I can't remember the xx.yy part (I think it was some university in the States) and I can't remember what that service was called. I've tried extensive slashdot and google searches, but I obviously can't remember the keywords for this service.
I think you mean this site. This was mentioned in this post related to the cookingforengineers site.
'As the moderator flexes his mod point to mod the post down as off-topic, the poor soul screams out, yelling, "Wait! It was this guy who was off-topic. I'm totally on-topic. Mod him down."':)
Why? Well, what keeps so many people on MS software? It's that they have old programs that they have to use. They have to access old data. They have to interface with their office that uses MS software. People are "tied down" so it's harder to move. But very few people over there are tied down the way many people here are.
IDK, but for most people (er, my friends in school) I know, backward-compatibility has nothing to do with why they use Windows. For one, they haven't used computer long enough, and most of them don't have any files that are important enough for them to back up when they format their hard drive to get rid of their abundant Adwares. I blame it more on laziness, ignorance (lack of information not expertise), and prejudice.
Laziness, because they are content to use whatever OS happens to come with their computers, whether it works or not.
Ignorance, because they still think Linux is hard to install and hard to set up and hard to use. Get a Suse distribution or something (although I wouldn't use it myself...too much like OS X or Windows...too encumbered with programs that I know I will never use...I prefer LFS system to any distribution).
Prejudice, because even when they know the progress desktop Linux has made last few years, they say, "Oh, but everyone uses Windows and I don't really want to be left out, and you know, I really need that word processing program in Windows."
Anyway--I do agree it will be interesting to see how countries without previous commitments will choose, at this level of Linux maturity.
Please identify your current sources of income so that I can lobby for their elimination to further the collective good. Thank you.
Heh. I'm a student. That explains the abundance of rehashed material on my comment (and no original research--well, if I had one, it won't be on linguistics anyway: linguistics is only a hobby for me). BTW, to make your job easier, I don't think you need to lobby anyone--there's enough movement in California state government to eliminate higher education altogether.
but isn't it more attributable to our homo-centric way of thinking than any product of logical reasoning process?
Huh huh. You're, like, gay or something. Heh heh.
Yeah... I wrote that in a hurry. I think the correct word is anthropo-centric....or something along that line. I probably should look up a dictionary, but I'm too lazy:)
They couldn't describe electricity before it was observed, so would you say that the experiments in which the empirical properties of electricity were explored should not be classed as science?
You mean the one with scrubbing sticks and things like that? (I would suppose that's what you had in mind... since it explores property of electricity, such as that it attracts something, but fails to describe the inverse-square nature of the force.)
I would be very hard pressed to debunk it all together. It has to be acknoweldged as the beginning of the science--the way alchemy is beginning of chemistry and creation myths are the beginning of cosmology. Such things got people interested in the subject matter, but, in hindsight, our current mass of knowledge draws very little from those "experiments."
But you are right. This (obvious though it may be) is something that could conceivably described as science, and perhaps, one day, when linguistics become advanced and is able to predict a structure of a language that can be possibly used by an intelligent life form and perhaps when it fills a pivotal role in our first success in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence or in creation of StarTrek-ish universal translator, we will be able to look back on history and say, "Look! These guys started it all. They were geniuses."
But on the other hand, if their research continues to be wasted on such redundant things like these (we don't really want to know how many kinds of sticks, with differing lengths and composition, can attract how many different sized pieces of paper, varying in shape), we will never have that way. They must evolve as well.
In fact, Ancient Greek does put predicate first in a predicate sentence where they omit the verb "to be."
Of course, that's not the only way Attic Greek would write it. (The "default" word order would go as, "brave the man," to say what is equivalent in English, "The man is brave." However, it isn't too infrequent to read something like "the man brave." I learned that, usually, the definite article marks the subject.)
Perhaps I should have said "Most languagues do that," or to limit myself even further, "All Indo-European languages can do that," but that would be overly limiting, as Korean, which is in a group of its own (I read it was somewhat related to Japanese, but never heard a classification that would put those two languages in a same group), also puts subject first, by default (Korean is inflected, so it doesn't have to be bound by word order to be understood).
No. There are ways to communicate that are not considered a language by linguists. To be a language, it must be flexible enough to describe new concepts, not just repeat a few sentences over and over. It must have a grammar defining how the words interact with one another, and it must be abstract. Also, structural complexity is important.
So... barring the most common forms of human communication that we think as not being a language (id est, hand gestures, although sign language is an advanced form of this; interjections, which happens to be integrated as part of a spoken language; pictures, including traffic signs, although this is the origin of many pictograms and some of modern writing system (Chinese anyone?); et cetera...), what method of human communication do we consider not to be a language? I know we don't consider bee dances or dog barks as a language, although they clearly communicate something, but isn't it more attributable to our homo-centric way of thinking than any product of logical reasoning process?
...but everything in the article is so obvious that it's hard to believe anyone can get paid either writing this article or conducting research done by these researchers.
As for the origin of sign language, it's as old as the origin of Native American tribes. Anyone who has taken an ASL course would know that Native American tribes used signs as a sort of inter-tribal language among themselves.
Even after that, it is not rare for an isolated group of people to develop a language of their own. That is exactly how sign language developed (Somebody didn't just make up a system of sign language out of pity for the deaf who couldn't possibly communicate on their own). Even now, a small group of people often come up with their own system for basic communication needs (i.e. mother and baby, a deaf person without formal education and his close family, etc.) Also, twins are known to come up with their own languages--this is a very well documented case.
This article falls short of other details that might have been interesting. It says,
That method of communicating now shows similarities to other languages, researchers say in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
What similarities? That it is used to communicate (isn't it how one defines language)? Knowing the diversity of modern languages, I find it difficult not to find any similarity to other languages. Do they tend to put the subject in front of everything else? Every language does that (for obvious reasons...). Do they tend to omit the subject? I know Korean does that regularly, whereas in English it's done only when brevity is paramount. Do they sometimes put the object first? Find any inflected language and you can do that there as well (usually means emphasis on the object, though). Tell me when the children have matured enough to learn multivariable calculus on their own and they happen to use the inverted capital delta for their "del" operator. Then I will be astonished at the similarity. Frankly, I doubt that this new language thing will go far (same case with twin language--for the twins to live in the world, they have to learn the language of their society, the process which inevitably all but destroys their own language). Or, if it is to "evolve" to show a parallel structure, well, expect to have generations of isolated (hereditary) deaf children for a century or a millenium.
Even the article's sidenotes about similarity among existing languages is trivial.
The mothers in every country reported that their children learned significantly more nouns than other types of words. The researchers said this held true regardless of whether the language emphasized nouns, as does American English, or verbs, as does Korean.
Might as well say, "The mothers in every country reported that their children learned significantly more words related to food or household item than words used to describe linear vector spaces or binary operation structure." Of course they know more nouns! That's what the mothers teach most, because it's the easiest thing to teach ther children. And, I'll bet, among nouns, the children know more concrete nouns abstract nouns. It's not just that. In all the languages I know (and I know more than 2, if you count a few dead languages), nouns comprise the biggest group of part of speech. Also, usually, there is always a way to make a word from any other part of speech (excepting a few specialized parts like conjunctions or articles) into a noun (but not the other way around--for example, how would turn the noun "apple" into a verb?).
This study reveals nothing new--that is, other than the fact that there are too many (useless) researchers around the world with too much time on their hands (even then, that's not new either, eh?).
I prefer the equally possible explanation -- that gravity is not linear, and performs differently at large distances than it does at small ones. This can explain the effect of dark matter without all the flubberyjubbery of matter that can't be seen and can't be detected.
It is most definitely not equally possible explanation for oddities in astronomical observation, at least as far as our knowledge of physics goes.
Many experiments have been done so far in attempts to verify/disprove that Newton's law is an exact law (there's Greenland Experiment and another one). None of them, so far, can say definitely that inverse square law was violated (deviations can mostly be attributed to variations in local mass density).
All that dark matter is that it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation (that's why we cannot optically detect it, and "see" it only by looking at its gravitational effect). There are many known weakly interacting particles that can be good candidates for dark matter.
PS. BTW, dark matter is anything but theoretical--it's a conjecture based on experimental evidence. There is no postulate or prior assumptions in physics that will predict existence of dark matter.
One possibility that has been suggested was that Lucifer formed the first union and it was an irreconcilable break down in industrial relations that caused the "war in heaven" ultimately leading to Lucifer and his union buddies being made redundant and going off to start "Hell Incorporated", now the universes leading provider of after death imprisonment for the wicked.
Are you saying that there were no union-protection laws back then? Why didn't Lucifer simply sue god for unfair labor practices? Surely he could have won a half to a quarter of the universe as settlement?
This one seems the most similar to what I learned.
That's the same algorithm I learned after much asking around. However, the way the website presented it does make it a little more error prone, as you noted. The way I learned (it was called something like "double division algorithm"), you place the intermidiate results on the left hand side of the row (where the website puts L#). I think that makes it a little easier to keep track of all the numbers.
Now, I find that hard to believe. At the very least, every one of them should have been able to use Newton's iteration, which is taught in basic college math courses.
Well. I think they all knew several different approximation techniques (mostly guess-and-check) for square root, but I was looking for an exact algorithm (or at least one that will give an exact answer, if one exists, on the first try). Also, Newton's iteration (at least the derivation of it...I trust it's a special case of Newton's method for finding roots of a function?) requires calculus and I think it was about a year or two before I took it.
I don't consider long-division mistake proof.
Of course. Nothing is mistake-proof. Since, for any given simplest job possible, there exists an idiot who can mess it up. However, as far as calculation by hand goes, I think long division is as mistake-proof as any algorithm for a division operation can be. And this square root algorithm is same for a square root operation.
PS. BTW, the website used '.' in place of ',' and ',' in place of '.' It reminded me of what my German instructor told us--that German does everything (at least as far as numbers go) backward as U.S. does. 'Wonder if the webmaster is German.
I learned how to calculate square roots by hand in 8th grade.
And what the algorithm might be? And in which decade were you in 8th grade?
I just find it hard to believe that there would actually be a middle school in U.S. that teaches this useful algorithm (now or, say, as far back as 10 years ago).
It's just that when I actually started asking around for an algorithm for square root, only one teacher (one of the oldest science teachers, too) knew it. None of the younger math teachers even knew such an algorithm existed.
The process is prone to mistakes and time consuming.
Time consuming? Yes. Prone to mistake? No. At least, with pencil and paper, it's as mistake-proof as long division. (And as far as tediousness of the algorithm goes, it's much less tedious than doing binary search or fixed point iteration by hand to achieve the same accuracy.)
Links don't work, although all the pages seem to be there.
Any way to change absolute links to relative links automatically? (I would imagine a versatile browser like Mozilla would have such a function or a plug-in that can do that....)
Like for square roots, you can actually used Fixed Point Iteration(x = g(x)), where g(x) = (x+x/n)/2, where n is the integer of the square root. Just continue that process for about 5 times, and the results are amazing.
Why would you want such things as fixed point iteration algorithm when you have a perfectly good algorithm-by-hand that can give you accurate digits (if you want to calculate to 3 sig. figs, you calculate to 3 sig. figs, and you know it's right, as long as you round down the digits after that--and you can go to 1 million sig. figs, if you have nothing better to do, and it will still be right--up to that digit) to square root of any real number?
Wait, I forgot--Americans forgot how to calculate square-root by hand ever since pocket calculator was invented.
PS. Even so, I prefer binary search to fixed point--fixed point is s____ unless you have a valid first guess. Every fixed point algorithm should have binary search as backup and a way to check when it's failing miserably.
In my junior your of high school, I took a probability and statistics course. 50% of the grade was your homework grade, and the homework problems were always the odd ones which had answers in the back of the book (we still had to show work). The other portion was mad eup of the tests.
Wow, there are high schools that teach statistics? My high school never did that--no, not even in classes that involve more serious lab work than looking at skin cells from inside your mouth (I will bet that the teacher herself didn't understand the basics of error analysis, though). The only statistics available was through AP Statistics, and no, there was no "official" class for it--in fact, I would be surprised if they got 5 students to pass the test in a span of 5 years, which must not include the year I took the test.
The teacher was quite depressed because she thought making the homework was basically a gimme to the students...
If she wanted to make getting A easier for students, why didn't she just make 50% the cutoff for A? (I will bet about 50% will still miss that cutoff, especially if they knew that) Less work for her and students! I guess that explains why she's teaching in high school.
...measuring the success level of college graduates:
cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude
(I know most diplomas will probably have this capitalized, but from what I learned in class, Latin doesn't capitalize nearly as freely as English does. I guess it just costs more money to carve into the stone capital letters which are bigger--just kidding. If it were carved, it would have been, CVM LAVDE, MAGNA CVM LAVDE, and SVMMA CVM LAVDE.)
I have come to believe that these are the administrators' codewords for,
"graduating below average", "graduating near average", and "graduating above averge"*
(*most of them would not be graduating above average had it been a little less lower, as it should have been)
(I know, comma belongs inside the closing quotation, but this is more aesthetically pleasing.)
Of course, other, more liberal, more Americanized, and yet least patriotic schools like the one I go to use different codewords, which read as:
Honors, High Honors, and Highest Honors.
Universal Code Translator(TM) should be able to convert these to the previous codewords, on which then, you can use your Administral Code Translator(TM).
...especially if they don't understand where the joke is coming from, to begin with.
(Yeah, yeah, writing sentences (or clauses) that have prepositions which the sentence ends with is considered incorrect, but it sounds more natural--with the exception of this sentence.)
Even in my physics classes, where the grade is said to be curved, I heard that scores around mean of the whole class correspond to B-, and that you need to be only 1 standard deviation higher than the mean to get A--hardly the standard to be expected from cold, hard statistics.
I can't complain, though--I would have gotten lots of B's and B-'s, instead of 4.0's that way.
Maybe they could change the descriptions to: A: Understands half (or more, but rarely) the materials taught in the class perfectly, B: Has barely enough basics to continue to higher level classes, but is strongly discouraged. C: The University requires that I give out only so many D's and F's. D: I would have given F, but if I give one more, I will have to teach summer school. F: Have I seen you in the class?
But then, in America, we put boosting kids' self-esteem above all else, don't we?
Sorry about the Latin at the beginning of the entry. It translates to (I think), "This seems German to me." (Inspired by a quote on a T-shirt that read, "omnia sunt Graeci mihi."; oh, and this comment refers to the previous non-English sentence, "Niederländisch ist nicht deutsch."; hmm, come to think of it, shouldn't deutsch here be capitalized, as it is a noun?)
Maybe the rest of the entry makes sense now.
PS.Oh, and, yes, I do know the "Dutch" in Pennsylvania Dutch is a corruption of original Pennsylvania Deutsch, a dialect of German which my German 1 instructor speaks natively.
Indeed. If it's bright enough to be observed optically, shouldn't your first reaction be, "Wait--this must be a binary system with a dim companion"?
The link to another page (er, something about using infrared, which supposedly is not a reflection from the star, but a blackbody radiation from the planet itself) has more credibility, but, still, they are using "infrared" there, using a tiny little (well, I don't know exactly how big it is, but since it's on Hubble, it can't be too big) telescope on Hubble: the resolution of such a picture can't be too good.
That's what I thought, too--so, how is this anything new? A simple binary search algorithm would do the job as well (er, if you know where to look for the zeros).
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean this site. This was mentioned in this post related to the cookingforengineers site.
'As the moderator flexes his mod point to mod the post down as off-topic, the poor soul screams out, yelling, "Wait! It was this guy who was off-topic. I'm totally on-topic. Mod him down."' :)
Ah, history repeats itself. Only this time--backwards.
Don't forget to inform visitors that they must delete the things they download within 24 hours!
IDK, but for most people (er, my friends in school) I know, backward-compatibility has nothing to do with why they use Windows. For one, they haven't used computer long enough, and most of them don't have any files that are important enough for them to back up when they format their hard drive to get rid of their abundant Adwares. I blame it more on laziness, ignorance (lack of information not expertise), and prejudice.
Laziness, because they are content to use whatever OS happens to come with their computers, whether it works or not.
Ignorance, because they still think Linux is hard to install and hard to set up and hard to use. Get a Suse distribution or something (although I wouldn't use it myself...too much like OS X or Windows...too encumbered with programs that I know I will never use...I prefer LFS system to any distribution).
Prejudice, because even when they know the progress desktop Linux has made last few years, they say, "Oh, but everyone uses Windows and I don't really want to be left out, and you know, I really need that word processing program in Windows."
Anyway--I do agree it will be interesting to see how countries without previous commitments will choose, at this level of Linux maturity.
Heh. I'm a student. That explains the abundance of rehashed material on my comment (and no original research--well, if I had one, it won't be on linguistics anyway: linguistics is only a hobby for me). BTW, to make your job easier, I don't think you need to lobby anyone--there's enough movement in California state government to eliminate higher education altogether.
You mean the one with scrubbing sticks and things like that? (I would suppose that's what you had in mind... since it explores property of electricity, such as that it attracts something, but fails to describe the inverse-square nature of the force.)
I would be very hard pressed to debunk it all together. It has to be acknoweldged as the beginning of the science--the way alchemy is beginning of chemistry and creation myths are the beginning of cosmology. Such things got people interested in the subject matter, but, in hindsight, our current mass of knowledge draws very little from those "experiments."
But you are right. This (obvious though it may be) is something that could conceivably described as science, and perhaps, one day, when linguistics become advanced and is able to predict a structure of a language that can be possibly used by an intelligent life form and perhaps when it fills a pivotal role in our first success in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence or in creation of StarTrek-ish universal translator, we will be able to look back on history and say, "Look! These guys started it all. They were geniuses."
But on the other hand, if their research continues to be wasted on such redundant things like these (we don't really want to know how many kinds of sticks, with differing lengths and composition, can attract how many different sized pieces of paper, varying in shape), we will never have that way. They must evolve as well.
Of course, that's not the only way Attic Greek would write it. (The "default" word order would go as, "brave the man," to say what is equivalent in English, "The man is brave." However, it isn't too infrequent to read something like "the man brave." I learned that, usually, the definite article marks the subject.)
Perhaps I should have said "Most languagues do that," or to limit myself even further, "All Indo-European languages can do that," but that would be overly limiting, as Korean, which is in a group of its own (I read it was somewhat related to Japanese, but never heard a classification that would put those two languages in a same group), also puts subject first, by default (Korean is inflected, so it doesn't have to be bound by word order to be understood).
No. There are ways to communicate that are not considered a language by linguists. To be a language, it must be flexible enough to describe new concepts, not just repeat a few sentences over and over. It must have a grammar defining how the words interact with one another, and it must be abstract. Also, structural complexity is important.
So... barring the most common forms of human communication that we think as not being a language (id est, hand gestures, although sign language is an advanced form of this; interjections, which happens to be integrated as part of a spoken language; pictures, including traffic signs, although this is the origin of many pictograms and some of modern writing system (Chinese anyone?); et cetera...), what method of human communication do we consider not to be a language? I know we don't consider bee dances or dog barks as a language, although they clearly communicate something, but isn't it more attributable to our homo-centric way of thinking than any product of logical reasoning process?
As for the origin of sign language, it's as old as the origin of Native American tribes. Anyone who has taken an ASL course would know that Native American tribes used signs as a sort of inter-tribal language among themselves.
Even after that, it is not rare for an isolated group of people to develop a language of their own. That is exactly how sign language developed (Somebody didn't just make up a system of sign language out of pity for the deaf who couldn't possibly communicate on their own). Even now, a small group of people often come up with their own system for basic communication needs (i.e. mother and baby, a deaf person without formal education and his close family, etc.) Also, twins are known to come up with their own languages--this is a very well documented case.
This article falls short of other details that might have been interesting. It says,
That method of communicating now shows similarities to other languages, researchers say in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
What similarities? That it is used to communicate (isn't it how one defines language)? Knowing the diversity of modern languages, I find it difficult not to find any similarity to other languages. Do they tend to put the subject in front of everything else? Every language does that (for obvious reasons...). Do they tend to omit the subject? I know Korean does that regularly, whereas in English it's done only when brevity is paramount. Do they sometimes put the object first? Find any inflected language and you can do that there as well (usually means emphasis on the object, though). Tell me when the children have matured enough to learn multivariable calculus on their own and they happen to use the inverted capital delta for their "del" operator. Then I will be astonished at the similarity. Frankly, I doubt that this new language thing will go far (same case with twin language--for the twins to live in the world, they have to learn the language of their society, the process which inevitably all but destroys their own language). Or, if it is to "evolve" to show a parallel structure, well, expect to have generations of isolated (hereditary) deaf children for a century or a millenium.
Even the article's sidenotes about similarity among existing languages is trivial.
The mothers in every country reported that their children learned significantly more nouns than other types of words. The researchers said this held true regardless of whether the language emphasized nouns, as does American English, or verbs, as does Korean.
Might as well say, "The mothers in every country reported that their children learned significantly more words related to food or household item than words used to describe linear vector spaces or binary operation structure." Of course they know more nouns! That's what the mothers teach most, because it's the easiest thing to teach ther children. And, I'll bet, among nouns, the children know more concrete nouns abstract nouns. It's not just that. In all the languages I know (and I know more than 2, if you count a few dead languages), nouns comprise the biggest group of part of speech. Also, usually, there is always a way to make a word from any other part of speech (excepting a few specialized parts like conjunctions or articles) into a noun (but not the other way around--for example, how would turn the noun "apple" into a verb?).
This study reveals nothing new--that is, other than the fact that there are too many (useless) researchers around the world with too much time on their hands (even then, that's not new either, eh?).
It is most definitely not equally possible explanation for oddities in astronomical observation, at least as far as our knowledge of physics goes.
Many experiments have been done so far in attempts to verify/disprove that Newton's law is an exact law (there's Greenland Experiment and another one). None of them, so far, can say definitely that inverse square law was violated (deviations can mostly be attributed to variations in local mass density).
All that dark matter is that it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation (that's why we cannot optically detect it, and "see" it only by looking at its gravitational effect). There are many known weakly interacting particles that can be good candidates for dark matter.
PS. BTW, dark matter is anything but theoretical--it's a conjecture based on experimental evidence. There is no postulate or prior assumptions in physics that will predict existence of dark matter.
Are you saying that there were no union-protection laws back then? Why didn't Lucifer simply sue god for unfair labor practices? Surely he could have won a half to a quarter of the universe as settlement?
That's the same algorithm I learned after much asking around. However, the way the website presented it does make it a little more error prone, as you noted. The way I learned (it was called something like "double division algorithm"), you place the intermidiate results on the left hand side of the row (where the website puts L#). I think that makes it a little easier to keep track of all the numbers.
Now, I find that hard to believe. At the very least, every one of them should have been able to use Newton's iteration, which is taught in basic college math courses.
Well. I think they all knew several different approximation techniques (mostly guess-and-check) for square root, but I was looking for an exact algorithm (or at least one that will give an exact answer, if one exists, on the first try). Also, Newton's iteration (at least the derivation of it...I trust it's a special case of Newton's method for finding roots of a function?) requires calculus and I think it was about a year or two before I took it.
I don't consider long-division mistake proof.
Of course. Nothing is mistake-proof. Since, for any given simplest job possible, there exists an idiot who can mess it up. However, as far as calculation by hand goes, I think long division is as mistake-proof as any algorithm for a division operation can be. And this square root algorithm is same for a square root operation.
PS. BTW, the website used '.' in place of ',' and ',' in place of '.' It reminded me of what my German instructor told us--that German does everything (at least as far as numbers go) backward as U.S. does. 'Wonder if the webmaster is German.
And what the algorithm might be? And in which decade were you in 8th grade?
I just find it hard to believe that there would actually be a middle school in U.S. that teaches this useful algorithm (now or, say, as far back as 10 years ago).
It's just that when I actually started asking around for an algorithm for square root, only one teacher (one of the oldest science teachers, too) knew it. None of the younger math teachers even knew such an algorithm existed.
The process is prone to mistakes and time consuming.
Time consuming? Yes. Prone to mistake? No. At least, with pencil and paper, it's as mistake-proof as long division. (And as far as tediousness of the algorithm goes, it's much less tedious than doing binary search or fixed point iteration by hand to achieve the same accuracy.)
Any way to change absolute links to relative links automatically? (I would imagine a versatile browser like Mozilla would have such a function or a plug-in that can do that....)
Why would you want such things as fixed point iteration algorithm when you have a perfectly good algorithm-by-hand that can give you accurate digits (if you want to calculate to 3 sig. figs, you calculate to 3 sig. figs, and you know it's right, as long as you round down the digits after that--and you can go to 1 million sig. figs, if you have nothing better to do, and it will still be right--up to that digit) to square root of any real number?
Wait, I forgot--Americans forgot how to calculate square-root by hand ever since pocket calculator was invented.
PS. Even so, I prefer binary search to fixed point--fixed point is s____ unless you have a valid first guess. Every fixed point algorithm should have binary search as backup and a way to check when it's failing miserably.
Wow, there are high schools that teach statistics? My high school never did that--no, not even in classes that involve more serious lab work than looking at skin cells from inside your mouth (I will bet that the teacher herself didn't understand the basics of error analysis, though). The only statistics available was through AP Statistics, and no, there was no "official" class for it--in fact, I would be surprised if they got 5 students to pass the test in a span of 5 years, which must not include the year I took the test.
The teacher was quite depressed because she thought making the homework was basically a gimme to the students...
If she wanted to make getting A easier for students, why didn't she just make 50% the cutoff for A? (I will bet about 50% will still miss that cutoff, especially if they knew that) Less work for her and students! I guess that explains why she's teaching in high school.
...especially if they don't understand where the joke is coming from, to begin with.
(Yeah, yeah, writing sentences (or clauses) that have prepositions which the sentence ends with is considered incorrect, but it sounds more natural--with the exception of this sentence.)
Even in my physics classes, where the grade is said to be curved, I heard that scores around mean of the whole class correspond to B-, and that you need to be only 1 standard deviation higher than the mean to get A--hardly the standard to be expected from cold, hard statistics.
I can't complain, though--I would have gotten lots of B's and B-'s, instead of 4.0's that way.
Maybe they could change the descriptions to:
A: Understands half (or more, but rarely) the materials taught in the class perfectly,
B: Has barely enough basics to continue to higher level classes, but is strongly discouraged.
C: The University requires that I give out only so many D's and F's.
D: I would have given F, but if I give one more, I will have to teach summer school.
F: Have I seen you in the class?
But then, in America, we put boosting kids' self-esteem above all else, don't we?
Heh.
Sorry about the Latin at the beginning of the entry. It translates to (I think), "This seems German to me." (Inspired by a quote on a T-shirt that read, "omnia sunt Graeci mihi."; oh, and this comment refers to the previous non-English sentence, "Niederländisch ist nicht deutsch."; hmm, come to think of it, shouldn't deutsch here be capitalized, as it is a noun?)
Maybe the rest of the entry makes sense now.
PS.Oh, and, yes, I do know the "Dutch" in Pennsylvania Dutch is a corruption of original Pennsylvania Deutsch, a dialect of German which my German 1 instructor speaks natively.
Indeed. If it's bright enough to be observed optically, shouldn't your first reaction be, "Wait--this must be a binary system with a dim companion"?
The link to another page (er, something about using infrared, which supposedly is not a reflection from the star, but a blackbody radiation from the planet itself) has more credibility, but, still, they are using "infrared" there, using a tiny little (well, I don't know exactly how big it is, but since it's on Hubble, it can't be too big) telescope on Hubble: the resolution of such a picture can't be too good.
That's what I thought, too--so, how is this anything new? A simple binary search algorithm would do the job as well (er, if you know where to look for the zeros).
> Niederländisch ist nicht deutsch!
hoc uidetur Germanus mihi.
Isn't it? I just started learning German, but I haven't seen any other language that calls German deutsch.
PS. What about Pennsylvania Dutch? Ist Pennsylvania Dutch deutsch?