Take the typical state lotto. If you knew all of the variables in the machine that draws the numbers, you can solve for which numbers will land in the winning numbers area.
Ummmm....yeah...I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Most of those machines blow ping-pong balls around with air, which is most likely turbulent, and they are blown up into the slots when the lottery lady pulls the lever for the slot. Since, at a minimum, you can't solve for the state of the lottery lady, you can't "solve for which numbers will land in the winning numbers area."
(Never mind the outrageous accuracy of initial conditions and precision of the calculations you'd need to solve for the movement of ~4 dozen ping-pong balls being blown around by turbulent air.)
...there would no longer be any armed thugs in airports around the world...
As much as I'd like to believe that, it won't happen. Too many people are too scared of their own shadows, and too many others are getting money and political power because the first group is so scared.
The main effect that Slovakia's little experiment will have is probably that some people won't check luggage, and they'll be wary of anybody trying to get inside their personal space when they're at the airport. Or they just won't travel to Slovakia for a while.
Really? In the shoot-first-ask-questions-later world of "fighting terrorism," you ask how planting explosives on somebody in an airport without their knowledge could get them killed?
I'm not so sure...I seem to recall that he somehow had an article published here a day or so after the announcement of his death (too lazy to look it up though). Also, I'm sure his articles will get duped at least a few dozen times in the next five years.
The Earth has been around for billions of years and in the last several hundred million years, it's been hit by how many bodies large enough to threaten all life?
I think the concern is not so much "large enough to threaten all life" as "large enough to screw up modern civilization." Our energy/food distribution systems are, I suspect, a lot more fragile than ecosystems and such. Most life would survive strikes much larger than Apophis could make, but we probably wouldn't without being downgraded to hunter-gatherer status.
It behooves us to learn how to move these things around, and (unfortunately) you'll probably only convince the public to spend money on that if it's a real danger.
This sad truth will continue to occur until intelligent, capable people begin to devote their lives toward the education of our children.
She loves teaching but has had to go back to graduate school in order to escape the bullshit pay... You want good teachers? Fucking pay them.
My impression is that, even if you go back to grad school, you're still not going to be paid anywhere near what you'd get paid if you went and got a job in industry with that same masters or PhD. As long as our society expects bright people to suck it up if they want to teach, we're not going to get as many of them to teach as we'd like.
Of course, I still don't understand why we require teachers to have a bachelors or masters degree to teach grade school, or why schools need so damn many administrators and experts to "optimize" the teaching process.
So computing languages that try to avoid classic mathematical syntax are probably more a reflection of "the fear of math" rather than "the fear of computers".... The real problem in both cases is widespread fear and ignorance.
In general, I don't like fear and ignorance. I think we'd be better off as a species if we worked harder to eliminate it.
But some days, like the days when I go looking for work, I really love the widespread fear and ignorance of math and computer science. These people will keep me in a job for the rest of my life as long as I don't mind cleaning up after those that like running with scissors.
Mathematically modelling the brain would seem to be a very trivial problem. The problem is that there's a lot of brain to model. I've posted (admittedly non-rigorous) mathematical models of the brain on Slashdot before, but narry a grant check from it. Bah.
You must be either one of the greatest geniuses of all time, or uninformed on the topic of neurological modeling. People doing real research generally tend not to waste their time trolling Slashdot to find insightful theories, so you might want to try to get it published in a journal instead.
If you were to treat CFD as a problem in chaos theory, rather than as isolated collections of imperfect examples of special cases, there would be no problem. It is always when engineers try to take shortcuts and oversimplify the maths to make it easy on themselves that they run into problems.
What specific treatment, pray tell, would suffice as a "one algorithm fits all" approach to solving Navier-Stokes (let alone when mixed with extra behavior like crystal growth, chemical/thermal diffusion, etc.)? If it works, you should code it up, sell it, and make yourself rich.
The reason people "oversimplify" Navier-Stokes--by using reasonable assumptions in the context of the problem at hand--is because it often lets them determine analytically how the system will behave. If they *do* have to resort to numerics, making those assumptions greatly reduces the computing power required, so you don't need some high-powered (or highly customized) machine.
That sounds like good money to me.:) It's not enough to make me willing to take responsibility for things that could cost a client millions of dollars, but I could definitely do software development again for that kind of money.
However, you might be surprised how unsurprised I'd be concerning silly business decisions nowadays.;)
If the bug you introduce slips through testing and ends up halting an oil refinery and costing the company ## million dollars you tend to get more anal.
Well, of course. But then the oil refinery is going to have risk-averse management willing to pay more for risk-averse software development, and I don't have the detail-oriented personality needed for that kind of analness. So I wouldn't be touching that code anyway.;)
For what it's worth, if I worked in the class of business you're in, I'd not be looking to take responsibility for anything I didn't have to. They probably don't pay non-management people enough to warrant that level of concern in what comes out of your business unit.
That's great, until your huge refactoring introduces a new bug.
You can always make sure you've got some legitimate reason to have done the refactoring/redesign. I got away with rewriting a section of code that the owner of the company had cordoned off with comments like "DO NOT TOUCH, YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS ANY FASTER" because I made it run about 10 times faster. (Honestly, how can you ignore that kind of comment if you like programming?)
I checked in a bug fix (with unrelated speed improvements included) that introduced another bug, but also dropped application CPU usage from 75-100% to under 10%. The owner was initially pissed, of course, but I fixed the bug I introduced in under an hour, and showed that it was still a lot faster in addition to working correctly, and in the end the only reprimand I got was, "well, don't do that again without asking."
For the next few years I kept replacing bad code if I had to touch it, and, no, I didn't always ask first. I was more careful about testing my changes and (since the standard development model at this place was "seat of your pants" anyway) I rarely had any issues because of it.
Refactoring bad code is only scary if you're afraid to take responsibility for the code you put out.
Warning: This message may contain cynicism that some people may find offensive. Viewer discretion is advised.
But they were so blind to see that the work I did while it was an expense, it saved then millions of dollars in lost productivity, lost CPU time, cost savings in not needing to buy faster processors and more memory as my code ran tight and compact in lower ones, and days if not weeks of downtime and a dysfunctional system and software that takes them years to fix by hiring high priced contractors to do the work I would have done for my small salary.
It seems like it takes an inordinate amount of effort to sell doing maintenance/cleanup to management types, and I don't know enough about psychology or the "business" mindset to understand why that is. Let us know if you figure out the secret to being a high-priced contractor while still having a conscience and some integrity. I suspect that the most essential component of success as a high-paid contractor is being able to oversell yourself. Being able to deliver on any of it is optional.
(Note: I'm just taking you at your word that you were that valuable...I've seen others (and, at times, I've done it myself) that looked at themselves that way, but couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.)
It's striking how few supercomputers are sold to commercial companies.
I'm sure that in the early 20th century somebody was saying, "It's striking how few airplanes are sold to commercial companies," and going on to draw the conclusion that government spending on aircraft was a pork program. (And I'm sure there was some pure pork spending involved, but 100 years later, the overall effect of that kind of spending lets us use airplanes for things that would have been unthinkably expensive when people started spending money on them).
Today's supercomputer is the next decade's mid-range workstation. (Yes, I know, duh.)
The problem isn't powerpoint, the problem is professors who can't (or can't be bothered to) teach.
I wonder if universities will ever figure out that teaching and doing research are orthogonal skill sets, and that they shouldn't assume good researchers will make (or even want to be) good professors. Maybe it's just too hard to get funding to pay somebody just to do research, or just to teach.
I remember reading an article (in National Geographic, I think) when I was a kid that stated geologists thought the horn of Africa would eventually be separated from the rest of the continent by this activity. I haven't been a kid in at least two decades.
While I wouldn't choose to do my scientific computing on Windows, I know some people do, and those Tesla cards (which are providing the bulk of the processing power) really don't care which OS you're running.
Wow, I never even thought about that (I was just going for the "what a stupid concept for a show" angle), but I don't doubt they hate it.
Actually, maybe these shows provide some value to society: if you find yourself in a conversation with a member of $GROUP_X, all you have to do is bring up the $POPCULTURE_DEPICTION_OF_X show, and just agree with the almost guaranteed strong negative reaction. Nothing breaks the ice like a topic you can both get angry about.;)
Only if your job can't be outsourced. You think American business management is gonna give you the job just because the better qualified guy moved back home, and can work for even less there than he did here?
Disclaimer: I don't have anything against outsourcing, and certainly not against these folks that are moving back home to take advantage of better opportunities (more power to them). I'm just pointing out a fact about the current US business environment.
How is installing something that doesn't do what I need it to do sane?
It's not. For the record, I hate working in Windows, because it feels so damn limited. But I know there are a lot of people for whom $300 is worth far less than the hassle of trying to get their job (or even their entertainment) done on a non-MS platform.
The two reactors generate, as I recall, around 950MW-980MW thermal each. So, around 150MW of heat, per reactor, is dumped into the river. 85% efficiency, done on a large scale...
I think you've got some numbers wrong. Even with a heat sink right at freezing, the reactor would need to heat the water to 2850F just to get the Carnot efficiency to 85%. [Source]
Supercritical steam plants get almost 50% efficiency, but (steam) nuclear plants operate at lower temperatures and pressures, so their efficiency will necessarily be lower.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been some attempts to test it, so I wouldn't call it untested.
Take the typical state lotto. If you knew all of the variables in the machine that draws the numbers, you can solve for which numbers will land in the winning numbers area.
Ummmm....yeah...I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Most of those machines blow ping-pong balls around with air, which is most likely turbulent, and they are blown up into the slots when the lottery lady pulls the lever for the slot. Since, at a minimum, you can't solve for the state of the lottery lady, you can't "solve for which numbers will land in the winning numbers area."
(Never mind the outrageous accuracy of initial conditions and precision of the calculations you'd need to solve for the movement of ~4 dozen ping-pong balls being blown around by turbulent air.)
NSTX produces a plasma that is shaped like a sphere with a hole through its center (a "cored apple" profile, see Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak), different from the "donut" (toroidal) shaped plasmas of conventional tokamaks.
...there would no longer be any armed thugs in airports around the world...
As much as I'd like to believe that, it won't happen. Too many people are too scared of their own shadows, and too many others are getting money and political power because the first group is so scared.
The main effect that Slovakia's little experiment will have is probably that some people won't check luggage, and they'll be wary of anybody trying to get inside their personal space when they're at the airport. Or they just won't travel to Slovakia for a while.
Really? In the shoot-first-ask-questions-later world of "fighting terrorism," you ask how planting explosives on somebody in an airport without their knowledge could get them killed?
I'm not so sure...I seem to recall that he somehow had an article published here a day or so after the announcement of his death (too lazy to look it up though). Also, I'm sure his articles will get duped at least a few dozen times in the next five years.
The Earth has been around for billions of years and in the last several hundred million years, it's been hit by how many bodies large enough to threaten all life?
I think the concern is not so much "large enough to threaten all life" as "large enough to screw up modern civilization." Our energy/food distribution systems are, I suspect, a lot more fragile than ecosystems and such. Most life would survive strikes much larger than Apophis could make, but we probably wouldn't without being downgraded to hunter-gatherer status.
It behooves us to learn how to move these things around, and (unfortunately) you'll probably only convince the public to spend money on that if it's a real danger.
Cynical Slashdot nerd is not impressed, set faces on stun.
I suppose that's better than having a cynical Slashdot monkey set feces on stun.
This sad truth will continue to occur until intelligent, capable people begin to devote their lives toward the education of our children.
She loves teaching but has had to go back to graduate school in order to escape the bullshit pay... You want good teachers? Fucking pay them.
My impression is that, even if you go back to grad school, you're still not going to be paid anywhere near what you'd get paid if you went and got a job in industry with that same masters or PhD. As long as our society expects bright people to suck it up if they want to teach, we're not going to get as many of them to teach as we'd like.
Of course, I still don't understand why we require teachers to have a bachelors or masters degree to teach grade school, or why schools need so damn many administrators and experts to "optimize" the teaching process.
So computing languages that try to avoid classic mathematical syntax are probably more a reflection of "the fear of math" rather than "the fear of computers". ... The real problem in both cases is widespread fear and ignorance.
In general, I don't like fear and ignorance. I think we'd be better off as a species if we worked harder to eliminate it.
But some days, like the days when I go looking for work, I really love the widespread fear and ignorance of math and computer science. These people will keep me in a job for the rest of my life as long as I don't mind cleaning up after those that like running with scissors.
<asshole>
Mathematically modelling the brain would seem to be a very trivial problem. The problem is that there's a lot of brain to model. I've posted (admittedly non-rigorous) mathematical models of the brain on Slashdot before, but narry a grant check from it. Bah.
You must be either one of the greatest geniuses of all time, or uninformed on the topic of neurological modeling. People doing real research generally tend not to waste their time trolling Slashdot to find insightful theories, so you might want to try to get it published in a journal instead.
If you were to treat CFD as a problem in chaos theory, rather than as isolated collections of imperfect examples of special cases, there would be no problem. It is always when engineers try to take shortcuts and oversimplify the maths to make it easy on themselves that they run into problems.
What specific treatment, pray tell, would suffice as a "one algorithm fits all" approach to solving Navier-Stokes (let alone when mixed with extra behavior like crystal growth, chemical/thermal diffusion, etc.)? If it works, you should code it up, sell it, and make yourself rich.
The reason people "oversimplify" Navier-Stokes--by using reasonable assumptions in the context of the problem at hand--is because it often lets them determine analytically how the system will behave. If they *do* have to resort to numerics, making those assumptions greatly reduces the computing power required, so you don't need some high-powered (or highly customized) machine.
</asshole>
That sounds like good money to me. :) It's not enough to make me willing to take responsibility for things that could cost a client millions of dollars, but I could definitely do software development again for that kind of money.
However, you might be surprised how unsurprised I'd be concerning silly business decisions nowadays. ;)
If the bug you introduce slips through testing and ends up halting an oil refinery and costing the company ## million dollars you tend to get more anal.
Well, of course. But then the oil refinery is going to have risk-averse management willing to pay more for risk-averse software development, and I don't have the detail-oriented personality needed for that kind of analness. So I wouldn't be touching that code anyway. ;)
For what it's worth, if I worked in the class of business you're in, I'd not be looking to take responsibility for anything I didn't have to. They probably don't pay non-management people enough to warrant that level of concern in what comes out of your business unit.
That's great, until your huge refactoring introduces a new bug.
You can always make sure you've got some legitimate reason to have done the refactoring/redesign. I got away with rewriting a section of code that the owner of the company had cordoned off with comments like "DO NOT TOUCH, YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS ANY FASTER" because I made it run about 10 times faster. (Honestly, how can you ignore that kind of comment if you like programming?)
I checked in a bug fix (with unrelated speed improvements included) that introduced another bug, but also dropped application CPU usage from 75-100% to under 10%. The owner was initially pissed, of course, but I fixed the bug I introduced in under an hour, and showed that it was still a lot faster in addition to working correctly, and in the end the only reprimand I got was, "well, don't do that again without asking."
For the next few years I kept replacing bad code if I had to touch it, and, no, I didn't always ask first. I was more careful about testing my changes and (since the standard development model at this place was "seat of your pants" anyway) I rarely had any issues because of it.
Refactoring bad code is only scary if you're afraid to take responsibility for the code you put out.
Warning: This message may contain cynicism that some people may find offensive. Viewer discretion is advised.
But they were so blind to see that the work I did while it was an expense, it saved then millions of dollars in lost productivity, lost CPU time, cost savings in not needing to buy faster processors and more memory as my code ran tight and compact in lower ones, and days if not weeks of downtime and a dysfunctional system and software that takes them years to fix by hiring high priced contractors to do the work I would have done for my small salary.
It seems like it takes an inordinate amount of effort to sell doing maintenance/cleanup to management types, and I don't know enough about psychology or the "business" mindset to understand why that is. Let us know if you figure out the secret to being a high-priced contractor while still having a conscience and some integrity. I suspect that the most essential component of success as a high-paid contractor is being able to oversell yourself. Being able to deliver on any of it is optional.
(Note: I'm just taking you at your word that you were that valuable...I've seen others (and, at times, I've done it myself) that looked at themselves that way, but couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.)
It's striking how few supercomputers are sold to commercial companies.
I'm sure that in the early 20th century somebody was saying, "It's striking how few airplanes are sold to commercial companies," and going on to draw the conclusion that government spending on aircraft was a pork program. (And I'm sure there was some pure pork spending involved, but 100 years later, the overall effect of that kind of spending lets us use airplanes for things that would have been unthinkably expensive when people started spending money on them).
Today's supercomputer is the next decade's mid-range workstation. (Yes, I know, duh.)
The problem isn't powerpoint, the problem is professors who can't (or can't be bothered to) teach.
I wonder if universities will ever figure out that teaching and doing research are orthogonal skill sets, and that they shouldn't assume good researchers will make (or even want to be) good professors. Maybe it's just too hard to get funding to pay somebody just to do research, or just to teach.
I remember reading an article (in National Geographic, I think) when I was a kid that stated geologists thought the horn of Africa would eventually be separated from the rest of the continent by this activity. I haven't been a kid in at least two decades.
While I wouldn't choose to do my scientific computing on Windows, I know some people do, and those Tesla cards (which are providing the bulk of the processing power) really don't care which OS you're running.
Wow, I never even thought about that (I was just going for the "what a stupid concept for a show" angle), but I don't doubt they hate it.
Actually, maybe these shows provide some value to society: if you find yourself in a conversation with a member of $GROUP_X, all you have to do is bring up the $POPCULTURE_DEPICTION_OF_X show, and just agree with the almost guaranteed strong negative reaction. Nothing breaks the ice like a topic you can both get angry about. ;)
Don't forget the Testosterone^WHistory Channel's "Ice Road Truckers," "Axe Men" and the like.
The Bad Astronomer says it's fake.
More jobs for the rest of us.
Only if your job can't be outsourced. You think American business management is gonna give you the job just because the better qualified guy moved back home, and can work for even less there than he did here?
Disclaimer: I don't have anything against outsourcing, and certainly not against these folks that are moving back home to take advantage of better opportunities (more power to them). I'm just pointing out a fact about the current US business environment.
How is installing something that doesn't do what I need it to do sane?
It's not. For the record, I hate working in Windows, because it feels so damn limited. But I know there are a lot of people for whom $300 is worth far less than the hassle of trying to get their job (or even their entertainment) done on a non-MS platform.
The two reactors generate, as I recall, around 950MW-980MW thermal each. So, around 150MW of heat, per reactor, is dumped into the river. 85% efficiency, done on a large scale...
I think you've got some numbers wrong. Even with a heat sink right at freezing, the reactor would need to heat the water to 2850F just to get the Carnot efficiency to 85%. [Source]
Supercritical steam plants get almost 50% efficiency, but (steam) nuclear plants operate at lower temperatures and pressures, so their efficiency will necessarily be lower.