Here it is on amazon.com (watch the wrap)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0020 248806/qid=1050158085/sr=1-41/ref=sr_1_41/002-1377 821-9446439?v=glance&s=books
If that fails, try an amazon search on "the adolescence of". The publisher has changed (now Collier) and the last word in the title is now spelled differently (as "P-1" or "P - 1"). But an interesting thing: 24 years after publication, it is still getting good reviews.
Read also The adolescence of P-One by Thomas Ryan (1977, MacMillan) who uses a fun piece of fiction to explore this theme.
One of his points is that an artificial sentience may well have a sense of self-preservation, and if so, it could cover its tracks and be very hard to identify. Especially if no one is looking for it. Another fascinating point is that an artificial sentience could easily be distributed over numerous physical hosts, making the job of figuring out which plugs to pull a very difficult task indeed.
It is also true that IANAL. However my understanding is that in loco parentis is a principle of law that dates back to around the Magna Carta-- give or take a few hundred years-- and is not a statute itself. (btw, thanks for providing the correct phrase!)
It clearly applies to the university's role toward students who are minors, just as it applies to youth camps. But it also applies to some degree to students who are of age. How much, and in exactly what situations, are areas nobody has ever wanted to define in absolute terms. Courts hate this kind of case, as do universities, and students... just about everybody will do everything possible to keep from having to go there. Which is a good part of the reason I think RIAA is acting like "a ass" (to use one of my favorite lawyerly quotes).
Western law and universities have long recognized that there is a period in the learning process where technical ability will exceed the experience needed for mature judgment. This applies whether a student is fifteen years old or fifty years old-- when he is learning something new, he is likely to end up in Sorceror Apprentice situations where he can unwittingly cause damage. His behavior will be rather adolescent within the fields his studies touch upon. The University assumes a responsibility for protecting society from these damages, and in order to facilitate this, the courts extend to the University some of the same kinds of protections, rights, and obligations that are used with parents, no matter what the age of the students. The courts have generally taken a dim view of third parties trying to coerce them into messing around within the University's "jurisdiction".
Perhaps there is another term for this, but I've always thought it was subsumed under the in loco parentis principle.
This is probably due to the fact that MTU students provide more revenue to the school than the RIAA does; and the fact that MTU doesn't want to see a drop in enrollment as a consequence.
It mostly has to do with MTU's legal role as the student's loco parentis (I think that's the correct term, but it has been nearly 40 years since that was a part of my life). Whether MTU intended to or not, this public letter to the RIAA seems to me to be a good first move in setting the basis for MTU filing a countersuit, or stepping in to defend the student, or both.
MTU is saying that it has a mechanism in place for justly disciplining its "children", that RIAA knew of this mechanism, or should have known of it, and that it is inappropriate for RIAA to involve the US legal system when MTU's judgment and disciplinary process was available and would have dealt properly with the situation, with much less damage all the way around. MTU can also argue, and probably would have to do so, that RIAA has damaged its student's reputation in a way that demands some form of compensation. The courts are generally favorable toward this kind of argument.
RIAA screwed up royally on this one. If they push this, it will blow up in their faces, because no university can afford to back away from this fight-- it challenges the nurturing role of universities and colleges and is an attack on principles of western civilization that were established hundreds of years ago, with the first universities.
Mistaken usage occurs when the speaker chooses a word that has a different meaning among his audience than what the speaker intended. In a practical sense, there are no other measures of correct usage that matter. There certainly is no absolute measure. Correct usage is always relevant to the audience's comprehension.
This does not contradict the better language teachers, for they recognize that the usages they are teaching have to do with improving communications among a well-defined audience (of persons with a certain degree of education and fluency, whom you can expect to be on the other side of the desk at your job interviews, etc).
A very useful related concept is that of layering your basic message with the nuances available to us from the history of certain words. Looking at a recent event in the news, there are a number of legitimate ways to describe it:
"US soldiers recently killed ten Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint." This is a neutral statement. The word "killed" does imply the action was intentional, but that is correct: the soldiers' guns did not go off by accident.
"US soldiers decimated a group of Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint, leaving ten dead." This overloads the facts with all that the reader knows about the current and past usage of "decimate". Much of the literate audience will think the writer is implying that the deaths were not only intentional, but delivered as punishment or retribution against Iraqi civilians.
"US soldiers slaughtered ten Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint." The nuances of "slaughter" are far different from "kill" or "decimate", and suggest a lethal intent on the part of the soldiers that may not have been there, and a helplessness on the part of the victims that may not have been there (why the hell didn't they stop when directed to??).
"Ten Iraqi women and children became war casualties when US soldiers opened fire on their van at a checkpoint." Here the passive voice is used to absolve the soldiers of any direct responsibility. I hope the inquiry finds that this is the most accurate way of describing what had happened.
To bring this back on point: all the above examples are factually the same. The choice of certain words shifts the emotional content, though. Persons who use language well know how to choose words that will carry this extra level of meaning to their audiences-- and learning how to do that well is the reason why the derivations and histories of usage can be an exciting area of study.
--
Improving communication skills is never off topic
OK, but suppose I still use decimate to mean "reduce by a tenth". Is the meaning of the word defined by my usage, or the usage of people who use it to mean (roughly) "reduce to a tenth"?
In practice, the meaning of any word you use is defined by its usage among the audience you are speaking to. Not by you; never by the speaker; always by the listener. For that's where comprehension occurs. Not in the generation of the words but in their reception; not in the speaking but in the listening.
Learn your audience, then choose your words to fit their ways.
Then you will come to see that it doesn't matter what definition you choose as your own, because you will realize that it is the definitions your listeners have chosen that matters. If you want to depart from the audience's definitions, then you've got to lay a foundation first-- by introducing your new definition. This is added work for you, but there is no getting around it. It is also added work for your audience-- and they just might walk away rather than go to the extra trouble of trying to learn the new vocabulary.
Another corollary: if you want to understand what someone else is saying, then think about which audience he is speaking to. And if you are not a member of that audience, then you will need to look at the meanings that particular audience will attach to the speaker's words.
Why do people insist on using 'her' instead of 'his' for the generic pronoun?
Hey, AC, would you step out into the light so I can see your badge? With you in the shadows like that, I can't tell whether you are with the Grammar Police or the Gender Police.
Nevermind. I don't think slashdot needs either type of policing. Though I guess I should thank you for your concern about the corruptibility of my culture acquisition capabilities.
Please mod parent up (I can't since I've already posted to the thread.)
This link is the one that should have been included in the article, instead of all those stupid repetitions of a particularly stupid press release written by someone who clearly couldn't be bothered to read anything about the subject, or have someone else check their work. [pardon the rant. It pisses me off when people who are getting paid to write informative press releases write disinformative crap instead-- especially when its obvious that it wasn't done by intent but simply by stupidity, laziness, or drug-brain interactions that violate workplace mores.]
A quick googling on "eleftheriades" demonstrates the professor does exist, is at the U of Toronto, and has published on this subject. Including an article in the Journal of applied physics that used the words "negative refractive index" and "metamaterial" in its title.
If this is a ruse, someone has gone to an improbably great effort on its details. My personal conclusion is that this is probably not a Professor Bourbaki situation.
However a lot about this becomes perfectly clear when you look at the author's name on the original article-- Nicolle Wahls-- and then read the fine print at the bottom of the article:
Nicolle Wahl is a news services officer with the department of public affairs [at UToronto].
If Nicolle manages to keep her position, I expect in the future that she will be required to have her work proofread by someone with some technical education before it is published.
UToronto does not look so good with egg all over its face.
Of course I cannot prove it: it is an engineering issue and proof is a mathematical term. Trying to prove engineering methods is like trying to taste the colors of a sunrise. : )
Now whether a thing works or not is a matter of engineering, but that is another question entirely...
On a more serious note: my authority on this was my father, who was the thermodynamics engineer on the design team for the Apollo heat shield in the mid 1960s, when I was in high school. We had a couple of relevant conversations in the 1980s, after we had each started playing around with personal computers. I think he would agree with the following summary-- though I'm sure he would find fault with the wording (such was our relationship).
Much of the basic work that was done by his team was in finding methods that would allow the complex thermodynamics problems (that sometimes involved matrices with 11 dimensions) to be approximated in three or four dimensions. These approximations could be handled by sliderules and published (hardcopy of course) lookup tables. A lot of work went into assessing whether the approximations were good enough, which involved developing cross-checking methods that were on the same order of complexity as the original problems.
Computers will yield the same kinds of results, but the heuristics are entirely different-- rather than busting the problem up into things that can be handled by sliderules, trig tables, and so on, the computer approach involves reshaping the problems into things that can be handled by its engineering math library, which knows how to solve some of the higher order equations. So the methods that the Apollo team came up with for solving the problems they faced have no relevance to a computerized approach. Worse, there is often no way to tell whether a design decision was made because of the intrinsic qualities of the materials or because it reduced the complexity of the math. It would take someone familiar with the techniques of the time to make that kind of determination-- and Kueffler+Essler stopped making sliderules a decade ago. The youngest people around who have the kind of expertise and experience to understand the Apollo development notes would now be in their 60s, and their applicable skills would be quite rusty.
Basically much of the knowledge that was developed by the Apollo project has about as much relevance to rocket science today as the techniques used 2.500 years ago at Stonehenge have to today's civil engineering.
That isn't to say we don't know how to make heat shields-- clearly we do. But we don't at the moment know how to build the equivalent of the Apollo / Saturn, and I doubt we could even replicate it from the blueprints. I have no doubt that we could come up with something better. But we don't seem to be doing that.
I think my original point, that we've lost the Apollo program technology, stands. We could replace it with something better, but at the moment we don't have anything like it at all.
Couldn't they have just outright copied the Unix method? At least then they would have done it right.
<tongueincheek>That might have been too expensive even for Microsoft, since SCO would surely file a multibillion dollar law suit since it would be patently obvious the MS engineers stole SCO's intellectual property (especially if MS had actually gotten it right-- that would be clear proof of IP theft).</tongueincheek>
Query of the unix gurus: how does the library versioning handle an upgraded "DLL" (don't know the unix term) that you want older apps to use? Such as perhaps a new arithmetic library that takes advantage of new FP hardware?
I've been following the debate my posts kicked off with interest, and found that others have been expanding so well on my original points that I haven't needed to say anything more.
But I do want to thank you for contributing the exact weight of the lunar material that was brought back by the Apollo program. 842 lbs-- probably even my hero Arnie couldn't lift that much all at once. But if none of the individual rocks was more than fifty pounds, I could hand load them into my pickup truck in under 20 minutes, and have room enough left over for a cord and a half of firewood.
[It would be sort of interesting to multiply the weight of the average astronaut by the number of astronauts who have visited the Moon, then divide the weight of the lunar rocks by that result. That would yield a "rock to meat" ratio, which I think would be less than 1:5. That is, I think it took more than five pounds of live meat to bring back every pound of lunar rock.]
Hmm, it seems I can't write anything more without it sounding bitter, so I'll stop at this point.
We know what's up there, we know how to get there, we know how to get back.
Well, to get snide about it, we don't know what's up there (but we do know that a golf club can be used in a space suit, and that funny wheels make an effective lunar go-cart, and we collected enough rocks that I think a strong man would have a problem lifting them all at once-- but I'm not sure). We knew how to get there, but like Goldie Hawn frequently said at the time, "I used to know all that stuff." Now we don't have a clue as to how to get back. We threw all that technology away.
Yes, I mean that. The Apollo program was based on technology that used (get ready for it) sliderules. The total amount of computer power that was used in the entire Apollo program is dwarfed by the desktop machine that you turn off without giving it a second thought, when your done with your evening's slashdot entertainment. You couldn't muster up enough people in the workforce today who know how to use a sliderule to repeat what was then done, or even understand the notes that were written about it. The technology of the Apollo program was never carried across into computers. To remake the heavy lift Saturn rockets or reconstruct the Apollo heat sheilds, we would have to redo everything from scratch. We orphaned the whole thing as we moved on to better technology.
Terribly shortsighted, that was.
In response to another of your comments: I did not discredit what you call the "residual accomplishments". Re-read my post.
As to Christopher Columbus-- he made several repeat voyages to the New World. He stuck to his program, even though it failed in the long run. His program was designed to return spices and gold-- the keys of that age. Our space adventure had no pragmatic purpose, and so was shut down before it accomplished anything of lasting significance. It was truly just a "First Post" effort.
[The USA attitude re: Moon exploration] it's more of a "Been there, done that" stance.
At its time, the "Moon Race" was an effective political ploy. Maybe not the best cold war strategy, but an effective one.
But to regard lunar exploration as something the USA has already accomplished is dumb. While there was some good technology fallout, and some good science, they were incidental to the thrust of the USA effort. Which was simply to establish "First Post" bragging rights on the Moon. Which gives the USA all the enduring value of "FP!" claim on slashdot.
I don't disagree with your assessment-- it does seem like most of my fellow Americans do think that way. Which I think is a pity.
One might argue that BSA's belief was arrived at negligently...
Exactly. The signatory to the letter, Ms Corina Beck, was clearly negligent in allowing this allegation of criminal activity to be made in her name, without first making at least a cursory review of the "evidence". As she was acting as the legal agent of the BSA, the BSA is responsible for her incompetence. BSA either failed to train Ms Corina Beck properly or failed to supervise her activities, or both.
As a result, BSA has accused an institution of criminal behavior. That is not something that should be taken lightly. The law deserves more respect than BSA is currently giving it.
At its best the law is a precision instrument. If we allow it to be used as a hammer, we'll lose a core part of civilization. There are other ways BSA can accomplish its goals.
...isn't this an "evil stupid BSA" topic? We'e had a dozen or so "evil stupid BSA" stories in the last few months - why not make an "evil stupid BSA" logo? Since "BSA" is also the initials of the Boy Scouts of America, why not make it like a three fingered salute with a big "NO!" slash through it?
That's not a bad idea, but I think it would be better if we do something with the logo to visually distinguish between the two BSAs. I suggest that The Business Software Alliance logo be just one saluting finger with the "NO!" slash through it.
That would pretty much visually capture my gut reaction to what they seem to be attempting to do to everyone else.
The Boy Scouts of Ameria should sue the Business Software Alliance and force them to change their name,...
This would be a good idea. The Boy Scouts of America have enough of their own image troubles without being confused with the other BSA (whose image is just going to get worse and worse as their chickens come home to roost).
There is nothing quite as off-putting as the spatterings you see on the heads of persons who choose to support a chicken roost.
So, the someone at the BSA made a mistake with their scripts, and when it was noticed they immediately apologized and said they would fix the problem.
Oh, it's worse than that. Much, much worse.
Their message alleges criminal activities. The evidence they offer is so absurd that it would have been rejected out of hand by anyone with any knowledge commercial software on a quick reading of the message. The inescapable conclusion is that BSA is not having a human review these allegations before sending them out.
BSA is churning out allegations of criminal activities through an automated process without even minimal human oversight. That is not prudent. It is probably legally actionable-- I think it is probably harrassment (but IANAL).
The law deserves more respect than BSA is giving it. At the very least, this Corina Beck person whose name is on the message should have read its content before sending it. That she failed to do so points to a serious problem with her ability to fill her position in a responsible way. And it points to a serious problem with BSA, that it would fill this position with an incompetent person.
Tossing around allegations of criminality is a serious business.
Re:Redifference between uppercase and lowercase
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
[re: Ford/ford] Problem is that situation is a homonym. two different words from different roots
I doubt that. More likely the surname is derived from the geographical feature.
I can't be sure of course, but I think the original poster may have been making a reference to that bit about how Tolkien chose "Frodo" as a single letter transliteration of "Fordo", which was a name that meant "doom-bringer" or something like that (as in "Enri the Fordo" (sometimes "Enri the Fordoer" or "Enri duFordo"-- all apparently the same guy. He was that Saxon noble who went on a rampage after the battle of Hastings). I recall at that time there was some talk of the name "Ford" being a shortened version of "Fordoer" or "duFordo" or something like that (the root of all of them is the verb "to fordo" which meant to destroy something by tearing out its insides). Certainly that kind of subtle word play was right up Tolkien's alley-- making "Frodo" a sort of anti-fordo.
It's probably just as well that the Ford family name was changed before they got into assembly line production. Otherwise I suppose that Chevies and other auto makerrs would have been unable to make any four door models (since that would have been a clear mockery of the Fordoer Motor Company's name and disallowed by trademark law).
like "read" and "rede" and "reed" (though most people screw it up and use "read" where they should use "rede"
Does anyone use 'rede' (in the Ethelred the un~ sense) these days?
I had to re-read the AC's post, but I think that was his point. That is, if I have reded his words correctly. (I think I got that right... yep, that usage agrees with the 20 pound Webster).
Re:Redifference between uppercase and lowercase
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 1
Yes, this is it exactly.
Note that in this case, the lawyer very carefully avoided any suggestion that Google might take any kind of legal action. There is good reason for that avoidance: it is so obvious that Google has no legal recourse in this instance that even the most veiled threat could backfire and force the company into defending itself against a claim of harrassment. Which would mean losing goodwill among potential google users no matter what the courtroom outcome would be.
Sending this letter is Google's way of stockpiling snow balls for a snow ball fight with GooglePlex.com (that's next year's competitor, a googol raised to the goolgoleth power IIRC). Undoubtedly the cost of preparing this letter (and others) is very carefully accounted for, so when they go to court against GooglePlex.com, they will be able to show they have spent $ThisMuch in defense of their trademark. (They do not have to demonstrate that they won any of the contests, and if questioned specifically about any of them, they can always say that in their opinion, it would have cost them too much in goodwill to fight that particular battle).
btw, back in the 1960's googolplex was the largest named cardinal number. Does anyone know if anyone has named a larger one? And is it still a few hundred magnitudes larger than all the quarks that ever were, or ever will be?
Slashdot Mirror
Here it is on amazon.com (watch the wrap)0 248806/qid=1050158085/sr=1-41/ref=sr_1_41/002-1377 821-9446439?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/002
If that fails, try an amazon search on "the adolescence of". The publisher has changed (now Collier) and the last word in the title is now spelled differently (as "P-1" or "P - 1"). But an interesting thing: 24 years after publication, it is still getting good reviews.
Read also The adolescence of P-One by Thomas Ryan (1977, MacMillan) who uses a fun piece of fiction to explore this theme.
One of his points is that an artificial sentience may well have a sense of self-preservation, and if so, it could cover its tracks and be very hard to identify. Especially if no one is looking for it. Another fascinating point is that an artificial sentience could easily be distributed over numerous physical hosts, making the job of figuring out which plugs to pull a very difficult task indeed.
It is also true that IANAL. However my understanding is that in loco parentis is a principle of law that dates back to around the Magna Carta-- give or take a few hundred years-- and is not a statute itself. (btw, thanks for providing the correct phrase!)
It clearly applies to the university's role toward students who are minors, just as it applies to youth camps. But it also applies to some degree to students who are of age. How much, and in exactly what situations, are areas nobody has ever wanted to define in absolute terms. Courts hate this kind of case, as do universities, and students... just about everybody will do everything possible to keep from having to go there. Which is a good part of the reason I think RIAA is acting like "a ass" (to use one of my favorite lawyerly quotes).
Western law and universities have long recognized that there is a period in the learning process where technical ability will exceed the experience needed for mature judgment. This applies whether a student is fifteen years old or fifty years old-- when he is learning something new, he is likely to end up in Sorceror Apprentice situations where he can unwittingly cause damage. His behavior will be rather adolescent within the fields his studies touch upon. The University assumes a responsibility for protecting society from these damages, and in order to facilitate this, the courts extend to the University some of the same kinds of protections, rights, and obligations that are used with parents, no matter what the age of the students. The courts have generally taken a dim view of third parties trying to coerce them into messing around within the University's "jurisdiction".
Perhaps there is another term for this, but I've always thought it was subsumed under the in loco parentis principle.
This is probably due to the fact that MTU students provide more revenue to the school than the RIAA does; and the fact that MTU doesn't want to see a drop in enrollment as a consequence.
It mostly has to do with MTU's legal role as the student's loco parentis (I think that's the correct term, but it has been nearly 40 years since that was a part of my life). Whether MTU intended to or not, this public letter to the RIAA seems to me to be a good first move in setting the basis for MTU filing a countersuit, or stepping in to defend the student, or both.
MTU is saying that it has a mechanism in place for justly disciplining its "children", that RIAA knew of this mechanism, or should have known of it, and that it is inappropriate for RIAA to involve the US legal system when MTU's judgment and disciplinary process was available and would have dealt properly with the situation, with much less damage all the way around. MTU can also argue, and probably would have to do so, that RIAA has damaged its student's reputation in a way that demands some form of compensation. The courts are generally favorable toward this kind of argument.
RIAA screwed up royally on this one. If they push this, it will blow up in their faces, because no university can afford to back away from this fight-- it challenges the nurturing role of universities and colleges and is an attack on principles of western civilization that were established hundreds of years ago, with the first universities.
Mistaken usage occurs when the speaker chooses a word that has a different meaning among his audience than what the speaker intended. In a practical sense, there are no other measures of correct usage that matter. There certainly is no absolute measure. Correct usage is always relevant to the audience's comprehension.
This does not contradict the better language teachers, for they recognize that the usages they are teaching have to do with improving communications among a well-defined audience (of persons with a certain degree of education and fluency, whom you can expect to be on the other side of the desk at your job interviews, etc).
A very useful related concept is that of layering your basic message with the nuances available to us from the history of certain words. Looking at a recent event in the news, there are a number of legitimate ways to describe it:
"US soldiers recently killed ten Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint." This is a neutral statement. The word "killed" does imply the action was intentional, but that is correct: the soldiers' guns did not go off by accident.
"US soldiers decimated a group of Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint, leaving ten dead." This overloads the facts with all that the reader knows about the current and past usage of "decimate". Much of the literate audience will think the writer is implying that the deaths were not only intentional, but delivered as punishment or retribution against Iraqi civilians.
"US soldiers slaughtered ten Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint." The nuances of "slaughter" are far different from "kill" or "decimate", and suggest a lethal intent on the part of the soldiers that may not have been there, and a helplessness on the part of the victims that may not have been there (why the hell didn't they stop when directed to??).
"Ten Iraqi women and children became war casualties when US soldiers opened fire on their van at a checkpoint." Here the passive voice is used to absolve the soldiers of any direct responsibility. I hope the inquiry finds that this is the most accurate way of describing what had happened.
To bring this back on point: all the above examples are factually the same. The choice of certain words shifts the emotional content, though. Persons who use language well know how to choose words that will carry this extra level of meaning to their audiences-- and learning how to do that well is the reason why the derivations and histories of usage can be an exciting area of study.
--
Improving communication skills is never off topic
OK, but suppose I still use decimate to mean "reduce by a tenth". Is the meaning of the word defined by my usage, or the usage of people who use it to mean (roughly) "reduce to a tenth"?
In practice, the meaning of any word you use is defined by its usage among the audience you are speaking to. Not by you; never by the speaker; always by the listener. For that's where comprehension occurs. Not in the generation of the words but in their reception; not in the speaking but in the listening.
Learn your audience, then choose your words to fit their ways.
Then you will come to see that it doesn't matter what definition you choose as your own, because you will realize that it is the definitions your listeners have chosen that matters. If you want to depart from the audience's definitions, then you've got to lay a foundation first-- by introducing your new definition. This is added work for you, but there is no getting around it. It is also added work for your audience-- and they just might walk away rather than go to the extra trouble of trying to learn the new vocabulary.
Another corollary: if you want to understand what someone else is saying, then think about which audience he is speaking to. And if you are not a member of that audience, then you will need to look at the meanings that particular audience will attach to the speaker's words.
Why do people insist on using 'her' instead of 'his' for the generic pronoun?
Hey, AC, would you step out into the light so I can see your badge? With you in the shadows like that, I can't tell whether you are with the Grammar Police or the Gender Police.
Nevermind. I don't think slashdot needs either type of policing. Though I guess I should thank you for your concern about the corruptibility of my culture acquisition capabilities.
Please mod parent up (I can't since I've already posted to the thread.)
This link is the one that should have been included in the article, instead of all those stupid repetitions of a particularly stupid press release written by someone who clearly couldn't be bothered to read anything about the subject, or have someone else check their work. [pardon the rant. It pisses me off when people who are getting paid to write informative press releases write disinformative crap instead-- especially when its obvious that it wasn't done by intent but simply by stupidity, laziness, or drug-brain interactions that violate workplace mores.]
A quick googling on "eleftheriades" demonstrates the professor does exist, is at the U of Toronto, and has published on this subject. Including an article in the Journal of applied physics that used the words "negative refractive index" and "metamaterial" in its title.
If this is a ruse, someone has gone to an improbably great effort on its details. My personal conclusion is that this is probably not a Professor Bourbaki situation.
However a lot about this becomes perfectly clear when you look at the author's name on the original article-- Nicolle Wahls-- and then read the fine print at the bottom of the article:
Nicolle Wahl is a news services officer with the department of public affairs [at UToronto].
If Nicolle manages to keep her position, I expect in the future that she will be required to have her work proofread by someone with some technical education before it is published.
UToronto does not look so good with egg all over its face.
This thread would have been much the safer if it had been entitled in the curse-proof tradition:
The Scottish Play augmented by the Finnish OS
Let us hope that the old curse knows not how cross platforms lest all our files be iambically pentameterized...
Thank you for saying this so well.
Here's the link:
Tom Lehrer's song of The Elements
There is a QuickTime recording of one of Tom's early performances of it, as well as the lyrics.
Wow, that brings back memories.
Of course I cannot prove it: it is an engineering issue and proof is a mathematical term. Trying to prove engineering methods is like trying to taste the colors of a sunrise. : )
Now whether a thing works or not is a matter of engineering, but that is another question entirely...
On a more serious note: my authority on this was my father, who was the thermodynamics engineer on the design team for the Apollo heat shield in the mid 1960s, when I was in high school. We had a couple of relevant conversations in the 1980s, after we had each started playing around with personal computers. I think he would agree with the following summary-- though I'm sure he would find fault with the wording (such was our relationship).
Much of the basic work that was done by his team was in finding methods that would allow the complex thermodynamics problems (that sometimes involved matrices with 11 dimensions) to be approximated in three or four dimensions. These approximations could be handled by sliderules and published (hardcopy of course) lookup tables. A lot of work went into assessing whether the approximations were good enough, which involved developing cross-checking methods that were on the same order of complexity as the original problems.
Computers will yield the same kinds of results, but the heuristics are entirely different-- rather than busting the problem up into things that can be handled by sliderules, trig tables, and so on, the computer approach involves reshaping the problems into things that can be handled by its engineering math library, which knows how to solve some of the higher order equations. So the methods that the Apollo team came up with for solving the problems they faced have no relevance to a computerized approach. Worse, there is often no way to tell whether a design decision was made because of the intrinsic qualities of the materials or because it reduced the complexity of the math. It would take someone familiar with the techniques of the time to make that kind of determination-- and Kueffler+Essler stopped making sliderules a decade ago. The youngest people around who have the kind of expertise and experience to understand the Apollo development notes would now be in their 60s, and their applicable skills would be quite rusty.
Basically much of the knowledge that was developed by the Apollo project has about as much relevance to rocket science today as the techniques used 2.500 years ago at Stonehenge have to today's civil engineering.
That isn't to say we don't know how to make heat shields-- clearly we do. But we don't at the moment know how to build the equivalent of the Apollo / Saturn, and I doubt we could even replicate it from the blueprints. I have no doubt that we could come up with something better. But we don't seem to be doing that.
I think my original point, that we've lost the Apollo program technology, stands. We could replace it with something better, but at the moment we don't have anything like it at all.
Thanks for the info. It looks like a very sensible system. I wonder if what MS comes up with will be as easy to work with?
Couldn't they have just outright copied the Unix method? At least then they would have done it right.
<tongueincheek>That might have been too expensive even for Microsoft, since SCO would surely file a multibillion dollar law suit since it would be patently obvious the MS engineers stole SCO's intellectual property (especially if MS had actually gotten it right-- that would be clear proof of IP theft).</tongueincheek>
Query of the unix gurus: how does the library versioning handle an upgraded "DLL" (don't know the unix term) that you want older apps to use? Such as perhaps a new arithmetic library that takes advantage of new FP hardware?
I've been following the debate my posts kicked off with interest, and found that others have been expanding so well on my original points that I haven't needed to say anything more.
But I do want to thank you for contributing the exact weight of the lunar material that was brought back by the Apollo program. 842 lbs-- probably even my hero Arnie couldn't lift that much all at once. But if none of the individual rocks was more than fifty pounds, I could hand load them into my pickup truck in under 20 minutes, and have room enough left over for a cord and a half of firewood.
[It would be sort of interesting to multiply the weight of the average astronaut by the number of astronauts who have visited the Moon, then divide the weight of the lunar rocks by that result. That would yield a "rock to meat" ratio, which I think would be less than 1:5. That is, I think it took more than five pounds of live meat to bring back every pound of lunar rock.]
Hmm, it seems I can't write anything more without it sounding bitter, so I'll stop at this point.
We know what's up there, we know how to get there, we know how to get back.
Well, to get snide about it, we don't know what's up there (but we do know that a golf club can be used in a space suit, and that funny wheels make an effective lunar go-cart, and we collected enough rocks that I think a strong man would have a problem lifting them all at once-- but I'm not sure). We knew how to get there, but like Goldie Hawn frequently said at the time, "I used to know all that stuff." Now we don't have a clue as to how to get back. We threw all that technology away.
Yes, I mean that. The Apollo program was based on technology that used (get ready for it) sliderules. The total amount of computer power that was used in the entire Apollo program is dwarfed by the desktop machine that you turn off without giving it a second thought, when your done with your evening's slashdot entertainment. You couldn't muster up enough people in the workforce today who know how to use a sliderule to repeat what was then done, or even understand the notes that were written about it. The technology of the Apollo program was never carried across into computers. To remake the heavy lift Saturn rockets or reconstruct the Apollo heat sheilds, we would have to redo everything from scratch. We orphaned the whole thing as we moved on to better technology.
Terribly shortsighted, that was.
In response to another of your comments: I did not discredit what you call the "residual accomplishments". Re-read my post.
As to Christopher Columbus-- he made several repeat voyages to the New World. He stuck to his program, even though it failed in the long run. His program was designed to return spices and gold-- the keys of that age. Our space adventure had no pragmatic purpose, and so was shut down before it accomplished anything of lasting significance. It was truly just a "First Post" effort.
[The USA attitude re: Moon exploration] it's more of a "Been there, done that" stance.
At its time, the "Moon Race" was an effective political ploy. Maybe not the best cold war strategy, but an effective one.
But to regard lunar exploration as something the USA has already accomplished is dumb. While there was some good technology fallout, and some good science, they were incidental to the thrust of the USA effort. Which was simply to establish "First Post" bragging rights on the Moon. Which gives the USA all the enduring value of "FP!" claim on slashdot.
I don't disagree with your assessment-- it does seem like most of my fellow Americans do think that way. Which I think is a pity.
So how much is one official LOC? :)
You want that in interior decorator measure? Broken down into shelf-yards of leatherbound, shelf-yards of bluecloth, shelf-yards of reds?
One might argue that BSA's belief was arrived at negligently...
Exactly. The signatory to the letter, Ms Corina Beck, was clearly negligent in allowing this allegation of criminal activity to be made in her name, without first making at least a cursory review of the "evidence". As she was acting as the legal agent of the BSA, the BSA is responsible for her incompetence. BSA either failed to train Ms Corina Beck properly or failed to supervise her activities, or both.
As a result, BSA has accused an institution of criminal behavior. That is not something that should be taken lightly. The law deserves more respect than BSA is currently giving it.
At its best the law is a precision instrument. If we allow it to be used as a hammer, we'll lose a core part of civilization. There are other ways BSA can accomplish its goals.
That's not a bad idea, but I think it would be better if we do something with the logo to visually distinguish between the two BSAs. I suggest that The Business Software Alliance logo be just one saluting finger with the "NO!" slash through it.
That would pretty much visually capture my gut reaction to what they seem to be attempting to do to everyone else.
The Boy Scouts of Ameria should sue the Business Software Alliance and force them to change their name, ...
This would be a good idea. The Boy Scouts of America have enough of their own image troubles without being confused with the other BSA (whose image is just going to get worse and worse as their chickens come home to roost).
There is nothing quite as off-putting as the spatterings you see on the heads of persons who choose to support a chicken roost.
So, the someone at the BSA made a mistake with their scripts, and when it was noticed they immediately apologized and said they would fix the problem.
Oh, it's worse than that. Much, much worse.
Their message alleges criminal activities. The evidence they offer is so absurd that it would have been rejected out of hand by anyone with any knowledge commercial software on a quick reading of the message. The inescapable conclusion is that BSA is not having a human review these allegations before sending them out.
BSA is churning out allegations of criminal activities through an automated process without even minimal human oversight. That is not prudent. It is probably legally actionable-- I think it is probably harrassment (but IANAL).
The law deserves more respect than BSA is giving it. At the very least, this Corina Beck person whose name is on the message should have read its content before sending it. That she failed to do so points to a serious problem with her ability to fill her position in a responsible way. And it points to a serious problem with BSA, that it would fill this position with an incompetent person.
Tossing around allegations of criminality is a serious business.
I doubt that. More likely the surname is derived from the geographical feature.
I can't be sure of course, but I think the original poster may have been making a reference to that bit about how Tolkien chose "Frodo" as a single letter transliteration of "Fordo", which was a name that meant "doom-bringer" or something like that (as in "Enri the Fordo" (sometimes "Enri the Fordoer" or "Enri duFordo"-- all apparently the same guy. He was that Saxon noble who went on a rampage after the battle of Hastings). I recall at that time there was some talk of the name "Ford" being a shortened version of "Fordoer" or "duFordo" or something like that (the root of all of them is the verb "to fordo" which meant to destroy something by tearing out its insides). Certainly that kind of subtle word play was right up Tolkien's alley-- making "Frodo" a sort of anti-fordo.
It's probably just as well that the Ford family name was changed before they got into assembly line production. Otherwise I suppose that Chevies and other auto makerrs would have been unable to make any four door models (since that would have been a clear mockery of the Fordoer Motor Company's name and disallowed by trademark law).
Does anyone use 'rede' (in the Ethelred the un~ sense) these days?
I had to re-read the AC's post, but I think that was his point. That is, if I have reded his words correctly. (I think I got that right... yep, that usage agrees with the 20 pound Webster).
Yes, this is it exactly.
Note that in this case, the lawyer very carefully avoided any suggestion that Google might take any kind of legal action. There is good reason for that avoidance: it is so obvious that Google has no legal recourse in this instance that even the most veiled threat could backfire and force the company into defending itself against a claim of harrassment. Which would mean losing goodwill among potential google users no matter what the courtroom outcome would be.
Sending this letter is Google's way of stockpiling snow balls for a snow ball fight with GooglePlex.com (that's next year's competitor, a googol raised to the goolgoleth power IIRC). Undoubtedly the cost of preparing this letter (and others) is very carefully accounted for, so when they go to court against GooglePlex.com, they will be able to show they have spent $ThisMuch in defense of their trademark. (They do not have to demonstrate that they won any of the contests, and if questioned specifically about any of them, they can always say that in their opinion, it would have cost them too much in goodwill to fight that particular battle).
btw, back in the 1960's googolplex was the largest named cardinal number. Does anyone know if anyone has named a larger one? And is it still a few hundred magnitudes larger than all the quarks that ever were, or ever will be?