Go learn some physics and come back. Massless-ness doesn't matter. Volume and Density don't matter. It carries energy (E=hv) and momentum (p=E/c), and the transfer of momentum that occurs upon reflection is what imparts pressure.
Because something that you or I would consider very simple would probably only BE simple because it relied on lots of knowledge that we already had and convention that we already followed.
> should aliens send back their own decoder in,
> say, base 29,
... we'd know they have 29 fingers. And given that this is a prime number, I'd guess they'd all be on one hand. I can't wait to see what these freaks look like.
In answer to your question, yes, I did figure out that they were going after largest prime found so far at the bottom. I basically arrived at the same deciphering that you had. I knew that every time someone find a new largest prime, it's always of the form 2^x-1. So I knew that's what they were going after. However, I spent a fair amount of time in a completely futile attempt to figure out where they got that minus sign from. I also couldn't figure out that figure in the top center of the page, which they don't bother to explain on the solution page. I noticed the binary representation for "1" in both the upper left and right corners, and tried to find some way to interpret it as a "number line" (even though the center symbol was not a zero) in order to find something that distinguished between the concepts of "positive" and "negative" from which I could deduce the meaning of the other symbol as a minus sign. But I suspect those were just page numbers:-).
But I've got some other questions that I hope someone else can answer:
1) How are the aliens supposed to convert a *stream* of bits into a TWO DIMENSIONAL image??? We're not shipping a piece of paper out in a capsule here.
2) Why do we assume they can turn this stream into two dimensions?
3) Why do we assume they even know they *ought* to?
4) How are they supposed to know the dimensions of the image?
5) And even if they can figure all that out, what makes us think they read left-to-right, top-to-bottom? How many of us would dhave found this image just as easy to parse if it were flipped vertically, or horizontally?
6) And wouldn't it be easier to do a lexical analysis if all the individual symbols consisted of a *single* connected component, rather than multiple non-intersecting "brush strokes" (see, e.g. the symbol for "2" that contains three separate pieces).
Is the "two-week" travel time estimate an estimate of Proper Time (experienced by the time-dilated traveller) or is it earth-clock time? Under a modest-yet-constant acceleration, you can get up to relativistically-significant velocities pretty quickly.
Why do smoke detectors need to be replaced every 10 years? I thought it was due to the radioactive material decaying too much. But if the half-life of Am241 is 432 years, then after 10 years the Am241 concentration only drops to 98.4% of its original value. Seems to me these things should be good for a lot longer than that. 50 years brings it down to just over 92%. Still seems like plenty. Is there so little tolerance in Am241 concentration for the proper operation of a smoke detector? Or is there some other reason for the replacement timeframe?
There is not a single digital computer in existence that is as computationally powerful as a turing machine. That's because all real digital computers are Deterministic Finite State Automata (D-FSA). A Turing Machine (TM) has an infinite tape, and it is this infinite storage capacity that allows it to compute things that no computer with a finite amount of storage can compute. An FSA (of both the deterministic and non-deterministic variety) can only *approximate* a TM, by using its finite storage to emulate an infinite tape for practical-sized problems.
The voltage across the tip and ring is, if I recall correctly, approximately 12V DC. Except when the phone is ringing, at which point you get about 40V AC. And the phone isn't drawing any current (well, negligible in most cases) unless it's actually in use.
How much total energy (in kilowatt-hours) do you really think is consumed by the phone(s) in your house each month? Compare that to your monthly electric bill and get back to us.
Actually happened to me at work. Someone stole it! I sent the following email to all my co-workers:
The coaster for my coffee cup has mysteriously disappeared from my desk. It is approximately 5 inches in diameter, with a half inch hole in the center. It's 1/8 inch thick, with a silver bottom and an orange top. If you've seen it, please return it ASAP, as I'm getting rings on my desk.
Unfortunately, it was never found.
Good idea!! (Re:Most Brokers don't know the terms.
on
Catch Me If You Can
·
· Score: 1
"One of our competitors (SEII) is even worse. You aren't allowed to move on to the next question until you've gotten the current question right."
This is actually a good idea, *IF* they record the number of wrong answers given before the right answer is arrived at. It separates the person who narrowed the question down to two possible answers and picked the wrong one, from the person who can't get the answer until eliminating all others. Ordinarily, these people would not be distinguishable on a simple right/wrong test.
Drawing names from a hat has the advantage of speed, but it doesn't help the problem, which is that a great deal of electoral weight is being thrown around on the basis of random chance. One way to remedy this would be to declare a draw in any state in which the win/loss margin is less than the margin of error. In the event of a draw, the electoral votes are split (with one abstention if there is an odd number, as is the case in Florida).
Of course, the problem with this is that there is still a discontinuity in the distribution of the electoral ballots as a function of win/loss margin. That is, as soon as the win/loss margin exceeds the error margin (which I'm sure some statistician out there in/. land can tell us how to compute based on population size), the electoral votes go from being split evenly to being cast unilaterally. This is no good because we have merely cut in half the number of electoral votes that can be affected by a single vote lead. A better solution would be to pro-rate the distribution of electoral ballots based on the ratio of the win/loss margin to the error margin. For example, if Jones and Smith are exactly tied in a state with 20 electoral votes, then each gets 10 electoral votes. And if, for example, the margin of error is 5000 votes, then as one candidate's lead approaches 5000, the number of electoral votes she receives grows from 10 to 20. So, for example, if Jones is ahead by 4000 votes, her number of electoral votes grows 80% of the way from an even split (10-10) to a full win (20-0), so she gets 18 electoral votes, and smith gets 2.
This has a number of advantages:
1) It preserves the essence of our electoral college system in which candidates are required to win states and can only gain so much by winning a state with a landslide.
2) It retains the *intent* of the electoral college system in situations where that intent is not currently accomplished (like in the situation with Florida right now). That is, you win electoral votes by winning a state, but you have to win the state *unambiguously* in order to win those votes. You can't win a state due to the uncertainty within the error margin.
3) It reduces the incentive to call for recounts, manual or otherwise. Since there are no sharp discontinuities in the distribution of electoral ballots, small change in the win/loss margin that might result from a recount can have only a proportionally small change in the electoral ballot distribution. It's only in cases where the national election is hinging on those one or two electoral ballots that might shift, that it would make sense to ask for a re-count. (In the current case with Florida, splitting the 25 electoral ballots 50-50 with 1 discarded, would leave Gore with a substantial lead, because he had a substantial lead with Florida out of the picture. Bush would have to acquire a much more substantial lead than he has now in order to shift enough of the electoral ballots to his favor to win the national election. In fact, he'd have to win outright, with a margin that at least equalled the margin of error, because winning all of Florida's electoral votes gives him the bare minimum needed to win at the national level.
They made the coefficient of friction between the tread and the road greater than 1, sure. But they forgot to do the same between the tread and the tire. As a result, road friction rips the tread right off the tire.
I thought the resolving capability (as a function of wavelength of light used) was a limitation imposed by Quantum Mechanics. I.e. some kind of heisenberg limitation on the position of the photon when it reflects of the objects you're trying to resolve. I didn't think it had anything to do with the quality of the lens, although that would certainly limit resolution considerably further. Anyone care to comment and enlighten me?
A combo GPS/cell-phone device. The device is manufactured in such a way that attempting to
hack it physically will destroy the device. Then you call a phone number, or some agency calls your cell phone, and you give a voiceprint and some PIN-like key to prove that it is, in fact, you on the other end.
This should be sufficient if you want to prevent others from impersonating you. For situations where one might *want* their buddy to impersonate them (e.g. provide an alibi), the agency that is relying on this device as proof of position, could equip the device with a fingerprint scan or a retina scan. That way, *you* are confident that nobody will impersonate you against your will, and *they* are confident that nobody is impersonating you against *their* will.
I got both W2K and 98SE OEM versions from software vendors I found on PriceWatch. Not pirated. Both were shrinkwrapped and had certificates of authenticity with anti-counterfeitting measures that would put the treasury department to shame.
How do you arrive at this non-sequitur? Just because a particular number's representation is
infinite, doesn't mean you can find any finite substring within its representation. Consider the following infinite representation consisting of, for example, an increasing number of consecutive 3's separated by a single digit 4. I.e.:
0.3_4_33_4_333_4_3333_4_33333_4_333333_4...
Notice that the finite digit string "44" doesn't appear anywhere in this.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "Reverse POLISH Notaion" (otherwise known simply as "postfix notation", but not "Reverse Postfix Notation").
Go learn some physics and come back. Massless-ness doesn't matter. Volume and Density don't matter. It carries energy (E=hv) and momentum (p=E/c), and the transfer of momentum that occurs upon reflection is what imparts pressure.
... a large spinning mirror and you can vaporize a human target from space"
-- Real Genius
Because something that you or I would consider very simple would probably only BE simple because it relied on lots of knowledge that we already had and convention that we already followed.
> should aliens send back their own decoder in,
> say, base 29,
... we'd know they have 29 fingers. And given that this is a prime number, I'd guess they'd all be on one hand. I can't wait to see what these freaks look like.
In answer to your question, yes, I did figure out that they were going after largest prime found so far at the bottom. I basically arrived at the same deciphering that you had. I knew that every time someone find a new largest prime, it's always of the form 2^x-1. So I knew that's what they were going after. However, I spent a fair amount of time in a completely futile attempt to figure out where they got that minus sign from. I also couldn't figure out that figure in the top center of the page, which they don't bother to explain on the solution page. I noticed the binary representation for "1" in both the upper left and right corners, and tried to find some way to interpret it as a "number line" (even though the center symbol was not a zero) in order to find something that distinguished between the concepts of "positive" and "negative" from which I could deduce the meaning of the other symbol as a minus sign. But I suspect those were just page numbers :-).
But I've got some other questions that I hope someone else can answer:
1) How are the aliens supposed to convert a *stream* of bits into a TWO DIMENSIONAL image??? We're not shipping a piece of paper out in a capsule here.
2) Why do we assume they can turn this stream into two dimensions?
3) Why do we assume they even know they *ought* to?
4) How are they supposed to know the dimensions of the image?
5) And even if they can figure all that out, what makes us think they read left-to-right, top-to-bottom? How many of us would dhave found this image just as easy to parse if it were flipped vertically, or horizontally?
6) And wouldn't it be easier to do a lexical analysis if all the individual symbols consisted of a *single* connected component, rather than multiple non-intersecting "brush strokes" (see, e.g. the symbol for "2" that contains three separate pieces).
Is the "two-week" travel time estimate an estimate of Proper Time (experienced by the time-dilated traveller) or is it earth-clock time? Under a modest-yet-constant acceleration, you can get up to relativistically-significant velocities pretty quickly.
Why do smoke detectors need to be replaced every 10 years? I thought it was due to the radioactive material decaying too much. But if the half-life of Am241 is 432 years, then after 10 years the Am241 concentration only drops to 98.4% of its original value. Seems to me these things should be good for a lot longer than that. 50 years brings it down to just over 92%. Still seems like plenty. Is there so little tolerance in Am241 concentration for the proper operation of a smoke detector? Or is there some other reason for the replacement timeframe?
Stanly [sic]...lost their patent on their black & yellow colour trademark
How can you have a patent on a trademark?
There is not a single digital computer in existence that is as computationally powerful as a turing machine. That's because all real digital computers are Deterministic Finite State Automata (D-FSA). A Turing Machine (TM) has an infinite tape, and it is this infinite storage capacity that allows it to compute things that no computer with a finite amount of storage can compute. An FSA (of both the deterministic and non-deterministic variety) can only *approximate* a TM, by using its finite storage to emulate an infinite tape for practical-sized problems.
The voltage across the tip and ring is, if I recall correctly, approximately 12V DC. Except when the phone is ringing, at which point you get about 40V AC. And the phone isn't drawing any current (well, negligible in most cases) unless it's actually in use.
How much total energy (in kilowatt-hours) do you really think is consumed by the phone(s) in your house each month? Compare that to your monthly electric bill and get back to us.
Yeah, I loved Ada. Especially how I had to write external C functions to do bitwise operations because Ada has no facilities for this.
Unfortunately, it was never found.
"One of our competitors (SEII) is even worse. You aren't allowed to move on to the next question until you've gotten the current question right."
This is actually a good idea, *IF* they record the number of wrong answers given before the right answer is arrived at. It separates the person who narrowed the question down to two possible answers and picked the wrong one, from the person who can't get the answer until eliminating all others. Ordinarily, these people would not be distinguishable on a simple right/wrong test.
Drawing names from a hat has the advantage of speed, but it doesn't help the problem, which is that a great deal of electoral weight is being thrown around on the basis of random chance. One way to remedy this would be to declare a draw in any state in which the win/loss margin is less than the margin of error. In the event of a draw, the electoral votes are split (with one abstention if there is an odd number, as is the case in Florida).
/. land can tell us how to compute based on population size), the electoral votes go from being split evenly to being cast unilaterally. This is no good because we have merely cut in half the number of electoral votes that can be affected by a single vote lead. A better solution would be to pro-rate the distribution of electoral ballots based on the ratio of the win/loss margin to the error margin. For example, if Jones and Smith are exactly tied in a state with 20 electoral votes, then each gets 10 electoral votes. And if, for example, the margin of error is 5000 votes, then as one candidate's lead approaches 5000, the number of electoral votes she receives grows from 10 to 20. So, for example, if Jones is ahead by 4000 votes, her number of electoral votes grows 80% of the way from an even split (10-10) to a full win (20-0), so she gets 18 electoral votes, and smith gets 2.
Of course, the problem with this is that there is still a discontinuity in the distribution of the electoral ballots as a function of win/loss margin. That is, as soon as the win/loss margin exceeds the error margin (which I'm sure some statistician out there in
This has a number of advantages:
1) It preserves the essence of our electoral college system in which candidates are required to win states and can only gain so much by winning a state with a landslide.
2) It retains the *intent* of the electoral college system in situations where that intent is not currently accomplished (like in the situation with Florida right now). That is, you win electoral votes by winning a state, but you have to win the state *unambiguously* in order to win those votes. You can't win a state due to the uncertainty within the error margin.
3) It reduces the incentive to call for recounts, manual or otherwise. Since there are no sharp discontinuities in the distribution of electoral ballots, small change in the win/loss margin that might result from a recount can have only a proportionally small change in the electoral ballot distribution. It's only in cases where the national election is hinging on those one or two electoral ballots that might shift, that it would make sense to ask for a re-count. (In the current case with Florida, splitting the 25 electoral ballots 50-50 with 1 discarded, would leave Gore with a substantial lead, because he had a substantial lead with Florida out of the picture. Bush would have to acquire a much more substantial lead than he has now in order to shift enough of the electoral ballots to his favor to win the national election. In fact, he'd have to win outright, with a margin that at least equalled the margin of error, because winning all of Florida's electoral votes gives him the bare minimum needed to win at the national level.
Comments, anyone?
-Chris
They use PCBs [1] to make PCBs [2]? I didn't know that.
[1] Poly-Chloro-Biphenyls
[2] Printed Circuit Boards
If so, compilers should check for it:
foobar.c: line 11402: Warning (703) Code written at 3:47 AM
They made the coefficient of friction between the tread and the road greater than 1, sure. But they forgot to do the same between the tread and the tire. As a result, road friction rips the tread right off the tire.
:-)
I thought the resolving capability (as a function of wavelength of light used) was a limitation imposed by Quantum Mechanics. I.e. some kind of heisenberg limitation on the position of the photon when it reflects of the objects you're trying to resolve. I didn't think it had anything to do with the quality of the lens, although that would certainly limit resolution considerably further. Anyone care to comment and enlighten me?
A combo GPS/cell-phone device. The device is manufactured in such a way that attempting to
hack it physically will destroy the device. Then you call a phone number, or some agency calls your cell phone, and you give a voiceprint and some PIN-like key to prove that it is, in fact, you on the other end.
This should be sufficient if you want to prevent others from impersonating you. For situations where one might *want* their buddy to impersonate them (e.g. provide an alibi), the agency that is relying on this device as proof of position, could equip the device with a fingerprint scan or a retina scan. That way, *you* are confident that nobody will impersonate you against your will, and *they* are confident that nobody is impersonating you against *their* will.
I got both W2K and 98SE OEM versions from software vendors I found on PriceWatch. Not pirated. Both were shrinkwrapped and had certificates of authenticity with anti-counterfeitting measures that would put the treasury department to shame.
Where does one get "rawrite.exe"?
How do you arrive at this non-sequitur? Just because a particular number's representation is
infinite, doesn't mean you can find any finite substring within its representation. Consider the following infinite representation consisting of, for example, an increasing number of consecutive 3's separated by a single digit 4. I.e.:
0.3_4_33_4_333_4_3333_4_33333_4_333333_4...
Notice that the finite digit string "44" doesn't appear anywhere in this.
Why would anyone spend $55 for IBM PC-DOS when they can get 98SE for $89?
Cool. Thanks for the tip.