I'd like to correct the impression that the OED is a profit centre for OUP. The OED, and in fact all of OUP, is a non-profit, and the OED runs at a loss of millions of pounds a year, a loss borne by the rest of OUP. The amount charged for the dictionary only just covers the cost of distributing it (i.e. either printing etc. or supporting the Web servers etc.), but not the cost of having sixty full-time staff members and hundreds of paid consultants. The OED does also work hard to try to make the dictionary widely available, for instance by encouraging libraries to license versions that they can make available offsite to members.
Your comments are true if the waste streams are really that heterogenous, but waste volume is so incredibly high in this society that I think you have to be wrong for quite a few particular "mixes". Sewage, for example; highly predictable mix and very high volume. Offal is another likely one.
I agree that some waste streams -- perhaps household garbage -- are going to be more difficult to separate than others, but just handling sewage, offal, agricultural waste and the waste discharge of the largest volume manufacturing systems is enough to have a huge impact all by itself.
There is no upper bound on the maximum gap between primes. The proof is quite easy: there are (N - 1) consecutive composite numbers from (N! + 2) to (N! + N). This is because 2 divides N! + 2; 3 divides N! + 3, and so on. So if you want a billion consecutive composite numbers, such a sequence starts at (1,000,000,001! + 2).
For those who find primes fascinating, I can recommend John Derbyshire's "Prime Obsession", a history of the Riemann Hypothesis. The math is kept to alternate chapters so it's readable as a pure history book. It does a pretty good job of explaining how Riemann's famous zeta function relates to primes.
Mike
Isaac Asimov has a piece in one of his science collections -- unfortunately I don't recall which one, but maybe someone can post a link -- that discusses "what is a moon?". The really interesting conclusion he draws is that by at least one common-sense test, the traditional "moon" is not a moon!
As I recall (and I apologize if I get this wrong; we're working with twenty-years-ago memories here) the key point was the relative strength of the gravitational attraction between the sun and moon, and between the earth and moon. I think the sun attracts the moon just a fraction more strongly than the earth does. The result is that at no time does the moon move away from the sun and towards the earth, and it does the opposite at some points in its orbit.
I can't remember the details so I won't post more, but with luck someone else can dig this up.
Perhaps the "72 years" refers to 1930, the year in which they cut the stem of the funnel and started the pitch dripping. Between 1927 and 1930 they let the pitch settle in the funnel.
One of the things that's interesting about this article is how closely related the release process for free software is to that for commercial software. Commercial products have many things in their genesis that free products do not, but when it gets to be time to produce a clean release "the aim of the release process is to finish software, not to develop it." Waugh cites that quote from Havoc Pennington as applying to Free Software, but in fact it applies to both. It's a kind of convergent evolution into a niche; the ecological imperatives of product survival force projects to adopt these mechanisms in order to be successful.
The really interesting question is where does this convergence start? Are the reward systems, involving kudos and problem-solving pleasure for free software, and money for commercial software, fundamentally different? I suspect they're not, and that there is much less difference between an open source project and commercial product development than is sometimes thought. I'd guess that the more successful examples of each strongly resemble each other.
It seems as though the businesses that do this sort of thing are suffering from wishful thinking. The DIV/X vs. DVD fiasco should have taught companies that you can't take away what consumers already have; it's like King Canute trying to hold back the tide. And Napster is another example: they cut off the hydra's head and out popped seven more, ready to eat the music industry.
I would like to know more about why they've put something into an expensive system that they have got to know is going to kill it in the marketplace. Do Microsoft and HP have ties to the entertainment industry I don't know about?
One thing's for certain -- the future of home entertainment is changing, but the "Media Center PC" is not where it's going.
Hi; yes, we'd need hardcopy. I'll go ahead and add this as information to the web page, and ask for anyone with access to track down a copy. This approach has been quite successful so far; just today I received a detailed citation for "skyhook" from a chap who'd read the request on the web page for a cite from a specific "Science" article.
Meanwhile I should add that because of the slashdot effect my turnaround time on most email is going to be about two weeks. I will get to everything eventually, but I have a bit of a full inbox right now. Thanks to everyone who's mailed me something.
The OED has 1956 as the earliest cite for "artificial intelligence", in a paper by Minsky. The source is cited as "Heuristic Aspects Artificial Intelligence Probl. (M.I.T. Lincoln Lab. Group Rep. 34-55)". If this can be antedated by a print reference from McCarthy earlier that year, that would be great.
Hi; Mike Christie here; I'm the person moderating the OED sf website and responding to emails there. We've had a lot of emails in the last few hours, so my response time is going to drop from a day or two to perhaps as long as a week, though I will be trying to keep up. I'll answer every email I get, so please don't think I'm ignoring you.
I think the Asimov's Robotics laws probably do need to be added, and I'll be talking to the OED editors about it soon. Please go ahead and send in cites: I should say that although I have a large sf collection, and have submitted many cites, one reason for the webpage is that I don't have time to dig out every cite that is relevant (though I often have the original magazine publication of a story, which is useful). So even if something seems obvious to you, go ahead and send it in.
I also want to say that we currently can't accept citations from web pages. I'm interested in hearing about them, because they may lead to a subsequent print citation, but for the moment they don't go in the database. I mention it because several people have sent the results of, for example, Google searches. They're interesting (and I'll reply individually to those folks) but unfortunately they're not citable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to correct the impression that the OED is a profit centre for OUP. The OED, and in fact all of OUP, is a non-profit, and the OED runs at a loss of millions of pounds a year, a loss borne by the rest of OUP. The amount charged for the dictionary only just covers the cost of distributing it (i.e. either printing etc. or supporting the Web servers etc.), but not the cost of having sixty full-time staff members and hundreds of paid consultants. The OED does also work hard to try to make the dictionary widely available, for instance by encouraging libraries to license versions that they can make available offsite to members.
Your comments are true if the waste streams are really that heterogenous, but waste volume is so incredibly high in this society that I think you have to be wrong for quite a few particular "mixes". Sewage, for example; highly predictable mix and very high volume. Offal is another likely one. I agree that some waste streams -- perhaps household garbage -- are going to be more difficult to separate than others, but just handling sewage, offal, agricultural waste and the waste discharge of the largest volume manufacturing systems is enough to have a huge impact all by itself.
For those who find primes fascinating, I can recommend John Derbyshire's "Prime Obsession", a history of the Riemann Hypothesis. The math is kept to alternate chapters so it's readable as a pure history book. It does a pretty good job of explaining how Riemann's famous zeta function relates to primes. Mike
As I recall (and I apologize if I get this wrong; we're working with twenty-years-ago memories here) the key point was the relative strength of the gravitational attraction between the sun and moon, and between the earth and moon. I think the sun attracts the moon just a fraction more strongly than the earth does. The result is that at no time does the moon move away from the sun and towards the earth, and it does the opposite at some points in its orbit.
I can't remember the details so I won't post more, but with luck someone else can dig this up.
Perhaps the "72 years" refers to 1930, the year in which they cut the stem of the funnel and started the pitch dripping. Between 1927 and 1930 they let the pitch settle in the funnel.
The really interesting question is where does this convergence start? Are the reward systems, involving kudos and problem-solving pleasure for free software, and money for commercial software, fundamentally different? I suspect they're not, and that there is much less difference between an open source project and commercial product development than is sometimes thought. I'd guess that the more successful examples of each strongly resemble each other.
I would like to know more about why they've put something into an expensive system that they have got to know is going to kill it in the marketplace. Do Microsoft and HP have ties to the entertainment industry I don't know about?
One thing's for certain -- the future of home entertainment is changing, but the "Media Center PC" is not where it's going.
Hi; yes, we'd need hardcopy. I'll go ahead and add this as information to the web page, and ask for anyone with access to track down a copy. This approach has been quite successful so far; just today I received a detailed citation for "skyhook" from a chap who'd read the request on the web page for a cite from a specific "Science" article.
Meanwhile I should add that because of the slashdot effect my turnaround time on most email is going to be about two weeks. I will get to everything eventually, but I have a bit of a full inbox right now. Thanks to everyone who's mailed me something.
Mike
Mike Christie (OED sf citations moderator)
I think the Asimov's Robotics laws probably do need to be added, and I'll be talking to the OED editors about it soon. Please go ahead and send in cites: I should say that although I have a large sf collection, and have submitted many cites, one reason for the webpage is that I don't have time to dig out every cite that is relevant (though I often have the original magazine publication of a story, which is useful). So even if something seems obvious to you, go ahead and send it in.
I also want to say that we currently can't accept citations from web pages. I'm interested in hearing about them, because they may lead to a subsequent print citation, but for the moment they don't go in the database. I mention it because several people have sent the results of, for example, Google searches. They're interesting (and I'll reply individually to those folks) but unfortunately they're not citable.
Mike