As a mathematician I find this absolutely astounding
Yeah, I find it pretty astounding that you are a mathematician too! Didn't you ever learn how to prove theorems? You certainly don't do it simply by asserting them to be true. I've read through your post a several times and you make no substantive arguments. Why am I supposed to believe your statements?
Interesting that Christ fulfilled over 300 prophecies but most of the people to whom the prophecies were given didn't recognize him. Well, like my Mom said, "Why do I always find things in the last place I look?"
Evolution is also falsifiable if you cannot show how a biological structure could develop through small, incremental, accidental changes to the genome.
False. Falsification is a positive process. Simply not knowing all the details doesn't falsify anything. The creationists like to posit a fossil that has not been found and then claim that it falsifies evolution. That doesn't prove anything other than the fact that we haven't found it yet and there will always be gaps in the fossil record.
Regarding Gould: I am a Christian evangelical. Gould was one of my favorite authors. Yes, he professed atheism but he was far from a rabid, media-whore blowhards with suspect ulterior motives. While he could be scathing in criticizing bad-science from whatever quarter, I never felt that he attacked my religious beliefs.
Evolution is easily falsifiable. Just find a dead human inside a tyrannosaurus and the Theory of Evolution will have been falsified since the theory says this can't happen.
Not true! As a matter of fact this is exactly the game that the creationist play. These three days in Topeka are full of "dead human inside a tyrannosaurus". Finding a human inside a tyrannosaurus would certainly change our current understanding of evolution, but it would _not_ prove it false. The basic mechanisms of evolution are not threatened by changes in the timeline.
A few months ago everybody was using euphemisms about the impossible task that Dick Cheney asked Pat Leahy to do. But now we know its not impossible at all. Just hack 127.0.0.1.
The blog and of course the SEC Form S-1 were written in April, 2004. As far as I can tell nothing has changed since then except for a very brief coming soon website.
Sounds like you got way too caught up in the politics of the place for someone who was really just a volunteer/temp worker. Eight percent is really a low number of firings for a new management team; twenty to thirty percent would be more typical. You have to realize that there was a reason the board of directors brought him in, and it wasn't because everything was just hunky-dory before.
I've watched the Cosmosphere's amazing growth from a small, community college planetarium to the premier exhibit of space. In fact my wife printed the brochure which first described Max's dream. It was an ambitious plan, but what impressed her most when visiting with Max at the time was how down to earth he was. (Pardon the pun.) As another poster has already stated, he saw an opportunity and worked hard and purposefully to achieve his goals.
Seeing these posts makes me wonder what kind of molecules are neccessary to construct a sense of humor.
Amen! Mostly the OP was simply making fun of the headline. My first thought when I saw it before I RTFA was "I'm doing that right now!" Then I took my hand off the mouse and thought for a moment that I wasn't Touching Molecules With My Bare Hands(tm), but then I remembered the O2, CO2, et al that I was still touching. I just started laughing at the really bad choice of headline made by Zonk, but was really curious what the article was about.
After I RTFA, I tried to think of a better headline. At first I thought it should be, "Manipulating Molecular Models with your bare hands," but that just reminded me of all the painted styrofoam balls I'd stuck onto straws. I got pretty close by adding "computer-generated", but even that seems inadequate. The process described is really quite cool. I guess the bottom-line is "Ignore this headline, RTFA"
Manybooks is a great website for downloading Project Gutenberg books. It provides a cleaner interface and dynamically generates 10 different formats to match your pda/application. It also recently got its RSS feed working so make a Live Bookmark in Firefox to see their recent additions.
Yup, you're right, that is USGS Urban images. Google definitely shouldn't be watermarking them. At the very least they need to credit USGS. Does anybody know what the USGS usage policy is?
these look like they are straight off of TerraServer
The Google images are not straight off of TerraServer. Actually to even say that perpetuates a misnomer. TerraServer is not a source of imagery. It simply serves public-domain USGS images which were created using our tax dollars. I'm not complaining, they are serving the public interest, but I'd be upset if they started putting watermarks on them or claiming copyright.
The Google images come from DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite. This is a private, for-profit corporation which raised enough money to put up their own satellite and start taking pictures which they are now selling on the open-market. I'm sure that their contract with Google necessitates the watermarks. Fair enough.
Well I don't want to get into a shouting match, but I still beg to differ. I have been using Terraserver for several years myself, as well as National Map Viewer and others. After reading your reply I went back to see if I had missed something, but Terraserver does not have a local search. It does allow you to search by address which is far different.
Here's an example of Google's local search. I just typed in Pizza in "what" and Newton, KS in "where", zoomed in a bit and voila a picture of my local Papa John's and Pizza Hut among others.
I beg to differ. All terraserver does is gives you static image; there have been a bunch of ways to view an image of a particular location. Google is the first to integrate it with a local search and route directions. Google maps was arguably the most advanced mapping website before yesterday, now it has set the bar another notch higher.
At the beginning of the school year, the school where I teach passed out a Tungsten E to each teacher and advanced math student. Since then I've read dozens of books on it and I love it. I adjust the scroll to my reading rate, hold it 12-15 inches in front of me and _just read_. No pages to turn, no light to annoy my wife; I get into the book better than if it were hard copy.
I do most of my downloading from manybooks.net. They take Project Gutenberg books and format them for PDAs. They also have a good RSS feed, so I use Live Bookmarks in Firefox and take a quick glance at new releases everyday.
Re:what if, what if, what if an apple!=an apple
on
Math Awareness Month
·
· Score: 1
I'll explain:
* I haven't seen any compelling proof that the cosmos IS mathematical.
What is that supposed to mean?!
Mathematics is not a religious ideology or cult.
As Einstein said, "I don't believe in mathematics. I believe in God. I trust mathematics." Science (or math) can never prove a theory definitively. The possibility of an alternative, better theory is always open. But the usefulness of a theory is based on how well it models known phenomena and this we can trust.
*... happen in a post-mathematical phase of human understanding ofthe cosmos.
what is that supposed to mean!?
"post-mathematical" phase... that might be something somebody would say that has no idea what math is....
Actually most people could be accurately described as being in the post-mathematical phase in understanding the cosmos. They accept the model, but have almost no understanding of the math that created the model. The problem with this is that the model becomes the object of trust, rather than the math itself. Then as the math develops and refines/changes the model, the model appears to be untrustworthy.
* I'm so wrapped up in and surrounded by the mathematical model, that it seems irrefutable. But a look at history provides a proud narrative of ingenious folly.
Ooh, nice oxymoron! Ingenious or folly, but never both. Ingenious and wrong, now that's possible. The nature of mathematical models assures us that we'll get alot of things wrong along the way. But don't mistake that effort as foolish, but view it as a necessary part of the process that advances understanding.
Seriously, who uses the grammar checker? I've usually been more annoyed by the false-positives. I'm kind of surprised that there are problems with false negatives as well. The first thing I do when I have to use a M$ product is turn off Clippy, spelling and grammar. Those things interrupt my train of thought quicker than anything else.
But I'm seriously curious, do most people try to use the grammar checker?
Have you ever read Einstein's Relativity: The special and general theory? Ok, I didn't think so. Most people assume that it's full of equations that a normal (read non-genius) person wouldn't have a chance of understanding. But its not. Pop over to Project Gutenberg and pick up a copy. It's quite readable and full of examples about poles and clouds and railroad cars and embankments and lightning. Sure there's some math, but less than the typical high school calculus book.
What I'm trying to say is that if Einstein had posted on slashdot, you'd probably have made fun of his examples and said he didn't know what he was talking about. But its exactly the kind of speculative thinking that is exhibited in this thread that led to the theory of relativity.
University of Minnesota on April 1, you could go to the
Spring 2005 Combinatorics Seminar
Friday at 3:35, Vincent Hall 364
April 1:Karl Mahlburg University of Wisconsin
The Andrews-Garvan-Dyson crank and proofs of partition congruences
Abstract: In 1944, Freeman Dyson conjectured the existence of an integer-valued crank function for partitions that would provide a combinatorial proof of Ramanujan's congruence p(11n+6) \mod{11} = 0 by dividing the partitions of 11n+6 into 11 classes of equal size. Forty years later, Andrews and Garvan successfully found such a function and proved the celebrated result that M(m,11,11n+6) = p(11n+6)/11, where M(m,N,n) is the number of partitions of n for which the crank is m modulo N. The main result of this talk proves a conjecture of Ono, which essentially asserts that Dyson's elusive crank is a universal combinatorial statistic that ``explains'' partition congruences of every known type.
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Google Print results are beginning to appear on searches. For those who don't know, Google has been scanning from libraries from some of the world's greatest universities in order to compile a freely accessible online library.
Two true statements, but almost totally unconnected from each other. Almost all, as in I didn't find an exception, the books currently in Google Print were placed there by their publishers. This renders moot all of the "what will publisher's do now?!" comments that are currently filling this forum.
The "News for Nerds" is that the books scanned from the Library Project will begin filtering into Google results when the book provides significant information about the topic being searched. Eventually this resource along with Google Scholar, could become a better source of good information than the WWW.
Perhaps you meant to say no cure, but there are several effective treatments. My father-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer's about 5 years ago. The progress of the disease has been significantly curtailed by medication. It has also been shown that higher level thinking/learning has a significant protective effect from the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
Yes, I would want to be tested specifically because there are currently effective medications and therapy which prolong quality of life.
Jeez, who's moderating these days...and what do they think redundant means?
Yeah, when I posted someone else had already posted that the Blue Gene website had been slashdotted. But if they read the rest of my post they'd of realized that wasn't the main idea in my post. My immediate thought when I saw that it was slashdotted was that they hadn't expected a high level of interest from the general public. They thought this would be pretty esoteric and limited to a few researchers who needed lots of processing power on an ongoing basis. In fact, if you're passing out 70 teraflops in 5.7 teraflop chunks you're only looking at around 12 customers. Sure some folks won't use a full chuck, but it still won't be more than maybe 50 customers.
That reminded me of a feasibity analysis done at IBM in the late 1940s when IBM was developing their first computer. They stated that the worldwide demand for the machine was expected to be around four machines.
Hence my post. And a sad day for slashdot when I have to explain an allusion to a very famous moment in computing history!
Slashdot Mirror
Google does html mail. Google doesn't do evil. Therefore html mail is not evil.
As a mathematician I find this absolutely astounding
Yeah, I find it pretty astounding that you are a mathematician too! Didn't you ever learn how to prove theorems? You certainly don't do it simply by asserting them to be true. I've read through your post a several times and you make no substantive arguments. Why am I supposed to believe your statements?
Interesting that Christ fulfilled over 300 prophecies but most of the people to whom the prophecies were given didn't recognize him. Well, like my Mom said, "Why do I always find things in the last place I look?"
You could just change how you spell the words then it wouldn't be plagerism.
Evolution is also falsifiable if you cannot show how a biological structure could develop through small, incremental, accidental changes to the genome.
False. Falsification is a positive process. Simply not knowing all the details doesn't falsify anything. The creationists like to posit a fossil that has not been found and then claim that it falsifies evolution. That doesn't prove anything other than the fact that we haven't found it yet and there will always be gaps in the fossil record.
Regarding Gould: I am a Christian evangelical. Gould was one of my favorite authors. Yes, he professed atheism but he was far from a rabid, media-whore blowhards with suspect ulterior motives. While he could be scathing in criticizing bad-science from whatever quarter, I never felt that he attacked my religious beliefs.
Evolution is easily falsifiable. Just find a dead human inside a tyrannosaurus and the Theory of Evolution will have been falsified since the theory says this can't happen.
Not true! As a matter of fact this is exactly the game that the creationist play. These three days in Topeka are full of "dead human inside a tyrannosaurus". Finding a human inside a tyrannosaurus would certainly change our current understanding of evolution, but it would _not_ prove it false. The basic mechanisms of evolution are not threatened by changes in the timeline.
A few months ago everybody was using euphemisms about the impossible task that Dick Cheney asked Pat Leahy to do. But now we know its not impossible at all. Just hack 127.0.0.1.
This is _so_ old news.
The blog and of course the SEC Form S-1 were written in April, 2004. As far as I can tell nothing has changed since then except for a very brief coming soon website.
Nothing to see here. Move on! Move on!
Sounds like you got way too caught up in the politics of the place for someone who was really just a volunteer/temp worker. Eight percent is really a low number of firings for a new management team; twenty to thirty percent would be more typical. You have to realize that there was a reason the board of directors brought him in, and it wasn't because everything was just hunky-dory before.
I've watched the Cosmosphere's amazing growth from a small, community college planetarium to the premier exhibit of space. In fact my wife printed the brochure which first described Max's dream. It was an ambitious plan, but what impressed her most when visiting with Max at the time was how down to earth he was. (Pardon the pun.) As another poster has already stated, he saw an opportunity and worked hard and purposefully to achieve his goals.
Seeing these posts makes me wonder what kind of molecules are neccessary to construct a sense of humor.
Amen!
Mostly the OP was simply making fun of the headline. My first thought when I saw it before I RTFA was "I'm doing that right now!" Then I took my hand off the mouse and thought for a moment that I wasn't Touching Molecules With My Bare Hands(tm), but then I remembered the O2, CO2, et al that I was still touching. I just started laughing at the really bad choice of headline made by Zonk, but was really curious what the article was about.
After I RTFA, I tried to think of a better headline. At first I thought it should be, "Manipulating Molecular Models with your bare hands," but that just reminded me of all the painted styrofoam balls I'd stuck onto straws. I got pretty close by adding "computer-generated", but even that seems inadequate. The process described is really quite cool. I guess the bottom-line is "Ignore this headline, RTFA"
Manybooks is a great website for downloading Project Gutenberg books. It provides a cleaner interface and dynamically generates 10 different formats to match your pda/application. It also recently got its RSS feed working so make a Live Bookmark in Firefox to see their recent additions.
DNA is axiomatic. QED
we need something simple so I've come to the Slashdot community for assistance.
Thanks! I think...
Yup, you're right, that is USGS Urban images. Google definitely shouldn't be watermarking them. At the very least they need to credit USGS. Does anybody know what the USGS usage policy is?
these look like they are straight off of TerraServer
The Google images are not straight off of TerraServer. Actually to even say that perpetuates a misnomer. TerraServer is not a source of imagery. It simply serves public-domain USGS images which were created using our tax dollars. I'm not complaining, they are serving the public interest, but I'd be upset if they started putting watermarks on them or claiming copyright.
The Google images come from DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite. This is a private, for-profit corporation which raised enough money to put up their own satellite and start taking pictures which they are now selling on the open-market. I'm sure that their contract with Google necessitates the watermarks. Fair enough.
Well I don't want to get into a shouting match, but I still beg to differ. I have been using Terraserver for several years myself, as well as National Map Viewer and others. After reading your reply I went back to see if I had missed something, but Terraserver does not have a local search. It does allow you to search by address which is far different.
Here's an example of Google's local search. I just typed in Pizza in "what" and Newton, KS in "where", zoomed in a bit and voila a picture of my local Papa John's and Pizza Hut among others.
I beg to differ. All terraserver does is gives you static image; there have been a bunch of ways to view an image of a particular location. Google is the first to integrate it with a local search and route directions. Google maps was arguably the most advanced mapping website before yesterday, now it has set the bar another notch higher.
Don't rule out the PDA until you try it.
Exactly!
At the beginning of the school year, the school where I teach passed out a Tungsten E to each teacher and advanced math student. Since then I've read dozens of books on it and I love it. I adjust the scroll to my reading rate, hold it 12-15 inches in front of me and _just read_. No pages to turn, no light to annoy my wife; I get into the book better than if it were hard copy.
I do most of my downloading from manybooks.net. They take Project Gutenberg books and format them for PDAs. They also have a good RSS feed, so I use Live Bookmarks in Firefox and take a quick glance at new releases everyday.
I'll explain: * I haven't seen any compelling proof that the cosmos IS mathematical. What is that supposed to mean?! Mathematics is not a religious ideology or cult.
... happen in a post-mathematical phase of human understanding ofthe cosmos.
what is that supposed to mean!?
"post-mathematical" phase... that might be something somebody would say that has no idea what math is ....
As Einstein said, "I don't believe in mathematics. I believe in God. I trust mathematics." Science (or math) can never prove a theory definitively. The possibility of an alternative, better theory is always open. But the usefulness of a theory is based on how well it models known phenomena and this we can trust.
*
Actually most people could be accurately described as being in the post-mathematical phase in understanding the cosmos. They accept the model, but have almost no understanding of the math that created the model. The problem with this is that the model becomes the object of trust, rather than the math itself. Then as the math develops and refines/changes the model, the model appears to be untrustworthy.
* I'm so wrapped up in and surrounded by the mathematical model, that it seems irrefutable. But a look at history provides a proud narrative of ingenious folly.
Ooh, nice oxymoron! Ingenious or folly, but never both. Ingenious and wrong, now that's possible. The nature of mathematical models assures us that we'll get alot of things wrong along the way. But don't mistake that effort as foolish, but view it as a necessary part of the process that advances understanding.
Seriously, who uses the grammar checker? I've usually been more annoyed by the false-positives. I'm kind of surprised that there are problems with false negatives as well. The first thing I do when I have to use a M$ product is turn off Clippy, spelling and grammar. Those things interrupt my train of thought quicker than anything else.
But I'm seriously curious, do most people try to use the grammar checker?
Have you ever read Einstein's Relativity: The special and general theory? Ok, I didn't think so. Most people assume that it's full of equations that a normal (read non-genius) person wouldn't have a chance of understanding. But its not. Pop over to Project Gutenberg and pick up a copy. It's quite readable and full of examples about poles and clouds and railroad cars and embankments and lightning. Sure there's some math, but less than the typical high school calculus book.
What I'm trying to say is that if Einstein had posted on slashdot, you'd probably have made fun of his examples and said he didn't know what he was talking about. But its exactly the kind of speculative thinking that is exhibited in this thread that led to the theory of relativity.
University of Minnesota on April 1, you could go to the
Spring 2005 Combinatorics Seminar
Friday at 3:35, Vincent Hall 364
April 1:Karl Mahlburg University of Wisconsin
The Andrews-Garvan-Dyson crank and proofs of partition congruences
Abstract: In 1944, Freeman Dyson conjectured the existence of an integer-valued crank function for partitions that would provide a combinatorial proof of Ramanujan's congruence p(11n+6) \mod{11} = 0 by dividing the partitions of 11n+6 into 11 classes of equal size. Forty years later, Andrews and Garvan successfully found such a function and proved the celebrated result that M(m,11,11n+6) = p(11n+6)/11, where M(m,N,n) is the number of partitions of n for which the crank is m modulo N. The main result of this talk proves a conjecture of Ono, which essentially asserts that Dyson's elusive crank is a universal combinatorial statistic that ``explains'' partition congruences of every known type.
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Google Print results are beginning to appear on searches. For those who don't know, Google has been scanning from libraries from some of the world's greatest universities in order to compile a freely accessible online library.
Two true statements, but almost totally unconnected from each other. Almost all, as in I didn't find an exception, the books currently in Google Print were placed there by their publishers. This renders moot all of the "what will publisher's do now?!" comments that are currently filling this forum.
The "News for Nerds" is that the books scanned from the Library Project will begin filtering into Google results when the book provides significant information about the topic being searched. Eventually this resource along with Google Scholar, could become a better source of good information than the WWW.
Perhaps you meant to say no cure, but there are several effective treatments. My father-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer's about 5 years ago. The progress of the disease has been significantly curtailed by medication. It has also been shown that higher level thinking/learning has a significant protective effect from the symptoms of Alzheimer's. Yes, I would want to be tested specifically because there are currently effective medications and therapy which prolong quality of life.
Jeez, who's moderating these days...and what do they think redundant means?
Yeah, when I posted someone else had already posted that the Blue Gene website had been slashdotted. But if they read the rest of my post they'd of realized that wasn't the main idea in my post. My immediate thought when I saw that it was slashdotted was that they hadn't expected a high level of interest from the general public. They thought this would be pretty esoteric and limited to a few researchers who needed lots of processing power on an ongoing basis. In fact, if you're passing out 70 teraflops in 5.7 teraflop chunks you're only looking at around 12 customers. Sure some folks won't use a full chuck, but it still won't be more than maybe 50 customers.
That reminded me of a feasibity analysis done at IBM in the late 1940s when IBM was developing their first computer. They stated that the worldwide demand for the machine was expected to be around four machines.
Hence my post. And a sad day for slashdot when I have to explain an allusion to a very famous moment in computing history!
I know let's take my 5.7 TeraFlops, your 5.7 TeraFlops, and his 5.7 TeraFlops and run a Beowulf cluster...