between the transistor and an influenza (closely related to SARS) virus, no less.
I don't think it shows the smallness of the transistor as much as I suddenly realized how much further we have to go before hitting biological complexity.
the surface of the virus has crazy number of protein receptors that allows it to latch onto only the proper cells, and inside a strand of genetic material that contains thousands, if not millions of ACGT pairs - which puts information density of our most hardcore RAM at a great shame. Actually there are probably other stuff inside, but IANAVirologist.
Looooong road ahead...
side note: I don't think the gearheads are so obsessed about the manufacturing process for cars, nor the martha-stuart followers the manufacturing process for triple flower-pattern guest-only bath towels, why are geeks sooooo into the photolithography process?
Anybody wants to offer an explanation?
i don't think you need to worry about it
on
Ant Farm PC
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· Score: 3, Funny
humans will do themselves in, and we dolphins will rule the earth!
well, 70% of it...
erm, okay, 25% of that 70% that hasn't been (badly) poluted yet...
actually, erm, 10% of that 25% of the 70% that hasn't had its ecosystem seriously impacted due to over-fishing...
ahh fsck it. i'm moving to ganymede.
yes, ants deserve such torture
on
Ant Farm PC
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· Score: 3, Informative
especially if you have ever been anywhere near fire ants. (for the record, I used to be in Louisiana - and I concur every bit with the article.
I don't know - when I read this, I got the same feeling of "bleh" I get when I think about genetic engineered corn and machine-pressed hamburger patties.
I mean, I know this will eventually comes out to be better wine (I hope), but I somehow feel creeped out by it.
Maybe this signals an oncoming age of specialty "wine made the same way as it always has been for the past 3000 years" niche.
Why does human mind do that, anyways - such illogical creatures, no?
hmm, just like his vacuum cleaner technology, right?
I believe his bagless version is quite some bit more advanced than the most (all?) of the other ones out there.
However, you are expected to pay some 400 dollars for a vacuum.
Now, that's very cool technology that he is touting, but no way in a billion years that i will choke up that kind of money for a vacuum - the fact is, if his vacuum technology is licensed liberally (or, I might add, not patented altogether), manufacturing for it would be drop in price and everyone can get hold of nice vacuums. However, now we'd have to wait some 17 years before that happens.
I don't think it's, in the end, for the Greater Good (tm). To be honest I have become quite convinced that even without patents, willingness to innovate would not be at all strifled, and patent laws, when abused, have a much higher tendency to do so. Yes if properly done patent is a wonderful thing, but so is communism - patent laws are too easy to abuse. But I digress - this is offtopic enough already
Before someone tries to market their own uphill water feature, they had better be warned. James Dyson - no stranger to court battles over patents - has presumably taken care of the necessary legal business.
Now, why would he do that? I know it might be a rhetorical question, but honestly though - all he would do, I presume, is to limit this neat but useless (admit it - this is as useless as your lava-lamp and plasma-ball (no seminal jokes please)) thing out of mainstream for a long time - instead of giving him eternal fame, etc.
Now - an interesting question to think about is what part of our pattern-recognizing brain is responsible for *falling* for such a visual illusion? Research like this can shed light on the workings of the mind, I think.
Doesn't Aibo run linux? How about Honda's Asimov (the robot) I really thought they did - maybe I was wrong, though. Anybody have definitive knowledge?
p.s. I think IBM japan is renting a honda Asimov as its receptionist for nearly 100,000 dollars per year. Who wants to be that it's the highest compensated 1) receptionist - ever 2) linux powered anything - ever (okay, if it ran linux - see above)
It does irks me that a robot makes more than me, though... sigh. I don't mind a 100k/yr job as a receptionist. Fuck, I will do the job for HALF that and do The Robot (dance) for 8 hours a day to impress the people coming in.
Well, if you want to be punctilious - I believe the bible has been originally been on parchment (i.e. processed horse-skin). I don't know if people are aware of this, but paper was invented in china many centuries later (600-900CE, i forgot), and not introduced to the west until even later.
My point, however, was that books has INDEED changed (even since the press). For one it's more accessible and more convenient. That, by itself, changed books in ways that greatly altered the way information is consumed from books. For example, what's the most frequent method of getting things out of (especially on-line) reference manuals? I usually load up the PDF and search for the item I am interested in. Now, I wouldn't do this to a novel, but that's exactly the thing - books are no longer only a medium to convey a continuous string of information like news or story, and this "search" functionality greatly improved the usefulness of books that are not continuous.
Moreover, the format of books are changing. Not even going to the tell a story with nothing but pictures approach, you can view a blog as a living book that's constantly updating itself to reflect the present, and re-examine the past.
So yes, books have changed. but of course you have to look at it at a different angle - though, really i guess the problem is that definition of a "book" isn't so clear anymore.
...The book has been largely unchanged for centuries...
I don't know about you but my stone tablet version of the bible has been getting dusty now that I can read pretty much everything under the sun on the internet.
or, hell, have the computer read it to me. (and if you have a Mac, have the computer SING it to you in various melodies that's - if nothing else - creepy but hilarious at the same time)
I have never have had that much good experience with OCR, personally. It seem that in the end, I get around 95% accuracy, while the OCR companies claim only 99% or somesuch.
Even assume that 99% accuracy is achievable, that's still 1% error, which means about 50 words would be OCR'd incorrectly out of every 1000 or so. (assuming 5 letters per word average)
That's a LOT of errors!
The problem is, for stuff like Mark Twain, who *intentionally* mis-spell stuff, or write out things phonetically (anybody read Huck Finn?), you won't know if it's an error because of the OCR or the author's original intent.
A typo was made that said spinach had 10x iron content than it really had. This became a undisputed fact for decades (and people are still going strong on it). So even though Mark Twain's works have millions of copies in circulation, I'd bet any errors contained within the digital versions won't surface for a long time, if ever. And this is Mark Twain we're talking about here. How about authors who don't get so much coverage?
So, if possible, can you enlighten us on some techniques that you guys are using to ensure that the digital replications are, well, CORRECT? I am sure it's impractical for human proofreaders...
never been in Silicon Valley during dotCom era?
on
30 Years of Ethernet
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you have, you would absolutely, certainly have the initials VC engarined in your mind. These are the overlords that controls your life and owns your soul.
Especially toward the end when all of them were changing from benevolent take-all-you-want piggybanks* to bloodsucking vampires that fires off one coworkers after next with glee**.
*note1: actually, from the beginning it was more like the inverse of beggars: they often *BEGGED* you to take their money if you just had the stupidest business plan involving the word "internet" and "e-commerce."
**note2: okay, I have to admit they didn't want to see the company they have vested interest fail, but toward the end, most VCs took control of their companies directly, and had no quarrals about tossing people out like used rags.
For all the geeks out there - the whole dot-com -> dot-bomb thing taught me one big lesson: unless you make it to upper management or start out on your own (really on your own, i.e. your own capital), you are just a (disposable) pawn in this game.
they say that this current inspired the Robot Wars, etc - which, incidentally, I have something to say.
Why oh why does nobody builds bepedal (or quadrapedal) robots? you get *TWICE* the weight limit! For that kind of mass, I'd get a robot that has two non-functional legs that will sit and peg the other guy with a retractable harpoon.
ahem.
Saw this on Google News a while back
on
OSI vs SCO
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Anyway - on a related note: this is why IBM will not buy SCO. As much as people daydream that IBM is "on our side" and all that, there seem to be all too many who conveniently forgets that IBM is in it for the money, not because they have some kind of conviction that OSI is morally good, or something - it's only good because it's making them money.
Buying SCO, even if it temporarily puts this behind them, makes OSI completely unworkable by IBM - beacuse this would set a precedence of sketchy IP companies suddenly realizing that IBM will actually pay CASH for bullshit patents and stuff. As much cash as IBM have, they can't be buying every bullshit patent touting company out there - at least not doing so while making a buck.
so, if SCO fucks linux over, IBM will just find another route to makey money, and if linux stands, IBM will continue to stand my its side. Regardless, though - don't expect IBM to chump out the change for SCO, though i do think they will push a few lawyers for the good cause, because getting a few lawyers and bust SCO's bs out of the water and keep linux standing will, in the end, mean the best bottom line for its business.
Why are humans soooo interested to keep all the old stuff around? I mean, being human I do realize that there are value in history - but am I the only one who thinks that some of this history can be re-created?
This can't be said about ecosystem because that's something we don't, and may not ever fully understand - so it is beneficial to keep species around because they can have potentially very important uses, but old computer hardware are stuff that was created by humans in the first place, so - despite some token items, why do we keep it all instead of dedicating resources to creating new and better stuff?
It's like a child who builds some lego creation but would not tear it down even though his current abilities in making lego based stuff are so much more advanced.
and, this question I think was asked on DS9, by who I forget - but certainly a Cardasian.
though if you didn't know you couldn't tell it from stainless steel or aluminium.
I'd figure that weight (specific. grav) would tell a great deal... Steel is at 7.8, Zirconium at 6.5, Aluminum at 3.2 or something. Besides that Aluminum has a tendency to oxidize in normal environments, giving it a hazy looking coat. Okay 7.8 and 6.5 is kinda hard, but I bet with enough practice it's doable. I mean, 20% difference.
Hmm, last I checked Spectra 1000 has tensile modulus of 172GPa (older version, Spectra 900 is at 117GPa or so) and steel averages around 210GPa... I wouldn't call that a huge difference. certainly more than half as you claimed.
impressive especially considering spectra has specific weight of.97 (water at 1) and steel 7.8 or so...
I mean, I can't imagine that if cost wasn't a consideration, any places where you wouldn't want a lighter material vs. the heavier one (except that polyethylene is not good with fire, so car engines are out).
but i digress. steel is cheap. but damn, as far as materials go, spectra is about the sexiest we got right now (that's mass-producable, anyway).
Zirconium plays a vital part in metallocene catalysis, which is the method of manufacturing high molecular density polyethylene, in another word, spectra. (stronger than steel (10x pound for pound), floats, i.e. stronger than KEVLAR and ~40-45% lighter, better chemical, UV resistance than kevlar, etc).
not related to silicon, but i like to point that out. in case people are looking for uses for zirconium =).
for those that thought about it - no spectra is not good enough for space elevator. only 3GPa tensile strength (steel about.25 for cheap ones and 5 for REALLY good ones). space elevator needs ~62GPa. nanotubes ~150GPa theoretical.
Anyway - I more or less flunked my Philosophy of Art class, but I got out this one little bit, which makes me look at all modern things called "art" in a whole new light.
In the old days, art copied things - but as photography came about, the necessity of that dropped away, and art began to *comment* on things.
One thing that art looooves to do is to comment on art itself. (basically one generation of art comments on the previous generation: e.g. post-modernism art being mostly comments on the modernism, etc (for the nit-pickers - i really forgot which "ism" comments on modern-ism, so if the fact is a little off, don't flame, ja?))
What it really boils down to is that for many years now, art has been very seclusive stuff - stuff commenting on previous stuff which were themselves comments on ever earlier stuff. For the non artist, besides the above as a background, one very, very important word of caution - unless you intend to keep track of what is the current subject of comment, and understand all the crap that came before that, I'd seriously recommend against spending money on the stuff. Besides very few items that eventually ends up famous for famous' sake (Mona-Lisa, for example, is viewed to be "famous because of it's fame" - that's another thing I got out of the class, btw), all you will be receiving in the end is a comment without any context to go with it, kinda like spending money for a single comment of slashdot, without knowledge of all its beowulf cluster of running jokes, previous stories with evil bits set, and you bought it just because it was moderated highly.
anyway, for decoration purposes, there are many decorating art you get at even malls these days. let me repeat: don't ever spend money on what *real* artist produces, unless you are very sure of what you are doing. (this in response to the auction site)
not to mention, most of the real art nowadays are crap anyways...
Since you already have every pair of nodes that are not connected, checking for the connectedness of intersects should be a walk in the park beacuse you are checking against list the first. I don't think that's O(n^2). It's more like O(however many intersect pairs you got)...
Unless the list of intersects (however many intersect pairs you got) is bound by n^2... hmmmmmmm...
haha, alright. I concede. you see why I am only the rank of "armchair computer programming contest participant."
p.s. I have to say, though, that the amount of connectedness amongst the nodes do tricky things - because if very few nodes are connected to eachother, that would give you a huge list to check previously (near n^2), but you would have nearly no neighbors, and vice versa. Even in the middle case (which I assume the worst), this should still limit the algorithm's O down. a little.
i don't think you need O(n^4) - though i must say, since it's limited to 50 nodes, even at n^4 it's pathetically small.
anyway, I think it's probably faster to (for every node n)
1) compile a list of nodes going out of n 2) compile a list of nodes coming into n 3) for every node m not associated to n (complement of (1)+(2), find its list nodes that it has relations with, and find the intersection of the sets 4) profit!
well, 250 points only, but i think the above should get you on your way at a lot less than O(n^4). unless i got some costs wrong for some of the operations (i am having doubts about the intersect).
I personally think this is a better programming competition paradigm than TopCoder.
in case people will probably not bother to click, it goes something like this:
you have three days to do the programming task (72 hours), and you submit it via email. you can use whatever language you want, etc etc. here is an official quote:
Programming should be about correctness and elegance, not about writing something in a hurry. Correctness is more and more important, for example in life-support systems and drive-by-wire automobiles, where there is no room for error.
There is no room for error in this contest either. The first thing the judges will do is test the programs and eliminate any entry that does not give correct results on all tests. Besides, the task will be simple enough that 3 days will be enough time to write, debug, and do some tweaking on your program, and get a normal amount of sleep. It was already the case for the previous years, and we see no reason to change.
the cool thing is this
[for the 1st place] Finally, the contest judges agree to state at least once during the presentation of the awards that the winning team's programming language is "the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers."
[for 2nd place] The contest judges agree to state at least once during the presentation of the awards that the winning team's programming language is "a fine programming tool for many applications."
[for special judges prize] The contest judges agree to state at least once during the presentation of the awards that the winning team is comprised of a group of "extremely cool hackers."
anyway... the money isn't as good, but I like it much better. btw the winner for the 2001 one used haskell, and second place used Dylan, ha! eat my (shorts), Arthur. =)
well after 69 comments (hehe), there has not been a SINGLE one discussing the competition problems, all three of which are quite interesting.
especially the hard one, probably, because my mind is drawing a blank on how to have it implemented... (no i didn't cheat and look at the solution).
heh, actually they go like this:
*easy* - okay, i can think of a algorithm. probably not the fastest thing in the world, but it should work out. *medium* - have a haze of an idea on what an algorithm might look like. with enough caffine it MIGHT solidify. *hard* - at least I understand the problem, but curses on the restrictions of a binary tree =)... no idea on algorithm that would finish executing before the end of the universe. (granted, only 50 elements, so maybe it's possible brute-force)
Damn; this is exactly how/. lowers productivity. making people spending way too much brain power on stuff that's completely unrelated and time consuming. heck; i might lose sleep over this.
I personally didn't notice any cg mistakes, but I usually don't until my second viewing of a film unless they are just glaring mistakes.
Remember the 1000px trailer a while back on/.? anyway, in the scene where all the Agent Smith(es) bum-rush Neo, you can see (frame-step helps) some Smith stuck their whole hands into other Smith's backs - and this happened on several occasions.
No it was not easy to spot, but it is *possible*. Anyhow I am not saying it ruins the experience in any way, but for 100 million dollars on special effects along, I'd figure that they checked for stuff like that.
The movie also flowed well. I didn't ever feel like a scene was put in "just because", except once. I personally felt that the love scene between Neo and Trinity was a little overboard, and that a lot more could have been said with a much more subtle approach.
Apparently you havn't read the last story about the perfect box office hit formula - you have to have sex scenes.
Which, I digress, is silly. How many movies can we name that would have been better without the sex? sigh... I am getting to a point that I think they knows this, and they don't want to change their formula - so what happens is usually that when I sense a stupid sex-scene coming, I take the opportunity for a bathroom break.
Slashdot Mirror
between the transistor and an influenza (closely related to SARS) virus, no less.
I don't think it shows the smallness of the transistor as much as I suddenly realized how much further we have to go before hitting biological complexity.
the surface of the virus has crazy number of protein receptors that allows it to latch onto only the proper cells, and inside a strand of genetic material that contains thousands, if not millions of ACGT pairs - which puts information density of our most hardcore RAM at a great shame. Actually there are probably other stuff inside, but IANAVirologist.
Looooong road ahead...
side note: I don't think the gearheads are so obsessed about the manufacturing process for cars, nor the martha-stuart followers the manufacturing process for triple flower-pattern guest-only bath towels, why are geeks sooooo into the photolithography process?
Anybody wants to offer an explanation?
humans will do themselves in, and we dolphins will rule the earth!
well, 70% of it...
erm, okay, 25% of that 70% that hasn't been (badly) poluted yet...
actually, erm, 10% of that 25% of the 70% that hasn't had its ecosystem seriously impacted due to over-fishing...
ahh fsck it. i'm moving to ganymede.
especially if you have ever been anywhere near fire ants. (for the record, I used to be in Louisiana - and I concur every bit with the article.
I don't know - when I read this, I got the same feeling of "bleh" I get when I think about genetic engineered corn and machine-pressed hamburger patties.
I mean, I know this will eventually comes out to be better wine (I hope), but I somehow feel creeped out by it.
Maybe this signals an oncoming age of specialty "wine made the same way as it always has been for the past 3000 years" niche.
Why does human mind do that, anyways - such illogical creatures, no?
hmm, just like his vacuum cleaner technology, right?
I believe his bagless version is quite some bit more advanced than the most (all?) of the other ones out there.
However, you are expected to pay some 400 dollars for a vacuum.
Now, that's very cool technology that he is touting, but no way in a billion years that i will choke up that kind of money for a vacuum - the fact is, if his vacuum technology is licensed liberally (or, I might add, not patented altogether), manufacturing for it would be drop in price and everyone can get hold of nice vacuums. However, now we'd have to wait some 17 years before that happens.
I don't think it's, in the end, for the Greater Good (tm). To be honest I have become quite convinced that even without patents, willingness to innovate would not be at all strifled, and patent laws, when abused, have a much higher tendency to do so. Yes if properly done patent is a wonderful thing, but so is communism - patent laws are too easy to abuse. But I digress - this is offtopic enough already
Now, why would he do that? I know it might be a rhetorical question, but honestly though - all he would do, I presume, is to limit this neat but useless (admit it - this is as useless as your lava-lamp and plasma-ball (no seminal jokes please)) thing out of mainstream for a long time - instead of giving him eternal fame, etc.
Now - an interesting question to think about is what part of our pattern-recognizing brain is responsible for *falling* for such a visual illusion? Research like this can shed light on the workings of the mind, I think.
Doesn't Aibo run linux? How about Honda's Asimov (the robot) I really thought they did - maybe I was wrong, though. Anybody have definitive knowledge?
p.s. I think IBM japan is renting a honda Asimov as its receptionist for nearly 100,000 dollars per year. Who wants to be that it's the highest compensated
1) receptionist - ever
2) linux powered anything - ever (okay, if it ran linux - see above)
It does irks me that a robot makes more than me, though... sigh. I don't mind a 100k/yr job as a receptionist. Fuck, I will do the job for HALF that and do The Robot (dance) for 8 hours a day to impress the people coming in.
Well, if you want to be punctilious - I believe the bible has been originally been on parchment (i.e. processed horse-skin). I don't know if people are aware of this, but paper was invented in china many centuries later (600-900CE, i forgot), and not introduced to the west until even later.
My point, however, was that books has INDEED changed (even since the press). For one it's more accessible and more convenient. That, by itself, changed books in ways that greatly altered the way information is consumed from books. For example, what's the most frequent method of getting things out of (especially on-line) reference manuals? I usually load up the PDF and search for the item I am interested in. Now, I wouldn't do this to a novel, but that's exactly the thing - books are no longer only a medium to convey a continuous string of information like news or story, and this "search" functionality greatly improved the usefulness of books that are not continuous.
Moreover, the format of books are changing. Not even going to the tell a story with nothing but pictures approach, you can view a blog as a living book that's constantly updating itself to reflect the present, and re-examine the past.
So yes, books have changed. but of course you have to look at it at a different angle - though, really i guess the problem is that definition of a "book" isn't so clear anymore.
I don't know about you but my stone tablet version of the bible has been getting dusty now that I can read pretty much everything under the sun on the internet.
or, hell, have the computer read it to me. (and if you have a Mac, have the computer SING it to you in various melodies that's - if nothing else - creepy but hilarious at the same time)
I have never have had that much good experience with OCR, personally. It seem that in the end, I get around 95% accuracy, while the OCR companies claim only 99% or somesuch.
Even assume that 99% accuracy is achievable, that's still 1% error, which means about 50 words would be OCR'd incorrectly out of every 1000 or so. (assuming 5 letters per word average)
That's a LOT of errors!
The problem is, for stuff like Mark Twain, who *intentionally* mis-spell stuff, or write out things phonetically (anybody read Huck Finn?), you won't know if it's an error because of the OCR or the author's original intent.
A typo was made that said spinach had 10x iron content than it really had. This became a undisputed fact for decades (and people are still going strong on it). So even though Mark Twain's works have millions of copies in circulation, I'd bet any errors contained within the digital versions won't surface for a long time, if ever. And this is Mark Twain we're talking about here. How about authors who don't get so much coverage?
So, if possible, can you enlighten us on some techniques that you guys are using to ensure that the digital replications are, well, CORRECT? I am sure it's impractical for human proofreaders...
If you have, you would absolutely, certainly have the initials VC engarined in your mind. These are the overlords that controls your life and owns your soul.
Especially toward the end when all of them were changing from benevolent take-all-you-want piggybanks* to bloodsucking vampires that fires off one coworkers after next with glee**.
*note1: actually, from the beginning it was more like the inverse of beggars: they often *BEGGED* you to take their money if you just had the stupidest business plan involving the word "internet" and "e-commerce."
**note2: okay, I have to admit they didn't want to see the company they have vested interest fail, but toward the end, most VCs took control of their companies directly, and had no quarrals about tossing people out like used rags.
For all the geeks out there - the whole dot-com -> dot-bomb thing taught me one big lesson: unless you make it to upper management or start out on your own (really on your own, i.e. your own capital), you are just a (disposable) pawn in this game.
they say that this current inspired the Robot Wars, etc - which, incidentally, I have something to say.
Why oh why does nobody builds bepedal (or quadrapedal) robots? you get *TWICE* the weight limit! For that kind of mass, I'd get a robot that has two non-functional legs that will sit and peg the other guy with a retractable harpoon.
ahem.
Anyway - on a related note: this is why IBM will not buy SCO. As much as people daydream that IBM is "on our side" and all that, there seem to be all too many who conveniently forgets that IBM is in it for the money, not because they have some kind of conviction that OSI is morally good, or something - it's only good because it's making them money.
Buying SCO, even if it temporarily puts this behind them, makes OSI completely unworkable by IBM - beacuse this would set a precedence of sketchy IP companies suddenly realizing that IBM will actually pay CASH for bullshit patents and stuff. As much cash as IBM have, they can't be buying every bullshit patent touting company out there - at least not doing so while making a buck.
so, if SCO fucks linux over, IBM will just find another route to makey money, and if linux stands, IBM will continue to stand my its side. Regardless, though - don't expect IBM to chump out the change for SCO, though i do think they will push a few lawyers for the good cause, because getting a few lawyers and bust SCO's bs out of the water and keep linux standing will, in the end, mean the best bottom line for its business.
look at the world with an economic eye, guys.
Why are humans soooo interested to keep all the old stuff around? I mean, being human I do realize that there are value in history - but am I the only one who thinks that some of this history can be re-created?
This can't be said about ecosystem because that's something we don't, and may not ever fully understand - so it is beneficial to keep species around because they can have potentially very important uses, but old computer hardware are stuff that was created by humans in the first place, so - despite some token items, why do we keep it all instead of dedicating resources to creating new and better stuff?
It's like a child who builds some lego creation but would not tear it down even though his current abilities in making lego based stuff are so much more advanced.
and, this question I think was asked on DS9, by who I forget - but certainly a Cardasian.
I'd figure that weight (specific. grav) would tell a great deal... Steel is at 7.8, Zirconium at 6.5, Aluminum at 3.2 or something. Besides that Aluminum has a tendency to oxidize in normal environments, giving it a hazy looking coat. Okay 7.8 and 6.5 is kinda hard, but I bet with enough practice it's doable. I mean, 20% difference.
All bets are off if they are alloyed, though...
Hmm, last I checked Spectra 1000 has tensile modulus of 172GPa (older version, Spectra 900 is at 117GPa or so) and steel averages around 210GPa... I wouldn't call that a huge difference. certainly more than half as you claimed.
.97 (water at 1) and steel 7.8 or so...
impressive especially considering spectra has specific weight of
I mean, I can't imagine that if cost wasn't a consideration, any places where you wouldn't want a lighter material vs. the heavier one (except that polyethylene is not good with fire, so car engines are out).
but i digress. steel is cheap. but damn, as far as materials go, spectra is about the sexiest we got right now (that's mass-producable, anyway).
btw - this kinda shows how bs was bush's little thing about saddam using ALUMINUM tubes for reactors.
not related to silicon, but i like to point that out. in case people are looking for uses for zirconium =).
for those that thought about it - no spectra is not good enough for space elevator. only 3GPa tensile strength (steel about .25 for cheap ones and 5 for REALLY good ones). space elevator needs ~62GPa. nanotubes ~150GPa theoretical.
okay. end rant.
In the old days, art copied things - but as photography came about, the necessity of that dropped away, and art began to *comment* on things.
One thing that art looooves to do is to comment on art itself. (basically one generation of art comments on the previous generation: e.g. post-modernism art being mostly comments on the modernism, etc (for the nit-pickers - i really forgot which "ism" comments on modern-ism, so if the fact is a little off, don't flame, ja?))
What it really boils down to is that for many years now, art has been very seclusive stuff - stuff commenting on previous stuff which were themselves comments on ever earlier stuff. For the non artist, besides the above as a background, one very, very important word of caution - unless you intend to keep track of what is the current subject of comment, and understand all the crap that came before that, I'd seriously recommend against spending money on the stuff. Besides very few items that eventually ends up famous for famous' sake (Mona-Lisa, for example, is viewed to be "famous because of it's fame" - that's another thing I got out of the class, btw), all you will be receiving in the end is a comment without any context to go with it, kinda like spending money for a single comment of slashdot, without knowledge of all its beowulf cluster of running jokes, previous stories with evil bits set, and you bought it just because it was moderated highly.
anyway, for decoration purposes, there are many decorating art you get at even malls these days. let me repeat: don't ever spend money on what *real* artist produces, unless you are very sure of what you are doing. (this in response to the auction site)
not to mention, most of the real art nowadays are crap anyways...
Since you already have every pair of nodes that are not connected, checking for the connectedness of intersects should be a walk in the park beacuse you are checking against list the first. I don't think that's O(n^2). It's more like O(however many intersect pairs you got)...
Unless the list of intersects (however many intersect pairs you got) is bound by n^2... hmmmmmmm...
haha, alright. I concede. you see why I am only the rank of "armchair computer programming contest participant."
p.s. I have to say, though, that the amount of connectedness amongst the nodes do tricky things - because if very few nodes are connected to eachother, that would give you a huge list to check previously (near n^2), but you would have nearly no neighbors, and vice versa. Even in the middle case (which I assume the worst), this should still limit the algorithm's O down. a little.
or so my gut tells me. heh.
i don't think you need O(n^4) - though i must say, since it's limited to 50 nodes, even at n^4 it's pathetically small.
anyway, I think it's probably faster to (for every node n)
1) compile a list of nodes going out of n
2) compile a list of nodes coming into n
3) for every node m not associated to n (complement of (1)+(2), find its list nodes that it has relations with, and find the intersection of the sets
4) profit!
well, 250 points only, but i think the above should get you on your way at a lot less than O(n^4). unless i got some costs wrong for some of the operations (i am having doubts about the intersect).
in case people will probably not bother to click, it goes something like this:
you have three days to do the programming task (72 hours), and you submit it via email. you can use whatever language you want, etc etc. here is an official quote:
the cool thing is thisanyway... the money isn't as good, but I like it much better. btw the winner for the 2001 one used haskell, and second place used Dylan, ha! eat my (shorts), Arthur. =)well after 69 comments (hehe), there has not been a SINGLE one discussing the competition problems, all three of which are quite interesting.
/. lowers productivity. making people spending way too much brain power on stuff that's completely unrelated and time consuming. heck; i might lose sleep over this.
especially the hard one, probably, because my mind is drawing a blank on how to have it implemented... (no i didn't cheat and look at the solution).
heh, actually they go like this:
*easy* - okay, i can think of a algorithm. probably not the fastest thing in the world, but it should work out.
*medium* - have a haze of an idea on what an algorithm might look like. with enough caffine it MIGHT solidify.
*hard* - at least I understand the problem, but curses on the restrictions of a binary tree =)... no idea on algorithm that would finish executing before the end of the universe. (granted, only 50 elements, so maybe it's possible brute-force)
Damn; this is exactly how
Remember the 1000px trailer a while back on /.? anyway, in the scene where all the Agent Smith(es) bum-rush Neo, you can see (frame-step helps) some Smith stuck their whole hands into other Smith's backs - and this happened on several occasions.
No it was not easy to spot, but it is *possible*. Anyhow I am not saying it ruins the experience in any way, but for 100 million dollars on special effects along, I'd figure that they checked for stuff like that.
Apparently you havn't read the last story about the perfect box office hit formula - you have to have sex scenes.
Which, I digress, is silly. How many movies can we name that would have been better without the sex? sigh... I am getting to a point that I think they knows this, and they don't want to change their formula - so what happens is usually that when I sense a stupid sex-scene coming, I take the opportunity for a bathroom break.