Burning that much rocket fuel would turn our atmosphere in to that of Venus's! Instead, we need to find other extrasolar terrestrial planets before we plan any trips to Mars. Trust me on this one.
People are forgetting Moore's law. We had the technology to pepper the third-world with these years ago, and in an indirect way, we did. Now we must follow through.
Another patch that's needed is to have internet-wide messaging capabilities with the Bablefish or Google-API translations, which would naturally be represented in the game with a handheld universal translator
Great, so, where's the patch that turns it into a The Sims-style system for the Army Corps of Engineers, where you go around installing solar roofs and handing out educational systems to disadvantaged third-world nations?
The only way to win is to not breed the festering terrorists that the marines have to shoot at in the first place.
Here are some more recommendations, in no particular order:
TableCurve -- this is a special case of number-crunching software, used to perform typical statistical analyses, and the integrated graphics are very good for most practical applications of statistics.
The Maple V Learning Guide -- this comes with Maple (and presumably Matlab if you get it with Maple) and teaches more than a typical undergraduate mathematics program in about 270 pages. Actually, you have to delve into the hypertext documentation of Maple to get at all the calculus, linear algebra, statistics, etc., but it's all in there.
What If there were No Significance Tests -- this overpriced volume (which you should be able to get for much less from the publisher's site, www.erlbaum.com that doesn't seem to be working right now) explains exactly what soft scientists (e.g., psychologists) mean when they say something is true.
100 Statistical Tests -- this reasonably priced but somewhat advanced, applied book will tell you how to tell whether something is true, even if you have to use indirect or partially correlated measurements. The author has provided tools with what you can quickly find the appropriate test(s) for most situations I can imagine.
To be fair, do you have any evidence that Earth is unique? I have looked, and there seems to me to be none at all.
There are many stars. Many of those stars are similar to our star. Since the late 80s, we know that there are many gassious planets. Many of those planets are similar to our gassious planets. We know from stellar specrtroscopy that the iron and other earthacious minerals produced by supernovae are abundant (the proof is because the universe is beige, believe it or not), and we know from our own solar system that accretion of such minerals tends to produce planets such as Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the asteroids. We also know from example that such planets are stable even when involved in systems with much larger planets. Read the TPF sites for more statisitical estimations of the probability.
Your next questions should be to ask: What proportion of expected orbits of terrestrial planets support liquid water? And, what proportion of the expected sizes of terrestrial planets can hold an earth-like atmosphere?
Many academic types have some good guesses, but they are only weak and meager theory. This race of ours needs to roll up our sleeves and get emperical on the questions!
The only way to find out for sure is to build stellar-occulding spectrographic and interferometric telescopes to look and see. To paraphrase, you are either with us that wish to find out, or your wish to waste precious resources on terraforming Mars is against those of us who want to put our eggs in more than just one other basket.
If we can terraform Mars for a couple of hundred quadrillion dollars now, think about how much less it would cost a few hundred years down the road. If instead we put generation starships on our critical path, we can easily put one in orbit around Mars on the side, and have them get a closer look at the problem. You must apply your capability of reason and critical path analysis to see the proper goal.
The parent comment is an excellent idea, but after you've brushed up with textbooks, if you want to know where the cutting edge of math is really these days, there is no substitute for interactive software.
You should start by looking at every single function in the header file "math.h" in ANSI C (Appendix B of Kernigan & Ritchie) and for each of them ask yourself "what exactly does this function do?"
Then you need some math programs. You only really need one from each of two categories. You need one serious number crunching program, and one serious algebra program.
For number crunching, I recommend "Octave" (which is free but hard to compile correctly unless there is already a binary for your platform), "Matlab" (which will run you several hundreds of dollars but you can probably get a used copy with a want ad or an auction site), or a spreadsheet with a sufficient coverage of library functions, such as Excel. I recommend them in that order.
In addition to a number cruncher, you will want a computer algebra system (which will also do calculus and "higher" math): Maple, Matlab, and Macsyma; again, I recommend them in that order.
EFF does "usually" win. The reason you might think they dont is that when they don't win, they keep trying, so the majority of the messages from the EFF are about something that they haven't won yet.
Therefore jcast would love to study optics, spectroscopy, and the related physics and math. Or, you could just email NASA -- the TPF team's explanation is probably superior to mine. I could ask them for you if you want that.
The human race needs to ask themselves: do you want a vacation so expensive as to make a real voyage impossible, or do they want the voyage?
Plenty of hardworking Americans have given their lives to help eradicate hunger. Pretending that they are frauds is the worst kind of psychological compensation for guilt about being so selfish. Without such FUD, people would not shrug off apathy so easily.
For shame!
Perhaps you would rather have your dollars taxed by George W. Bush, so he can go "finish the job" in Iraq, where his father's policies have already contributed to the deaths of half a million children. That's just what the middle-eastern tinderbox needs.
When I read posts like the parent comment, I sometimes wish for additional nuclear proliferation. If the more of the third world got the bomb, perhaps they would all the sudden be our close personal friends like Pakistan is all of the sudden. Those nukes have sent more US aid to Pakistan than all the charity commercials on television.
Why should looking for an already habitable planet be next to impossible? Once we have have stellar occluding cameras with the spectographic resolution to determine temperature, water, oxygen, and other essential compounds, we will be able to make very good guesses. That is why they are called "Terrestrial" Planet Finders.
"Generation starship" means that the travel time is longer than human lifetime(s); the passengers at arrival are the (great)*-grandchildren of the passengers at departure. The next feat of engineering on the spacefaring critical path is to build such a generation starship with sufficient resources for a "round trip" in case they have to turn around and come back. Although that is difficult, it is many orders of magnitude easier than terraforming Mars.
Neither the moon nor any asteroid can hold an atmosphere, and thus can not be terraformed. Mars is the best local bet, true, but until our bioligical sciences improve, Mars would still require more trips with more tons of cargo to terraform than is practical relative to extrasolar colonization, unless we can't find any extrasolar suitably terrestrial planets. There is evidence that we probably can, though. Don't shoot first and ask questions later.
The real question is, who knows how to build the smallest speech recognition hardware and software system effective in such situations, e.g., which requires the least amount of CPU, cache, and battery support? Speech recognition is not easy, but a 200 MHz system with the kind of cache common in Pentium systems is overkill. StrongArm and other RISCs without FPUs aren't that great for the task, although fixed-point versions of the DSP routines involved are feasable.
If this happened often enough, we could hasten the melting of Antartica (raising seas 16 feet) much faster than global warming, even.
Did anyone read Douglas Adam's Last Chance To See? If people are willing to spend that much money and disruptive tourism on endangered species safaries, all while ignoring the cognitive dissonance, can real estate on sea-going glacier ice be too far behind?
All with heated cabins and world-class chefs, I'm sure.
AMR is a truly great vocodec technology, which stands for "Adaptive Multi Rate." Accordingly, it takes less bandwidth and battery time because when the microphone isn't picking up sound (from, e.g., your speech) your phone isn't sending as much information. Just the way it ought to be. Why spend 4 kbps to send comfort noise when 20 bps can do just as well? Execellent code!
Slashdot Mirror
Please do not go to Mars.
Burning that much rocket fuel would turn our atmosphere in to that of Venus's! Instead, we need to find other extrasolar terrestrial planets before we plan any trips to Mars. Trust me on this one.
Love,
James
Do-it-yourself speech recognition-based reading instruction
CMU Sphinx
comp.speech.research
Cambridge Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (speech data not included)
Best wishes,
James
To learn to read, you need speech recognition
People are forgetting Moore's law. We had the technology to pepper the third-world with these years ago, and in an indirect way, we did. Now we must follow through.
... and George W. Bush would just prefer I forget that he's a convicted drunk driver and traitor.
Another patch that's needed is to have internet-wide messaging capabilities with the Bablefish or Google-API translations, which would naturally be represented in the game with a handheld universal translator
Great, so, where's the patch that turns it into a The Sims-style system for the Army Corps of Engineers, where you go around installing solar roofs and handing out educational systems to disadvantaged third-world nations?
The only way to win is to not breed the festering terrorists that the marines have to shoot at in the first place.
TableCurve -- this is a special case of number-crunching software, used to perform typical statistical analyses, and the integrated graphics are very good for most practical applications of statistics.
Books:
The Nuts and Bolts of Proofs -- the heart of correct math is showing your work, and this book shows you how.
The Data Game -- Controverses in Social Science Statistics -- this really puts you in touch with the kinds of numbers you hear bandied about on the news, and what those numbers mean.
The Maple V Learning Guide -- this comes with Maple (and presumably Matlab if you get it with Maple) and teaches more than a typical undergraduate mathematics program in about 270 pages. Actually, you have to delve into the hypertext documentation of Maple to get at all the calculus, linear algebra, statistics, etc., but it's all in there.
Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability -- actually there were two volumes published in 1980, and one or both might have gone out of print.
What If there were No Significance Tests -- this overpriced volume (which you should be able to get for much less from the publisher's site, www.erlbaum.com that doesn't seem to be working right now) explains exactly what soft scientists (e.g., psychologists) mean when they say something is true.
100 Statistical Tests -- this reasonably priced but somewhat advanced, applied book will tell you how to tell whether something is true, even if you have to use indirect or partially correlated measurements. The author has provided tools with what you can quickly find the appropriate test(s) for most situations I can imagine.
Of course I agree. When I wrote "sometimes," I meant, "less than one one-millionth of a percent of the times I think about it."
There are many stars. Many of those stars are similar to our star. Since the late 80s, we know that there are many gassious planets. Many of those planets are similar to our gassious planets. We know from stellar specrtroscopy that the iron and other earthacious minerals produced by supernovae are abundant (the proof is because the universe is beige, believe it or not), and we know from our own solar system that accretion of such minerals tends to produce planets such as Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the asteroids. We also know from example that such planets are stable even when involved in systems with much larger planets. Read the TPF sites for more statisitical estimations of the probability.
Your next questions should be to ask: What proportion of expected orbits of terrestrial planets support liquid water? And, what proportion of the expected sizes of terrestrial planets can hold an earth-like atmosphere?
Many academic types have some good guesses, but they are only weak and meager theory. This race of ours needs to roll up our sleeves and get emperical on the questions!
The only way to find out for sure is to build stellar-occulding spectrographic and interferometric telescopes to look and see. To paraphrase, you are either with us that wish to find out, or your wish to waste precious resources on terraforming Mars is against those of us who want to put our eggs in more than just one other basket.
If we can terraform Mars for a couple of hundred quadrillion dollars now, think about how much less it would cost a few hundred years down the road. If instead we put generation starships on our critical path, we can easily put one in orbit around Mars on the side, and have them get a closer look at the problem. You must apply your capability of reason and critical path analysis to see the proper goal.
The actual computer algebra programs I recommend, in order, are: Maple, Mathematica, and Macsyma.
You should start by looking at every single function in the header file "math.h" in ANSI C (Appendix B of Kernigan & Ritchie) and for each of them ask yourself "what exactly does this function do?"
Then you need some math programs. You only really need one from each of two categories. You need one serious number crunching program, and one serious algebra program.
For number crunching, I recommend "Octave" (which is free but hard to compile correctly unless there is already a binary for your platform), "Matlab" (which will run you several hundreds of dollars but you can probably get a used copy with a want ad or an auction site), or a spreadsheet with a sufficient coverage of library functions, such as Excel. I recommend them in that order.
In addition to a number cruncher, you will want a computer algebra system (which will also do calculus and "higher" math): Maple, Matlab, and Macsyma; again, I recommend them in that order.
EFF does "usually" win. The reason you might think they dont is that when they don't win, they keep trying, so the majority of the messages from the EFF are about something that they haven't won yet.
The human race needs to ask themselves: do you want a vacation so expensive as to make a real voyage impossible, or do they want the voyage?
For shame!
Perhaps you would rather have your dollars taxed by George W. Bush, so he can go "finish the job" in Iraq, where his father's policies have already contributed to the deaths of half a million children. That's just what the middle-eastern tinderbox needs.
When I read posts like the parent comment, I sometimes wish for additional nuclear proliferation. If the more of the third world got the bomb, perhaps they would all the sudden be our close personal friends like Pakistan is all of the sudden. Those nukes have sent more US aid to Pakistan than all the charity commercials on television.
"Generation starship" means that the travel time is longer than human lifetime(s); the passengers at arrival are the (great)*-grandchildren of the passengers at departure. The next feat of engineering on the spacefaring critical path is to build such a generation starship with sufficient resources for a "round trip" in case they have to turn around and come back. Although that is difficult, it is many orders of magnitude easier than terraforming Mars.
Neither the moon nor any asteroid can hold an atmosphere, and thus can not be terraformed. Mars is the best local bet, true, but until our bioligical sciences improve, Mars would still require more trips with more tons of cargo to terraform than is practical relative to extrasolar colonization, unless we can't find any extrasolar suitably terrestrial planets. There is evidence that we probably can, though. Don't shoot first and ask questions later.
a generation starship would not require a moonbase. Presumably, it would be constructed at L3 or L5.
I would rather have six dozen Terrestrial Planet Finders than a single manned mission to mars.
As for a moonbase, that can wait a few hundred years, too.
Yep. What goes around, comes around.
Big deal.
The Canadians know: single payer is where it's at.
Wow! I am in awe. You sir, Charlie, are a brilliant exemplar of humankind.
Any relation to Blackmire Industries? (Try the on-line security minion web chat feature!!!)
The real question is, who knows how to build the smallest speech recognition hardware and software system effective in such situations, e.g., which requires the least amount of CPU, cache, and battery support? Speech recognition is not easy, but a 200 MHz system with the kind of cache common in Pentium systems is overkill. StrongArm and other RISCs without FPUs aren't that great for the task, although fixed-point versions of the DSP routines involved are feasable.
If this happened often enough, we could hasten the melting of Antartica (raising seas 16 feet) much faster than global warming, even.
Did anyone read Douglas Adam's Last Chance To See? If people are willing to spend that much money and disruptive tourism on endangered species safaries, all while ignoring the cognitive dissonance, can real estate on sea-going glacier ice be too far behind?
All with heated cabins and world-class chefs, I'm sure.
When circumvention devices are outlawed, only outlaws will own felt-tip pens.
MMS: Multimedia Messaging System -- this allows you to send email with audio/amr attachments, so you can play them with open source code from public 3GPP technical standards TS 26.071, TS 26.073, TS 26.101 and TS 26.074.
AMR is a truly great vocodec technology, which stands for "Adaptive Multi Rate." Accordingly, it takes less bandwidth and battery time because when the microphone isn't picking up sound (from, e.g., your speech) your phone isn't sending as much information. Just the way it ought to be. Why spend 4 kbps to send comfort noise when 20 bps can do just as well? Execellent code!