On a related note, the soundtrack album by the Vince Guaraldi Trio is about the only Christmas music that I find tolerable.
Re:Have you even read the book?
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have read the book, and that is not the impression that I, nor many other people who've read it, came away with. On the contrary, he repeatedly refers to it as his discovery- "...the new kind of science I [emphasis mine] have developed...", "...my discovery...", "...one of the more important single discoveries in the whole history of theoretical science..."
That's just in the first chapter, but it continues throughout. He makes little reference to others' work in the field, pretty much dismissing all work done prior to his becoming aware of the subject.
It is a good indicator of how lost in one's own world one is when none of the major peer-reviewed journals or scientific publishers is interested in "one of the more important single discoveries in the whole history of theoretical science". If a minor patent clerk can get his groundbreaking ideas out, one would hope an MacArthur award-winning, CalTech PhD-holding, Mathematica creator would be heard.
The whole book sounds to me like a guy who's been told how smart he was all his life, and is probably surrounded by sycophants, who has a lot of money and might have smoked a little too much weed.
It's okay, though, Stephen- the pictures are lovely.
While A New Kind of Science may have lots of pretty pictures, and may be a decent survey of the field of cellular automata and its potential applications, and while Stephen Wolfram is no doubt a smart man, the quality of the book is overshadowed by his pathetically arrogant writing, wherein he pratically claims credit for CA, despite actually doing very little to even further the field. It's sad that people are beginning to think he really is a leader in the study. Please dissociate Wolfram and CA in your mind. Thanks...
i agree, although one must wonder exactly how successful this shameless self-promotion is when, as far as i can tell so far, every comment is either making a joke, saying how it's nothing new, or dissing it completely? perhaps justin's running with the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" mantra...
maybe, you're just trolling, but ever heard of a dictionary? "A measure of computing speed equal to one trillion floating-point operations per second [flops]"
i understand your concern, but i ride the bus for an hour every day. i usually read, and probably would continue to do so, but i might not mind having the option of watching something every now and then...
there are lots of perfectly legitimate things that would be really stupid to do while driving. i see lots of people reading while driving. should we ban books?
amen- you're not gonna have java programmers making spongebob cartoon animations, so you're gonna have to get artists to do it. i know very few artists who can program in java (or even really know what java is, for that matter) but pretty much everyone knows their way around flash.
i think it was to macromedia's benefit that flash was designed as an animation tool first and then got the code side added on afterward. actionscript has gotten quite powerful and thoroughly object-oriented and easy to learn. they've earned their place.
Re:a better alternative to being a packrat
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
yeah, my dad recycles the newspapers, and the mail, but he saves them for a while first, and he always has to make a big production of the getting rid of stuff process, going through everything piece by piece before putting it in the trash/recycle bin, so the outflow is substantially less than the inflow.
a better alternative to being a packrat
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
my dad has some serious obsessive compulsive tendencies and is a horrible pack-rat. we've got stacks and stacks of newspapers, bills, junk mail, tons of software boxes going back to the 80's, records, cd's, videos, boatloads of NASCAR and other auto racing memorabilia (his thing, definitely not mine), etc, etc. it's all over the house, making some rooms unusable
since i was a kid, i have been greatly bothered by this, especially seeing how much it distressed my mom. as a result, i have been very conscious of what i save and what i do with it, to the point of having a somewhat austere and minimalist aesthetic in my own place.
having digital media and a large hard drive has made it possible for me to indulge in some of his pack-rat-ism without having it take over my physical space. i've tried to get him to try it, but there's something about the physical objects that he's attached to, so there's no hope. he won't get rid of his newspaper subscription, even if he can find all the same stuff on the internet, and the DVR that time warner provides (the scientific atlanta explorer 9000HD) has no way to get video off of it (yet), so it has just become the thing he records stuff on before transferring it to VHS (soon to be DVD-R). Alas, it will never end with him, but it ends with me.
Today's one of those days when you can really see the difference between what the rest of the world is talking about and what the US media is covering by looking at google news and comparing it to the US sites. No mention of this historic anniversary anywhere in the US media, but pretty clear it's weighing on the minds of people everywhere else.
not to mention that there is nothing about the name "firefox" that even remotely suggests it has anything to do with the internet. "mozilla firefox" just sounds like some amateur, inferior product to most people. i realize people want to be cute and have fun with names, and that may be fine while the product is in beta, but if you want to gain market share, you're gonna have to succumb to a boring name which immediately conveys the software's purpose. the name netscape, for the mere fact that people have heard of it before, is a good start.
putting yourself at great personal risk by going above and beyond the call of duty to accomplish the mission
i completely agree with you, although it makes me wonder-- where does this put superman and other superheroes? he's not really putting himself at any great personal risk, so what's so super or heroic about what he does?:)
maybe heroism implies some sort of supernatural bravery, strength, or whatever that is activated by an urgent need to help others. i've heard that mothers can exhibit all sorts of unnatural strength when it comes to saving their babies, and other such stories of people lifting cars to save people, etc. the soldier who is shot but still manages to run back and rescue his fellow soldier. to me being a hero means doing what for any normal human in their position should be impossible.
my friends and i have started using gmail like some kind of e-mail-IM hybrid. the mere fact that the message is threaded and there is an empty box at the bottom waiting for the next message make it very easy to shoot things back and forth. works really well for group discussions. someone will send an e-mail the others saying "hey, check this out" with a link, and then we'll all "reply all" with our thoughts and ensuing responses...
it has the conversationality of IM without the annoying immediate demand for attention, and it has the non-time-critical-ness (?) of e-mail without making a bazillion e-mails in your box to have a conversation
My buddy made me a copy of YHF and that's how I got into that band
You're in Wilco? I didn't know they read slashdot! What do you play? Can I have your autograph? Do you think maybe your buddy could burn me a copy of YHF so I can be in the band, too?
does anyone honestly think the government would spend all this money to haul passengers around at mach 10? no- this technology is being developed for one thing only- missiles. it's so we can launch all our cruise missiles from the "homeland" at a moment's notice and not need carriers, foreign bases, long-range bombers, etc. so that we can wage wars on the (relatively) cheap and pull back much of the resources we've got committed on foreign soil.
i don't know for sure, but someone might be able to attest to whether or not a mach 10 missile would be better for intercepting ICBM's. (maybe catch them in launch phase?)
Yesterday was how un-American it would be to vote for Bush and how he divides the country and now with Bush winning, it's "America is going to HELL" and "I'm moving to Canada." Who is really dividing America?
Clearly, it's Bush. I don't see how these two views (yesterday and today) contradict each other. No flip-flopping there.
Bush divides the country by making campaign issues out of things that scare a lot of people but that he really has no control over and no intention of really doing enything about. For example, the gay marriage thing- a)The President plays no part in the process of constitutional amendments (see Article V), b)it has no chance of ever getting ratified by 3/4 of the States. He's merely using it to make political hay.
Likewise, he appeals to the fool's sense of greed by making a big to-do of his tax cuts- throwing a measly few hundred to the poor while giving shitloads to the rich and running the government bankrupt with a costly war and corporate givaways. Little does the fool know that those few hundred he's getting (and the millions the rich are getting with it) are going to cost him the social programs that benefitted him and his fellow Americans and made this a great place to live. He has sold his birthright for a bowl of beans.
Clearly America IS going to hell, because either the majority of its citizens are too stupid to see through this kind of crap and realize that he's playing the fiddle while Rome burns or else they've got the system so well rigged that we can hardly prove it.
Slashdot Mirror
On a related note, the soundtrack album by the Vince Guaraldi Trio is about the only Christmas music that I find tolerable.
I have read the book, and that is not the impression that I, nor many other people who've read it, came away with. On the contrary, he repeatedly refers to it as his discovery- "...the new kind of science I [emphasis mine] have developed...", "...my discovery...", "...one of the more important single discoveries in the whole history of theoretical science..."
That's just in the first chapter, but it continues throughout. He makes little reference to others' work in the field, pretty much dismissing all work done prior to his becoming aware of the subject.
It is a good indicator of how lost in one's own world one is when none of the major peer-reviewed journals or scientific publishers is interested in "one of the more important single discoveries in the whole history of theoretical science". If a minor patent clerk can get his groundbreaking ideas out, one would hope an MacArthur award-winning, CalTech PhD-holding, Mathematica creator would be heard.
The whole book sounds to me like a guy who's been told how smart he was all his life, and is probably surrounded by sycophants, who has a lot of money and might have smoked a little too much weed.
It's okay, though, Stephen- the pictures are lovely.
While A New Kind of Science may have lots of pretty pictures, and may be a decent survey of the field of cellular automata and its potential applications, and while Stephen Wolfram is no doubt a smart man, the quality of the book is overshadowed by his pathetically arrogant writing, wherein he pratically claims credit for CA, despite actually doing very little to even further the field. It's sad that people are beginning to think he really is a leader in the study. Please dissociate Wolfram and CA in your mind. Thanks...
i don't understand. could you maybe make an analogy? involving cars?
no, i think the yanks are right on this one. which makes more sense to you?
one thousand, three hundred and twenty six
or
one thousand. three hundred and twenty six? Periods end things, commas separate them. That seems to be true for most European languages, anyway...
i agree, although one must wonder exactly how successful this shameless self-promotion is when, as far as i can tell so far, every comment is either making a joke, saying how it's nothing new, or dissing it completely? perhaps justin's running with the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" mantra...
isn't it QA, as in Quality Assurance, and not Q&A?
maybe, you're just trolling, but ever heard of a dictionary? "A measure of computing speed equal to one trillion floating-point operations per second [flops]"
i understand your concern, but i ride the bus for an hour every day. i usually read, and probably would continue to do so, but i might not mind having the option of watching something every now and then... there are lots of perfectly legitimate things that would be really stupid to do while driving. i see lots of people reading while driving. should we ban books?
amen- you're not gonna have java programmers making spongebob cartoon animations, so you're gonna have to get artists to do it. i know very few artists who can program in java (or even really know what java is, for that matter) but pretty much everyone knows their way around flash.
i think it was to macromedia's benefit that flash was designed as an animation tool first and then got the code side added on afterward. actionscript has gotten quite powerful and thoroughly object-oriented and easy to learn. they've earned their place.
yeah, my dad recycles the newspapers, and the mail, but he saves them for a while first, and he always has to make a big production of the getting rid of stuff process, going through everything piece by piece before putting it in the trash/recycle bin, so the outflow is substantially less than the inflow.
my dad has some serious obsessive compulsive tendencies and is a horrible pack-rat. we've got stacks and stacks of newspapers, bills, junk mail, tons of software boxes going back to the 80's, records, cd's, videos, boatloads of NASCAR and other auto racing memorabilia (his thing, definitely not mine), etc, etc. it's all over the house, making some rooms unusable
since i was a kid, i have been greatly bothered by this, especially seeing how much it distressed my mom. as a result, i have been very conscious of what i save and what i do with it, to the point of having a somewhat austere and minimalist aesthetic in my own place.
having digital media and a large hard drive has made it possible for me to indulge in some of his pack-rat-ism without having it take over my physical space. i've tried to get him to try it, but there's something about the physical objects that he's attached to, so there's no hope. he won't get rid of his newspaper subscription, even if he can find all the same stuff on the internet, and the DVR that time warner provides (the scientific atlanta explorer 9000HD) has no way to get video off of it (yet), so it has just become the thing he records stuff on before transferring it to VHS (soon to be DVD-R). Alas, it will never end with him, but it ends with me.
Today's one of those days when you can really see the difference between what the rest of the world is talking about and what the US media is covering by looking at google news and comparing it to the US sites. No mention of this historic anniversary anywhere in the US media, but pretty clear it's weighing on the minds of people everywhere else.
But, you know, if Julia Roberts has twins...
not to mention that there is nothing about the name "firefox" that even remotely suggests it has anything to do with the internet. "mozilla firefox" just sounds like some amateur, inferior product to most people. i realize people want to be cute and have fun with names, and that may be fine while the product is in beta, but if you want to gain market share, you're gonna have to succumb to a boring name which immediately conveys the software's purpose. the name netscape, for the mere fact that people have heard of it before, is a good start.
putting yourself at great personal risk by going above and beyond the call of duty to accomplish the mission
:)
i completely agree with you, although it makes me wonder-- where does this put superman and other superheroes? he's not really putting himself at any great personal risk, so what's so super or heroic about what he does?
maybe heroism implies some sort of supernatural bravery, strength, or whatever that is activated by an urgent need to help others. i've heard that mothers can exhibit all sorts of unnatural strength when it comes to saving their babies, and other such stories of people lifting cars to save people, etc. the soldier who is shot but still manages to run back and rescue his fellow soldier. to me being a hero means doing what for any normal human in their position should be impossible.
my friends and i have started using gmail like some kind of e-mail-IM hybrid. the mere fact that the message is threaded and there is an empty box at the bottom waiting for the next message make it very easy to shoot things back and forth. works really well for group discussions. someone will send an e-mail the others saying "hey, check this out" with a link, and then we'll all "reply all" with our thoughts and ensuing responses...
it has the conversationality of IM without the annoying immediate demand for attention, and it has the non-time-critical-ness (?) of e-mail without making a bazillion e-mails in your box to have a conversation
...to the phrase "blowin' up my celly"
Your real goal though is to write something, get it patented and then sell it for millions to the big boys.
actually, sir, I have a patent on that business model. you'll be hearing from my lawyers shortly.
You have no idea how fucked up your country looks from down under
something just doesn't sound right about that...
while it may violate the tenants of the church of consumerism, it is more likely that it violates the tenets thereof...
My buddy made me a copy of YHF and that's how I got into that band
You're in Wilco? I didn't know they read slashdot! What do you play? Can I have your autograph? Do you think maybe your buddy could burn me a copy of YHF so I can be in the band, too?
Anything involving passengers is many years away
does anyone honestly think the government would spend all this money to haul passengers around at mach 10? no- this technology is being developed for one thing only- missiles. it's so we can launch all our cruise missiles from the "homeland" at a moment's notice and not need carriers, foreign bases, long-range bombers, etc. so that we can wage wars on the (relatively) cheap and pull back much of the resources we've got committed on foreign soil.
i don't know for sure, but someone might be able to attest to whether or not a mach 10 missile would be better for intercepting ICBM's. (maybe catch them in launch phase?)
Mustn't.... visualism... slashdot... geeks... wearing... spray on clothing... arrrgGHHHHHH!
it'stoo late!
Yesterday was how un-American it would be to vote for Bush and how he divides the country and now with Bush winning, it's "America is going to HELL" and "I'm moving to Canada." Who is really dividing America?
Clearly, it's Bush. I don't see how these two views (yesterday and today) contradict each other. No flip-flopping there.
Bush divides the country by making campaign issues out of things that scare a lot of people but that he really has no control over and no intention of really doing enything about. For example, the gay marriage thing- a)The President plays no part in the process of constitutional amendments (see Article V), b)it has no chance of ever getting ratified by 3/4 of the States. He's merely using it to make political hay.
Likewise, he appeals to the fool's sense of greed by making a big to-do of his tax cuts- throwing a measly few hundred to the poor while giving shitloads to the rich and running the government bankrupt with a costly war and corporate givaways. Little does the fool know that those few hundred he's getting (and the millions the rich are getting with it) are going to cost him the social programs that benefitted him and his fellow Americans and made this a great place to live. He has sold his birthright for a bowl of beans.
Clearly America IS going to hell, because either the majority of its citizens are too stupid to see through this kind of crap and realize that he's playing the fiddle while Rome burns or else they've got the system so well rigged that we can hardly prove it.
GOD HELP US ALL