The reason for tenure *and* academic free speech was that corporations and political bigwigs would make donations to universities in order to silence the professors. That is, they'd say "I'll donate $X if you will not teach ______ subject." Or "Professor Loudmouth is such a pain. I'll donate $X if you'll fire him."
Deans actually hated this, because once you start down that path, there's no stopping it, and worse, each person thinks that his previous purchase should be enough to last forever, and that he, however, can simply pay a little bit more than the last guy who disagreed...... definitely not something you want to see at a university.
Unfortunately, this has started to come full circle in some areas, as (1) Universities became cash cows (2) corruption entered the administrative ranks.
For example at James Madison University a good while back, you would see stupid comments from the administration in the Faculty Handbook like "Academic Free Speech consists of the University's ability to determine what the professors can and cannot say."
Fortunately, the Faculty Senate voted it down, pointing out the the Faculty Handbook was their contract, and that until they accepted [signed] a new contract, the *old* one stood. Administration wasn't happy with that, but there was also the point that the new handbook was not even a legal contract, and could not be, because it included a clause that the administration could change it at will.
[Understand that this nonsense is not still happening at JMU, AFAIK]
Legally speaking, one-side-modifiable contracts are not contracts. EULAs, okay, but not contracts.
Remember that there's two ways of socializing
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Build Your Own ECG
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· Score: 1
I'd just like to point out that medicine is *already* socialized.
My late grandfather, Joseph F. Rudmin, was the first doctor in NY state to immunize all the kids in his district. But while he was county health commissioner, despite laws that said that only AMA members could hold government positions, he resigned the AMA.
He did this, because the AMA was using his dues to lobby for laws that would reduce the number of doctors, in order to raise doctors' wages. In the end, the state AMA made him an honorary member, rather than allow a stink to be made.
But they succeeded with their goals, and the number of doctors is held artificially low. So their wages are high. So the lawyers gather, because birds gather for free seed, and lawyers gather for free money. And the insurance companies step in, and...... the cost of healthcare skyrockets, 15% per year more than other costs.
But medicine is already socialized. If a doctor comes in from India, or another country, he can't just set up a practice. Nor can you just say "give me the medical tests, I'll pass them, the way reading lawyers can get their degree." Nor can you just go to another country to get a medical degree. It has to be an approved school, and so on and so forth.
In a related issue, my own town's hospital was one of the first in the state to build a cancer center. A nice little wing, built not too long after it had built a few other wings. Then they expanded it. Then they built a maternity wing.
Then I noticed a cancer center going up in Charlottesville. Then in Norfolk. Then I noticed cancer centers going up where there was no hospital (Waynesboro).
It's clear that the nation's health care system has metastacized!
"937 boxes of documents from the SCO vs. Microsoft case; you must register this with the appropriate judge, and may not destroy it, but you can have your own little piece of Microsoft dirt! This lot contains boxes #237-244. A digitized list of the contents of each box is as follows:..."
Not a problem at all
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Hijacking .NET
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· Score: 3, Funny
How could this ever be a problem?
This implies that Microsoft, in switching to the.net development model, is going open source!
Unofficially, of course. And people who implement it without being registered members of the Department of Homeland Security *could* be branded terrorist hijackers. But not to worry: only the evil ones will be. The others will accept automatic induction into the DHL framework.
If you want to stop talking theory, and look at evidence, go real "The Cross and the Switchblade", as I said. Then go look at Teen Challenge. Then come back, report on the evidence you found, and fit that into your theory.
For when a theory is at odds with evidence, the theory needs to be updated. Evidence is never wrong.
I don't talk about religion. I talk about Christianity and the Holy Spirit. "Religion", per se, is a political institution, as you say.
You want to say that great evil is done in the name of politics, I'd agree. That's called a beast: a great, lumbering, unintelligent composite animal, and there are more than enough beasts to go around.
But Christianity is necessarily personal, as is a relationship with the Holy Spirit and has nothing to do with beasts, except insofar as any group of like-minded people does start to take on a political dimension, as does any group of differently minded people.
If I point to the sun, and say "the sun is hot", you can always point at space and say "oh, the sun is just in space, and space is cold. So you're wrong." But I'm not wrong. You simply do not want to look at the hot part.
Which is fine -- nobody's forcing you. But it doesn't make you right.
To those who follow the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit (and thus God) is still very active. And through those people, God does a ton. But it isn't the pointless stuff like putting another man on the moon (very interesting, to be sure) or even feeding more people in India with the same amount of land (very good, and I'm sure God is quite impressed, couldn't have done it without you and all that). But it instead makes differences where it counts: such as healing hearts before they create wars like we have in Zaire, Israel, Iraq/Iran, or Nigeria.
Go back and look at the more recent saints, canonized by Pope John Paul II, and you'll see examples of the Holy Spirit in action.
No, God is quite active. Problem is that man is also very active, and often does not listen to God.
Have you ever had a son or daughter tell you that you're doing it wrong, and that you should build a house *this* way? We're good at that too, but instead of telling our parents, we tell God.
And he patiently waits for us to become convinced that we're wrong, and are willing to listen to him -- even if we have to fall on our face a dozen times before we figure it out that we really were wrong, and He really was right.
You want to see what God in action is like, go read "The Cross and the Switchblade". Then -- though that group is not so much for this time as its own time -- go see Teen Challenge. Check out its truth for yourself.
Just my thought here: Many states, maybe all, have made spam a crime.
But they have not been effective in stopping it.
Now, normally, when I am victimized by a crime, I am justified in defending myself. Mailblocks, however, is saying "You can't defend yourself against this crime, because we own the intellectual property for the methods of defense"?!?!
Okay, so whenever a new technology comes out, the mafia just needs to figure out (1) a way to victimize people (2) the best ways to defend against it. Then patent the defenses, and subsequently hit people from both sides.
Our government is coming to a real decision. Either defend IP at let criminals roam free, victimizing all and destroying the economy, or give up IP, and maintain order.
Meanwhile, Ralsky and his friends are going to be down at the patent office in a flash.
Something is rotten in the state of our legal system.
As I remember, there were irregularities in Mercury's orbit. He then adjusted the space-time equations to account for the gravitational field of the Sun, and proposed it as a theorem.
So that would imply to me that he applied the math. But first he had to come up with a model: that the irregularities were in fact regularities of the true space-time system.
He then had to decide what his limits were likely to be, and then come up with the new mathematical model. Finally, he had to check his work.
None of it was easy. None of it is easy today. But I think it was understandable for an incredibly smart person with enough time on his hands. He had both, and so he came up with it.
I think your wonderment is excellent, and you are right to wonder. But I could honestly ask the same about Linus Torvaldas' invention Linux (or semiinvention: I know he didn't do it *all* himself, neither did Einstein who had Newton's calculus to help him).
The bigger question to me is "what made him identify that as a productive field for his efforts?"
Good point. As a matter of fact, I don't tend to get details right in most things that aren't important, and [unfortunately] a lot of things that are.
In the case of alcohol and its effects on the human body, it is so far removed from my existance that I really don't know what percentage was. I was under the impression that 3% alcohol *would be* impossibly high. But maybe it isn't. Add in the fact that I'm living in an area without books for me to check things -- and either I say nothing, or I give what I have.
Modify the joke yourself, to suit, if you ever want to use it.
I just asked to see their logs, and showed on the diff-GPS system where the car appeared to jump 20 feet in the air and do a 360 degree flip. When they saw that, they realized that the GPS device was messed up, and didn't charge me the fine.
With the money I saved from that fine, I was able to upgrade my graphics card AND sound card on my computer. You wouldn't believe the difference that makes when playing GTA3.
And yes, that is a variation of a much older drunk driving joke.
Man and his family comes driving down the road, doesn't signal, officer pulls him over. Officer checks BAC since it's 1AM on New Years -- it's 0.034 -- impossibly high. Officer taps the device, takes the batteries out, puts them back in -- still 0.034. So he asks the wife to try it, just to check his data. She blows into it -- 0.034. Hmmm. So he tries it on the kids. 0.034. Finally, in desperation, he tries it himself. 0.034. Impossibly high, must be broken. He lets them go. As they're driving away, the man asks the kids "Okay, what's up?" The kids say "We broke into your stash while you had a cigarette before starting home."
HOW DID YOU KNOW I was eating a Cadbury bar and drinking water, and thinking about privacy issues !?! Yeah, I know you said *not* thinking about it, but I can tell a ruse when I see one...
... Let me make a note to tell Emma to buy more aluminum foil. This hat isn't working properly.
I really don't think it's possible for each of 30 people to be aware of all 30 other articles.
Why not assign one person to read *all* articles, and flag dupes?
Then everything has to be cleared by him, and we'll eliminate dupes. And if CmdrTaco or someone else has a reason that it should go up again, he can argue it out, and modify the headline accordingly, so the readers will also know why this should go up again.
Link here. In your browser, find "CmdrTaco", click on the checkbox next to it, and then go to the bottom and click "submit" (rough translation from swahili: submit = "apply patch".
[JUUUUST kidding, don't do this or you won't see any more of CmdrTaco's articles.]
Turning the FFT into an integer monster.
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Inside the PowerPC 970
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In response to your FFT being a floating point monster... in a lot of cases, couldn't you turn it into an integer monster? I've been thinking about this, and it occurs to me that the vector can be decomposed into halves (thus the 2^x units in the FFT), but a vector and angle theta it can as easily be decomposed into to vectors half the length, one at angle phi, and the other at angle (2theta-2phi).
That, where phi is any angle. That being the case, it seems to me that you could pick your values phi to correspond to "perfect" triangles (3-4-5, ~42 degrees, for example), and keep your operations in the integer realm for everything except subtraction of angles.
I dunno, I haven't checked this out really thoroughly, and this is therefore probably nonsense. Last time I tried to do anything with the DFT, I thought I had something that blew the FFT away in terms of speed... precisely because I didn't understand the full FFT process, and its beautiful simplicity.
In reality, I got a very modest improvement over the FFT, not worth the extra code in my opinion.
My method was very different, involving a redefinition of the DFT matrix-vector combination, and had more work on paper, but fewer multiplications. But what I thought was (log2n)^2 instead of the DFT's N^2 order of magnitude multiplications, was really something like 0.87Nlog2N multiplications. FFT gets N*log2N multiplications.
Essentially, when I understood the FFT well, and applied my lessons to it, I ended up showing that not all the multiplications are neccesary. Some of the FFT multiplications are dupes just like this article, and there is a system for finding them, also just like this article. (Look for the multiplications posted by Taco.)
But the fact that I can make such errors means that I could be completely wrong about my supposed integer FFT.
Just a point, here. If you bought that code from Caldera under the GNU license, specifically because it was an open-source, free-as-in-speech, and for whomever really wanted it, free-as-in-beer license,
and therefore found huge added value because you realised the amount of code that would be added by others to such a "viral" license......then suing all other distributions for "royalties" would significantly decrease the value of your purchase that you had made, because it would render your OS into obsolensence, which would then make your programs and data effectively inaccessible to you.
In other words, in an era where most products are "end-of-lifed" in 3-5 years, Linux has no end-of-life under the GPL, and therefore is far more valuable. And their violation of the GPL destroys that.
* No one wants to rip them off*... probably, very few people primarily want to rip them off, but a lot of people their music for free, and are *willing* to rip them off.
* I have never seen a business model that treats their customers do badly *. How about Stalin's business model, or Lenin's? How about the IRS? Or for non-governmental groups, how about universities? Airlines? Drug lords? Africa's AIDS-infected prostitutes? The Russian mafia's "Work in America" program for young East European and Russian women? Casinos? Believe me, there are plenty of business models that treat their customers badly.
For you to say "the best traditions", you are imposing your specific tastes and selection on what is "all the traditions, rules, profitability, service, and more" of UNIX.
That's kindof like picking "love your neighbor" as "the best traditions of Christianity" and thinking that therefore any Christian who doesn't support porn or homosexuality isn't... well... in the best traditions of Christianity.
Any traditional (orthodox) Christian would say "You can't reinterpret Christianity, and still call it Christianity", "You can't pick and choose, and still call it Christianity", "You can't break up the whole, and still call it Christianity".
The sum is more than the parts. If you have your own viewpoint, well, okay, just don't call it by the original name.
Because it isn't.
And for a deeply religious subject like UNIX vs. Linux vs. BSD, I have to say: the sum is more than the parts. You can't really break it up, and keep the same name.
So say "Linux" or "BSD". It'll help keep things clear.
And if you think about it, that too is in the best traditions of open source software: you don't like something, you can change it. And if the developers like the change you submit, they can incorporate it. But if they don't, you can distribute your own source code: just keep the same license (GNU) or not (BSD) as the case may be, and *give it your own name so that people don't get confused*.
They always say that the most important statement is given after the P.S.
You know, the RIAA is going to justify their economic injustice, by saying "well, we are just mitigating our losses due to theft, and we aren't going to pay more than we have to."
They're wrong to think that it makes their paying unjustly low wages okay, but you might just be comforted to know that they are using *your* petty evil, copying music illegally, to justify their evil.
It might just be a comforting thought. Or something.
Of course, you justify your petty evil either by saying "but I don't have the money I want" [same justification shoplifters use, and evil corporate directors], or by pointing out that the law goes against natural law -- which it does. It is a granted right, and granted rights usually damage inherent rights.
And that is justified because of other granted rights.
I just have a question, though. Is anybody going to stand up, like me, at least when it comes to their luxuries, and say "the shit stops here"?
At least, if this cycle of evil is going to complete another turn, say "that's life, but I won't be a part of the evil"?
It's easy to condemn others' evil -- but a bit harder, and more important to give up our own.
I'd just like to make a point here: when you see "temp employee", what you are seeing is "we don't want to or can't pay this person a full time salary and benefits". In other words, we can't or won't pay the upkeep costs of our help.
I can understand this for a startup company, as long as the company quickly moves to start covering the costs of its labor. But in the case of a wealthy organization, this means that the wealthy organization just *chooses* not to give economic justice. More for me, nothing for you.
I have been seeing this more and more, and it is part of what ails America. It comes from the move to give more to the investors, and comes from the blinds that are provided by corporate coverage, in which the investors can't see the plight of their workers.
But let me point out the results of economic injustice: if there is economic injustice, then the victim's investments remain unpaid, and in that case, it does not pay for the victim to invest!
In the case of inventors who can't afford to patent and defend their inventions, because the patent system only benefits wealthy corporations, the proper response is to not devote effort to inventing.
In the case where your compensation is not based upon justice, it does not pay to invest in an education that will make you a more valuable employee.
In the case where businesses are taxed to death, so that other businesses can recieve lucrative government contracts, it does not pay to start a business and help the economy: it pays to work your own garden instead.
In the case where individuals are taxed to death, to pay for more tax collectors, the farmer's strategy doesn't pay -- only the highway robber's strategy pays. If you want to see what this is like, look at Congo/Zaire.
If you think it is getting bad, and the problem is the government, then tell the government. If you don't think they'll listen, then it's better to leave, and find a better place.
If you think it is getting bad, and the problem is the people (yeah, they're all good people, they just, well, you can depend on them to do really evil things), then it's doubly important to find a better group of people.
Those pages have the links and the explanation. But assuming you want to get straight to the links [the external data], try here and pan down to problem number 36.
From all of this, you should walk away with the fact that tornados are inherently electrical events. They are not caused by warming. Yes, warming is integral to getting them started -- but pure warming does not have the power to make the tornado deadly.
Now, I don't know where you get the idea that a theory has merit or doesn't have merit. To me, merit comes from actual data, and matching physical reality. And no, I have never seen a tornado firsthand: the day a warming-style tornado (nondestructive) sat outside my apartment for 6 hours, I was out of the city. Another time, we saw a possible one forming behind us during severe storm on the superhighway, but it never touched down. But tornados are actually very rare and very small, even when you live where they often hit. So the chances are against seeing one.
However, as I said, I came from an area that had tornados, so I have been able to check out the tornado tracks firsthand. And I can testify that where the normal track of a tornado was this
This was the Colloseum Mall tornado in Hampton, VA. The tornado probably would have just damaged the tower building and gone on, if it hadn't already lost all its power. However, as it had already lost its power, it lifted up and did not touch down again.
There isn't anything that I can give you more than references to physical evidence. If you're going to believe this is bull, you're going to believe this is bull.
Pan down about 4 comments, to the bit about Electric Power lines.
You'll see a comment that is a little hard to believe, then an Anonymous coward, saying it is complete and utter bull, and then below that, a more complete explanation, with a reference to specific measurements.
But down't take my word for it. Get as far as the abstract in this paper, and you'll see that this is actually a valid theory.
Destructive tornados are electrically driven.
And mobile home parks, raising the ground level, really do draw em.
Except for the case of firestorms, the warm-air cold-air results in dust-devils and non-tornadic water spouts. It doesn't result in highly destructive tornados. The energy density of the warm-air cold-air heat engine just isn't enough to maintain it.
Sorry, talking off the top of my head, I said Kansas. I was wrong. It was the Geophysical Observatory in Tulsa OK, 1962.
The magnetic field was 1.5E-8 Tesla, so the current was about 600 Amps. Apply that to the electric field that is typical in storms [those tornados are filled with lightning], and you will find that the electrical power of the tornado is approximately equal to its wind power.
When you find a continuous energy exchange between two forms of energy, one potential, and one kinetic, it is no coincidence that the energy of each will be approximately equal. That is called an engine.
Now, to disrupt a tornado, you can either disrupt the kinetic energy, or you can disrupt the potential energy supply. Problem is, it is extremely difficult to even imagine disrupting the kinetic energy. Nonetheless, disrupting the potential energy source is possible in the case of 10kV power lines, and you can watch it happen in the ground tracks of tornados that approach them. Not the super-powerful ones, of course, but the smaller, hurricane-spawned ones.
I came from the Hampton Roads area, an area well known for tornados, and one observation I made was that high-voltage (10kV) powerlines act as tornado fences.
That is the observation. Here is what I believe is a related fact:
The wind power of the tornado is approximately equal to the electrical power that has been measured flowing through the tornado. That is, in Kansas approximately 1.2 Amps was measured flowing through a huge voltage (millions of volts), from ground to sky.
Another related fact: the air ionizing during lightning results in a cracking sound--but no boom. That boom is a capacitor discharging: Ground - cloud, just like your monitor before it goes bad. It is the clouds literally bouncing up and down after the discharge and released pressure on the dielectric air.
So these tornados are electrically driven. The storm drops a layer of charge, the right soil type holds the charge, then you get the tube, which forms a *low* power tornado, but the return of water ions to an electrically neutral state drives it up to high power.
But what happens in the zone of the power lines? The power lines disrupt the pickup and return process of the ions, which stops the tornado from crossing its path. So the tornado starts to run along the power lines, looking for a way through. Add in one other unit like a well-grounded tower, and -- in the case of the Hampton Roads tornado, it killed the tornado.
Now, that's not going to happen for a *really* large tornado, but for the small but deadly ones, getting on the other side of the power lines could be an advantage. Staying near the power lines could be bad.
Just as an aside, what's the reverse situation? Well, how about raising electrical ground over a large area? How about, for example, raising electrical ground by 20 feet over a square mile? Wouldn't that attract the tornado? Energy minimization would seem to draw a tornado in that direction, I would think. [A mobile home park, of course].
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The reason for tenure *and* academic free speech was that corporations and political bigwigs would make donations to universities in order to silence the professors. That is, they'd say "I'll donate $X if you will not teach ______ subject." Or "Professor Loudmouth is such a pain. I'll donate $X if you'll fire him."
... definitely not something you want to see at a university.
Deans actually hated this, because once you start down that path, there's no stopping it, and worse, each person thinks that his previous purchase should be enough to last forever, and that he, however, can simply pay a little bit more than the last guy who disagreed...
Unfortunately, this has started to come full circle in some areas, as (1) Universities became cash cows (2) corruption entered the administrative ranks.
For example at James Madison University a good while back, you would see stupid comments from the administration in the Faculty Handbook like "Academic Free Speech consists of the University's ability to determine what the professors can and cannot say."
Fortunately, the Faculty Senate voted it down, pointing out the the Faculty Handbook was their contract, and that until they accepted [signed] a new contract, the *old* one stood. Administration wasn't happy with that, but there was also the point that the new handbook was not even a legal contract, and could not be, because it included a clause that the administration could change it at will.
[Understand that this nonsense is not still happening at JMU, AFAIK]
Legally speaking, one-side-modifiable contracts are not contracts. EULAs, okay, but not contracts.
I'd just like to point out that medicine is *already* socialized.
... the cost of healthcare skyrockets, 15% per year more than other costs.
My late grandfather, Joseph F. Rudmin, was the first doctor in NY state to immunize all the kids in his district. But while he was county health commissioner, despite laws that said that only AMA members could hold government positions, he resigned the AMA.
He did this, because the AMA was using his dues to lobby for laws that would reduce the number of doctors, in order to raise doctors' wages. In the end, the state AMA made him an honorary member, rather than allow a stink to be made.
But they succeeded with their goals, and the number of doctors is held artificially low. So their wages are high. So the lawyers gather, because birds gather for free seed, and lawyers gather for free money. And the insurance companies step in, and...
But medicine is already socialized. If a doctor comes in from India, or another country, he can't just set up a practice. Nor can you just say "give me the medical tests, I'll pass them, the way reading lawyers can get their degree." Nor can you just go to another country to get a medical degree. It has to be an approved school, and so on and so forth.
In a related issue, my own town's hospital was one of the first in the state to build a cancer center. A nice little wing, built not too long after it had built a few other wings. Then they expanded it. Then they built a maternity wing.
Then I noticed a cancer center going up in Charlottesville. Then in Norfolk. Then I noticed cancer centers going up where there was no hospital (Waynesboro).
It's clear that the nation's health care system has metastacized!
Just auction it off on ebay.
"937 boxes of documents from the SCO vs. Microsoft case; you must register this with the appropriate judge, and may not destroy it, but you can have your own little piece of Microsoft dirt! This lot contains boxes #237-244. A digitized list of the contents of each box is as follows:..."
How could this ever be a problem?
.net development model, is going open source!
This implies that Microsoft, in switching to the
Unofficially, of course. And people who implement it without being registered members of the Department of Homeland Security *could* be branded terrorist hijackers. But not to worry: only the evil ones will be. The others will accept automatic induction into the DHL framework.
If you want to stop talking theory, and look at evidence, go real "The Cross and the Switchblade", as I said. Then go look at Teen Challenge. Then come back, report on the evidence you found, and fit that into your theory.
For when a theory is at odds with evidence, the theory needs to be updated. Evidence is never wrong.
Mmm hmm... Marx thought so too.
I don't talk about religion. I talk about Christianity and the Holy Spirit. "Religion", per se, is a political institution, as you say.
You want to say that great evil is done in the name of politics, I'd agree. That's called a beast: a great, lumbering, unintelligent composite animal, and there are more than enough beasts to go around.
But Christianity is necessarily personal, as is a relationship with the Holy Spirit and has nothing to do with beasts, except insofar as any group of like-minded people does start to take on a political dimension, as does any group of differently minded people.
If I point to the sun, and say "the sun is hot", you can always point at space and say "oh, the sun is just in space, and space is cold. So you're wrong." But I'm not wrong. You simply do not want to look at the hot part.
Which is fine -- nobody's forcing you. But it doesn't make you right.
Go back and look at the more recent saints, canonized by Pope John Paul II, and you'll see examples of the Holy Spirit in action.
No, God is quite active. Problem is that man is also very active, and often does not listen to God.
Have you ever had a son or daughter tell you that you're doing it wrong, and that you should build a house *this* way? We're good at that too, but instead of telling our parents, we tell God.
And he patiently waits for us to become convinced that we're wrong, and are willing to listen to him -- even if we have to fall on our face a dozen times before we figure it out that we really were wrong, and He really was right.
You want to see what God in action is like, go read "The Cross and the Switchblade". Then -- though that group is not so much for this time as its own time -- go see Teen Challenge. Check out its truth for yourself.
Just my thought here: Many states, maybe all, have made spam a crime.
But they have not been effective in stopping it.
Now, normally, when I am victimized by a crime, I am justified in defending myself. Mailblocks, however, is saying "You can't defend yourself against this crime, because we own the intellectual property for the methods of defense"?!?!
Okay, so whenever a new technology comes out, the mafia just needs to figure out (1) a way to victimize people (2) the best ways to defend against it. Then patent the defenses, and subsequently hit people from both sides.
Our government is coming to a real decision. Either defend IP at let criminals roam free, victimizing all and destroying the economy, or give up IP, and maintain order.
Meanwhile, Ralsky and his friends are going to be down at the patent office in a flash.
Something is rotten in the state of our legal system.
Your sig: Engineers do the work of man; physicists do the work of God.
Correction:
Engineers design the works of man
Natural philosophers (physicists), like all philosophers, *try to understand* the design of the works of God.
Christ did the work of God.
(and for those who say, don't bring religion into this, I didn't. He did.)
As I remember, there were irregularities in Mercury's orbit. He then adjusted the space-time equations to account for the gravitational field of the Sun, and proposed it as a theorem.
So that would imply to me that he applied the math. But first he had to come up with a model: that the irregularities were in fact regularities of the true space-time system.
He then had to decide what his limits were likely to be, and then come up with the new mathematical model. Finally, he had to check his work.
None of it was easy. None of it is easy today. But I think it was understandable for an incredibly smart person with enough time on his hands. He had both, and so he came up with it.
I think your wonderment is excellent, and you are right to wonder. But I could honestly ask the same about Linus Torvaldas' invention Linux (or semiinvention: I know he didn't do it *all* himself, neither did Einstein who had Newton's calculus to help him).
The bigger question to me is "what made him identify that as a productive field for his efforts?"
Good point. As a matter of fact, I don't tend to get details right in most things that aren't important, and [unfortunately] a lot of things that are.
In the case of alcohol and its effects on the human body, it is so far removed from my existance that I really don't know what percentage was. I was under the impression that 3% alcohol *would be* impossibly high. But maybe it isn't. Add in the fact that I'm living in an area without books for me to check things -- and either I say nothing, or I give what I have.
Modify the joke yourself, to suit, if you ever want to use it.
With the money I saved from that fine, I was able to upgrade my graphics card AND sound card on my computer. You wouldn't believe the difference that makes when playing GTA3.
And yes, that is a variation of a much older drunk driving joke.
Man and his family comes driving down the road, doesn't signal, officer pulls him over. Officer checks BAC since it's 1AM on New Years -- it's 0.034 -- impossibly high. Officer taps the device, takes the batteries out, puts them back in -- still 0.034. So he asks the wife to try it, just to check his data. She blows into it -- 0.034. Hmmm. So he tries it on the kids. 0.034. Finally, in desperation, he tries it himself. 0.034. Impossibly high, must be broken. He lets them go. As they're driving away, the man asks the kids "Okay, what's up?" The kids say "We broke into your stash while you had a cigarette before starting home."
I really don't think it's possible for each of 30 people to be aware of all 30 other articles. Why not assign one person to read *all* articles, and flag dupes? Then everything has to be cleared by him, and we'll eliminate dupes. And if CmdrTaco or someone else has a reason that it should go up again, he can argue it out, and modify the headline accordingly, so the readers will also know why this should go up again.
Link here. In your browser, find "CmdrTaco", click on the checkbox next to it, and then go to the bottom and click "submit" (rough translation from swahili: submit = "apply patch".
[JUUUUST kidding, don't do this or you won't see any more of CmdrTaco's articles.]
In response to your FFT being a floating point monster... in a lot of cases, couldn't you turn it into an integer monster? I've been thinking about this, and it occurs to me that the vector can be decomposed into halves (thus the 2^x units in the FFT), but a vector and angle theta it can as easily be decomposed into to vectors half the length, one at angle phi, and the other at angle (2theta-2phi).
That, where phi is any angle. That being the case, it seems to me that you could pick your values phi to correspond to "perfect" triangles (3-4-5, ~42 degrees, for example), and keep your operations in the integer realm for everything except subtraction of angles.
I dunno, I haven't checked this out really thoroughly, and this is therefore probably nonsense. Last time I tried to do anything with the DFT, I thought I had something that blew the FFT away in terms of speed... precisely because I didn't understand the full FFT process, and its beautiful simplicity.
In reality, I got a very modest improvement over the FFT, not worth the extra code in my opinion.
My method was very different, involving a redefinition of the DFT matrix-vector combination, and had more work on paper, but fewer multiplications. But what I thought was (log2n)^2 instead of the DFT's N^2 order of magnitude multiplications, was really something like 0.87Nlog2N multiplications. FFT gets N*log2N multiplications.
Essentially, when I understood the FFT well, and applied my lessons to it, I ended up showing that not all the multiplications are neccesary. Some of the FFT multiplications are dupes just like this article, and there is a system for finding them, also just like this article. (Look for the multiplications posted by Taco.)
But the fact that I can make such errors means that I could be completely wrong about my supposed integer FFT.
Just a point, here. If you bought that code from Caldera under the GNU license, specifically because it was an open-source, free-as-in-speech, and for whomever really wanted it, free-as-in-beer license,
...then suing all other distributions for "royalties" would significantly decrease the value of your purchase that you had made, because it would render your OS into obsolensence, which would then make your programs and data effectively inaccessible to you.
and therefore found huge added value because you realised the amount of code that would be added by others to such a "viral" license...
In other words, in an era where most products are "end-of-lifed" in 3-5 years, Linux has no end-of-life under the GPL, and therefore is far more valuable. And their violation of the GPL destroys that.
Sounds like a class-action lawsuit to me.
* No one wants to rip them off*... probably, very few people primarily want to rip them off, but a lot of people their music for free, and are *willing* to rip them off.
* I have never seen a business model that treats their customers do badly *. How about Stalin's business model, or Lenin's? How about the IRS? Or for non-governmental groups, how about universities? Airlines? Drug lords? Africa's AIDS-infected prostitutes? The Russian mafia's "Work in America" program for young East European and Russian women? Casinos? Believe me, there are plenty of business models that treat their customers badly.
"GNU" is very different from "UNIX".
... well... in the best traditions of Christianity.
For you to say "the best traditions", you are imposing your specific tastes and selection on what is "all the traditions, rules, profitability, service, and more" of UNIX.
That's kindof like picking "love your neighbor" as "the best traditions of Christianity" and thinking that therefore any Christian who doesn't support porn or homosexuality isn't
Any traditional (orthodox) Christian would say "You can't reinterpret Christianity, and still call it Christianity", "You can't pick and choose, and still call it Christianity", "You can't break up the whole, and still call it Christianity".
The sum is more than the parts. If you have your own viewpoint, well, okay, just don't call it by the original name.
Because it isn't.
And for a deeply religious subject like UNIX vs. Linux vs. BSD, I have to say: the sum is more than the parts. You can't really break it up, and keep the same name.
So say "Linux" or "BSD". It'll help keep things clear.
And if you think about it, that too is in the best traditions of open source software: you don't like something, you can change it. And if the developers like the change you submit, they can incorporate it. But if they don't, you can distribute your own source code: just keep the same license (GNU) or not (BSD) as the case may be, and *give it your own name so that people don't get confused*.
Deception is not encouraged.
You know, the RIAA is going to justify their economic injustice, by saying "well, we are just mitigating our losses due to theft, and we aren't going to pay more than we have to."
They're wrong to think that it makes their paying unjustly low wages okay, but you might just be comforted to know that they are using *your* petty evil, copying music illegally, to justify their evil.
It might just be a comforting thought. Or something.
Of course, you justify your petty evil either by saying "but I don't have the money I want" [same justification shoplifters use, and evil corporate directors], or by pointing out that the law goes against natural law -- which it does. It is a granted right, and granted rights usually damage inherent rights.
And that is justified because of other granted rights.
I just have a question, though. Is anybody going to stand up, like me, at least when it comes to their luxuries, and say "the shit stops here"?
At least, if this cycle of evil is going to complete another turn, say "that's life, but I won't be a part of the evil"?
It's easy to condemn others' evil -- but a bit harder, and more important to give up our own.
Just my $2.00.
I can understand this for a startup company, as long as the company quickly moves to start covering the costs of its labor. But in the case of a wealthy organization, this means that the wealthy organization just *chooses* not to give economic justice. More for me, nothing for you.
I have been seeing this more and more, and it is part of what ails America. It comes from the move to give more to the investors, and comes from the blinds that are provided by corporate coverage, in which the investors can't see the plight of their workers.
But let me point out the results of economic injustice: if there is economic injustice, then the victim's investments remain unpaid, and in that case, it does not pay for the victim to invest!
In the case of inventors who can't afford to patent and defend their inventions, because the patent system only benefits wealthy corporations, the proper response is to not devote effort to inventing.
In the case where your compensation is not based upon justice, it does not pay to invest in an education that will make you a more valuable employee.
In the case where businesses are taxed to death, so that other businesses can recieve lucrative government contracts, it does not pay to start a business and help the economy: it pays to work your own garden instead.
In the case where individuals are taxed to death, to pay for more tax collectors, the farmer's strategy doesn't pay -- only the highway robber's strategy pays. If you want to see what this is like, look at Congo/Zaire.
If you think it is getting bad, and the problem is the government, then tell the government. If you don't think they'll listen, then it's better to leave, and find a better place.
Here's How.
If you think it is getting bad, and the problem is the people (yeah, they're all good people, they just, well, you can depend on them to do really evil things), then it's doubly important to find a better group of people.
Here's a hint.
If worst comes to worst, duck, cover the ones you love as well as possible, stay out of the way of wars as much as possible, and try to live with as much justice and charity as possible.
But the bible is absolutely right: when we choose to withhold a man's wages, we commit violence. When we choose economic theft as a regular diet, we commit murder. And we recreate our world to become a horror. Our spiritual failings definitely bring physical problems and death.
Just my two cents. That's all.
Within the same zone would be a start.
Here or here
Those pages have the links and the explanation. But assuming you want to get straight to the links [the external data], try here and pan down to problem number 36.
Or go here and read again.
From all of this, you should walk away with the fact that tornados are inherently electrical events. They are not caused by warming. Yes, warming is integral to getting them started -- but pure warming does not have the power to make the tornado deadly.
Now, I don't know where you get the idea that a theory has merit or doesn't have merit. To me, merit comes from actual data, and matching physical reality. And no, I have never seen a tornado firsthand: the day a warming-style tornado (nondestructive) sat outside my apartment for 6 hours, I was out of the city. Another time, we saw a possible one forming behind us during severe storm on the superhighway, but it never touched down. But tornados are actually very rare and very small, even when you live where they often hit. So the chances are against seeing one.
However, as I said, I came from an area that had tornados, so I have been able to check out the tornado tracks firsthand. And I can testify that where the normal track of a tornado was this
ccccccTccc [Map key:]
ccccccTccc
ccccccTccc (T=Tornado)
PccccTcccc
cPccTccccc
ccTccccccc
TccPcccccc (P=Powerlines)
ccccPccccc
cccccPccGc (G=well-grounded tower-style office building)
as based on the cloud motion during the hurricane, the actual path that the tornado took was this:
ccccccTccc
ccccccTccc
ccccccTccc
PccccTcccc
cPccTccccc
ccPccTcccc
cccPccTccc
ccccPccTcc
cccccPccGc
This was the Colloseum Mall tornado in Hampton, VA. The tornado probably would have just damaged the tower building and gone on, if it hadn't already lost all its power. However, as it had already lost its power, it lifted up and did not touch down again.
There isn't anything that I can give you more than references to physical evidence. If you're going to believe this is bull, you're going to believe this is bull.
You'll see a comment that is a little hard to believe, then an Anonymous coward, saying it is complete and utter bull, and then below that, a more complete explanation, with a reference to specific measurements.
But down't take my word for it. Get as far as the abstract in this paper, and you'll see that this is actually a valid theory.
Destructive tornados are electrically driven.
And mobile home parks, raising the ground level, really do draw em.
Except for the case of firestorms, the warm-air cold-air results in dust-devils and non-tornadic water spouts. It doesn't result in highly destructive tornados. The energy density of the warm-air cold-air heat engine just isn't enough to maintain it.
M C: www.hsutx.edu/academics/chem_physics/kstephens/phy s1411/chapter19q.pdf+Geophysical+Observatory+1962+ tornado+magnetic+field&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Sorry, talking off the top of my head, I said Kansas. I was wrong. It was the Geophysical Observatory in Tulsa OK, 1962.
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:nZROvmxL6c
[Pan down to problem 36].
The magnetic field was 1.5E-8 Tesla, so the current was about 600 Amps. Apply that to the electric field that is typical in storms [those tornados are filled with lightning], and you will find that the electrical power of the tornado is approximately equal to its wind power.
When you find a continuous energy exchange between two forms of energy, one potential, and one kinetic, it is no coincidence that the energy of each will be approximately equal. That is called an engine.
Now, to disrupt a tornado, you can either disrupt the kinetic energy, or you can disrupt the potential energy supply. Problem is, it is extremely difficult to even imagine disrupting the kinetic energy. Nonetheless, disrupting the potential energy source is possible in the case of 10kV power lines, and you can watch it happen in the ground tracks of tornados that approach them. Not the super-powerful ones, of course, but the smaller, hurricane-spawned ones.
Which is what we had in Hampton Roads.
IANAM, but...
I came from the Hampton Roads area, an area well known for tornados, and one observation I made was that high-voltage (10kV) powerlines act as tornado fences.
That is the observation. Here is what I believe is a related fact:
The wind power of the tornado is approximately equal to the electrical power that has been measured flowing through the tornado. That is, in Kansas approximately 1.2 Amps was measured flowing through a huge voltage (millions of volts), from ground to sky.
Another related fact: the air ionizing during lightning results in a cracking sound--but no boom. That boom is a capacitor discharging: Ground - cloud, just like your monitor before it goes bad. It is the clouds literally bouncing up and down after the discharge and released pressure on the dielectric air.
So these tornados are electrically driven. The storm drops a layer of charge, the right soil type holds the charge, then you get the tube, which forms a *low* power tornado, but the return of water ions to an electrically neutral state drives it up to high power.
But what happens in the zone of the power lines? The power lines disrupt the pickup and return process of the ions, which stops the tornado from crossing its path. So the tornado starts to run along the power lines, looking for a way through. Add in one other unit like a well-grounded tower, and -- in the case of the Hampton Roads tornado, it killed the tornado.
Now, that's not going to happen for a *really* large tornado, but for the small but deadly ones, getting on the other side of the power lines could be an advantage. Staying near the power lines could be bad.
Just as an aside, what's the reverse situation? Well, how about raising electrical ground over a large area? How about, for example, raising electrical ground by 20 feet over a square mile? Wouldn't that attract the tornado? Energy minimization would seem to draw a tornado in that direction, I would think. [A mobile home park, of course].