An interesting idea. This might seem a sily question, bu humor me... Is there anything on the internet the Chinese government WANTS their people to be able to get to or or anything that they would be worried about that people might not being able to get to? In other words, who would actually get hurt by this?
And any configuration that can be reached by scrambling a solved cube with n 21 twist can be solved in n moves just by going backwards. There must be a whole lot of configuations of this kind. My guess is that there is a very certain class of the "hardest" configurations that actually require 25 moves (or alightly less, should the limit be imrpoved). These may not even be a large fraction of all possible permutations. Figuring out the average number of moves required should be another interesting problem.
How are the current versions of lower/upper limits of solutions to n-dimensional cubes with n not necessarily 3? It might sound ridiculous to you but I'm willing to bet my pants that some mathematician has thought about it and come up with some results.
Yeah, the professor figured out that, since rubik's cube is essentially a single player game, the "select" button, traditionally used to switch to "two-player" wasn't needed.
Yeah, then maybe a dude to do the homework for me, someone to go out every now and then for me, someone to read slashdot for me, maybe with some new technology someone to EAT for me, a friendly bot to take care of my friends and an info bot to watch TV for me - so I REALLY could have time to... uhm, wait a minute...
Well, we might have wireless access to our pets. And be able to watch porn during sleep. And the newest windows operating system will do the same things as today with 10^8 times the space.
Frankly, these things are just easy to screw up. It's like making typos. I never had a trouble understanding the difference and used to laugh at people who did - but I actually make these errors once in a while when writing in a hurry or when riding on top of that "self-righteous wave of common sense" I sometimes feel I'm on when I get carried away.:-P
Granted, I'm not a native speller. Point valid still are.
If the record companies just decided to agree to tell Wal-Mart to go fuck themselves, what would actually happen? Do they matter SO much that that is not a possibility? Do people buy music at Wal-Mart just because they saw a CD there (a CD they wouldn't have bought otherwise) or would they actually go buy that CD elsewhere if it wasn't at Wal-Mart.
Even though record companies are by no means my favourite, they would gain some tiny bit of respect if they decided to just drop Wal-Mart. A way of saying "we only do business with people who care about music". Though we know that it's not true.
No it's not. The real artists aren't hanging around bars. These guys we're probably just like you: Pretending. The real artists are AT HOME doing something useful. But you did make a good point. There are a lot of people who like pretending. I see them all the time and GOOD GOD I would have hated your guts - no offense - if I had seen you at that bar.
That is also the reason I don't use the word "artist" and that I use the word "art" sparingly. It just conjures up an image of those phoney people with army jackets and pins on them. I actually think the modern self-taught computer-geek has more to do with art than those people. There is probably less difference that you think in being a geek sitting in front of his computer hout after hour chasing after a buffer overflow, trying to get a tetris-piece to move or god-knows what and thet geek in the 16th century who spent hour after hour trying to get that smile to look just right. And there certainly is less difference between both the computer geek and the real artist than those phoney hanging-out-in-bars supposedly breathing in "culture" types.
An arist is a person who creates art. Show me the results, not the clothes. I agree with you on about a thousand levels, but I don't agree that you should accuse "art" of BEING this phoney - even modern art.
Yes, I know we are arrogant. Sometimes there is a reason for it though. I'm living with a girl who wrote a ten-page article on Plato's idea of "good". It's idea-history. It took her a week. By doing so she passed half of th semester. She was telling me that at a time I hadn't slept for twenty four-hours after the sheer terror of fininshing an exam in discrete mathamatics. The only reason I wasnðt jealous of her (or bitter) is that I was so damn proud of it. It was eleven pages of hard mathematics done in four days where I didn't sleep. I actually had six other ones I had to turn in, one for every week. The total amount of text I wrote was about forty pages. At the same time I was reading algebra 2 and had to take a verbal exam in that the same day I was handing in the other one. To finish the semester I went through the exact same thing with elementary number theory and topology. I don't know if you know the feeling of sitting somewhere for ten hours straight and just thinking about some problem. Then realise that it didn't do shit.
I'm not bitter. I LIKE doing this. You have to like it not to go insane. I don't know about other subjects' comparison, but mathematics is harder - so infitelty much harder - that idea-history.
But I really admire liberal arts peolle who actually ARE doing the equivalent quality of work I am doing. It just seems that there are some subjects, containing some people, that are able to get their eduacation for almost no amount of work. But of course that's an empty victory. People in Science departments wouldn't be arrogant if they really enjoyed their work. I'm not arrogant. People who don't know the sheer terror of discrete mathematics also don't know the fantastic thrill of discrete mathematics. It's their loss, not mine.
I, by the way, also compose music in my spare time and I agree that inspiration can be a total bitch. It's just so unpredictable!:)
And to conclude that little ramble, I'd like to leave a message for our engineering student: Save the drama for yo' mama!
Well, beer-drinking scientests... it's just fun. There's nothing wrong with throwing in something funny among all the oether ones about quantum cryptography, scientology and nuclear weapons in China. It's comic-relief. And writing a paper about drinking beer? Why not? It's one way of having fun while still doing science - a kind of an in-joke with scientists. And if it doesn't blow TOO much research money on the project, then what the heck?
As for people complaining about it... does it really upset you guys that much that this article took up 1/10th of your visual space on/.?
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting idea. This might seem a sily question, bu humor me... Is there anything on the internet the Chinese government WANTS their people to be able to get to or or anything that they would be worried about that people might not being able to get to? In other words, who would actually get hurt by this?
And any configuration that can be reached by scrambling a solved cube with n 21 twist can be solved in n moves just by going backwards. There must be a whole lot of configuations of this kind. My guess is that there is a very certain class of the "hardest" configurations that actually require 25 moves (or alightly less, should the limit be imrpoved). These may not even be a large fraction of all possible permutations. Figuring out the average number of moves required should be another interesting problem.
How are the current versions of lower/upper limits of solutions to n-dimensional cubes with n not necessarily 3? It might sound ridiculous to you but I'm willing to bet my pants that some mathematician has thought about it and come up with some results.
Yeah, but imagine hime trying to explain THAT to everybody present! :D
Yeah, the professor figured out that, since rubik's cube is essentially a single player game, the "select" button, traditionally used to switch to "two-player" wasn't needed.
Yeah, then maybe a dude to do the homework for me, someone to go out every now and then for me, someone to read slashdot for me, maybe with some new technology someone to EAT for me, a friendly bot to take care of my friends and an info bot to watch TV for me - so I REALLY could have time to... uhm, wait a minute...
http://www.applegate.co.uk/images/1388311_10.jpg
There is still money to go around?
Well, we might have wireless access to our pets. And be able to watch porn during sleep. And the newest windows operating system will do the same things as today with 10^8 times the space.
Frankly, these things are just easy to screw up. It's like making typos. I never had a trouble understanding the difference and used to laugh at people who did - but I actually make these errors once in a while when writing in a hurry or when riding on top of that "self-righteous wave of common sense" I sometimes feel I'm on when I get carried away. :-P
Granted, I'm not a native speller. Point valid still are.
And when they finally do, I'm NOT paying for it!
If the record companies just decided to agree to tell Wal-Mart to go fuck themselves, what would actually happen? Do they matter SO much that that is not a possibility? Do people buy music at Wal-Mart just because they saw a CD there (a CD they wouldn't have bought otherwise) or would they actually go buy that CD elsewhere if it wasn't at Wal-Mart.
Even though record companies are by no means my favourite, they would gain some tiny bit of respect if they decided to just drop Wal-Mart. A way of saying "we only do business with people who care about music". Though we know that it's not true.
Too bad we can't mod this "spiteful" rather than "insightful".
No it's not. The real artists aren't hanging around bars. These guys we're probably just like you: Pretending. The real artists are AT HOME doing something useful. But you did make a good point. There are a lot of people who like pretending. I see them all the time and GOOD GOD I would have hated your guts - no offense - if I had seen you at that bar.
That is also the reason I don't use the word "artist" and that I use the word "art" sparingly. It just conjures up an image of those phoney people with army jackets and pins on them. I actually think the modern self-taught computer-geek has more to do with art than those people. There is probably less difference that you think in being a geek sitting in front of his computer hout after hour chasing after a buffer overflow, trying to get a tetris-piece to move or god-knows what and thet geek in the 16th century who spent hour after hour trying to get that smile to look just right. And there certainly is less difference between both the computer geek and the real artist than those phoney hanging-out-in-bars supposedly breathing in "culture" types.
An arist is a person who creates art. Show me the results, not the clothes. I agree with you on about a thousand levels, but I don't agree that you should accuse "art" of BEING this phoney - even modern art.
Yes, I know we are arrogant. Sometimes there is a reason for it though. I'm living with a girl who wrote a ten-page article on Plato's idea of "good". It's idea-history. It took her a week. By doing so she passed half of th semester. She was telling me that at a time I hadn't slept for twenty four-hours after the sheer terror of fininshing an exam in discrete mathamatics. The only reason I wasnðt jealous of her (or bitter) is that I was so damn proud of it. It was eleven pages of hard mathematics done in four days where I didn't sleep. I actually had six other ones I had to turn in, one for every week. The total amount of text I wrote was about forty pages. At the same time I was reading algebra 2 and had to take a verbal exam in that the same day I was handing in the other one. To finish the semester I went through the exact same thing with elementary number theory and topology. I don't know if you know the feeling of sitting somewhere for ten hours straight and just thinking about some problem. Then realise that it didn't do shit.
:)
I'm not bitter. I LIKE doing this. You have to like it not to go insane. I don't know about other subjects' comparison, but mathematics is harder - so infitelty much harder - that idea-history.
But I really admire liberal arts peolle who actually ARE doing the equivalent quality of work I am doing. It just seems that there are some subjects, containing some people, that are able to get their eduacation for almost no amount of work. But of course that's an empty victory. People in Science departments wouldn't be arrogant if they really enjoyed their work. I'm not arrogant. People who don't know the sheer terror of discrete mathematics also don't know the fantastic thrill of discrete mathematics. It's their loss, not mine.
I, by the way, also compose music in my spare time and I agree that inspiration can be a total bitch. It's just so unpredictable!
And to conclude that little ramble, I'd like to leave a message for our engineering student: Save the drama for yo' mama!
Well, beer-drinking scientests... it's just fun. There's nothing wrong with throwing in something funny among all the oether ones about quantum cryptography, scientology and nuclear weapons in China. It's comic-relief. And writing a paper about drinking beer? Why not? It's one way of having fun while still doing science - a kind of an in-joke with scientists. And if it doesn't blow TOO much research money on the project, then what the heck?
/.?
As for people complaining about it... does it really upset you guys that much that this article took up 1/10th of your visual space on
He probably debunked a few beers in the process.
You mean the kind of drinker that has taken the "beer-bong-on-helmet" a little too far?
Would people care very much is we just settled for the first sunday in april?
Yep, it goes along with the article on how to find out which weekday "seven days before yesterday" is without using your fingers.
This is very true. Only TOO true in fact, if you remember what happened on Tian'anmen square 1989:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
I on the other hand would like to buy a virtualzation product from Microsoft about buying a vehicle from Merrill Lynch.
Please make that happen.
Group hug!
http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com/strip.aspx?id=5e13d87b-c596-4df8-8c9c-47f651d57893
Hence the "self-inflicted vocabulary impugnation".
Like when you try to eat a kilowatt of yellow.
Hahaha, he's probably the only one who knew the answer to that one! :)
Imagine THAT! If it was NP-complete, ALL NP-complete problems would be solved. Now THAT would be a major breakthrough.
You know what that means right? We could finally make a computer play a perfect game of tetris!