If you want to be taken at all seriously, Vonnegut and Orwell are a must.
Jack Vance had an amazing vocabulary, and is probably worth putting on the list. Much of his stuff (Dying Earth) seems to be science fiction and swords & sorcery type fantasy simultaneously, which is an interesting trick, too.
I'm not a biologist either, but mammalian viruses are all RNA, afaik, and "additive" not replacements. I.e. they just make the cell do new things, they can't make it not do old things (apoptasis). Even retroviruses add more to the genome; they don't replace the genome.
This is all per my biology recall supplemented with Wikipedia.
You know, I had thought that humans were among the Great Apes, and I also thought I looked it up in the hazy past (more than 6 months ago) and discovered I was wrong.
I just double checked; you are of course 100% correct. Thanks!
The 'answer' given in the headline is to a question very different than the one asked.
I'd bet the vast majority of people would rather see targeted ads than random ads. There is no need to give away your private information to get targeted ads - you could have ad finding algorithm live in your computer and display targeted ads *without* letting arbitrary third parties track you online.
OK, you measure photon phase with a polarized lens. The way you measure the phase is to pass the photon through a polarized lens at an arbitrary angle. Unfortunately, all you can measure about the phase is whether the phase matches that of the lens - either the photon makes it through the lens, which means the photon had the phase of the lens, or it doesn't, which means the photon had a phase at 90 degrees to the lens. There's lots more to say about this, but I think this is enough to explain the answer to your question.
If you measure the phase of a photon with random phase (whether it's just classical random meaning it has a phase, but you don't know what it is, or if it's quantum random, meaning it's unknowable), half the time the measurement will say it's in phase, and half the time it will say it's 90 degrees out of phase. It will never say anything else (obviously).
If you have two photons with entangled phases, and you set up lenses at 90 degrees to one another, you will always (guaranteed, at least up to how accurately you can get the lenses at true 90 degrees to one another) get corresponding phase readings. Note that the actual angle of the two lenses doesn't matter - just their relative angle.
If the entangled photons had an initial phase, there's no way that could happen. If the angle happened to be 45 degrees off from your lenses, each of the photons would only get through half the time, and both would be random, not correlated. Either the photons somehow "know" what angle the lens you're going to use to measure them is at the time the photons are emitted (even though the lens might not be set up then), or they "communicate" about what angle the lens is after they hit it. (Or they have an infinite number of correlated states telling them how to react to every possible angle, or...)
In any case, the phase is not the expected classical relation.
The thing that bugs me about magnetic monopoles is that magnetism is the special relativistic correction to electric force. It seems like a side effect rather than something with an independent existence.
Of course, in a way most of physics seems like that: "broken symmetry".
For example, the normal "kinetic energy = 1/2 m v^2" is just an approximation of the relativistic mass minus the rest mass.
And classical behavior is a statistical approximation of quantum behavior.
This is the danger of QC to crypto - it's still so new. No one knows if factoring can be done in polynomial time using classical algorithms, but we know people have been trying forever and failing. I don't think we even have a good handle on what is hard with QC and what's not. There are lots of other asymmetric algorithms (unfortunately none that I know of that have anywhere near the kind of analysis that's been applied to factoring), but who knows if QC will make inverting them trivial?
Any approach along the lines of "do everything quantumly in parallel and somehow select the interesting results" will do no better than a Grover search, which is a quadratic speedup.
I agree with the sentiment, but this bold statement is just not true. The Deutch-Jozsa algorithm solves a problem which is provably O(e^n) using the best classical algorithm in O(1) with a quantum algorithm (in fact, in one step).
As far as I know, the "only" crypto applications of QC that would give an exponential speed-up are for factoring (Shor's algorithm). I realize that that's essentially all currently used asymmetric (public/private key) encryption, but afaik elliptical encryption, which is also usable for asymmetric encryption, isn't impacted.
Of course, no one knows if elliptical encryption will fall to some quantum algorithm, and you can always get a O^0.5 speed up using Grover's algorithm, but O^0.5 just requires double the key length rather than making encryption impractical.
Scott Aaronson, a quantum algorithm complexity researcher at MIT, believes that quantum computing does not in general give an exponential speed-up to algorithms, and I believe him...
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
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Coders At Work
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· Score: 2, Informative
In general, I agree with you. To nitpick, though...
Proving things is the domain of math, not science. In science, you can only find models which aren't disproven in a particular domain or by the body of experimental data. You can't prove your model is correct.
And the only reason you can do it in math is because you get to choose the assumptions and assume they're absolutely true.
Oh yeah, and YAGNI (You ain't gonna need it) is important, too. Don't implement stuff until and unless you actually need it for functionality that impacts an end user.
I think the best thing about Agile is TDD, but it's not the only good thing...
TDD is far better if your tests are written to emulate a user using the features they care about. That's a User Story focus, which is explicit in Agile.
TDD enables you to refactor mercilessly, which Agile points out and encourages.
Not related to TDD - Planning Poker as an estimation process gives the developers a stake in estimation, which gives them a feeling of responsibility for being done on time, which keeps them motivated to get done quickly while working their task. The actual estimate gives them a stretch goal to strive for, then the adjusted estimate (using the team's velocity) gives them a realistic goal, and lets them know when to start being worried that they're going too slow.
Personally, I find it very motivating to have a time goal for a task that I helped set, and to know both how I'm tracking against my ideal estimate and against the realistic, adjusted estimate.
In Agile, you should only be tracking completed sets of features that the end-user cares about when you estimate progress. This helps you track your real progress, as opposed to the typical "80% done" forever state you end up in with seat-of-the-pants estimates of progress.
Focusing on reasonably short sprints (usually two weeks) and strictly disallowing changing the workset during those sprints helps you stay focused on something long enough to actually get it done. It helps keep managers from fucking everything up by changing your focus every few days.
A very short, targeted "what I did, what I'm doing, and what's holding me back" meeting with only developers helps keep developers focused on getting done, lets people see when they have special knowledge that can make someone else's task easier, and keeps everyone aware of (and hopefully focused on fixing) any impediments.
Yes, most of these things are obvious, and many developers left to their own devices will mostly do them. However, having a plan that focuses on things that everyone can agree are important to do a good job is obviously better than flying "seat of the pants", and developers aren't left to their own devices - managers interfere, and finally, managers like methodologies.
Obviously, a methodology is a way to keep you doing things you think are smart. If conditions arise where the methodology tells you to do obviously wrong things (or not to do obviously right things), you diverge from the methodology. If the company sells the division you were writing some feature for on this sprint, you should probably abandon the sprint. Etc.
A methodology is not a replacement for brains, but it's a nice augmentation.
Yeah, my wife actually brought that up too. I still find it impossible to believe that a human could accidentally be gradually changed into an alien, particularly reversibly.
The movie was easily good enough to overcome this.
In fact, what I thought was happening was that the spray was *designed* to change a prawn into one of their command creatures (like royal jelly). My thought was that the father/son were members of the intellectual class, the death of their commanders had incapacitated the ship, and they were working to convert a prawn into a leader so they could organize & run the ship to go home.
That would at least make it marginally believable for the human to get converted.
My other thought was that they had invented a virus to either kill all humans (before I saw that he was changing), or turn them into prawns (after).
My first alternative could have worked for all their storytelling goals, I think, and would have been both more believable and cooler:-)
The dude is turned into a mix of alien & human by getting sprayed in the face by alien fuel, as a totally accidental side effect. The rest of the movie I loved, and I can definitely forgive the flaws, but this (aliens that can live just fine on earth; spacecraft that are stuck for lack of 6 oz of fuel [found in various alien electronic junk that had to have been on the ship in the first place]; FTL) was not hard sci-fi.
What made the movie good was the way it treated its subject matter seriously, and made the characters real, warts & all.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, or you could type it in once and bookmark it?
If you want to be taken at all seriously, Vonnegut and Orwell are a must.
Jack Vance had an amazing vocabulary, and is probably worth putting on the list. Much of his stuff (Dying Earth) seems to be science fiction and swords & sorcery type fantasy simultaneously, which is an interesting trick, too.
A very interesting idea, but...
I'm not a biologist either, but mammalian viruses are all RNA, afaik, and "additive" not replacements. I.e. they just make the cell do new things, they can't make it not do old things (apoptasis). Even retroviruses add more to the genome; they don't replace the genome.
This is all per my biology recall supplemented with Wikipedia.
You know, I had thought that humans were among the Great Apes, and I also thought I looked it up in the hazy past (more than 6 months ago) and discovered I was wrong.
I just double checked; you are of course 100% correct. Thanks!
I dunno, several people (including you) responded to his lame post.
Well, humans and apes came from a common recent ancestor.
The 'answer' given in the headline is to a question very different than the one asked.
I'd bet the vast majority of people would rather see targeted ads than random ads. There is no need to give away your private information to get targeted ads - you could have ad finding algorithm live in your computer and display targeted ads *without* letting arbitrary third parties track you online.
OK, you measure photon phase with a polarized lens. The way you measure the phase is to pass the photon through a polarized lens at an arbitrary angle. Unfortunately, all you can measure about the phase is whether the phase matches that of the lens - either the photon makes it through the lens, which means the photon had the phase of the lens, or it doesn't, which means the photon had a phase at 90 degrees to the lens. There's lots more to say about this, but I think this is enough to explain the answer to your question.
If you measure the phase of a photon with random phase (whether it's just classical random meaning it has a phase, but you don't know what it is, or if it's quantum random, meaning it's unknowable), half the time the measurement will say it's in phase, and half the time it will say it's 90 degrees out of phase. It will never say anything else (obviously).
If you have two photons with entangled phases, and you set up lenses at 90 degrees to one another, you will always (guaranteed, at least up to how accurately you can get the lenses at true 90 degrees to one another) get corresponding phase readings. Note that the actual angle of the two lenses doesn't matter - just their relative angle.
If the entangled photons had an initial phase, there's no way that could happen. If the angle happened to be 45 degrees off from your lenses, each of the photons would only get through half the time, and both would be random, not correlated. Either the photons somehow "know" what angle the lens you're going to use to measure them is at the time the photons are emitted (even though the lens might not be set up then), or they "communicate" about what angle the lens is after they hit it. (Or they have an infinite number of correlated states telling them how to react to every possible angle, or...)
In any case, the phase is not the expected classical relation.
So you're saying that I should kill you to save my grandchildren? After all, you're willing to kill them to make your life a little easier.
If you think it feels bad to do it once every few months, just imagine what we folks who have to live here feel like ;-)
The thing that bugs me about magnetic monopoles is that magnetism is the special relativistic correction to electric force. It seems like a side effect rather than something with an independent existence.
Of course, in a way most of physics seems like that: "broken symmetry".
For example, the normal "kinetic energy = 1/2 m v^2" is just an approximation of the relativistic mass minus the rest mass.
And classical behavior is a statistical approximation of quantum behavior.
Physics is freaky. That's why I love it!
Bummer. Thanks for the info!
This is the danger of QC to crypto - it's still so new. No one knows if factoring can be done in polynomial time using classical algorithms, but we know people have been trying forever and failing. I don't think we even have a good handle on what is hard with QC and what's not. There are lots of other asymmetric algorithms (unfortunately none that I know of that have anywhere near the kind of analysis that's been applied to factoring), but who knows if QC will make inverting them trivial?
I agree with the sentiment, but this bold statement is just not true. The Deutch-Jozsa algorithm solves a problem which is provably O(e^n) using the best classical algorithm in O(1) with a quantum algorithm (in fact, in one step).
As far as I know, the "only" crypto applications of QC that would give an exponential speed-up are for factoring (Shor's algorithm). I realize that that's essentially all currently used asymmetric (public/private key) encryption, but afaik elliptical encryption, which is also usable for asymmetric encryption, isn't impacted.
Of course, no one knows if elliptical encryption will fall to some quantum algorithm, and you can always get a O^0.5 speed up using Grover's algorithm, but O^0.5 just requires double the key length rather than making encryption impractical.
Scott Aaronson, a quantum algorithm complexity researcher at MIT, believes that quantum computing does not in general give an exponential speed-up to algorithms, and I believe him...
In general, I agree with you. To nitpick, though...
Proving things is the domain of math, not science. In science, you can only find models which aren't disproven in a particular domain or by the body of experimental data. You can't prove your model is correct.
And the only reason you can do it in math is because you get to choose the assumptions and assume they're absolutely true.
Thanks!
Oh yeah, and YAGNI (You ain't gonna need it) is important, too. Don't implement stuff until and unless you actually need it for functionality that impacts an end user.
I think the best thing about Agile is TDD, but it's not the only good thing...
TDD is far better if your tests are written to emulate a user using the features they care about. That's a User Story focus, which is explicit in Agile.
TDD enables you to refactor mercilessly, which Agile points out and encourages.
Not related to TDD - Planning Poker as an estimation process gives the developers a stake in estimation, which gives them a feeling of responsibility for being done on time, which keeps them motivated to get done quickly while working their task. The actual estimate gives them a stretch goal to strive for, then the adjusted estimate (using the team's velocity) gives them a realistic goal, and lets them know when to start being worried that they're going too slow.
Personally, I find it very motivating to have a time goal for a task that I helped set, and to know both how I'm tracking against my ideal estimate and against the realistic, adjusted estimate.
In Agile, you should only be tracking completed sets of features that the end-user cares about when you estimate progress. This helps you track your real progress, as opposed to the typical "80% done" forever state you end up in with seat-of-the-pants estimates of progress.
Focusing on reasonably short sprints (usually two weeks) and strictly disallowing changing the workset during those sprints helps you stay focused on something long enough to actually get it done. It helps keep managers from fucking everything up by changing your focus every few days.
A very short, targeted "what I did, what I'm doing, and what's holding me back" meeting with only developers helps keep developers focused on getting done, lets people see when they have special knowledge that can make someone else's task easier, and keeps everyone aware of (and hopefully focused on fixing) any impediments.
Yes, most of these things are obvious, and many developers left to their own devices will mostly do them. However, having a plan that focuses on things that everyone can agree are important to do a good job is obviously better than flying "seat of the pants", and developers aren't left to their own devices - managers interfere, and finally, managers like methodologies.
Obviously, a methodology is a way to keep you doing things you think are smart. If conditions arise where the methodology tells you to do obviously wrong things (or not to do obviously right things), you diverge from the methodology. If the company sells the division you were writing some feature for on this sprint, you should probably abandon the sprint. Etc.
A methodology is not a replacement for brains, but it's a nice augmentation.
Star Wars was science fantasy.
Yeah, my wife actually brought that up too. I still find it impossible to believe that a human could accidentally be gradually changed into an alien, particularly reversibly.
The movie was easily good enough to overcome this.
In fact, what I thought was happening was that the spray was *designed* to change a prawn into one of their command creatures (like royal jelly). My thought was that the father/son were members of the intellectual class, the death of their commanders had incapacitated the ship, and they were working to convert a prawn into a leader so they could organize & run the ship to go home.
That would at least make it marginally believable for the human to get converted.
My other thought was that they had invented a virus to either kill all humans (before I saw that he was changing), or turn them into prawns (after).
My first alternative could have worked for all their storytelling goals, I think, and would have been both more believable and cooler :-)
Oh! I can see how one would make that mistake. Often one goes with the other (unbelievable science along with surface-level characters & story).
/. conveniently removed all the blank lines I put in to give people an opportunity to avoid it :-(
I said I loved the movie because it treated the subject matter seriously.
My post was complaining about calling it hard sci-fi - that's all.
In short, I agree with you on all counts. You just weren't responding to my actual post :-)
Hard sci-fi?
*page down for spoiler*
The dude is turned into a mix of alien & human by getting sprayed in the face by alien fuel, as a totally accidental side effect. The rest of the movie I loved, and I can definitely forgive the flaws, but this (aliens that can live just fine on earth; spacecraft that are stuck for lack of 6 oz of fuel [found in various alien electronic junk that had to have been on the ship in the first place]; FTL) was not hard sci-fi.
What made the movie good was the way it treated its subject matter seriously, and made the characters real, warts & all.
Moon *is* hard sci-fi, and just as good.
Yes, because Google, computers, calculators, and reading/writing have made us all so stupid...