Of course everyone should learn to speak and write "properly," as you say, if for no other reason than the next pompous ass could be someone with the power to hire and fire, instead of some random Slashdot pajama warrior.
I attended a talk by him at the Netherlands IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics), in 1995. He was the first "big-shot" computer scientist I ever heard speak, so I was very excited. I seem to remember that his main point was that one shouldn't talk about "computer science" but about "computing science." After the talk, it turns out that he and his wife were sitting in the same table as I was, along with the rest of my team. We had left our stuff at the table, and after we came back with trays of food, he was sitting there. It was sort of awkward.
It's quite obviously a satire, yes. The Language Instinct is a great book, as are Pinker's other books How the Mind Works and Words and Rules. Pinker is a very good writer and teacher, and a nice guy too.
[...] Is there any evidence that the polygraph is really able to detect lies? The machine measures changes in blood pressure, breath rate and respiration rate. When a person lies it is assumed that these physiological changes occur in such a way that a trained expert can detect whether the person is lying. Is there a scientific formula or law which establishes a regular correlation between such physiological changes and lying? No. Is there any scientific evidence that polygraph experts can detect lies using their machine at a significantly better rate than non-experts using other methods? No. There are no machines and no experts that can detect with a high degree of accuracy when people, selected randomly, are lying and when they are telling the truth. [...]
(From The Skeptic's Dictionary, by Robert Todd Carroll)
Gimme a break. If your only argument for his conviction is that he didn't report the hole soon enough and to the exact right people, then you don't have much of an argument.
Generatingfunctionology, by Prof. Herbert Wilf. A must read for the theoretically-minded computer science nerd! It described all (well, most) the ins and outs of using generating functions (formal power series) to enumerate various combinatorial objects.
A = B, by Petkovsek, Wilf and Zeilberger. This book completely kills the problem of simplifying nasty summations involving (for example) binomial coefficients, which often arise in combinatorial analysis.
Algebraic Topology, by Allen Hatcher. A beautiful, though technical, subject. It has no immediate interest for compsci nerds (though it does have an important application to the theory of distributed computability), but I include it as an example of other quality math books available online.
A. S. Fraenkel and D. Lichtenstein, Computing a perfect strategy for n*n chess requires time exponential in n,
Proc. 8th Int. Coll. Automata, Languages, and Programming, Springer LNCS 115 (1981) 278-293 and J. Comb. Th. A 31 (1981) 199-214.
Apparently it's actually EXPTIME-complete, which means (roughly) that being able to solve NxN chess efficiently would automatically yield a way to solve any problem requiring exponential time efficiently.
It is a not-so-hard result of combinatorial game theory that any deterministic game with perfect information (such as Chess) has a winning strategy for one of the two players. A great place to learn some about this is Guy and Berlekamp's "Winning Ways" book.
Some posters have claimed that in order for a computer to play a perfect game of chess, it would have to search potentially all of the game tree, or at best a still exponentially large portion of it. However, while this is plausible, we do not know this to be true. There are examples of combinatorial games that can be played perfectly with very limited knowledge. For instance, I believe that the category of combinatorial games called "impartial games" (epitomized by the game of Nym) has an easily computable perfect strategy for each of its members. See the same book for more details.
Hence, the interesting question is not whether a perfect strategy exists (it does), but whether we can attain it with reasonable computational effort. Since Chess is after all has a finite (though humongous) set of potential positions, traditional computational complexity theory doesn't have much to say about it, since it only deals with problems whose input (in this case, pieces on a board) have a size that can vary. However, some generalizations of chess to NxN boards have been proven to be NP-complete (i.e., probably very hard). Unfortunately, I don't have a reference to this handy.
This is reminiscent of physicist Roger Penrose's "theory" of consciousness, popularized in his book The Emperor's New Mind. Even though he is widely discredited among theorizers in this area, some people think that because he published a pop science book about it that it must be reputable.
I'm not claiming that this quantum evolution stuff is bogus. If it produces testable predictions, then it's a welcome addition to the theory of the origins of life. But from the article, it seems to bandy about the catchword "quantum" without much real meaning to it. One should always be wary of researchers who publish controversial science-related stuff as popularizations... it may just be that they didn't succeed through the normal scientific channels, and maybe for good reasons. [An example of this phenomenon is Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe, where he argues against evolution using some pretty ill-defined concept of "irreducible complexity". This flaky stuff would've never made it pass a journal's referee... but you see the nice glossy book at Barnes and Noble and you might just think it has some credibility.]
As Prof. Stephen Pinker put it in a psych class I took with him, in reference to Penrose's consciousness stuff, the reasoning is as follows: "Hmm... consciousness is kind of weird. And quantum mechanics sure is weird. They must be... the same thing!!"
The theory of evolution as *two* parts. One is, as you hint, random variation. But the other indispensable part is SELECTION which is by no means random! Which organism lives and which dies has nothing to do with toin cosses, and much to do with the physics of the environment.
This is a big point of misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. To cast doubt on it on the grounds that it expects too much from mere randomness is to attack a straw man.
[devs expressed] concerns that the hard work they put into developing the
implementations of these interfaces (which will not have any dependency on Litestep-specific code) will be silently stolen by other (closed-source) projects [...]
Emphasis is mine. It clearly says that the concerns are about the implementations of these interfaces, and not about the interfaces themselves. So many people are having this kneejerk reaction without even reading clearly. The problem is interesting, and genuine.
The defendants can always say that "que pasa" *really* means "what happens", and not "what is happening"...
"what is happening" is more properly translated as "que esta pasando"
(Of course, I think the whole thing is idiotic.)
Re: Dismissing an author for his politics
on
Ender's Shadow
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· Score: 1
You know, I feel exactly the same way about OSC... I read a few of his books and enjoyed them a lot, especially _Speaker for the Dead_. I don't know... when I find a good author I tend to think of him or her as a sort of friend, so learning about his his anti-gay article ("The Hypocrites of Homosexuality", published in some Mormon journal), it really made me feel betrayed in a way. Now I just don't have any motivation to pick up a book by him, new or old. So, this is partly an emotional reaction on my part, though I also like to say that I'm consciously boycotting him.
And yeah, I share your misgivings about whether or not his politics should affect my reaction to his work. But I sometimes think that the word "politics" is misused to justify homophobia... as if somehow being disgusted at someone's racism could also be described as a disapproval of their "politics".
Actually, the consensus among complexity theorists is that quantum turing machines are more powerful, even theoretically, than regular probabilistic turing machines. This has not been proven, for similar reasons that ~(P=NP) has not been proven either (namely, that it is freakin HARD problem to do so).
For more on this, look at this paper by Umesh Vazirani (one of the big names in computational complexity): Quantum Complexity Theory.
Re:Christians aspire to be like the MYTH of Yesu.
on
RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
If you use GDB (the GNU debugger), you can integrate it very well with Emacs and do most of the things you ask for. Look at the info page for GDB (C-h i); it has an Emacs section that says how.
Emacs has long had parenthesis highlighting, by the way.
A problem that is "outside of NP" can't be solved in polynomial time (otherwise it would be in P) and has solutions that can't be checked in polynomial time (otherwise it would be in NP). I can't think of a good example off the top of my head, but they exist.
A good way to make (conjectured) examples of this is to reverse yes and no. For example, it is NP to determine whether two graphs are isomorphic (equal up to a rearranging of the vertices), but it is not known whether the complement is in NP: given two graphs, determine whether they are _not_ isomorphic. To clarify the jargon: a graph is a collection of vertices, some of which are joined by edges. Two graphs are "isomorphic" if there is a way to match up their vertices in a one-to-one correspondence in a way that makes the edges also match (in other words, if they are the same up to a reordering of the vertices).
Slashdot Mirror
You're a pompous ass.
Of course everyone should learn to speak and write "properly," as you say, if for no other reason than the next pompous ass could be someone with the power to hire and fire, instead of some random Slashdot pajama warrior.
Dunno, but next time you buy a book by Chomsky, just pay in cash.
I attended a talk by him at the Netherlands IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics), in 1995. He was the first "big-shot" computer scientist I ever heard speak, so I was very excited. I seem to remember that his main point was that one shouldn't talk about "computer science" but about "computing science." After the talk, it turns out that he and his wife were sitting in the same table as I was, along with the rest of my team. We had left our stuff at the table, and after we came back with trays of food, he was sitting there. It was sort of awkward.
It's quite obviously a satire, yes. The Language Instinct is a great book, as are Pinker's other books How the Mind Works and Words and Rules. Pinker is a very good writer and teacher, and a nice guy too.
Myth?? Not so! Here's them eskimo snow words.
Gimme a break. If your only argument for his conviction is that he didn't report the hole soon enough and to the exact right people, then you don't have much of an argument.
MIT regards pranks as part of its mystique, and encourages their publicity for PR reasons.
And good PR it needs, after the recent cluster of suicides and alcohol-related deaths and near-deaths.
Seconded.
- Generatingfunctionology, by Prof. Herbert Wilf. A must read for the theoretically-minded computer science nerd! It described all (well, most) the ins and outs of using generating functions (formal power series) to enumerate various combinatorial objects.
- A = B, by Petkovsek, Wilf and Zeilberger. This book completely kills the problem of simplifying nasty summations involving (for example) binomial coefficients, which often arise in combinatorial analysis.
- Algebraic Topology, by Allen Hatcher. A beautiful, though technical, subject. It has no immediate interest for compsci nerds (though it does have an important application to the theory of distributed computability), but I include it as an example of other quality math books available online.
The tide is turning...er... "encryption", that is
If nothing else, this should at least serve as an incentive to make encription legal in France...
This is reminiscent of physicist Roger Penrose's "theory" of consciousness, popularized in his book The Emperor's New Mind. Even though he is widely discredited among theorizers in this area, some people think that because he published a pop science book about it that it must be reputable.
I'm not claiming that this quantum evolution stuff is bogus. If it produces testable predictions, then it's a welcome addition to the theory of the origins of life. But from the article, it seems to bandy about the catchword "quantum" without much real meaning to it. One should always be wary of researchers who publish controversial science-related stuff as popularizations... it may just be that they didn't succeed through the normal scientific channels, and maybe for good reasons. [An example of this phenomenon is Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe, where he argues against evolution using some pretty ill-defined concept of "irreducible complexity". This flaky stuff would've never made it pass a journal's referee... but you see the nice glossy book at Barnes and Noble and you might just think it has some credibility.]
As Prof. Stephen Pinker put it in a psych class I took with him, in reference to Penrose's consciousness stuff, the reasoning is as follows: "Hmm... consciousness is kind of weird. And quantum mechanics sure is weird. They must be... the same thing!!"
The theory of evolution as *two* parts. One is, as you hint, random variation. But the other indispensable part is SELECTION which is by no means random! Which organism lives and which dies has nothing to do with toin cosses, and much to do with the physics of the environment.
This is a big point of misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. To cast doubt on it on the grounds that it expects too much from mere randomness is to attack a straw man.
No! Look:
Emphasis is mine. It clearly says that the concerns are about the implementations of these interfaces, and not about the interfaces themselves. So many people are having this kneejerk reaction without even reading clearly. The problem is interesting, and genuine.
...is mostly bunk
http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html
The defendants can always say that "que pasa" *really* means "what happens", and not "what is happening"...
"what is happening" is more properly translated as "que esta pasando"
(Of course, I think the whole thing is idiotic.)
You know, I feel exactly the same way about OSC... I read a few of his books and enjoyed them a lot, especially _Speaker for the Dead_. I don't know... when I find a good author I tend to think of him or her as a sort of friend, so learning about his his anti-gay article ("The Hypocrites of Homosexuality", published in some Mormon journal), it really made me feel betrayed in a way. Now I just don't have any motivation to pick up a book by him, new or old. So, this is partly an emotional reaction on my part, though I also like to say that I'm consciously boycotting him.
And yeah, I share your misgivings about whether or not his politics should affect my reaction to his work. But I sometimes think that the word "politics" is misused to justify homophobia... as if somehow being disgusted at someone's racism could also be described as a disapproval of their "politics".
Actually, the consensus among complexity theorists is that quantum turing machines are more powerful, even theoretically, than regular probabilistic turing machines. This has not been proven, for similar reasons that ~(P=NP) has not been proven either (namely, that it is freakin HARD problem to do so).
For more on this, look at this paper by Umesh Vazirani (one of the big names in computational complexity): Quantum Complexity Theory.
If you use GDB (the GNU debugger), you can integrate it very well with Emacs and do most of the things you ask for. Look at the info page for GDB (C-h i); it has an Emacs section that says how.
Emacs has long had parenthesis highlighting, by the way.