I also knew I wanted to go into computer science at an early age.
The problem is that my high school did not offer any CS or even CS-like courses. The closest I could get was electronics, which was interesting but more of an engineering field. I had programmed on the side, so I was fairly well prepared regardless, but some programming courses would have made high school more fun.
To my knowledge, my high school still doesn't offer CS courses, so being forced to choose a "major" in high school would likely mean I'd be forced into a major I didn't plan on taking in college.
Though if I had known then that true CS is theoretical (and that I'd find the theory interesting), I'd have taken up math, since it would have prepared me just as well (maybe better).
Keep in mind that global warming, despite being well-known decades ago (and theorized since the 1820s!) did not become a mainstream issue until Al Gore stepped in. Individually, many people will agree with you, but collectively, society is fairly indifferent to this reasoning. Even now, everyone is becoming "carbon neutral" (often by simply slapping some money down for "offsets") because it's the fashionable thing to do. I'm starting to see "green" banners sprouting up on websites and advertisements indicating that an operation offsets its carbon production, but I'm not seeing any real work going into eliminating the source of the problem (emissions). Even the "fashionable" attempts at new fuel sources (Ethanol, Biodiesel, etc.) arose from ideas recently popularized by the Bush administration and rely on combustion of organic matter. These reactions are going to release chemicals into the atmosphere, and even if they are as innocuous as water vapor, we cannot predict what their environmental effects will be when emitted in large quantities (as evidenced by the fact that there is still a debate on the role of CO2 in the atmosphere). After all, even water vapor is a greenhouse gas, although drawing it from the atmosphere and putting it back later is probably fairly inconsequential. Ultimately, what we require is energy, not fuel, and it would be great if we could popularize the search for more efficient forms of renewable energy capture that do not rely on combustion of organic matter.
But that requires a demagogue, because while individuals are capable of thinking beyond the surface issues presented to them, the masses, collectively, are not. The "Support the Troops" phenomenon is another example of this: everyone loves to put stickers on their cars, but without action, that's simply grasping the message without understanding its meaning. The message can't only be about global warming, but must also be about the dangers of adopting nonrenewable energy sources. Similarly, the message can't be about "supporting the troops" in some vague way, but must be about preserving their lives, however that end goal may be accomplished.
The fact that an entire industry has built up around the concept of fueling also doesn't help. I don't believe that this industry is holding back the solution, per se, but they are not helping: the researchers these companies employ are not going to be interested in, say, solar power, unless there was some way for the company to maintain its viability in an economy dominated by that form of energy.
But at least what society is doing now might serve as a temporary measure. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any measure of transience to society's current plan; whatever methods of energy production we select in the near future, they are going to be used for quite some time and we are going to devote significant amounts of resources to their production, as with oil.
Dyson is correct; we do require "heretics". But these people also need to be able to call public attention directly down upon an issue, or they will be largely ignored in policy.
It is possible to do many things and do them all well. Granted, not everyone can do it, but it is possible nonetheless. In fact, if you can carry ideas from one discipline to another, you might do even better than an equivalent specialist. And even the most successful generalists usually have one primary skill that they tend to use often (da Vinci was a polymath, but he was still primarily an artist).
True, but I don't think that just upping the level cap by 10 each time an expansion is released is the solution. That just keeps people playing because they don't want to fall behind (Red Queen hypothesis). Eventually, they stop caring and leave. Adding, say, new dungeons, monsters, and items can be much more satisfying, and running more quests and getting players more involved in the storyline of the world is best of all, IMO.
This is true. My research group is doing this right now with brain tumors. As soon as (a) we have enough data (which usually involves testing treatments on the condition) and (b) the mouse begins to manifest intractable symptoms of the tumor or resulting mass effect, the mouse is killed quickly and (hopefully) painlessly.
Unfortunately, they also kill the mice after the experiment if treatment is successful. I don't see the need for this except to free up cages, and I am a bit surprised they don't want to continue studying the health of the mice over a longer term to see whether the treatment has adverse long-term effects or the tumors recur.
In other respects, the mice are treated quite well: they are given ample room to run around, their cages are well-kept, and there are lab staff dedicated to making sure the mice are regularly fed and watered. The researchers chosen to supervise the mice are specifically chosen for their empathy to further ensure that the animals aren't being mistreated.
...Not that all this changes the fact that we are doing horrible things to innocent animals in the name of science, but at least we are trying to minimize the amount of damage we need to do to get results that may save lives in the future.
I wasn't inferring that I agreed with Bush's policies... in fact, I deliberately chose wording that would not reflect any particular political stance. What I meant is that Bush had an easy time of influencing legislation that was favorable to him until the recent congressional election.
Parties are the problem, not the solution. We need no parties; we need politicians to think on their own about some issues for a change. Things like cohesive party-wide election strategies, "whips", thoughtless polarization on the issues by candidates, and thoughtless voting along party lines by voters have no place in a system originally designed to represent the interests of the people.
Not to mention the existence of political parties violates the doctrine of separation of powers, as one can observe from the increasing difficulty of the Bush administration to have favorable legislation passed after control of congress passed to the Democrats.
Slightly offtopic, but while we're disclosing weird Windows bugs...
Type (1+1=) into the Windows Vista calculator. It won't work for any other versions of Windows. A recent patch seemed to do something about it, but only in the sense of changing the crash that resulted to an abort or false assertion (which just crashes in a different way).
CS is more than just programming. You don't need a large amount of math to code, but good luck doing anything theoretical without a solid math background.
This is already done quite a bit, both on sites like halfbakery and on individual blogs. The reason is more to get the ideas out there than to have a dated record for prior art purposes, but it also serves that purpose well (although the timestamp is somewhat unreliable unless the post date is updated on edits).
You're correct, but most of us don't care. Until the journals write my papers for me, the public's right to access that information and my own right to dictate what to do with my content, as the author, trumps the journals' right to restrict access in the name of profit. When we receive neither compensation for nor rights to our own work, the intellectual property system is broken.
As scientists, it is our mission to advance our fields. A necessary precondition to this is enabling access to our work for the widest audience possible, so other scientists may build upon or refine our methods. I would argue that any "scientist" holding back results in the name of personal gain is not a scientist at all.
This is probably going to be used as an argument against net neutrality, whether valid or fallacious. Critics are going to claim that net neutrality will prevent ISPs from stopping piracy.
Ironic that the site carrying this story is called Red Herring.
Our solution on a roleplaying-only UO freeshard I used to run was to roleplay those people as crazy and/or speaking a foreign language... which they essentially were. They went away soon enough when they realized they were being ostracized by the community and picked on by the GMs.
Another interesting fact was that these were almost always the people who ran into random moongates (portals) without knowing where they led. Calling up a gate to somewhere dangerous and dispelling it immediately after they run in was one perfectly legal way to get rid of those people (after all, it was their choice to run in).
Why are we, probably the ones most capable of hacking said machines, complaining? I'm not advocating doing so, but a blatantly altered election following passage of a bill like that would send a message to the state. Perhaps we can just give the legislature input on "how we'd do it if we did it"... assuming they cared.
I find it ironic that you question my knowledge of number theory, as it's a field I've done research in. I realize that 1 must be treated as a special case in many proofs, thus the widespread use of the term "nontrivial", but thankfully, it does not have to be invoked every time a proof involving primality arises. That is what I was trying to illustrate.
As for considering 1 a prime, I suppose that's a question of opinion, but it doesn't really obey enough properties of the primes to warrant that designation in my mind (or the minds of most mathematicians, as far as I know). For instance, it's not relatively prime to any other primes - something that can be said of every other prime number. It's a very nice thing to say that any two distinct primes are coprime, and declaring 1 prime screws that up.
This is science we're talking about. 'Grandfathering' a planet would be like declaring 1 a prime because it was treated as one in the past. If we did this, we'd have to start explicitly making exclusions for the grandfathered planet/number ("all planets except Pluto are...").
Yes and no. Individual improvements tend to be incremental because everyone wants to get a lot of stuff published (this applies to about all of science nowadays). On the other hand, there still are the occasional breakthroughs, and overall the field is moving fairly rapidly. The research tends to sound really interesting, which leads to "hype" when the news agencies attempt to translate the messages in publications for the general public. The papers themselves (and papers in general, really) tend to be cautiously optimistic, citing potential problems, limitations, and improvements for the research in the conclusion.
Don't you mean 1 - (.02 *.4) =.992? (.98 *.6 =.588). If we have xW of power with 2% efficiency at the bulb and 40% efficiency at the line, (.02 *.4)x W of power would be used - divide by x, the total power, and the efficiency is (.02 *.4) =.008. This is a ratio, so we can subtract from 1 to get the inefficiency, or percentage of wasted power.
In any case, both you and the parent bring up good points. I still maintain that it's better to compound inefficiency as little as possible (imagine if everyone's power consumption was suddenly halved). We can do this at the line or by replacing current bulbs with CFLs (~four times as efficient).
Slashdot Mirror
I also knew I wanted to go into computer science at an early age.
The problem is that my high school did not offer any CS or even CS-like courses. The closest I could get was electronics, which was interesting but more of an engineering field. I had programmed on the side, so I was fairly well prepared regardless, but some programming courses would have made high school more fun.
To my knowledge, my high school still doesn't offer CS courses, so being forced to choose a "major" in high school would likely mean I'd be forced into a major I didn't plan on taking in college.
Though if I had known then that true CS is theoretical (and that I'd find the theory interesting), I'd have taken up math, since it would have prepared me just as well (maybe better).
Keep in mind that global warming, despite being well-known decades ago (and theorized since the 1820s!) did not become a mainstream issue until Al Gore stepped in. Individually, many people will agree with you, but collectively, society is fairly indifferent to this reasoning. Even now, everyone is becoming "carbon neutral" (often by simply slapping some money down for "offsets") because it's the fashionable thing to do. I'm starting to see "green" banners sprouting up on websites and advertisements indicating that an operation offsets its carbon production, but I'm not seeing any real work going into eliminating the source of the problem (emissions). Even the "fashionable" attempts at new fuel sources (Ethanol, Biodiesel, etc.) arose from ideas recently popularized by the Bush administration and rely on combustion of organic matter. These reactions are going to release chemicals into the atmosphere, and even if they are as innocuous as water vapor, we cannot predict what their environmental effects will be when emitted in large quantities (as evidenced by the fact that there is still a debate on the role of CO2 in the atmosphere). After all, even water vapor is a greenhouse gas, although drawing it from the atmosphere and putting it back later is probably fairly inconsequential. Ultimately, what we require is energy, not fuel, and it would be great if we could popularize the search for more efficient forms of renewable energy capture that do not rely on combustion of organic matter.
But that requires a demagogue, because while individuals are capable of thinking beyond the surface issues presented to them, the masses, collectively, are not. The "Support the Troops" phenomenon is another example of this: everyone loves to put stickers on their cars, but without action, that's simply grasping the message without understanding its meaning. The message can't only be about global warming, but must also be about the dangers of adopting nonrenewable energy sources. Similarly, the message can't be about "supporting the troops" in some vague way, but must be about preserving their lives, however that end goal may be accomplished.
The fact that an entire industry has built up around the concept of fueling also doesn't help. I don't believe that this industry is holding back the solution, per se, but they are not helping: the researchers these companies employ are not going to be interested in, say, solar power, unless there was some way for the company to maintain its viability in an economy dominated by that form of energy.
But at least what society is doing now might serve as a temporary measure. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any measure of transience to society's current plan; whatever methods of energy production we select in the near future, they are going to be used for quite some time and we are going to devote significant amounts of resources to their production, as with oil.
Dyson is correct; we do require "heretics". But these people also need to be able to call public attention directly down upon an issue, or they will be largely ignored in policy.
If they piss enough developers off, all they're going to kill is DirectX as everyone moves to OpenGL.
Athlon XP and an AGP NVidia GeForce 6800. No problems :)
Maybe it was a problem with your particular chipset?
It is possible to do many things and do them all well. Granted, not everyone can do it, but it is possible nonetheless. In fact, if you can carry ideas from one discipline to another, you might do even better than an equivalent specialist. And even the most successful generalists usually have one primary skill that they tend to use often (da Vinci was a polymath, but he was still primarily an artist).
True, but I don't think that just upping the level cap by 10 each time an expansion is released is the solution. That just keeps people playing because they don't want to fall behind (Red Queen hypothesis). Eventually, they stop caring and leave. Adding, say, new dungeons, monsters, and items can be much more satisfying, and running more quests and getting players more involved in the storyline of the world is best of all, IMO.
In the long run, however, it tends to kill the game.
This is true. My research group is doing this right now with brain tumors. As soon as (a) we have enough data (which usually involves testing treatments on the condition) and (b) the mouse begins to manifest intractable symptoms of the tumor or resulting mass effect, the mouse is killed quickly and (hopefully) painlessly.
Unfortunately, they also kill the mice after the experiment if treatment is successful. I don't see the need for this except to free up cages, and I am a bit surprised they don't want to continue studying the health of the mice over a longer term to see whether the treatment has adverse long-term effects or the tumors recur.
In other respects, the mice are treated quite well: they are given ample room to run around, their cages are well-kept, and there are lab staff dedicated to making sure the mice are regularly fed and watered. The researchers chosen to supervise the mice are specifically chosen for their empathy to further ensure that the animals aren't being mistreated.
...Not that all this changes the fact that we are doing horrible things to innocent animals in the name of science, but at least we are trying to minimize the amount of damage we need to do to get results that may save lives in the future.
You give no more reason for your claims than the parent that you criticize does.
I wasn't inferring that I agreed with Bush's policies... in fact, I deliberately chose wording that would not reflect any particular political stance. What I meant is that Bush had an easy time of influencing legislation that was favorable to him until the recent congressional election.
Parties are the problem, not the solution. We need no parties; we need politicians to think on their own about some issues for a change. Things like cohesive party-wide election strategies, "whips", thoughtless polarization on the issues by candidates, and thoughtless voting along party lines by voters have no place in a system originally designed to represent the interests of the people.
Not to mention the existence of political parties violates the doctrine of separation of powers, as one can observe from the increasing difficulty of the Bush administration to have favorable legislation passed after control of congress passed to the Democrats.
Slightly offtopic, but while we're disclosing weird Windows bugs...
Type (1+1=) into the Windows Vista calculator. It won't work for any other versions of Windows. A recent patch seemed to do something about it, but only in the sense of changing the crash that resulted to an abort or false assertion (which just crashes in a different way).
No, you'll still pay... and they'll serve you ads.
CS is more than just programming. You don't need a large amount of math to code, but good luck doing anything theoretical without a solid math background.
This is already done quite a bit, both on sites like halfbakery and on individual blogs. The reason is more to get the ideas out there than to have a dated record for prior art purposes, but it also serves that purpose well (although the timestamp is somewhat unreliable unless the post date is updated on edits).
You're correct, but most of us don't care. Until the journals write my papers for me, the public's right to access that information and my own right to dictate what to do with my content, as the author, trumps the journals' right to restrict access in the name of profit. When we receive neither compensation for nor rights to our own work, the intellectual property system is broken.
As scientists, it is our mission to advance our fields. A necessary precondition to this is enabling access to our work for the widest audience possible, so other scientists may build upon or refine our methods. I would argue that any "scientist" holding back results in the name of personal gain is not a scientist at all.
This is probably going to be used as an argument against net neutrality, whether valid or fallacious. Critics are going to claim that net neutrality will prevent ISPs from stopping piracy.
Ironic that the site carrying this story is called Red Herring.
Our solution on a roleplaying-only UO freeshard I used to run was to roleplay those people as crazy and/or speaking a foreign language... which they essentially were. They went away soon enough when they realized they were being ostracized by the community and picked on by the GMs.
Another interesting fact was that these were almost always the people who ran into random moongates (portals) without knowing where they led. Calling up a gate to somewhere dangerous and dispelling it immediately after they run in was one perfectly legal way to get rid of those people (after all, it was their choice to run in).
Why are we, probably the ones most capable of hacking said machines, complaining? I'm not advocating doing so, but a blatantly altered election following passage of a bill like that would send a message to the state. Perhaps we can just give the legislature input on "how we'd do it if we did it"... assuming they cared.
I find it ironic that you question my knowledge of number theory, as it's a field I've done research in. I realize that 1 must be treated as a special case in many proofs, thus the widespread use of the term "nontrivial", but thankfully, it does not have to be invoked every time a proof involving primality arises. That is what I was trying to illustrate.
As for considering 1 a prime, I suppose that's a question of opinion, but it doesn't really obey enough properties of the primes to warrant that designation in my mind (or the minds of most mathematicians, as far as I know). For instance, it's not relatively prime to any other primes - something that can be said of every other prime number. It's a very nice thing to say that any two distinct primes are coprime, and declaring 1 prime screws that up.
This is science we're talking about. 'Grandfathering' a planet would be like declaring 1 a prime because it was treated as one in the past. If we did this, we'd have to start explicitly making exclusions for the grandfathered planet/number ("all planets except Pluto are...").
Consistency is important in science.
Yes and no. Individual improvements tend to be incremental because everyone wants to get a lot of stuff published (this applies to about all of science nowadays). On the other hand, there still are the occasional breakthroughs, and overall the field is moving fairly rapidly. The research tends to sound really interesting, which leads to "hype" when the news agencies attempt to translate the messages in publications for the general public. The papers themselves (and papers in general, really) tend to be cautiously optimistic, citing potential problems, limitations, and improvements for the research in the conclusion.
If you don't already know about it, you should check out FLAC. It's lossless.
Don't you mean 1 - (.02 * .4) = .992? (.98 * .6 = .588). If we have xW of power with 2% efficiency at the bulb and 40% efficiency at the line, (.02 * .4)x W of power would be used - divide by x, the total power, and the efficiency is (.02 * .4) = .008. This is a ratio, so we can subtract from 1 to get the inefficiency, or percentage of wasted power.
In any case, both you and the parent bring up good points. I still maintain that it's better to compound inefficiency as little as possible (imagine if everyone's power consumption was suddenly halved). We can do this at the line or by replacing current bulbs with CFLs (~four times as efficient).
So let's compound the inefficiency?