If I open my Greek New Testament, I see manuscript evidence going back to the 1st Century, you know, the people that walked with Christ.
If this were the case, why would the gospels have copied from each other, or from since-lost common sources?
And, as you study church history, you will find that the more educated Christians are, the less likely they are to go to war.
I suspect this is not specific to Christians. The more you know about something, the less it tends to seem absolutely black and white, and the less willing you will be to kill someone for having a different interpretation of it.
Now, mind you, this only holds for Christianity and Judaism, which encourage study of the Bible, including the most accurate original documents we can possibly find.
I'm not sure this is true. Many variants of Christianity in particular hold to infallibility of one sort or another (biblical or papal spring to mind immediately), and 'encourage' is not the word I would have used to describe their attitude to critical analysis.
No really. Comparing Wikipedia with the Library of Alexandria shows you have idea
about the first and are calling the other names with it.
The loss of the Library of Alexandria was a tragedy - but in large part because much of the knowledge in the Library was not reproduced elsewhere, and thus was permanently lost. I think if the knowledge contained in Wikipedia was permanently lost, our civilisation would be all but over. The existence of articles on pop-cultural ephemera alongside those on magnificent achievments in culture and science does not diminish this one bit; I think it would be more likely to enhance its value for future historians. The comparison is valid and interesting, IMO, although losing Wikipedia would not in fact lead to the permanent loss of the information therein. This is again, a strength.
The Library of Alexandria contained ancient to possibly even antedeluvian texts
The modern consensus in geology is that there was no single worldwide flood in recent history, so the notion that there might have been any 'antediluvian' texts in the Library of Alexandria is based on a false premise. Wikipedia could have told you this. It could also have told you that text of a sort from as long ago as 3200 BCE still exists.
Tivo doesn't prohibit you from modifying the software. They prevent you from running the modified software on their hardware. This seems perfectly reasonable. You can modify their software and run it on any other device.
But it's not their hardware. If I bought a Tivo, it's my hardware, and I should be able to do whatever I like with it. Your argument seems to be saying that the wishes of Tivo - who made something physical, that they then sold to me - outweigh the wishes of the authors of the code they used. I think if someone releases software with the explicit desire that people who use it be able to modify it (provided they preserve this ability for others) then that condition should be respected.
The design of the hardware belongs to Tivo, yes, but as long as it isn't duplicated, I don't see how this could matter.
The word "meter" does exist in written Commonwealth English, but it denotes a device for measurement . A different spelling from the unit for length ("metre") reduces the ambiguity within written discussion of measurements. Words like "litre" are simply being spelled consistently with this.
I would imagine that the distinction is absent in written American English because of the altered spelling of words like theatre/theater and centre/center. While this is somewhat reasonable, especially given that most American accents are rhotic, it is a slight disadvantage when writing about measurement.
Also, I think the original etymology for both metre/meter is Greek via Latin before coming through French.
Another great shortcut is the Apple-backtick/tilde keystroke to cycle within the windows of the foreground application. Physically right above the tab key, so the related functionality is quite intuitive (to me at least). I have used this all the time since I heard about it!
A quick google tells me that the Raq2 uses MIPS, but for x86 processors, python's performance can be boosted by a large margin for almost no effort by using Psyco.
I use python almost exclusively for my research work (it's quite common in my field, computational linguistics) and the performance when I use Psyco is often pretty close to that using a compiled language, especially when I/O is a factor, where python's optimised routines are very quick. Sure, it is sometimes a little slower than what I could code up in C, but when I can develop the python code several times faster, most of the time python wins out.
Um, sorry to both you and the mods that decided your post was informative, but the presumption of innocence is a part of the common law, and as far as I'm aware is a central part of criminal law in all common-law countries.
I belive this idea dates back to at least ancient Rome.
I hate to say it, but better illegal than legal *and* legally recognized by the State as a "normal" profession like in Germany. There was the recent case of an unemployed lady there who was refused continuing unemployment benefits because she didn't take a job as a "sex worker." (Cite: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/01/30/wgerm30.xml ) I'd be ok if it were legal for the purpose of harm reduction but not overtly encouraged by the State.
That seems like a much better argument for "legal but voluntary" than "illegal". The police in the US must waste so much time trying to stamp out something that is never, ever going to go away. Here in New South Wales (the most populous state in Australia), prostitution has been legal for decades. It's not like there isn't still a social stigma attached, but I find it hard to see how throwing criminal sanctions into the mix is helpful.
Your perspective is sinful man. If you are citing examples of man's sin, and additionally, men who claimed Christianity and sinned, well, you'll find yourself in agreement with the Bible. God's Word is very clear and redundant in stating that man is sinful at heart, that there is no good in him, and doesn't even have the ability to be good. So simply choosing examples from history of men sinning does no damage to true Christianity; on the contrary, it enforces the truth of what is said over and over in God's Word.
Personally, I think our best chance of increasing our understanding of the world is when we consider alternative viewpoints and ask questions. If noticing that interpretation of the Bible changes from time to time, place to place, and person to person is "sinful", so be it.
There also seems to be a bet each way in your argument. When people do good (or believe in truthful things) and claim their position is in accordance with the Bible, that is vindication of the Bible. When they "sin" and claim their position is in accordance with the Bible, that is vindication of the hypocrisy of people - as claimed in the Bible. Is there any situation you could imagine (it doesn't have to be real) where events would contradict what is in the Bible?
I also don't think there is any such thing as "sin", I was just using your terminology.
If you care to question Christianity, true Christianity that is, not political activists, or the millions of church-goers who may be associated with religious organizations but at heart don't know Jesus, then don't seek the answer from men. The question you should be asking is: what does God think about this? Exposing hypocrisy in people is no accomplishment at all (exposing a lack of it might be, but exposing it is basically declaring someone a sinner, which we know already). You are correct that true Christians should not be hypocrites. But shortcomings you may find are not those of Christ, they are those of people, and the very nature which inside all of us that the Bible speaks directly about, so it is foolish to base your conclusions about Christ and your own eternity on the shortcomings of sinful men. Base your questions and criticisms on Jesus Himself -- what are your criticisms of Him?
So you are saying most Christians aren't Christians? If this belief system has so many adherents who are misled in their faith, what hope is there for Jesus as saviour of the world?
If Christianity can't help people change, why should we bother to consult the Bible at all for anything but guidance about how to make sure you get the afterlife you want?
If you don't start from an assumption that the Bible is divinely inspired, its reliability is as open to question as any other mythology from millenia ago. I am far from convinced that the Jesus depicted in the Bible accords closely enough with the life of an historical figure that I can criticise him directly. If you talk about the Jesus of the Bible, he had much to say that I completely agree with, and a good deal to say that I think is downright harmful.
I'm not concerned about my "eternity". I will die within the next hundred years, and I will cease to exist, just as I did not exist before I was born.
how can you be sure the same won't be said of modern Christians' viewpoints in another few centuries?
We can say that. Very easily. Something you left out there that is important to realize is that during this time (11th-13th centuries) the Christians had no access to the Bible-- it was controlled and read by the pope/bishops and people in power (they told the people it was too holy for them, another thing that the bible does not say). It wasn't until the reformation (16th century) and Martin Luther's "95 Thesis" that ordinary folks began to question what the religous figures were telling them. After the reformation people were finally able to read the bible and see for themselves that "gosh, you know, the bible infact does not condone anything related to the crusades." Now unless some very sick and twisted cult of Christianity comes about, one that would purpose to start another crusade, at this point it would stop being Christian, as the bible never says anywhere that they're good, it is safe to say that it "would not happen" under the guise of Christianity. Some may say that it was, but this, as the crusades, would be a misunderstanding, as the core of Christianity says nothing of the sort.
I tried to be reasonably careful and say "biblical scholars", rather than "ordinary Christians". You are right access to the biblical text was controlled by The Church at the time of the crusades, but I don't think Bad Things that some claimed to have been supported on biblical grounds stopped with the reformation. A good example is slavery, which was certainly not universally opposed by protestant thought until at least the 19th century. Extremist hate groups continue to use the bible to justify their racism.
Also, this sudden access to the bible didn't convince everyone to leave or change the Catholic Church itself: it is still with us today.
My perspective is that the knowledge available to us and the influence that has on our view of the past is always changing - and since at least the enlightenment, this has been in the direction of increasing knowledge and broader views of historical events. Sometimes religious thought has no choice but to come along (such as with the status of women in society, the institution of slavery, the responsibility of all Jews for the death of Jesus) and sometimes a significant movement resists this change (such as concerning civil rights for consenting same-sex adults and the explanation of the process by which organisms came about). I think it is rather against the grain of history to say that these positions will never change, or will always be agreed upon by everyone who draws their instruction from the Bible.
What is Truly Said by the "Core of Christianity" about these things is not really important to the argument I am making. The point is there are and were people who honestly believe they have biblical justification for positions neither you nor I would support. And there are others who would very likely say that the "Core of Christianity" would oppose various things you might see as required by it. My point is that it is not possible to decide between these positions on the basis of "the Bible is right" because everyone claims to be supported by it.
Nothing in the bible condones the crusades, nor any other of the violations against the Laws of Humanity/Nature(tm) that are on these lists.
The difficulty I see is that things that you are attempting to distance yourself from, such as the crusades (and there are many more examples), were once accepted by the vast majority of Christians as being in accordance with, or even required by, the biblical scholarship of the time.
If you can say "oh, those Christians in ages past were all just misguided, we've got the right idea now", how can you be sure the same won't be said of modern Christians' viewpoints in another few centuries?
At my university there is a computer science summer school run for bright and interested high school students.
I was a tutor this year, and we had each group of around 15 students build a working search engine in python in one week. The engines only had to index a single site, but still, all the groups succeeded in just one week.
Unfortunately, the probability of bacteria mutating to be resistant to several antibiotics may not be simply the product of the probabilities of the individual mutations. Multiple resistance has been observed, although the likelihood of even one bacillus simultaneously undergoing all required mutations with independent probabilities is vanishingly small.
This is rather puzzling. A quantum mechanism has been proposed. I should point out the the author's (McFadden) book is where I learned of these surprising mutations.
ClearCase is pretty neat too, once you're used to it. I no longer work for the company where I used it, but there are some very nice features, eg having version control transparently part of the filesystem, actually useful branching and labelling schemes, decent merge/conflict resolution, and multi-site support. This meant we were mainly dealing with the genuine complexity in making 50 or so developers work together, rather than fighting against version control and each other.
One cool way I was told about for etching a board is to print the mirror image on a laser printer and ironing the printout onto the copper side of the board. Here is a
page describing the process and best materials in detail.
I am surprised that it is possible to believe that spoken language has no grammar. Seeing that you've studied some linguistics at University, I'll assume you have a good reason for this - just for my own curiosity though, could you elaborate?
I would have thought there has to be some grammar in any spoken language - the fact that any native speaker can immediately identify when an utterance "sounds wrong", or "doesn't make any sense", indicates that there are some rules, even if entirely tacit. Spoken languages use grammatical techniques (like word order, inflection, agglutination, etc) to distinguish between the subject/object of transitive verbs, the timing of an event, the number of something and many other things. Isn't this grammar? Isn't the presence of a grammar also generally considered the difference between a pidgin and a creole?
I would also have thought that there are analogues to punctuation in spoken language - pauses, tonal inflection, emphasis etc all make listening easier, and written punctuation was invented to make reading easier in a similar way.
I agree that the rules of formal English (and probably other languages) are more rigid and prohibit many perfectly clear expressions. This does not however mean that a native speaker's intuitive understanding can't ever be expressed as rules - just that the rules of formal/written language may not always match those of informal/spoken language.
I would guess that non-native speakers may sometimes make fewer mistakes partly due to the meta-knowledge gained by learning a new language; they get a better idea of how language and grammar work in general. I know that my (fairly limited) knowledge of a language very different to English certainly improved my understanding of the way that English worked.
I know this is a bit pedantic, but I'm not so sure that C does count as just syntactic sugar on top of assembly language, whatever path of reasoning you follow.
I would argue that there are valid, useful sequences that can be hand-coded in assembly where you could not write any C code that, when compiled, gave that assembly. This is not just confined to weird trivial examples - if you are writing for particular capabilities of a processor, or have some crazy dogma about how you would like registers to be used. An optimising compiler might do a better job than a person could in some instances, but that doesn't make them identical.
Yes, you can put inline assembler in C, but that just goes straight through, and doesn't have to follow the standards, so it doesn't count.
To follow through with your auto-mechanic analogy, their tools are probably not speech, but descriptions of their methods most certainly are speech. Don't you think it would be a violation of mechanics' right to express themselves if they were prevented from publishing their methods as manuals? In much the same way, a programmer's computer is not really speech, but the code compiled and run on it is.
What you say about comments is true, although I would have said this shows that code is the same as speech, as any natural language text can be thrown into a comment in code, and the code is still valid.
One useful way of looking at actual program code though, is as a description for how to do something. For people well-versed in the language used, it is often a more precise and concise way of expressing that description than using a natural language. You could instead choose to describe the exact same process in English or Swahili, although it would most likely be a lot less efficient. This does not change the fact that the content would be identical.
It is possible to take the text of code, and express it in a way that shows it is undeniably speech - putting it on a t-shirt for example. You can't run it directly any more, although the text is unchanged. You can hardly argue that text on a t-shirt is not speech. Particularly in the case of the OpenDVD t-shirt, worn to make a political statement.
Even more to the point, any code expressed in a Turing-complete language can be expressed in natural languages as pseudocode. The best example is the De-CSS haiku - while it is code of a sort, it is also poetry!
Code expresses ideas. Ideas are speech. Not that complicated.
Again, the point here is to look at context. That much beloved First Amendment that we love to scream about here at Slashdot was written by a bunch of racists who lived in a completely different world than you and I. Cut'm some slack.
I'm not American and haven't formally studied US history, so I could be wrong about this, but I thought some of the founding fathers actually were concerned with the rights of people other than free white adult males - Thomas Paine for one comes to mind immediately.
Your post makes some valid points, but there would seem to be an obvious objection - if we know (now) not to follow the racist/sexist/*ist teachings because they were wrong and simply a "product of the times" how is it possible to trust the other teachings? Couldn't they be viewed as a product of their times too? This of course is not confined to Mormonism, I would say it also goes for many other faiths whose leaders or older teachings might have some skeletons in their historical closets.
Ugh. The magic doesn't come from vectors. Vectors are just how you throw the numbers around. The reason the classification apparently works well is their choice of representation of the document: a word histogram -- the occurance count for each word.
I disagree. I use similar techniques to the ones described in the article in the research I work on every day. The initial vector representations are indeed histograms of a sort, but it is the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) that allows these enormous vectors to be cut down to a manageable size, and also in a sense distills the meaning from the word frequencies. As the article says, this is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which is a reasonably well known technique in the literature.
To measure the distance between two histograms, you usually use the chi-squared test. So, forget all about "vectors", the real work horse is the histogram.
A processor cannot understand histograms, and so I find it hard to see how they could be the "real work horse". Vector calculations at a decent speed are crucially important here. Using LSA means you get the vectors down to a more manageable size when compared to the original word counts, but there is still a lot of vector crunching to be done. A large amount of vector-intensive work is also required to perform the SVD/LSA itself.
And, we can discuss about "clustering", but it's just as imporant to know how you're measuring the distance from one document to another.
I think you'll find that it's not generally tractable to compare the "histograms" (or more accurately the reduced-dimensionality vectors) of each document/email individually - the number of comparisons required would double with each new document! You are right that the distance measure must be valid for the clustering analysis, but if the clustering analysis is to be reasonably robust, it should be relatively insensitive to the distance measure chosen, which really means that the clustering is more important. Chi-squared is one distance measuring option, but so are city-block, euclidean, cosine, etc. The article doesn't mention what sort of clustering analysis is used, but there are several appropriate methods which will reduce the work needed to classify a new document into a fairly simple geometric-type procedure after LSA has been performed. There is additional work in re-examining the clusters once new documents are incorporated, but this is the "training" the article talks about, and is once more, vector-arithmetic intensive.
I had to stop reading the article because it was so clearly written by someone who had no comfort with the mathematical concepts or techniques. (Sorry, but seriously, it's the blind leading the blind.)
I strongly disagree. I thought the article was an excellent plain-language discussion of LSA, although I concede that I was already familiar with the mathematics involved. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the techniques related to the ones I explore in my work are finding their way into mainstream applications. What you say about clustering analysis with respect to image classification sounds plausible, but just because the techniques in this article might not work for images doesn't automatically mean that the article is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
This is getting rather OT, but...
If I open my Greek New Testament, I see manuscript evidence going back to the 1st Century, you know, the people that walked with Christ.If this were the case, why would the gospels have copied from each other, or from since-lost common sources?
And, as you study church history, you will find that the more educated Christians are, the less likely they are to go to war.I suspect this is not specific to Christians. The more you know about something, the less it tends to seem absolutely black and white, and the less willing you will be to kill someone for having a different interpretation of it.
Now, mind you, this only holds for Christianity and Judaism, which encourage study of the Bible, including the most accurate original documents we can possibly find.I'm not sure this is true. Many variants of Christianity in particular hold to infallibility of one sort or another (biblical or papal spring to mind immediately), and 'encourage' is not the word I would have used to describe their attitude to critical analysis.
The loss of the Library of Alexandria was a tragedy - but in large part because much of the knowledge in the Library was not reproduced elsewhere, and thus was permanently lost. I think if the knowledge contained in Wikipedia was permanently lost, our civilisation would be all but over. The existence of articles on pop-cultural ephemera alongside those on magnificent achievments in culture and science does not diminish this one bit; I think it would be more likely to enhance its value for future historians. The comparison is valid and interesting, IMO, although losing Wikipedia would not in fact lead to the permanent loss of the information therein. This is again, a strength.
The Library of Alexandria contained ancient to possibly even antedeluvian textsThe modern consensus in geology is that there was no single worldwide flood in recent history, so the notion that there might have been any 'antediluvian' texts in the Library of Alexandria is based on a false premise. Wikipedia could have told you this. It could also have told you that text of a sort from as long ago as 3200 BCE still exists.
But it's not their hardware. If I bought a Tivo, it's my hardware, and I should be able to do whatever I like with it. Your argument seems to be saying that the wishes of Tivo - who made something physical, that they then sold to me - outweigh the wishes of the authors of the code they used. I think if someone releases software with the explicit desire that people who use it be able to modify it (provided they preserve this ability for others) then that condition should be respected.
The design of the hardware belongs to Tivo, yes, but as long as it isn't duplicated, I don't see how this could matter.
SPICE itself (without the p) is originally a unix program IIRC. Could he use that?
The word "meter" does exist in written Commonwealth English, but it denotes a device for measurement . A different spelling from the unit for length ("metre") reduces the ambiguity within written discussion of measurements. Words like "litre" are simply being spelled consistently with this.
I would imagine that the distinction is absent in written American English because of the altered spelling of words like theatre/theater and centre/center. While this is somewhat reasonable, especially given that most American accents are rhotic, it is a slight disadvantage when writing about measurement.
Also, I think the original etymology for both metre/meter is Greek via Latin before coming through French.
Another great shortcut is the Apple-backtick/tilde keystroke to cycle within the windows of the foreground application. Physically right above the tab key, so the related functionality is quite intuitive (to me at least). I have used this all the time since I heard about it!
I use python almost exclusively for my research work (it's quite common in my field, computational linguistics) and the performance when I use Psyco is often pretty close to that using a compiled language, especially when I/O is a factor, where python's optimised routines are very quick. Sure, it is sometimes a little slower than what I could code up in C, but when I can develop the python code several times faster, most of the time python wins out.
I belive this idea dates back to at least ancient Rome.
How does it count as "freedom" if you restrict the the things that people are allowed to make light of?
That seems like a much better argument for "legal but voluntary" than "illegal". The police in the US must waste so much time trying to stamp out something that is never, ever going to go away. Here in New South Wales (the most populous state in Australia), prostitution has been legal for decades. It's not like there isn't still a social stigma attached, but I find it hard to see how throwing criminal sanctions into the mix is helpful.
Personally, I think our best chance of increasing our understanding of the world is when we consider alternative viewpoints and ask questions. If noticing that interpretation of the Bible changes from time to time, place to place, and person to person is "sinful", so be it.
There also seems to be a bet each way in your argument. When people do good (or believe in truthful things) and claim their position is in accordance with the Bible, that is vindication of the Bible. When they "sin" and claim their position is in accordance with the Bible, that is vindication of the hypocrisy of people - as claimed in the Bible. Is there any situation you could imagine (it doesn't have to be real) where events would contradict what is in the Bible?
I also don't think there is any such thing as "sin", I was just using your terminology.
If you care to question Christianity, true Christianity that is, not political activists, or the millions of church-goers who may be associated with religious organizations but at heart don't know Jesus, then don't seek the answer from men. The question you should be asking is: what does God think about this? Exposing hypocrisy in people is no accomplishment at all (exposing a lack of it might be, but exposing it is basically declaring someone a sinner, which we know already). You are correct that true Christians should not be hypocrites. But shortcomings you may find are not those of Christ, they are those of people, and the very nature which inside all of us that the Bible speaks directly about, so it is foolish to base your conclusions about Christ and your own eternity on the shortcomings of sinful men. Base your questions and criticisms on Jesus Himself -- what are your criticisms of Him?So you are saying most Christians aren't Christians? If this belief system has so many adherents who are misled in their faith, what hope is there for Jesus as saviour of the world?
If Christianity can't help people change, why should we bother to consult the Bible at all for anything but guidance about how to make sure you get the afterlife you want?
If you don't start from an assumption that the Bible is divinely inspired, its reliability is as open to question as any other mythology from millenia ago. I am far from convinced that the Jesus depicted in the Bible accords closely enough with the life of an historical figure that I can criticise him directly. If you talk about the Jesus of the Bible, he had much to say that I completely agree with, and a good deal to say that I think is downright harmful.
I'm not concerned about my "eternity". I will die within the next hundred years, and I will cease to exist, just as I did not exist before I was born.
We can say that. Very easily. Something you left out there that is important to realize is that during this time (11th-13th centuries) the Christians had no access to the Bible-- it was controlled and read by the pope/bishops and people in power (they told the people it was too holy for them, another thing that the bible does not say). It wasn't until the reformation (16th century) and Martin Luther's "95 Thesis" that ordinary folks began to question what the religous figures were telling them. After the reformation people were finally able to read the bible and see for themselves that "gosh, you know, the bible infact does not condone anything related to the crusades." Now unless some very sick and twisted cult of Christianity comes about, one that would purpose to start another crusade, at this point it would stop being Christian, as the bible never says anywhere that they're good, it is safe to say that it "would not happen" under the guise of Christianity. Some may say that it was, but this, as the crusades, would be a misunderstanding, as the core of Christianity says nothing of the sort.
I tried to be reasonably careful and say "biblical scholars", rather than "ordinary Christians". You are right access to the biblical text was controlled by The Church at the time of the crusades, but I don't think Bad Things that some claimed to have been supported on biblical grounds stopped with the reformation. A good example is slavery, which was certainly not universally opposed by protestant thought until at least the 19th century. Extremist hate groups continue to use the bible to justify their racism.
Also, this sudden access to the bible didn't convince everyone to leave or change the Catholic Church itself: it is still with us today.
My perspective is that the knowledge available to us and the influence that has on our view of the past is always changing - and since at least the enlightenment, this has been in the direction of increasing knowledge and broader views of historical events. Sometimes religious thought has no choice but to come along (such as with the status of women in society, the institution of slavery, the responsibility of all Jews for the death of Jesus) and sometimes a significant movement resists this change (such as concerning civil rights for consenting same-sex adults and the explanation of the process by which organisms came about). I think it is rather against the grain of history to say that these positions will never change, or will always be agreed upon by everyone who draws their instruction from the Bible.
What is Truly Said by the "Core of Christianity" about these things is not really important to the argument I am making. The point is there are and were people who honestly believe they have biblical justification for positions neither you nor I would support. And there are others who would very likely say that the "Core of Christianity" would oppose various things you might see as required by it. My point is that it is not possible to decide between these positions on the basis of "the Bible is right" because everyone claims to be supported by it.
The difficulty I see is that things that you are attempting to distance yourself from, such as the crusades (and there are many more examples), were once accepted by the vast majority of Christians as being in accordance with, or even required by, the biblical scholarship of the time.
If you can say "oh, those Christians in ages past were all just misguided, we've got the right idea now", how can you be sure the same won't be said of modern Christians' viewpoints in another few centuries?
Pretty much what I would have said.
At my university there is a computer science summer school run for bright and interested high school students.
I was a tutor this year, and we had each group of around 15 students build a working search engine in python in one week. The engines only had to index a single site, but still, all the groups succeeded in just one week.
This is rather puzzling. A quantum mechanism has been proposed. I should point out the the author's (McFadden) book is where I learned of these surprising mutations.
ClearCase is pretty neat too, once you're used to it. I no longer work for the company where I used it, but there are some very nice features, eg having version control transparently part of the filesystem, actually useful branching and labelling schemes, decent merge/conflict resolution, and multi-site support. This meant we were mainly dealing with the genuine complexity in making 50 or so developers work together, rather than fighting against version control and each other.
I would have thought there has to be some grammar in any spoken language - the fact that any native speaker can immediately identify when an utterance "sounds wrong", or "doesn't make any sense", indicates that there are some rules, even if entirely tacit. Spoken languages use grammatical techniques (like word order, inflection, agglutination, etc) to distinguish between the subject/object of transitive verbs, the timing of an event, the number of something and many other things. Isn't this grammar? Isn't the presence of a grammar also generally considered the difference between a pidgin and a creole?
I would also have thought that there are analogues to punctuation in spoken language - pauses, tonal inflection, emphasis etc all make listening easier, and written punctuation was invented to make reading easier in a similar way.
I agree that the rules of formal English (and probably other languages) are more rigid and prohibit many perfectly clear expressions. This does not however mean that a native speaker's intuitive understanding can't ever be expressed as rules - just that the rules of formal/written language may not always match those of informal/spoken language.
I would guess that non-native speakers may sometimes make fewer mistakes partly due to the meta-knowledge gained by learning a new language; they get a better idea of how language and grammar work in general. I know that my (fairly limited) knowledge of a language very different to English certainly improved my understanding of the way that English worked.
Just the facts ma'am.
I would argue that there are valid, useful sequences that can be hand-coded in assembly where you could not write any C code that, when compiled, gave that assembly. This is not just confined to weird trivial examples - if you are writing for particular capabilities of a processor, or have some crazy dogma about how you would like registers to be used. An optimising compiler might do a better job than a person could in some instances, but that doesn't make them identical.
Yes, you can put inline assembler in C, but that just goes straight through, and doesn't have to follow the standards, so it doesn't count.
You're right of course - but isn't that just the point the parent is making?
I'll bite anyway, just in case you are genuine.
To follow through with your auto-mechanic analogy, their tools are probably not speech, but descriptions of their methods most certainly are speech. Don't you think it would be a violation of mechanics' right to express themselves if they were prevented from publishing their methods as manuals? In much the same way, a programmer's computer is not really speech, but the code compiled and run on it is.
What you say about comments is true, although I would have said this shows that code is the same as speech, as any natural language text can be thrown into a comment in code, and the code is still valid.
One useful way of looking at actual program code though, is as a description for how to do something. For people well-versed in the language used, it is often a more precise and concise way of expressing that description than using a natural language. You could instead choose to describe the exact same process in English or Swahili, although it would most likely be a lot less efficient. This does not change the fact that the content would be identical.
It is possible to take the text of code, and express it in a way that shows it is undeniably speech - putting it on a t-shirt for example. You can't run it directly any more, although the text is unchanged. You can hardly argue that text on a t-shirt is not speech. Particularly in the case of the OpenDVD t-shirt, worn to make a political statement.
Even more to the point, any code expressed in a Turing-complete language can be expressed in natural languages as pseudocode. The best example is the De-CSS haiku - while it is code of a sort, it is also poetry!
Code expresses ideas. Ideas are speech. Not that complicated.
I'm not American and haven't formally studied US history, so I could be wrong about this, but I thought some of the founding fathers actually were concerned with the rights of people other than free white adult males - Thomas Paine for one comes to mind immediately.
Your post makes some valid points, but there would seem to be an obvious objection - if we know (now) not to follow the racist/sexist/*ist teachings because they were wrong and simply a "product of the times" how is it possible to trust the other teachings? Couldn't they be viewed as a product of their times too? This of course is not confined to Mormonism, I would say it also goes for many other faiths whose leaders or older teachings might have some skeletons in their historical closets.
I disagree. I use similar techniques to the ones described in the article in the research I work on every day. The initial vector representations are indeed histograms of a sort, but it is the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) that allows these enormous vectors to be cut down to a manageable size, and also in a sense distills the meaning from the word frequencies. As the article says, this is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which is a reasonably well known technique in the literature.
To measure the distance between two histograms, you usually use the chi-squared test. So, forget all about "vectors", the real work horse is the histogram.
A processor cannot understand histograms, and so I find it hard to see how they could be the "real work horse". Vector calculations at a decent speed are crucially important here. Using LSA means you get the vectors down to a more manageable size when compared to the original word counts, but there is still a lot of vector crunching to be done. A large amount of vector-intensive work is also required to perform the SVD/LSA itself.
And, we can discuss about "clustering", but it's just as imporant to know how you're measuring the distance from one document to another.
I think you'll find that it's not generally tractable to compare the "histograms" (or more accurately the reduced-dimensionality vectors) of each document/email individually - the number of comparisons required would double with each new document! You are right that the distance measure must be valid for the clustering analysis, but if the clustering analysis is to be reasonably robust, it should be relatively insensitive to the distance measure chosen, which really means that the clustering is more important. Chi-squared is one distance measuring option, but so are city-block, euclidean, cosine, etc. The article doesn't mention what sort of clustering analysis is used, but there are several appropriate methods which will reduce the work needed to classify a new document into a fairly simple geometric-type procedure after LSA has been performed. There is additional work in re-examining the clusters once new documents are incorporated, but this is the "training" the article talks about, and is once more, vector-arithmetic intensive.
I had to stop reading the article because it was so clearly written by someone who had no comfort with the mathematical concepts or techniques. (Sorry, but seriously, it's the blind leading the blind.)
I strongly disagree. I thought the article was an excellent plain-language discussion of LSA, although I concede that I was already familiar with the mathematics involved. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the techniques related to the ones I explore in my work are finding their way into mainstream applications. What you say about clustering analysis with respect to image classification sounds plausible, but just because the techniques in this article might not work for images doesn't automatically mean that the article is wrong.