Just before Christmas break, word got around to our entire class (not just the usual cheaters) that the answers to the matching test spelled "MERRY CHRISTMAS" down the side.
Hmm... I'd be suspicious merely because matching tests *usually* (I have seen exceptions to this) don't re-use letters like that.
Who needs to simulate this? Just get a telescope and watch any suburban American house. Some of your statements:
Males had eyesight, so they could tell what was in front of them a few squares. Females had a sense of smell, so they could tell when a male was around.
Now, the fact that males and females had to find each other produced some interesting results.
Not in Massachusetts, dude.
Different sets of organisms couldn't mate with each other, not because their genes were incompatible, but because their mating dances differed.
GNOME vs. KDE.
Oh, and my favorite part? In order to mate, a male and female had to meet at the same point (or adjacent points, while pointing the right way, I cant exactly recall).
"Mom? What's up with grandpa?" "Oh, he's OK, honey, he's just still doing a Stage 1 of the.2005 Gentoo release. It's going to be [whispered] optimized."
Very interesting, and I'll have to check out the link.
It's intriguing to me, though, that you mention two things which I thought were no longer thought in evolutionary theory:
1) it tended to get stuck with a far from perfect solution I know that one who plays with these things can tell when a solution is "far from perfect", but there's often no way to tell if one is getting "close to perfect", since the solution space is so damned huge, and the fact that the environment can not only change dramatically due to outside influences, but is also intricately coupled to the organisms themselves. This, of course, is a drastically more difficult modelling exercise, in that the environment is almost an organism in and of itself, but it makes the simulations a bit more like what actually goes on;
2) most small variation on that solution was worse (such as outputting 0.5 regardless of the input). This is known as getting stuck in a "local minima". Which way is up? In functional theory, if one is at a spot where no matter which way you move along the function results in a decrease in that function's value, that's a local maximum, not minimum. Perhaps one must be in a "fitness landscape" "dip", or "bowl", to be considered both stable and at a minimum?
the larger issue is the amount of bandwidth used by students
Absolutely. I attend a public university, and we've gone from being able to use P2P programs several years ago, to not being allowed anything like that, including BitTorrent. The protocol is simply blocked. Discussing this with the IT people is interesting; more than 80% of the University's bandwidth was being taken up by filesharing, and that's awfully frustrating for everyone.
Indeed, when my research machine got compromised several months ago, the networking people were justifiably worried about a zombie machine, child pornography, and so forth. However, one of their main concerns was that the school might get a reputation for "easy" bandwidth, and attract too many other attacks.
LyX http://www.lyx.org/ is a great, great, wonderful tool, which is available on linux (mainly), OS X, and as a Windows port. My colleagues, many of whom have years of experience using "raw" LaTeX for academic articles, come to me for advice, and I've just been using LyX for a little while.
Even if they don't use LyX, I can almost always find an elegant way to do the things things they want with it, and then export the code to LaTeX so that they can do the same thing with LaTeX code. It's a very, very, very nice tool, and I actually *enjoy* writing with it.
Too, the LyX mailing lists are very helpful.
If a complicated subject can be distilled into a written answer that makes sense and can be covered with three fingers, that is elegance.
I was going to make a comment about writing the answer in Perl code, but then I noticed the "makes sense" part.
Hey, it can always be done for very large values of finger-width. . . . . . (I can see *that* comment getting quoted out of context on/.)
One can see that there really *is* a reaction force in rocketry, and it's not mysterious at all: The fact that exhaust gases are directed in generally one direction away from the rocket engine means that they, before being expelled, bounced off of the engine parts in such a way as to go out the back. This "bounce" pushes the rocket in the opposite direction.
Of course, conservation of momentum holds true, but one *does*, in classical rocketry, have a reaction force between the hot gases and the rocket itself.
And you know why conservation of momentum holds true? It's because of Newton's Third Law!
After one has studied physics for a while, the reasoning that Newton's Third Law ==> Conservation of Linear Momentum is generally replaced by more of a feeling that momentum conservation is more basic (due to, in part, Noether's Theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem) and that Newton's Laws are simply a consequence of momentum conservation. The advantages of this abstraction are manifold (*cough*), but the "obvious" ones are cases in which forces are very hard to identify (such as in radiation reaction), and systems which may be much more immediately approached through Hamiltonian's or Lagrage's formulations rather than Newton's laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Just before Christmas break, word got around to our entire class (not just the usual cheaters) that the answers to the matching test spelled "MERRY CHRISTMAS" down the side.
Hmm... I'd be suspicious merely because matching tests *usually* (I have seen exceptions to this) don't re-use letters like that.
***It doesn't say anything negative about women at all.
*That's a fact, the worst I ever had was wonderful.
This is Slashdot! What are you talking about?
they kindly ommited any of it from the assignment sheet and put down something completely diferent.
Let me help. That was obviously an assignment about Monty Python. Thus all the winking and the nudging.
Don't imagine the health department takes kindly to lithium-ion french fries.
Just call them Freedom Fries. The complaints will go away.
And here I've always heard that chimps have the most impressive schlongs. Well, whatever. It takes all kinds, I guess.
The "nothing to see here, please move along" comment finally makes sense.
My first grammer nazi reply!
:-)
*cough*
KDE: Koffice
Gnome: Gnome Office
Windows: ??????????
I think you misspelled "profit!"
You're getting an office suite, which, while it admittedly isn't perfect, it's definately the best *value* out there.
3 1&tid=185&tid=201&tid=133
*cough*
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/28/19232
...a cracker!
Truthfully, "Poor software does A good marketing job ON Microsoft" when I enable my semantic checker.
Yes, I wish Symantec would catch Microsoft products.
evar!
Who needs to simulate this? Just get a telescope and watch any suburban American house. Some of your statements:
Males had eyesight, so they could tell what was in front of them a few squares. Females had a sense of smell, so they could tell when a male was around.
Now, the fact that males and females had to find each other produced some interesting results.
Not in Massachusetts, dude.
Different sets of organisms couldn't mate with each other, not because their genes were incompatible, but because their mating dances differed.
GNOME vs. KDE.
Oh, and my favorite part?
In order to mate, a male and female had to meet at the same point (or adjacent points, while pointing the right way, I cant exactly recall).
Dr. Ruth would be SO disappointed.
Right.
.2005 Gentoo release. It's going to be [whispered] optimized."
"Mom? What's up with grandpa?"
"Oh, he's OK, honey, he's just still doing a Stage 1 of the
Robots that evolve to lubricate themselves.
I'm SO there.
Very interesting, and I'll have to check out the link.
It's intriguing to me, though, that you mention two things which I thought were no longer thought in evolutionary theory:
1) it tended to get stuck with a far from perfect solution I know that one who plays with these things can tell when a solution is "far from perfect", but there's often no way to tell if one is getting "close to perfect", since the solution space is so damned huge, and the fact that the environment can not only change dramatically due to outside influences, but is also intricately coupled to the organisms themselves. This, of course, is a drastically more difficult modelling exercise, in that the environment is almost an organism in and of itself, but it makes the simulations a bit more like what actually goes on;
2) most small variation on that solution was worse (such as outputting 0.5 regardless of the input). This is known as getting stuck in a "local minima". Which way is up? In functional theory, if one is at a spot where no matter which way you move along the function results in a decrease in that function's value, that's a local maximum, not minimum. Perhaps one must be in a "fitness landscape" "dip", or "bowl", to be considered both stable and at a minimum?
Cheers! Interesting stuff.
The hell I can't. Did you hear that, everyone? I'm being repressed!
the larger issue is the amount of bandwidth used by students
Absolutely. I attend a public university, and we've gone from being able to use P2P programs several years ago, to not being allowed anything like that, including BitTorrent. The protocol is simply blocked. Discussing this with the IT people is interesting; more than 80% of the University's bandwidth was being taken up by filesharing, and that's awfully frustrating for everyone.
Indeed, when my research machine got compromised several months ago, the networking people were justifiably worried about a zombie machine, child pornography, and so forth. However, one of their main concerns was that the school might get a reputation for "easy" bandwidth, and attract too many other attacks.
I think you misspelled "XXX".
So the original poster should be sued for slander since he's told slashdot?
LyX http://www.lyx.org/ is a great, great, wonderful tool, which is available on linux (mainly), OS X, and as a Windows port. My colleagues, many of whom have years of experience using "raw" LaTeX for academic articles, come to me for advice, and I've just been using LyX for a little while.
Even if they don't use LyX, I can almost always find an elegant way to do the things things they want with it, and then export the code to LaTeX so that they can do the same thing with LaTeX code. It's a very, very, very nice tool, and I actually *enjoy* writing with it.
Too, the LyX mailing lists are very helpful.
If a complicated subject can be distilled into a written answer that makes sense and can be covered with three fingers, that is elegance.
/.)
I was going to make a comment about writing the answer in Perl code, but then I noticed the "makes sense" part.
Hey, it can always be done for very large values of finger-width.
.
.
.
.
. (I can see *that* comment getting quoted out of context on
One can see that there really *is* a reaction force in rocketry, and it's not mysterious at all: The fact that exhaust gases are directed in generally one direction away from the rocket engine means that they, before being expelled, bounced off of the engine parts in such a way as to go out the back. This "bounce" pushes the rocket in the opposite direction.
Of course, conservation of momentum holds true, but one *does*, in classical rocketry, have a reaction force between the hot gases and the rocket itself.
And you know why conservation of momentum holds true? It's because of Newton's Third Law!
After one has studied physics for a while, the reasoning that Newton's Third Law ==> Conservation of Linear Momentum is generally replaced by more of a feeling that momentum conservation is more basic (due to, in part, Noether's Theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem) and that Newton's Laws are simply a consequence of momentum conservation. The advantages of this abstraction are manifold (*cough*), but the "obvious" ones are cases in which forces are very hard to identify (such as in radiation reaction), and systems which may be much more immediately approached through Hamiltonian's or Lagrage's formulations rather than Newton's laws.