IIRC the fractal format basically is done by taking a wavelet transform and then searching for IFS patterns in the tree and storing those instead of the actual leaf coefficients. However, putting in all the IFS junk just makes the math a lot harder to work with, is really quite slow, and does poorly on anything other than nature images (i.e., anything that is not visibly fractal). Simply pruning and coding the wavelet tree (e.g. jpeg2000) is a much more practical approach.
One question, since CPAP is only partially effective, is surgury an option? Will insurance cover the operation? I'd think they would considering the cost of care in the face of future health consequences.
Regarding the nutrition, etc., I personally recommend the Zone books by Dr. Sears. Personal weirdnesses aside, I think he understands nutritional science much better than anyone else who cares about this stuff.
but isn't 22.34 million a lot more than 4.84 million?
Its a good point, and the republicans often use this argument to say that they have more "grassroots" supporters than the democrats. However, we also see that the bulk of that "grassroots" money comes from folks who are cutting checks right at the maximum allowable limit, $2500 each, and they give sizeable sums to other candidates in other races, too. The people that can afford to blow that much cash are generally wealthy business owners. We also know that the IRS is very lenient with allowing top execs to take home HUGE salaries. The result is that most small-to-medium size companies try hard to payout all their profit in salary to avoid double taxation. What I'm trying to say here is that I think the distinction between business and personal contributions is really quite blurry. The other issue I have with this sort of statistic is that the presidential race is only one piece of the puzzle. There are hundreds of other races going on, even a mayoral race for a big city can rack up spending in the millions, not to mention the senators, congress, etc. Is there a database that combines all this info nation wide? If there is, I'd love to look at it.
Oh yes, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather - all staunch Bush supporters.
I think NPR is dangerously conservative -- but I can respect a difference of opinion on that point.
What is happening is that two democrats have backed two draft bills (one in the house and one in the senate)
There is a lot of misconception about these actions, predictably spread by right wing propaganda. They are actually trying to clean up the draft legislation so that rich boys with sugar daddies in powerful places can't dodge the draft as easily as our current president did. This is a genius move because its popular with the majority of americans and it puts pressure on bush in an interesting way... I'll explain.
Now, I doubt very much that Bush really wants to reinstate the draft except as a last resort, because if he did it would crush his campaign entirely -- however, as a consequence of his abysmal foreign policy (e.g., inability to cooperate with other nations who also have large military forces available) has made it such that, in order to stablize iraq, it may be necessary to reinstate the draft to get sufficient manpower. However, if the draft is reformed so that rich boys can't dodge it, then bush will be in a really tight corner because the draft would hit his base hard -- essentially it will force him to reconcile and cooperate with the UN to get the necessary troops from other countries.
While it is unquestionably scary, I don't think its fearmongering, simply because the threat is quite real -- everyone with a clue was predicting a massive shortfall in manpower before this war even started. Iraqi troops might have outdated equipment, but they outnumbered the size of our invasion force by nearly 4 to 1 -- if they had bothered to put up a fight, this war would have been a LOT more bloody, most likely, we would not have ever gotten into bhagdad with so few men. Bush et al. were betting that they would not, due to the unpopularity of saddam, and due to the incredible US air superiority (useful but highly leathal to the civilian population), which turned out to be mostly correct ("mission accomplished"). Where they went wrong was 1) assuming that things would remain relatively peaceful without much work, in fact crime spiked uncontrollably which led to an atmosphere of lawlessness, 2) that us unilateral action against iraq was viewed positively by the middle eastern populace, dead wrong -- iraq is the world's hottest spot for extremist organized terror, and 3) that iraqis would unquestionably embrace democracy as america envisioned it -- wrong, they envisioned it their own way, and thus the rise of local leaders such as al sadr and the insurgency. bottom line is that the war was a big gamble, and at first it looked like we got lucky, but that luck went sour quickly (and if you ever go to vegas, things will probably turn out the same way).
This is getting to be a rather long post, but I want to mention one more thing. There is a reason that the democrats use "non-partisan" groups to repeat their platform points, while the republicans do not. The republicans platform is "pro-business", that means they take huge contributions from corporate interests, and correspondingly support tax cuts and other give aways to support their funders. The dems, are "for the people", but in reality they take almost as much money from big business as the republicans. The problem for the democrats then, is that there is an inherent conflict of interest -- they solve this by creating those "non-partisan" entities to repeat the pro-people messages, which puts some separation between their two sides, thereby relieving the stress somewhat. The republicans, on the other hand, simply don't view the corporate money as a conflict of interest, therefore they don't have to create that separation. Now, there are some instances where the republicans use "non-partisan" groups to promote their message, and more or less for the same reasons that the dems do, and in their case probably to capture support from more moderate voters, but its just not as important because their base is with the rich business owners.
There is another side to this also, which is that in this election season w
On a totally offtopic note, anyone else find it funny that bin Laden's intervention has probably helped Bush's chances of re-election?
I've noticed the media seems to have this interpretation, but I don't think it makes nearly as much of a difference as they would like you to believe -- the incentive to spin the story is enormous at this point in the game. We know the gallup polls are complete b.s. and the rest are pseudo-scientific at best. The fact is 10 million people are not going to change their mind because bin laden says he doesn't like bush -- we already know that. Now, if bush suddenly produced bin laden's head on a platter, we might see that kind of shift in opinion.
Furthermore, elections which are reasonably close tend to get closer due to economics. That is, opinion polls are used to gauge the amount of money to spend on advertising, which is calculated to push the margin just slightly past the half-way mark -- no more, no less -- and correspondingly there is a huge incentive to try to manipulate the outcome by making these small changes -- it is easy, cheap, and its also devastatingly effective.
No voter fraud cases are being in any way instructed by anyone up-top.
Uh... and who was Katherine Harris again? Its just not called "fraud" when its up-top -- its called "oops, sorry" and the current laws are too weak to prevent it from happening. As long as there is no accountability, there will be fraud -- at every level.
if they get caught, they'll get so utterly crushed it will be disgusting.
Crushed how, exactly? Voter rebellion? Not if the machines don't work, the laws are gutted and the courts packed with facists. Riots? Maybe in the ghetto but not in middle class america, plus its a great excuse to establish martial law and kill all the "terrorists". Massive non-violent protests? You might get some good turnout but Americans are dangerously complacent these days.
I would not say indictment since its not a criminal investigation (though maybe it should be), however the DHS abuse was investigated by the house ethics committee (along with a two other recent incidents involving delay) and they found that he was guilty of ethical misconduct; but only issued an admonition, i.e., just a report stating that his actions were improper, a mere slap on the wrist -- even so, that is saying a lot considering the ethics committee is run by republicans -- seriously the guy is a liability and an embarassment to his own party. the trmpac stuff is more serious but still in the courts. here is a link for more details on delay's long history with the ethics committee:
Slackware is unquestionably the best distro for linux newbies. It was my first distro and it forced me to learn all the nitty gritty details of linux. Now its nothing but debian for me, but I must pay homage to their roots. Way to go Patrick... and praise Bob!
Why do you think there a conductor is necessary for the orchestra? Yes -- they would fall out of time without one because of latency!
Also in advanced musicianship there is a phenomena called microtime-deviation where the musician intentionally modifies the time-arc... (this is part of the humans!=robots thing)
That is certainly untrue. The human ear is in fact sensitive to differences in timing as small as a millionth of a second. This fact has a lot to do with how we resolve the direction of a sound source. Tests of ability to resolve direction demonstrate accuracy down to 1 degree -- work out the trig, thats a pretty small difference in arrival time. (yes, the head-related transfer function is also involved)
For real time performance the maximum acceptable latency is generally agreed to be about 6 ms.
To put this into perspective, remember that sound travels about 1 foot in 1 ms. Try playing in time with a drummer who is 30 feet away -- it won't work. This is also why when the audience claps at a concert they always slip out of time.
Its not hard to make this system yourself, if you are inclined to do so... using PD (pure data) the software would be very easy to write.
1) press a record with an audio-based timecode that readable at any playback speed. (prolly AM)
2) write some software to decode the audio signal
3) hook up your program to a synth, sampler program or whatever you want-- added bonus, its an infinitely flexible instrument.
I use GNUCash for my business accounting. Does it work? Yes. Does my bank account balance? Perfectly. Can I track expenses, revenue, profits? Stocks, Fixed assets? Yes. Honestly business accounting is far simpler than personal accounting... the business spends money in much more predictable ways.
GNUCash is great. Its at least as good as quickbooks... actually its a lot less confusing... I hate the quickbooks UI and its incosistencies.
wireless keyboards/mouse-- is it just me?
on
Concept PC 2001
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· Score: 1
I use a logitech wireless keyboard and mouse... is it just me or is this technology still a little immature? Once every few weeks things go on the "fritz" -- the mouse stops responding or the keyboard acts really weird -- radio interference?? I'm only 3 feet from the transmitter... its nice to have no wires but when the keyboard malfunctions its -really- annoying.
I've got one of those hunks-o-steel right here next to my desk... I used to think it was like the sports car of keyboards... now I am using the Logitech wireless split keyboard... very nice feel.
Anyways, the risk of carpel tunnel and other complications of the hand/wrist are actually greater when enganging in typing activity without force feedback. Fingers were designed to push and manipulate things, not to swipe at empty nonexistant 'phantom keys'.
i.e. shannons law, nyquist, etc.-- widely misunderstood perhaps by the layman -- but really I think this is a very simple concept.
btw-
Gershenfeld's _Nature of Mathematical Modeling_ is another book to check out... its more numerical analysis/computational modeling oriented, and like _Physics of Information..._ its also incredibly dense.
I would not recommend Gershenfeld's books unless one already posesses a good deal of knowledge about the topic... the presentation is too abridged.
Keystroke timing is different for us dvorak typists... its more regular due to the efficient design.
Re:Why subscribe to software in the future...
on
Windows in 2020
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· Score: 1
Obviously machines in the future use powerful self-governing AI -- so we don't really even "use" these machines... they just do what they are made to do, and continue doing so until they die.
The only reason we don't use old machines now is that they are too difficult to maintain -- but that is because we are human operators with limited time and budgets.
Unfortunately the unstable ones die first. Conclusion: Windows is doomed. (its a proof!)
My god... thats a scary thought... a worm which can mutate its own binary? It could be a hard thing to squash with simple detection methods.
Its all too easy to think of evil viruses which can be written... maybe that is why it keeps happening.. because its just too easy not to try it.;)
Its kinda like the brass in the Pentagon talking about some new bio-weapons they made... danger schmanger joe, it was so easy to make this virus, we gotta try it out!
Well, its an interesting read.. but most of the technical stuff is kind of glossed-over.. I'm sure the graph theory behind it makes sense if you know the math.
The article mentions a 0.05% sample... is that statistically significant? Not to mention the fact that 'web page' is a vaguely defined term (i.e. static versus dynamic) -- this makes me doubt that this report contains any type of 'real' conclusions.
However I suspect this type of research must be really juicy for the big search engine comanies (e.g. Google, etc..). I especially like the idea of giving the user a feeling of spatial orientation when browsing the internet (but what would that mean??)... in the end, I'm afraid that the internet/web/whatever is simply changing too fast -- by the time we analyze it enough to determine its topology and organization, something new will be replacing it. Note that the data in this article is already 2 years old... the web has probably at least doubled in size by now.
To really understand the internet, statistical mechanics is not going to cut it-- we need better tools - adaptive ones that learn the new rules without being reprogrammed...;)
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC the fractal format basically is done by taking a wavelet transform and then searching for IFS patterns in the tree and storing those instead of the actual leaf coefficients. However, putting in all the IFS junk just makes the math a lot harder to work with, is really quite slow, and does poorly on anything other than nature images (i.e., anything that is not visibly fractal). Simply pruning and coding the wavelet tree (e.g. jpeg2000) is a much more practical approach.
One question, since CPAP is only partially effective, is surgury an option? Will insurance cover the operation? I'd think they would considering the cost of care in the face of future health consequences.
Regarding the nutrition, etc., I personally recommend the Zone books by Dr. Sears. Personal weirdnesses aside, I think he understands nutritional science much better than anyone else who cares about this stuff.
but isn't 22.34 million a lot more than 4.84 million?
Its a good point, and the republicans often use this argument to say that they have more "grassroots" supporters than the democrats. However, we also see that the bulk of that "grassroots" money comes from folks who are cutting checks right at the maximum allowable limit, $2500 each, and they give sizeable sums to other candidates in other races, too. The people that can afford to blow that much cash are generally wealthy business owners. We also know that the IRS is very lenient with allowing top execs to take home HUGE salaries. The result is that most small-to-medium size companies try hard to payout all their profit in salary to avoid double taxation. What I'm trying to say here is that I think the distinction between business and personal contributions is really quite blurry. The other issue I have with this sort of statistic is that the presidential race is only one piece of the puzzle. There are hundreds of other races going on, even a mayoral race for a big city can rack up spending in the millions, not to mention the senators, congress, etc. Is there a database that combines all this info nation wide? If there is, I'd love to look at it.
Oh yes, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather - all staunch Bush supporters.
I think NPR is dangerously conservative -- but I can respect a difference of opinion on that point.
What is happening is that two democrats have backed two draft bills (one in the house and one in the senate)
There is a lot of misconception about these actions, predictably spread by right wing propaganda. They are actually trying to clean up the draft legislation so that rich boys with sugar daddies in powerful places can't dodge the draft as easily as our current president did. This is a genius move because its popular with the majority of americans and it puts pressure on bush in an interesting way... I'll explain.
Now, I doubt very much that Bush really wants to reinstate the draft except as a last resort, because if he did it would crush his campaign entirely -- however, as a consequence of his abysmal foreign policy (e.g., inability to cooperate with other nations who also have large military forces available) has made it such that, in order to stablize iraq, it may be necessary to reinstate the draft to get sufficient manpower. However, if the draft is reformed so that rich boys can't dodge it, then bush will be in a really tight corner because the draft would hit his base hard -- essentially it will force him to reconcile and cooperate with the UN to get the necessary troops from other countries.
While it is unquestionably scary, I don't think its fearmongering, simply because the threat is quite real -- everyone with a clue was predicting a massive shortfall in manpower before this war even started. Iraqi troops might have outdated equipment, but they outnumbered the size of our invasion force by nearly 4 to 1 -- if they had bothered to put up a fight, this war would have been a LOT more bloody, most likely, we would not have ever gotten into bhagdad with so few men. Bush et al. were betting that they would not, due to the unpopularity of saddam, and due to the incredible US air superiority (useful but highly leathal to the civilian population), which turned out to be mostly correct ("mission accomplished"). Where they went wrong was 1) assuming that things would remain relatively peaceful without much work, in fact crime spiked uncontrollably which led to an atmosphere of lawlessness, 2) that us unilateral action against iraq was viewed positively by the middle eastern populace, dead wrong -- iraq is the world's hottest spot for extremist organized terror, and 3) that iraqis would unquestionably embrace democracy as america envisioned it -- wrong, they envisioned it their own way, and thus the rise of local leaders such as al sadr and the insurgency. bottom line is that the war was a big gamble, and at first it looked like we got lucky, but that luck went sour quickly (and if you ever go to vegas, things will probably turn out the same way).
This is getting to be a rather long post, but I want to mention one more thing. There is a reason that the democrats use "non-partisan" groups to repeat their platform points, while the republicans do not. The republicans platform is "pro-business", that means they take huge contributions from corporate interests, and correspondingly support tax cuts and other give aways to support their funders. The dems, are "for the people", but in reality they take almost as much money from big business as the republicans. The problem for the democrats then, is that there is an inherent conflict of interest -- they solve this by creating those "non-partisan" entities to repeat the pro-people messages, which puts some separation between their two sides, thereby relieving the stress somewhat. The republicans, on the other hand, simply don't view the corporate money as a conflict of interest, therefore they don't have to create that separation. Now, there are some instances where the republicans use "non-partisan" groups to promote their message, and more or less for the same reasons that the dems do, and in their case probably to capture support from more moderate voters, but its just not as important because their base is with the rich business owners.
There is another side to this also, which is that in this election season w
On a totally offtopic note, anyone else find it funny that bin Laden's intervention has probably helped Bush's chances of re-election?
I've noticed the media seems to have this interpretation, but I don't think it makes nearly as much of a difference as they would like you to believe -- the incentive to spin the story is enormous at this point in the game. We know the gallup polls are complete b.s. and the rest are pseudo-scientific at best. The fact is 10 million people are not going to change their mind because bin laden says he doesn't like bush -- we already know that. Now, if bush suddenly produced bin laden's head on a platter, we might see that kind of shift in opinion.
it applies to all elections that are close.
Furthermore, elections which are reasonably close tend to get closer due to economics. That is, opinion polls are used to gauge the amount of money to spend on advertising, which is calculated to push the margin just slightly past the half-way mark -- no more, no less -- and correspondingly there is a huge incentive to try to manipulate the outcome by making these small changes -- it is easy, cheap, and its also devastatingly effective.
No voter fraud cases are being in any way instructed by anyone up-top.
Uh... and who was Katherine Harris again? Its just not called "fraud" when its up-top -- its called "oops, sorry" and the current laws are too weak to prevent it from happening. As long as there is no accountability, there will be fraud -- at every level.
if they get caught, they'll get so utterly crushed it will be disgusting.
Crushed how, exactly? Voter rebellion? Not if the machines don't work, the laws are gutted and the courts packed with facists. Riots? Maybe in the ghetto but not in middle class america, plus its a great excuse to establish martial law and kill all the "terrorists". Massive non-violent protests? You might get some good turnout but Americans are dangerously complacent these days.
I would not say indictment since its not a criminal investigation (though maybe it should be), however the DHS abuse was investigated by the house ethics committee (along with a two other recent incidents involving delay) and they found that he was guilty of ethical misconduct; but only issued an admonition, i.e., just a report stating that his actions were improper, a mere slap on the wrist -- even so, that is saying a lot considering the ethics committee is run by republicans -- seriously the guy is a liability and an embarassment to his own party. the trmpac stuff is more serious but still in the courts. here is a link for more details on delay's long history with the ethics committee:
http://www.alternet.org/election04/20312/
They must have a neato solar charger or something... where can I buy one?
Slackware is unquestionably the best distro for linux newbies. It was my first distro and it forced me to learn all the nitty gritty details of linux. Now its nothing but debian for me, but I must pay homage to their roots. Way to go Patrick... and praise Bob!
maybe they meant insightful as in inciting a riot.
Why do you think there a conductor is necessary for the orchestra? Yes -- they would fall out of time without one because of latency!
Also in advanced musicianship there is a phenomena called microtime-deviation where the musician intentionally modifies the time-arc... (this is part of the humans!=robots thing)
ref. Psychology of Music, Diana Deutsch 1999
That is certainly untrue. The human ear is in fact sensitive to differences in timing as small as a millionth of a second. This fact has a lot to do with how we resolve the direction of a sound source. Tests of ability to resolve direction demonstrate accuracy down to 1 degree -- work out the trig, thats a pretty small difference in arrival time. (yes, the head-related transfer function is also involved)
For real time performance the maximum acceptable latency is generally agreed to be about 6 ms.
To put this into perspective, remember that sound travels about 1 foot in 1 ms. Try playing in time with a drummer who is 30 feet away -- it won't work. This is also why when the audience claps at a concert they always slip out of time.
one simple reason why google ads are better;
they are in all text... which means that the browser is actually more likely to see them, because they can't be blocked as easily as banner.
Its not hard to make this system yourself, if you are inclined to do so... using PD (pure data) the software would be very easy to write.
1) press a record with an audio-based timecode that readable at any playback speed. (prolly AM)
2) write some software to decode the audio signal
3) hook up your program to a synth, sampler program or whatever you want-- added bonus, its an infinitely flexible instrument.
Notes on incorporating for personal consulting work; (for US C-type corporations)
- if you spend more $5000 per year on corporate expenses (i.e. computers, office rent) you might save money because these expenses are not taxed.
- between minimum tax payments, CPA and bank services, you must spend at least $1500/year on "accounting"
- you have to personally spend time to keep the books and paperwork in order, plus comply with local laws and the EDD.
- use NDAs and IP licencing agreements with your clients... IANAL but I don't think you really need one to use these.
warning: this statement is based on subjective experience.
Uh.
... I hate the quickbooks UI and its incosistencies.
I use GNUCash for my business accounting. Does it work? Yes. Does my bank account balance? Perfectly. Can I track expenses, revenue, profits? Stocks, Fixed assets? Yes. Honestly business accounting is far simpler than personal accounting... the business spends money in much more predictable ways.
GNUCash is great. Its at least as good as quickbooks... actually its a lot less confusing
I use a logitech wireless keyboard and mouse... is it just me or is this technology still a little immature? Once every few weeks things go on the "fritz" -- the mouse stops responding or the keyboard acts really weird -- radio interference?? I'm only 3 feet from the transmitter... its nice to have no wires but when the keyboard malfunctions its -really- annoying.
I've got one of those hunks-o-steel right here next to my desk... I used to think it was like the sports car of keyboards... now I am using the Logitech wireless split keyboard ... very nice feel.
Anyways, the risk of carpel tunnel and other complications of the hand/wrist are actually greater when enganging in typing activity without force feedback. Fingers were designed to push and manipulate things, not to swipe at empty nonexistant 'phantom keys'.
i.e. shannons law, nyquist, etc.-- widely misunderstood perhaps by the layman -- but really I think this is a very simple concept.
btw-
Gershenfeld's _Nature of Mathematical Modeling_ is another book to check out... its more numerical analysis/computational modeling oriented, and like _Physics of Information..._ its also incredibly dense.
I would not recommend Gershenfeld's books unless one already posesses a good deal of knowledge about the topic... the presentation is too abridged.
AND...
Automatic join optimization.
(the biggest reason no dba in their right mind will ever use mysql for a complex, normalized schema).
Keystroke timing is different for us dvorak typists... its more regular due to the efficient design.
Obviously machines in the future use powerful self-governing AI -- so we don't really even "use" these machines... they just do what they are made to do, and continue doing so until they die.
The only reason we don't use old machines now is that they are too difficult to maintain -- but that is because we are human operators with limited time and budgets.
Unfortunately the unstable ones die first. Conclusion: Windows is doomed. (its a proof!)
Its sort of darwinian, isn't it?
My god... thats a scary thought... a worm which can mutate its own binary? It could be a hard thing to squash with simple detection methods.
;)
Its all too easy to think of evil viruses which can be written... maybe that is why it keeps happening.. because its just too easy not to try it.
Its kinda like the brass in the Pentagon talking about some new bio-weapons they made... danger schmanger joe, it was so easy to make this virus, we gotta try it out!
Well, its an interesting read.. but most of the technical stuff is kind of glossed-over .. I'm sure the graph theory behind it makes sense if you know the math.
;)
The article mentions a 0.05% sample... is that statistically significant? Not to mention the fact that 'web page' is a vaguely defined term (i.e. static versus dynamic) -- this makes me doubt that this report contains any type of 'real' conclusions.
However I suspect this type of research must be really juicy for the big search engine comanies (e.g. Google, etc..). I especially like the idea of giving the user a feeling of spatial orientation when browsing the internet (but what would that mean??)... in the end, I'm afraid that the internet/web/whatever is simply changing too fast -- by the time we analyze it enough to determine its topology and organization, something new will be replacing it. Note that the data in this article is already 2 years old... the web has probably at least doubled in size by now.
To really understand the internet, statistical mechanics is not going to cut it-- we need better tools - adaptive ones that learn the new rules without being reprogrammed...