By saying this you fall into the trap of justifying space research because it might eventually help children/poor/3rd world nations.
What the hell is the point of having a human race if all it does is breed? Humanity ought to be setting its aims a little higher and actually *do* something worthwhile. We can debate about what specific things are worthwhile, but worthwhile does not mean simply pumping out more babies.
C++ isn't bad. It comes with basic I/O as standard, and certainly it's trivial to read tab delimited data directly with the standard libraries. C++ comes with a math library that has many of the math functions you need: from trig functions to the gamma function. GNU C++ comes with other functions such as the Bessel functions and so on. C++ has control structures that support looping over arrays in a freeform manner and using the standard template library gives you high level ways to access and manipulate those arrays in a functional way. It has flexible data types ranging from the built in IEEE float and double types to high level object oriented classes. It's hard to exaggerate the number of numerical C++ libraries in existence. There must be tens of thousands. And importantly, the major graphics libraries like OpenGL and DirectX work well with C++. You can download C++ and these libraries for free and a C++ compiler will work well on anything from a 4Mb 33MHz PC to a petaflop cluster.
There is no essential conflict here. As Hume said, "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions". You're right to criticise those who "[seek] to supplant human concerns with an inhuman, unthinking, and presumptive moral calculus.". But once you have those concerns, logic can be a helpful tool in managing them.
The surface area of a black hole increases with its mass. And we expect the total area of all event horizons to increase over time (apart from a small amount of leakage from Hawing radiation).
And the boom from a black hole is usually in the form of X-rays or gamma rays radiation and, in energetic terms, it's very loud.
That was the most content-free science article...
on
Seeing With Your Skin?
·
· Score: 1
...ever.
There's no mechanism proposed, just some vague waffle about some organisms having IR sensitive skin and some nonsense about computer simulation. I wonder if there's even anything sensible behind this article or if it's a bogus article about some bogus science.
Some of us have to crunch numbers every day and it's interesting to consider Excel as a tool for this purpose. But to then have a reviewer talk about things like "insane equations" makes it clear that the reviewer sees "equations" as some kind of esoteric icon associated with peculiar people with "pulsing brains" rather than the bread and butter of the jobs of thousands, if not millions of people the world over. How can/. post a review by such a clearly ignorant reviewer? It verges on embarassing to read. What next? A review of a book on functional programming by someone whose only experience with computers is programming the VCR?
The link you provided looks like it's the LONGEST path they could find
What you are implying makes no sense at all. There is no longest proof that 2+2=4 because given any proof, you can find a longer one. What they are doing is this: take metamath's proof that 2+2=4 (which is the result of lots of people working hard to find an efficient proof) and find the longest path you can take *drilling down* into that proof. In other words, the 150 is telling you that the best proof of 2+2=4 found so far is a tree 150 layers *deep*. The full proof consists of 25933 steps. That's enormous. A typical book on set theory gets from the axioms of ZF, to ordinal or cardinal arithmetic, in but a few pages. It only takes a couple of pages more to define Cauchy sequences or Dedekind cuts and from there get to the field of complex numbers. Almost any mathematics textbook or paper elides hundreds of steps (if not thousands or tens of thousands) on every page.
I can give a concrete answer. Browse metamath.org, a similar project in which machine verified proofs are collected. Look at the vast amount of work required to prove even the most trivial things. For example check out 2+2=4. Make sure you drill down into the proofs of the theorems used, not just the top level. Converting real world mathematics into machine readable form is a vast endeavor. It's also something that doesn't interest mathematicians, so the collection of machine verifiable proofs will lag *centuries* behind the state of the art.
I've seen this list before and I really dislike it.
* The Mathematics of the Brain: Develop a mathematical theory to build a functional model of the brain that is mathematically consistent and predictive rather than merely biologically inspired.
This isn't an issue of mathematics. Sure, when we come to the stage when we can model brains we'll be using mathematics. But the question of how to model brains isn't itself mathematics.
* Biological Quantum Field Theory: Quantum and statistical methods have had great success modeling virus evolution. Can such techniques be used to model more complex systems such as bacteria? Can these techniques be used to control pathogen evolution?
This is highly suspect stuff. There isn't really a subject called "Biological Quantum Field Theory" and I doubt that anything similar to QFT has been used to model virus evolution.
* Computational Duality: Duality in mathematics has been a profound tool for theoretical understanding. Can it be extended to develop principled computational techniques where duality and geometry are the basis for novel algorithms?
These are just empty buzzwords. There are already countless things called "duality" all the way through computer science.
* An Information Theory for Virus Evolution: Can Shannon's theory shed light on this fundamental area of biology?
I'm ambivalent about this one. People were interested in this decades ago and I read a good chunk of the literature. But nothing real has come out of it. Maybe something could. But biological systems are inherently messy and I'm not sure that new mathematics is the solution.
* The Geometry of Genome Space: What notion of distance is needed to incorporate biological utility?
This simply isn't mathematics. I worked in a similar field years ago. But this wasn't really a subject that would push forward mathematics, it was just creative use of mathematics in a new domain. There's no deep mathematics to be found here.
* What are the Symmetries and Action Principles for Biology?: Extend our understanding of symmetries and action principles in biology along the lines of classical thermodynamics, to include important biological concepts such as robustness, modularity, evolvability and variability.
This is a bit off the wall. The person behind this list clearly sees some kind of analogy between quantum mechanics and biology (eg. biological QFT above). Wacky ideas are all well and good, but making some 'official' list from one person's hobby horse seems very strange to me.
* Settle the Smooth Poincare Conjecture in Dimension 4: What are the implications for space-time and cosmology? And might the answer unlock the secret of "dark energy"?
The mention of "dark energy" here is completely bogus. I guess it's a scheme to raise funding or something by trying to link some pure mathematics to a hot topic.
* What are the Fundamental Laws of Biology?: This question will remain front and center for the next 100 years. DARPA places this challenge last as finding these laws will undoubtedly require the mathematics developed in answering several of the questions listed above.
Again, "Fundamental Laws of Biology" sounds like one person's hobby horse than any serious trend in biology. And anyway, this isn't mathematics. We already have a Fundamental Law of Biology, it's called "Evolution by Natural Selection". Just about everything else slots into that framework and we explain almost everything in biology in terms of this. Sure, it'd be nice to extract some solid numerical predictions from evolution, but that's not a problem for mathematics.
Bear with me as I go a bit abstract, but/. is for nerds, right? Organisms are a kind of fixed point. a zygote with genome G implanted in an organism with womb (or egg, or, more generally, an environment of some sort) W gives rise to some organism O. O = f(G,W) where f is the 'development' function. But W is itself a function of the organism. So we really have O = f(G,W(O)). O is a fixed point of the function \x -> f(G,W(x)). But it's not at all clear this equation has unique solutions.
Just so you know I haven't gone off the rails consider the example of Ken Thompsons's famous paper. You might imagine that compiling the source of a C compiler with the compiler it produces is guaranteed to give you the 'right thing'. It's exactly analogous, the 'development' process has multiple fixed points.
So it's not 100% clear to me that selectively breeding an organism with the same genome gives rise to the same organism. It depends on how much the state stored in the environment W contributes to O.
That reminds me of the people who tested their polygraph device by splitting their guinea pigs into two groups. One group was told to pretend they'd committed a crime and the other group was told not to. People in each group were then asked whether or not they'd committed a crime. They could apparently spot the people who lied about their imaginary crime. I kid you not. I got this from a BBC documentary, probably Horizon.
That's interesting. A month or two ago I bought a game for my PC (actually, MacBook booted in Windows). I haven't bought a PC game in about 5 years. I quickly discovered I hadn't actually bought the game. Even though it came with a big fat DVD, there appeared to be nothing on it apart from some tool to download the game. It took about 48 hours to download it, and then I discovered that I needed a network connection to play it. That's the last PC game I ever buy. Back to the DS and PSP for me. That was my second worst buying experience ever. (Second only to making the mistake of buying from Acer.)
(Note, I may have misguided expectations here. I've made no effort to track PC game culture in the last few years. Maybe I should have already known that bait-and-switch is commonplace in the PC gaming world. Maybe expecting to be able to go to a store, buy a game, take it home, and play it, is not appropriate nowadays. But console games seem to work fine.)
JAGs? I like to get only the best advice, which is why I go right to the top and get my interpretation of the Geneva and Hague conventions from reliable sources like the memos of ex-Attorney General Alberto C Gonzales himself.
The important phenomenon at work here is that of Rossby waves. It's interesting that this type of polar standing wave may also be implicated in the famous Saturnian hexagon.
It's amazing how out of touch some people are with what is and isn't possible with today's engineering. All I can say is this: meet you here in a few decades so I can say "told you so". There will be no space elevator within our lifetimes, or the lifetimes of our children. A few specks of nanotube in a lab do not make a practical building material and the chain from the lab to engineering on a scale beyond anything achieved before will require generations of work.
But having said that, you are absolutely right to point out that a space elevator is probably trivial compared to an FTL drive.
> So are you trying to say that people shouldn't drink, have sex, or do anything else that others would consider inappropriate so as to ensure such actions could never be photographed and posted online?
I've never found it particularly hard to avoid getting photographed while having sex.
> It's not that much of a stretch to guess that life-as-we-know-it is not uncommon
Yes it is. It's like saying that Mars has molecules on is surface, brains have molecules inside, therefore there must be intelligent life on Mars.
Organic molecules are trivial things compared to organisms. Don't get confused because they both start with o-r-g.
it is not such a good idea to put a religious person at the head of a science organisation.
I'm as anti-religious as they come. I think that religion is a despicable con propagated by evil people for their own nefarious ends. But I still disagree with you. I learned the theory of evolution from an ordained minister and his education was perfectly sound. He was a nice guy actually (besides being evil and nefarious, that is). There are enough safety checks in place in an organisation like the Royal Society that someone's religion is unlikely to cause too much harm. In fact, this event shows that those safety checks may have been a little too easy too trigger.
I suspect the more we resolve and catalog and the more we get direct observations of planets, the more the theories will change.
Do you really think so? I wonder if that principle applies to other things too. Like if astronomers keep observing galaxies then theories of galaxy formation will evolve too.
Slashdot Mirror
> How many times does it have to be repeated...
By saying this you fall into the trap of justifying space research because it might eventually help children/poor/3rd world nations.
What the hell is the point of having a human race if all it does is breed? Humanity ought to be setting its aims a little higher and actually *do* something worthwhile. We can debate about what specific things are worthwhile, but worthwhile does not mean simply pumping out more babies.
C++ isn't bad. It comes with basic I/O as standard, and certainly it's trivial to read tab delimited data directly with the standard libraries. C++ comes with a math library that has many of the math functions you need: from trig functions to the gamma function. GNU C++ comes with other functions such as the Bessel functions and so on. C++ has control structures that support looping over arrays in a freeform manner and using the standard template library gives you high level ways to access and manipulate those arrays in a functional way. It has flexible data types ranging from the built in IEEE float and double types to high level object oriented classes. It's hard to exaggerate the number of numerical C++ libraries in existence. There must be tens of thousands. And importantly, the major graphics libraries like OpenGL and DirectX work well with C++. You can download C++ and these libraries for free and a C++ compiler will work well on anything from a 4Mb 33MHz PC to a petaflop cluster.
There is no essential conflict here. As Hume said, "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions". You're right to criticise those who "[seek] to supplant human concerns with an inhuman, unthinking, and presumptive moral calculus.". But once you have those concerns, logic can be a helpful tool in managing them.
Besides quasicrystals, can you name any work by Penrose that has resulted in testable physics?
And the boom from a black hole is usually in the form of X-rays or gamma rays radiation and, in energetic terms, it's very loud.
...ever.
There's no mechanism proposed, just some vague waffle about some organisms having IR sensitive skin and some nonsense about computer simulation. I wonder if there's even anything sensible behind this article or if it's a bogus article about some bogus science.
Some of us have to crunch numbers every day and it's interesting to consider Excel as a tool for this purpose. But to then have a reviewer talk about things like "insane equations" makes it clear that the reviewer sees "equations" as some kind of esoteric icon associated with peculiar people with "pulsing brains" rather than the bread and butter of the jobs of thousands, if not millions of people the world over. How can /. post a review by such a clearly ignorant reviewer? It verges on embarassing to read. What next? A review of a book on functional programming by someone whose only experience with computers is programming the VCR?
What you are implying makes no sense at all. There is no longest proof that 2+2=4 because given any proof, you can find a longer one. What they are doing is this: take metamath's proof that 2+2=4 (which is the result of lots of people working hard to find an efficient proof) and find the longest path you can take *drilling down* into that proof. In other words, the 150 is telling you that the best proof of 2+2=4 found so far is a tree 150 layers *deep*. The full proof consists of 25933 steps. That's enormous. A typical book on set theory gets from the axioms of ZF, to ordinal or cardinal arithmetic, in but a few pages. It only takes a couple of pages more to define Cauchy sequences or Dedekind cuts and from there get to the field of complex numbers. Almost any mathematics textbook or paper elides hundreds of steps (if not thousands or tens of thousands) on every page.
I can give a concrete answer. Browse metamath.org, a similar project in which machine verified proofs are collected. Look at the vast amount of work required to prove even the most trivial things. For example check out 2+2=4. Make sure you drill down into the proofs of the theorems used, not just the top level. Converting real world mathematics into machine readable form is a vast endeavor. It's also something that doesn't interest mathematicians, so the collection of machine verifiable proofs will lag *centuries* behind the state of the art.
I've seen this list before and I really dislike it.
* The Mathematics of the Brain: Develop a mathematical theory to build a functional model of the brain that is mathematically consistent and predictive rather than merely biologically inspired.
This isn't an issue of mathematics. Sure, when we come to the stage when we can model brains we'll be using mathematics. But the question of how to model brains isn't itself mathematics.
* Biological Quantum Field Theory: Quantum and statistical methods have had great success modeling virus evolution. Can such techniques be used to model more complex systems such as bacteria? Can these techniques be used to control pathogen evolution?
This is highly suspect stuff. There isn't really a subject called "Biological Quantum Field Theory" and I doubt that anything similar to QFT has been used to model virus evolution.
* Computational Duality: Duality in mathematics has been a profound tool for theoretical understanding. Can it be extended to develop principled computational techniques where duality and geometry are the basis for novel algorithms?
These are just empty buzzwords. There are already countless things called "duality" all the way through computer science.
* An Information Theory for Virus Evolution: Can Shannon's theory shed light on this fundamental area of biology?
I'm ambivalent about this one. People were interested in this decades ago and I read a good chunk of the literature. But nothing real has come out of it. Maybe something could. But biological systems are inherently messy and I'm not sure that new mathematics is the solution.
* The Geometry of Genome Space: What notion of distance is needed to incorporate biological utility?
This simply isn't mathematics. I worked in a similar field years ago. But this wasn't really a subject that would push forward mathematics, it was just creative use of mathematics in a new domain. There's no deep mathematics to be found here.
* What are the Symmetries and Action Principles for Biology?: Extend our understanding of symmetries and action principles in biology along the lines of classical thermodynamics, to include important biological concepts such as robustness, modularity, evolvability and variability.
This is a bit off the wall. The person behind this list clearly sees some kind of analogy between quantum mechanics and biology (eg. biological QFT above). Wacky ideas are all well and good, but making some 'official' list from one person's hobby horse seems very strange to me.
* Settle the Smooth Poincare Conjecture in Dimension 4: What are the implications for space-time and cosmology? And might the answer unlock the secret of "dark energy"?
The mention of "dark energy" here is completely bogus. I guess it's a scheme to raise funding or something by trying to link some pure mathematics to a hot topic.
* What are the Fundamental Laws of Biology?: This question will remain front and center for the next 100 years. DARPA places this challenge last as finding these laws will undoubtedly require the mathematics developed in answering several of the questions listed above.
Again, "Fundamental Laws of Biology" sounds like one person's hobby horse than any serious trend in biology. And anyway, this isn't mathematics. We already have a Fundamental Law of Biology, it's called "Evolution by Natural Selection". Just about everything else slots into that framework and we explain almost everything in biology in terms of this. Sure, it'd be nice to extract some solid numerical predictions from evolution, but that's not a problem for mathematics.
What was quoted may in fact be part of a script that the astronauts are required to speak for a TV appearance.
Maybe he could become a video game designer.
Bear with me as I go a bit abstract, but /. is for nerds, right? Organisms are a kind of fixed point. a zygote with genome G implanted in an organism with womb (or egg, or, more generally, an environment of some sort) W gives rise to some organism O. O = f(G,W) where f is the 'development' function. But W is itself a function of the organism. So we really have O = f(G,W(O)). O is a fixed point of the function \x -> f(G,W(x)). But it's not at all clear this equation has unique solutions.
Just so you know I haven't gone off the rails consider the example of Ken Thompsons's famous paper. You might imagine that compiling the source of a C compiler with the compiler it produces is guaranteed to give you the 'right thing'. It's exactly analogous, the 'development' process has multiple fixed points.
So it's not 100% clear to me that selectively breeding an organism with the same genome gives rise to the same organism. It depends on how much the state stored in the environment W contributes to O.
That reminds me of the people who tested their polygraph device by splitting their guinea pigs into two groups. One group was told to pretend they'd committed a crime and the other group was told not to. People in each group were then asked whether or not they'd committed a crime. They could apparently spot the people who lied about their imaginary crime. I kid you not. I got this from a BBC documentary, probably Horizon.
I can see why you got a job PORTing Hardware Abstraction Layers.
That's interesting. A month or two ago I bought a game for my PC (actually, MacBook booted in Windows). I haven't bought a PC game in about 5 years. I quickly discovered I hadn't actually bought the game. Even though it came with a big fat DVD, there appeared to be nothing on it apart from some tool to download the game. It took about 48 hours to download it, and then I discovered that I needed a network connection to play it. That's the last PC game I ever buy. Back to the DS and PSP for me. That was my second worst buying experience ever. (Second only to making the mistake of buying from Acer.)
(Note, I may have misguided expectations here. I've made no effort to track PC game culture in the last few years. Maybe I should have already known that bait-and-switch is commonplace in the PC gaming world. Maybe expecting to be able to go to a store, buy a game, take it home, and play it, is not appropriate nowadays. But console games seem to work fine.)
JAGs? I like to get only the best advice, which is why I go right to the top and get my interpretation of the Geneva and Hague conventions from reliable sources like the memos of ex-Attorney General Alberto C Gonzales himself.
The important phenomenon at work here is that of Rossby waves. It's interesting that this type of polar standing wave may also be implicated in the famous Saturnian hexagon.
But having said that, you are absolutely right to point out that a space elevator is probably trivial compared to an FTL drive.
I've never found it particularly hard to avoid getting photographed while having sex.
Yes it is. It's like saying that Mars has molecules on is surface, brains have molecules inside, therefore there must be intelligent life on Mars. Organic molecules are trivial things compared to organisms. Don't get confused because they both start with o-r-g.
It was better in the same way that 0.0000011 is bigger than 0.000001099.
Don't forget the munchkins! Or are they midgets?
I'm as anti-religious as they come. I think that religion is a despicable con propagated by evil people for their own nefarious ends. But I still disagree with you. I learned the theory of evolution from an ordained minister and his education was perfectly sound. He was a nice guy actually (besides being evil and nefarious, that is). There are enough safety checks in place in an organisation like the Royal Society that someone's religion is unlikely to cause too much harm. In fact, this event shows that those safety checks may have been a little too easy too trigger.
Do you really think so? I wonder if that principle applies to other things too. Like if astronomers keep observing galaxies then theories of galaxy formation will evolve too.