizers, if you dig a hole about 30-40 km deep, you'll find that a pretty good air pressure and temperature will result. It'll be CO2, of course, but perhaps some trees won't mind too much.
In the case of Venus, the question is, then, "why bother landing?" Why not just build yourself a balloon that floats around at some convenient altitude where it's not so hot, below the H2SO4 clouds so you can see the ground, perhaps occasionally deploying gliders or whatever to go down to the surface....
A subsequent/. post mentions that the Soviet landers bounced off the surface at 7m/s. If a "lander" had been equipped with airbags, it probably wouldn't have it the surface at all, if the bags were filled with a gas with lower molecular weight than that of Venus. Rather, it would bob at some altitude(well) above the surface, a sort of low altitude satellite bobbing along in Venus extremely dull weather.
[ The submersibles like the Trieste used "balloons" filled with gasoline to supply bouyancy; the gasoline was not crushed by the terrific pressure down there. Then by shedding ballast, the subermisibles could return to the surface. ]
Re:Sorta agree with both points of view
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Singularity Sky
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You know, I'd be the first to enjoy a bit of Harlequin Romance bashing... and my wife (who is smarter than I am) shyly enjoys HRs...and (amazingly) puts up with me sneering at them.
Because I read Real Man's Literature! Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Coover... Yes, avert your eyes in my presence!
But one day, my wife approached me gingerly with some HR, and said, "honey, I know you hate the idea of these things, but, um, humor me and take a look at this..."
And I did. And it was absolutely charming. So I don't beat up on Harlequin Romances anymore.
I wish all the people who responded were my students; my classes would certainly be livelier!
Some quick replies:
(*) I like Vineland. So sue me. Yes, I've read all the others; I like them too. But I like Vineland, and I'm Just Man Enough to admit it.
(*) Alas, I have tenure. If it is any comfort, I am unhappy about the kind of behavior that the American system of tenure encourages and tolerates. And yes, I am too lame to simply resign. This is one of my many limitations.
(*) There is a difference between having sympathy for cheaters, and having a desire to fly in airplanes designed by them.
(*) Cheating is indeed rampant in classes in which the instructor has taken no precautions to discourage or impede cheating in the first place. To overgeneralize:
(+) If you have ever taken a multiple choice exam, then you have taken an exam which fosters cheating.
(+) if you have ever taken an exam in which scores are based on the mere presence of a correct answer, then you have taken an exam which fosters cheating.
I once gave an exam in which I secretly distributed 8 different but similar appearing exams to the 120 students. We caught some cheaters (and threw the book at them), but it turns out that *none* of our cheating detection depended upon the catspaw of different exams --- all the different exams accomplished was to make the grading more complicated; a poor engineering choice which I have subsequently shunned.
I remind you, Gentle Reader, that I frequently give oral final exams --- a practice which is time consuming and probably impervious to cheating. I believe that I am the only professor in my College of several hundred engineering faculty who regularly employs oral examinations.
(*) TA-slaves. Forgive me. I attempted irony and committed calumny.
(*) Someone challenges that I am biased by sampling: I only notice what I have detected. Hard to deny this without elaborating at great length. it's a reasonable criticism.
(*) The same person suggests that students are far better detectors of cheating than are professors. Of course! But students are cowards about reporting cheating. If you have ever noticed cheating (your own included), but have done nothing at all about it... well, are you not part of the problem?
(*) Someone accused me of being a windbag! Guilty as charged! Indeed, when properly consumed with the righteous indignation that so frequently passes for wit on Slashdot, why I feel compelled to unleash my lexicon of 6&asas^%%$=&^^[carrier lost]
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, did Google ever claim that this was a math problem? It is a problem, sure, but it is obviously not a request for a proof of Goldbach's conjecture. Jerf critiques the problem as "sophomoric" but I think that Jerf's complaint is "beating up a strawman" --- he claims that Google posed a math problem and then declares the problem stupid. It is a stupid math problem
And, after all, there is a specific set of correct answers, which are perfectly apparent to those who solve the suggested problems --- because they lead to recognition by somebody, perhaps Google --- of particular, quite reasonable answers. If you type in random responses, you're just incredibly unlikely to stumble into the "honeypot."
So (blush, gloat) I have to admit enjoying 45 minutes in the solution of the problems, when I should have been doing what I'm actually supposed to be doing. If only for providing me with 45 minutes of fun, I'm grateful for the problem --- math problem or no.
The quasi-mathematical nature of the problems requires one to either "cheat" by invoking search engines (which, as some have pointed out, may be a perfectly valid solution method as far as Google is concerned), or to demonstrate familiarity with computer tools that facilitate the discovery of the answers.
The very first problem is quite well posed, and if you can figure out how to generate the ten digit numbers, you don't have to look very far. A subsequent problem is very ill-posed (as jerf points out), but nevertheless a "human" is capable of inferring a kind of pattern with far less information than a "mathematician" would consider acceptable. Surely this is precisely the sort of thing that we hope search engines will do for us.
It was fun. Probably Google isn't going to offer me a job, but I had fun. Is that so bad?
A private mail exchange system is an awesome Idea, ...
I'm suddenly reminded of Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" in which a private mail service looms, with eerie acronym W.A.S.T.E.
Wait a minute, I think Van Allen is getting needlessly beat up here, and I'm wondering (silly me) how many of the people beating him up read the article, and read it carefully.
As a space scientist myself, it is obvious that unmanned probes are vastly less expensive than manned probes, and have returned far more data. The really dirty secret is that ground-based instruments do a remarkably good job, too, for a tiny fraction of the cost of space-based instruments. For the price of a *single* satellite (say $500M) you could endow NSF's aeronomy program in perpetuity! The amount of space science you could fund with a single satellite's price tag is breathtaking.
Breathtaking.
Obviously I'm a big proponent for ground-based observational space science!
But having said that, I'm *also* a proponent for manned space flight, as long as it's for the right reason. "Science" is *not* the right reason. Adventure is
Almost. It also depends on the molecular weight of the gas. The speed of sound in H2 is four times the speed of sound in O2 at the same temperature. modulo constants and units,
C_s = \sqrt{T/m}
I'm sort of puzzled by getting modded to "flamebait" on this. or perhaps honored, or something. Was what happened in Florida in 2000 good? Bad? Ugly?
Did a pack of Evil Republican Hackers descend upon Poor Hapless Inspector Lopez while the duck squeezing, tree hugging Green Party was out sampling organic, union label, hallucinogenic mushrooms with their same sex (possibly transgendered) companion (soul mate).
Just wondering.
BTW, I just finished The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Incredible!
Of course! EAW is a pretty amazing writer. He stumbled onto something lovely with The Monkey Wrency Gang. If you'd like to read something troubling and brilliant, then you have to read his last complete novel, namely "The Fool's Progress (An Honest Novel)" which is unsparingly awful and wonderful all at once.
Abbey was most consistent as an essayist, including the hilarious sketch "God's Plan for the State of Utah: A Revelation" but he was obnoxious enough to write bizarre things like "Good News" as well as the weirdly wonderful "Black Sun."
Ed Abbey changed my world as a graduate student. I'm in his debt, probably to the horror of my family.
Post proof and I will read it though
This is one of the standard arguments, and is, in a simplistic way, irrefutable.
There is little doubt that recounts show that Bush won Florida. However,
- a huge number of voters were improperly excluded by K. Harris's office (50,000 to 100,000),
- and thousands of cast votes were spoiled by the idiotic design of the "butterfly ballot" .
These flaws in the Florida ballot are, to the best of my knowledge, not in dispute. In both cases, these flaws were biased heavily in favor of Bush. Most of the disenfranchised voters were black, who strongly favored Gore; and the butterfly ballot could be misinterpreted to create votes for Buchanan rather than Gore, or if the mistake was noticed, spoiled by voting for Gore and Buchanan.(I don't personally believe that the Republicans are clever enough to have designed the "butterfly ballot" to achieve the biased spoilage that occurred. For a picture of the "butterfly ballot" see the top of this WWW page.)
Thus, of the voters in Florida who attempted to register their preference, Gore won. Of those who were privileged enough to have their votes count, it would appear that Bush "won."
For an analysis of the Supreme Court's actions, see "None Dare Call It Treason" and for a (mostly ad hominem) rebuttal, see this.
The Democrats, meanwhile, caved in far too easily in the courts, and found it far easier to beat up Nader for "losing" Florida rather than to contemplate their own lame campaign (how could Gore lose Tennessee! Crikey!). This lameness is repeated again four years later. The press, by and large, has been pleased to kick Dean, and ignore Kucinich --- both of whom have injected far more interest into the campaign than has Kerry.
And now Michael Moore comes along, a provocative slob with a keen wit and an unblinking camera. The results are just fascinating; the only people who seem surprised by the public's response are the pundits. If any of them had bothered to go to the caucuses in Washington State last February, they would have been stunned by the huge reservoir of contempt for W that has built up inexorably over the past three years.
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/bginterview.
That article shocked my world 10 years ago.
There are a number of problems with the article.
To return to the topic at hand, the fact that Michael Moore is a fat slob who dresses even worse than I do should not detract from the value of his documentary.
Now then, given the fact that Bush won by an extremely small fraction of votes
Yup. it was 5 to 4.
In fact, Al Gore won 500,000 more popular votes, and half a percentage point.
Despite howls of scorn from the Right to the tune of "get over it," there is ample evidence that Gore won the popular vote in Florida, too. Of course, the idiotic Gore campaign was so lame it couldn't even win Tennessee. However, the Bush administration should wear a scarlett A for its voting adultery in Florida in 2000.
One thing that is hard to do with finger prints is to leave someone else's at a crime scene. With DNA, however, it is not so difficult to imagine a whole new business starting up, which is the collection of DNA junk and bottling it.
So there you are, a smarter felon than usual, you commit some terrible crime, but you thoughtfully get out your DNA bomb, and set it off just like an insect fogger, painting the crime scene with the DNA of 100,000 individuals --- and in far greater quantity than what you left. If you've been a little careful, you'll generate a sufficient quantity of chaos to
- bring the DNA lab to its knees, or
- get some unfortunate schmuck tossed in your stead (remember the Portland OR lawyer whose fingerprints got mangled by the FBI for the Spanish bombing? Oops.), or
- you just get an expert witness to point out that a DNA bomb has been set off, and that the crime scene DNA is effectively worthless, including
...
... set off DNA bombs *elsewhere* which include your own DNA, thus presenting credible evidence that your own DNA has been captured for DNA bombs used by other fiendish folk
I guess the point is that we may be in a rather unique little window of time when DNA evidence is actually useful --- it just can't be that long before effective countermeasures are readily available to the thoughtful criminal. Go read some Phillip K Dick scifi to learn how to think about such things. "Minority Report" gives a perfectly entertaining presentation about the potential misuse of "indisputable" information.So: if you wonder where could you get a bunch of junk DNA without working too hard
I'm feeling a bit foolish about actually describing a potentially lucrative business opportunity. I take it all back. Move along, move along, nothing to see here.
By and large, the new faculty hired by my Department in the past 15 years have all been solid cat1 (teachers) or cat2 (researchers) and occasionally both. However, we do have some faculty who teach poorly and do little research. As far as I can tell, these get that way by simply wearing out, or being overwhelmed by the march of progress in their fields. Being a successful professor is extremely hard work. There is a widespread perception that faculty are on the gravy train --- but most of my colleagues work extremely hard. However, it is quite possible that students may see very little of the result of that work. This is tragic.
The market forces on R1 universities strongly dissuade faculty from investing time in teaching well. This means that if any of you have had a class that you thoroughly enjoyed, you might want to take a moment to thank that professor in person. They are doing what they do for pure love, and very likely paying a penalty in salary, promotion, and tangible respect from their colleagues.
People who teach well tend to have a certain minimum set of organizational skills, as well as a demonstrated sense of responsibility to "the system." Such folk get asked to do some of the more important administrative tasks --- which are largely invisible to students.
Thus, universities contain several powerful mechanisms for removing capable instructors from teaching roles. I have yet to see any powerful mechanisms to actually retain capable instructors, or create more of them.
The current situation is very robust to positive change, for reasons which include the following.
Attention Earthling: We have been studying your culture and We find it ... fascinating.
Your use of the expression "fucking comedian" leads Us to interpret this as a "profession" or line of work. Previous study has led Us to generate a rough understanding of "comedian." We have nothing really like "comedian" here on Betelgeuse IV; the nearest thing would be translated roughly as "dentist." We also have deduced a wealth of words referring to copulation (again no real equivalent exists here; the closest is "shovelling volcanic ash out of the commode")
However the confluence of the terms "fucking" and "comedian" has confounded even Our most famous dentists.
We would be most grateful for an explanation.
In objecting to paltemalte's assertion, I will stipulate that the author has the ability to levitate, and thus has no routine need for roads.
... these things will all become apparent to the thoughtful citizen.
... but on the other hand, I live in a safe, wealthy, healthy, well-educated society. The quality of my society is not an accident; it has arisen through substantial public investment of taxes.
However, the local fire department is composed of conventional humans which must drive their fire engines over conventional roads. Should a wayward spark ignite the shingles of paltemalte's roof, the value of roads, of a telecom system, of FCC regulated spectrum used by emergency services, of performance standards (developed by or for government agencies)
It is naive to suggest that the infrastructure of society is a pure commodity which can be incrementally procured at the local hardware store.
Of course, it is inevitable that stupid excesses of tax law and enforcement will occur; I have (I think) been victim of a theft by the State of New York
In brief: tax cheaters suck.
As long as CPUs are so fast, RAM is so cheap, and disks are big ... and the net is relatively slow, thin clients will have only thin application.
.NET), but there is no need for a thin client to run a word processor or mail client or www browser. Religious wars aside, our desktop software is quite capable, and getting more so.
I *do* remember the good old days of VT100s, and they worked great; the thing that displaced VT100s in our research group was *Macintosh* --- those wascally little SEs and the occasional MacII had such nice software onboard, they were a delight to use. The Macs were in turn partially displaced by DEC RISC machines, which cost more but brought a lot of horsepower to the desktop.
We used to use a Beowulf in our current project, but the blasted Pentia got so fast there was no point. Our real-time processor now relaxes on a single machine.
It's not so hard to imagine the pendulum swinging back to thin clients (perhaps in the guise of wireless PDAs, or in a more sinister form via
It's a great idea, and it won't work. What will happen is that a new kind of brokerage will come into being which holds stocks long enough to get the lower tax rates/higher loss exemptions.
It works like this. Some of you may have observed that it can be cheaper to buy two round trip plane tickets (each spanning a Saturday night), and use the interior half of each, rather than a single roundtrip that did *not* span a Saturday night.
This brokerage buys and sells "slowly" and its clients buy and sell as fast as they wish, bypassing the market force that the proposed regulation was attempting to create. Furthermore, the complexity of the scheme, and likely buy-in cost, would bring advantage only to the wealthy. Thus, you'd be pumping taxes out of hapless little people. As usual.
One might say "well, we'll just make such middlemen illegal!" That will simply drive such brokerages to the Bahamas.
A slightly simpler version of this scheme would be to simply tax every stock transaction. Then, you benefit from holding stocks for a long time by avoiding transaction taxes; specifically discouraging churning, and (somewhat indirectly) taxing insider trading.
To first order, the speed of sound does not depend upon the pressure at all; rather it depends primarily upon the mean mass density and the temperature.
The reduction of sound speed at altitude is due to the reduction of temperature. The temperature rises again in the upper stratosphere (ozone heating) and then drops down to its coldest temperature at the mesopause (around 120 K, at 85 km). However, the temperature increases rapidly above that, getting back to room temperature by 110 km, and heading for 1000k and beyond by the time you get to LEO.
At high altitudes the mass density is decreasing as you get more and more atomic species (e.g. O rather than O2) as well as larger fractions of light constituents (e.g. H2, H), so the speed of sound is quite high at LEO. At altitudes above the "turbopause" (somewhere around 105 km) the components of the atmosphere are no longer well-mixed, thus the different component gases stand at their own scale heights.
see scale height and speed of sound
I believe that this line "Shoot, a fella ..." is one of Slim Picken's lines in "Dr. Strangelove".
Remove the blast door and replace it with glass (it would probably have to be bulletproof to withstand the downward force from the snow in the winter).
Growing up Eastern Washington, I can say that you probably would need bulletproof glass, but not for the snow (it doesn't snow much at all at this missile site). Rather, you'd need bulletproof glass to keep the bullets out.
There's an astronomical observatory about an hour's drive from this silo. It has heavy steel shutters on the windows. The shutters are not there to keep the stray light away from the telescope --- but rather to keep the bullets out.
Eastern Washington has many charms, but it also has a robust population of people with guns. A noticable minority of these folks are remarkably generous in their application of these weapons.
... and an earlier SlashPost remarked that latency was inevitably large with these huge block codes. And that's true. However, the trellis codes --- which have their own problems for decoders, such as big memory requirements --- have relatively low intrinsic latency.
The trellis codes have less "beautiful math" supporting them than do the block codes (the Galois Fields are gorgeous, but the trellis codes are very very useful. Someone else mentioned that block codes are fine for long-haul comm in space; but I'm pretty certain that the error control coding for Galileo (of damaged antenna fame) were big trellis (convolutional) codes --- not block codes.
There was a rather interesting article in Nature. 'way back in 1988 or so, in which some physicists developed a class of codes which could approach the Shannon Limit even in low SNR. These codes were developed as analogs of Ising Spin Glass models.
Gotta love Google! Here's the citation---
N. Sourlas. Spin-glass models as error-correcting codes. Nature, 339:693a"695, 1989
For those of you with too much time on your hands, and wishing to explore the excellent possibilities of suing yourself, may I recommend to you "A Frolic of His Own" by the most excellent William Gaddis, alas recently deceased.
When you've gobbled that up, read "JR" --- but tape your ribs first, because you will laugh hard enough to break them.
- Inspector Lopez
eg:
As an American, let me gently note that "exempli gratia" is properly abbreviated "e.g." as it is two words, albeit not English words.
If you'd like to put vinegar on your chips, that's just dandy, however.
Goodness! I'm in a surly mood tonight.
"Foreigners talk better than they spell" -- Mark Twain
One of the weird coincidences of the Solar System is that, on every planet, there is a place that is not too far from STP ("standard temperature and pressure --- more or less like sea level and 300 K). In the case of Mars, that place happens to be in a very deep hole in the ground, whereas on Venus and Jupiter, that place happens to be well above the "surface" (whatever that means on Jupiter). For you Mars colonizers, if you dig a hole about 30-40 km deep, you'll find that a pretty good air pressure and temperature will result. It'll be CO2, of course, but perhaps some trees won't mind too much.
/. post mentions that the Soviet landers bounced off the surface at 7m/s. If a "lander" had been equipped with airbags, it probably wouldn't have it the surface at all, if the bags were filled with a gas with lower molecular weight than that of Venus. Rather, it would bob at some altitude(well) above the surface, a sort of low altitude satellite bobbing along in Venus extremely dull weather.
In the case of Venus, the question is, then, "why bother landing?" Why not just build yourself a balloon that floats around at some convenient altitude where it's not so hot, below the H2SO4 clouds so you can see the ground, perhaps occasionally deploying gliders or whatever to go down to the surface....
A subsequent
[ The submersibles like the Trieste used "balloons" filled with gasoline to supply bouyancy; the gasoline was not crushed by the terrific pressure down there. Then by shedding ballast, the subermisibles could return to the surface. ]
You know, I'd be the first to enjoy a bit of Harlequin Romance bashing ... and my wife (who is smarter than I am) shyly enjoys HRs...and (amazingly) puts up with me sneering at them.
Because I read Real Man's Literature! Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Coover... Yes, avert your eyes in my presence!
But one day, my wife approached me gingerly with some HR, and said, "honey, I know you hate the idea of these things, but, um, humor me and take a look at this..."
And I did. And it was absolutely charming. So I don't beat up on Harlequin Romances anymore.
Wow! Hit a nerve!
... well, are you not part of the problem?
I wish all the people who responded were my students; my classes would certainly be livelier!
Some quick replies:
(*) I like Vineland. So sue me. Yes, I've read all the others; I like them too. But I like Vineland, and I'm Just Man Enough to admit it.
(*) Alas, I have tenure. If it is any comfort, I am unhappy about the kind of behavior that the American system of tenure encourages and tolerates. And yes, I am too lame to simply resign. This is one of my many limitations.
(*) There is a difference between having sympathy for cheaters, and having a desire to fly in airplanes designed by them.
(*) Cheating is indeed rampant in classes in which the instructor has taken no precautions to discourage or impede cheating in the first place. To overgeneralize:
(+) If you have ever taken a multiple choice exam, then you have taken an exam which fosters cheating.
(+) if you have ever taken an exam in which scores are based on the mere presence of a correct answer, then you have taken an exam which fosters cheating.
I once gave an exam in which I secretly distributed 8 different but similar appearing exams to the 120 students. We caught some cheaters (and threw the book at them), but it turns out that *none* of our cheating detection depended upon the catspaw of different exams --- all the different exams accomplished was to make the grading more complicated; a poor engineering choice which I have subsequently shunned.
I remind you, Gentle Reader, that I frequently give oral final exams --- a practice which is time consuming and probably impervious to cheating. I believe that I am the only professor in my College of several hundred engineering faculty who regularly employs oral examinations.
(*) TA-slaves. Forgive me. I attempted irony and committed calumny.
(*) Someone challenges that I am biased by sampling: I only notice what I have detected. Hard to deny this without elaborating at great length. it's a reasonable criticism.
(*) The same person suggests that students are far better detectors of cheating than are professors. Of course! But students are cowards about reporting cheating. If you have ever noticed cheating (your own included), but have done nothing at all about it
(*) Someone accused me of being a windbag! Guilty as charged! Indeed, when properly consumed with the righteous indignation that so frequently passes for wit on Slashdot, why I feel compelled to unleash my lexicon of 6&asas^%%$=&^^[carrier lost]