OK, where are the visual geeks? The ones who can model the solar system in their heads?
The moon appears to go around the earth every day, just as the sun does. But it doesn't. So no, the moon is not closer to Mars within every 24 hour period.
Here are some facts you can use to piece together a 3D model in your head:
* The sun appears to rise and set at the same time every day on the earth's equator. That's because it's entirely caused by the earth's rotation.
* The moon rises 45 minutes later every day than it did the day before. That's because the moon is slowly orbiting the Earth in a direction counter to the Earth's rotation.
* Mars appears to slowly "wander" back and forth along a straight line in the sky from day to day. The line is roughly the same as that traveled by the moon and sun (a happy coincidence that's true for most planets, but not all), and it is called the "plane of the ecliptic".
So, if my head is correct, the moon is between Mars and Earth once every 28 days.
More important than the position of the Moon is the position of the two planets relative to each other. Earth's year is shorter than Mars'. They both coincide on the same side of the solar system once every 7 years, I think. And getting to the moon represents less than 0.01% of the trip to Mars; hardly anything distance-wise.
Yes, absolutely it sucks for everyone. Just maybe not right away.
In the short term, a few will do well and be happy. In the long term, everyone will suffer. I guess that's OK because we'll all be long gone. The joke's on our descendants. Ha ha, suckers!
The world is full of examples where "best" short term strategy == very bad long term strategy. In my town, the groundwater is radioactive because some company needed to maximize their profit margins a few decades ago. The island nation of Nauru is 90% wasteland because they allowed mining companies to remove almost all of their potassium-rich topsoil for lots of money in the 70's and 80's. They've now burned through all that money, and they have to import all their food and drinking water from Australia by jet because nothing will grow there.
I'd suggest not planning on passing any waterfront property down through your family, unless you're planning to have them start a shrimp or oyster farm.
The source is not enough by itself. It only takes two extra lines of C code to rig an election:
if (some_condition)
votes[0]++;
They should allow people to double-check the veracity of the final product (the binary) by building it themselves. It would be nice if they would reveal:
* The size of the binary * The hardware/software configuration of the machine on which the compiling was done. * The MD5 sum.
, I'm associate it with people that do a lot of talking, yelling, stomping, and yapping, as well as a bit of frothing,...
The loudest person here is clearly yourself. Are you interested in constructive discussion? I take it from your tone that you're more interested in shouting all other opinions down. I wonder why.
I hope others will choose to ignore your loud ranting and get on with idea sharing.
Here's one interesting idea: it takes money to avoid energy comsumption.
The ability to choose lifestyles is often a question of having enough money. The path of least resistance for many poor people involves following short-sighted strategies that get them through the next week, month, or year.
Poor people drive old cars with bad gas mileage, for example, because it costs too much money to buy a better car. TCO might break even in a couple years, but they can't wait that long. Same for appliances, same for preventative health,
To call these people hypocrites, as you did above, is a symptom of too much time in front of the keyboard. Spend more time walking on the fringes of poor neighborhoods. Until then, please refrain from labeling people you clearly know nothing about.
We seem to be having a terminology gap. Unfortunately, this is not unusual for the Grossberg crowd. I'm not trying to flame, but the Cohen-Grossberg Theorem is not enough to rest one's laurels on. For some reason, that whole obsession with the stability/plasticity dilemma is really strange to me and (I believe) a majority of people in the field.
Neurons always have a clearly defined functional behavior. So yes, a neuron with a given set of weights *does* have clearly defined behavior. And no, if you've trained the neural net to do something, the functional behavior of the neurons is not random.
And no, neurons do not (by most people's accounts) perform bitwise computation. I don't know who you've been reading for that one.
I'll resist the temptation to list my credentials, but suffice it to say that I've got a number of publications in peer-reviewed journals. I kind of doubt that in your case.
There are some problems with the article: it makes claims that aren't backed up. So what's new on slashdot? Anyway, here are the gory details from my point of view. The original source reference appears to suffer from the same problem.
The gist of the new idea is a clever way to create a special type of gate whose dynamical threshold value can be modified to implement one of several possible logic gates. An interesting idea, but not computationally revolutionary. These gates would still implement the same chips we use today.
Now, the article goes on to claim that there is a wonderful new horizon of modifiable computation. I see a lot of words and no details. How are those modifiable threshold levels in these gates stored, anyway? Don't tell me it's with something like a flip-flop. It would be asinine to need 6-8 gates to store each bit of the modifiable threshold value for one "chaotic" gate.
Also, there's the small problem that we can MODEL any type of strange new computational paradigm and have been able to for years. We're no closer to a replacement for Turing-style computation than we were decades ago. I've seen one paper about Analog computers being able to compute some esoteric set of functions that discrete computers can't touch, but I haven't seen anyone explain how this helps in any useful way.
Uh, nothing you said in your post makes any sense. I wonder about a moderation system that gives you a +5 score.
Neurons do not "work" by having randomly perturbed input thresholds. Are you talking about some weird computational architecture of your own design, perhaps? Then you should cite it. If it involves "bitwise decisionmaking", then it's a very special architecture indeed.
Tell us more about this "intelligent thought" and how it corresponds to "correct answer rates". Those of us who have studied neural computation for the past 15 years are just dying to know!
Almost nobody I know had a way out provided by their parents. Or in short, in this as in much else, you are wrong.
OK, maybe my wording was too narrow. How did you learn how to drive? Did your parents pay for your car insurance? How did you pay for college? Ever had to borrow money?
If you're being honest, you'll admit that you've had quite a helping hand as you've grown up. Not everyone is as lucky.
I'm not some raging liberal, either. It's what I call common sense that comes over you once you actually make friends with good, hardworking people that just don't happen to have lots of spare savings.
My biggest pet peeve: the uniquely American obsession with owning "pleasure boats" and/or RVs. Yeah, that was a necessity all right...
Sorry, I guess they deserve to get those luxuries if it really makes them happy. Of course, that happiness kind of wears off after a while, doesn't it? Strange, I think someone once said something about true happiness that lasts. I can't remember, though, I'm too busy planning my next purchase to recall or look up what it was.
What are we up to in terms of troops there, somewhere around 100K? That puts your chances of getting killed as a troop at, right now, about 1 in 250 PER YEAR.
I don't like those odds, personally. I would not be a happy troop. And the prevailing morale among troops is quite low right now:
Seventy-two percent of the 756 troops surveyed this fall in Iraq and Kuwait reported low or very low unit morale, and 52 percent reported low personal morale, findings in line with an unscientific poll conducted last summer by Stars and Stripes.
The findings were "somewhat" surprising to Patterson. Of the "biased sampling" of surveyed troops, 82 percent had seen combat, Patterson said.
"It was a pretty miserable set of circumstances at the time," Patterson said Thursday at a media briefing. "We speculate that all of those contributed to the factor of low morale." The team conducted the survey between Aug. 27 and Oct. 7.
Factors included austere living conditions, brutal heat, a lack of communications with families back home, combat and traumatic stress and notably barriers in troops' ability to get help in dealing with the stress, Patterson said.
The team was dispatched to Iraq in July following a surge in suicides that month. Between April and June, the Army tallied two suicides a month. The figure climbed to five in July, a number that Lt. Gen. James Peake, surgeon general for the Army, described as a "little bump."
Last summer, 1,935 troops responded to a questionnaire circulated by Stars and Stripes reporters visiting camps throughout Iraq.
This didn't start out as a rant, but it kind of turned into one. I hope it ends up being constructive to those who read it.
First of all, remember that most households before 1980 had one wage-earner. Now most have two and have about the same earning power as before. Nobody suffers except the children and the parents' relationships to them and each other.
Second of all, I'm paying over $1000/month for health insurance for my family because my job doesn't cover it. This is standard, no frills Blue Cross/Blue Shield. It raises the hair on my neck because there's no guarantee it's going to stay that "low". I'm lucky that I have an income that allows me to afford it. $400/week, if you know anything about providing for a family, will not come close to covering this and everything else.
Now for some general philosophical points.
Is the parent poster is one of those rare individuals that's never made a mistake that has cost money? How many people do you know like that? I'll bet most people you can think of have made a costly mistake somewhere along their lives. They probably had a way out provided them by their parents such that the blow was softened, in the interest of chalking the mistake up to a "learning experience". Please correct me if I'm wrong about this because I'm pretty darn sure I'm right.
Now, a reality check. Despite their best laid plans, some people get divorced, or their job gets sent overseas, or they have more kids than they can afford, or their work stops paying for insurance, or their house gets flooded, or their child is born with a birth defect that costs tons of money to treat.
I'm guessing none of none of these things has happened to you, or you would not be saying what you're saying.
Now, there are two mindsets about what society should do when bad things happen to good people, or maybe just people in general since there are very few of us who thrive on committing evil acts. One, which I like to call "Compassionate Conservatism" because it makes me chuckle every time I say it, says "That's the breaks. Too bad, if you're worth having in our society, you'll find a way through." The other says, "You'll pay, but we're going to make it possible for you to get back on your feet so you can pull your weight again."
The first mindset seems reasonable to people who have the means to help themselves. It's natural for people to be selfish. The second seems reasonable to people who have that special understanding of reality that life in the American suburbs simply cannot provide. And it's not just poor people. It's people who (gasp) try to help the outcasts in our society, in line with Christ's teachings.
How is it possible to be conservative and a good Christian, again? I guess they're so sure they know God's intent; they know God doesn't really want them throwing their precious money on those undeserving heathen.
I didn't make it very clear in my previous post, but my thinking with PySol was that you can get a computer program to play thousands of FreeCell games every minute. Once you have a dataset of wins and losses, you can compute the empirical chances of winning when you use Strategy A, determine if chances are better with Strategy B, and so on.
If you kept modifying your current best strategy and accepting a modification if it improves your chance of winning (after each change in strategy, you play 1000 games with that strategy to see if you're doing better), you could end up converging toward the optimal strategy for winning the game.
I had a similar situation. They allowed employees to bring in laptops, so I ended up getting a cheap laptop. In several months' time, I had written a device driver and started several of my own software projects.
It definitely beats playing Freecell, although I understand the attraction. It is a thinking game.
Hey, you could even spend a little time looking at PySol, a program that allows you to write your own solitaire game! You enter the rules, and the program displays the cards where you want and according to your rules.
You could try to determine the optimal strategy to win at the game of Freecell. I've always wanted to know: what are the chances of winning at Freecell? Is it possible that all games are winnable, or can you actually come up with a game that is not winnable? All these cool questions, and PySol is beckoning for you to answer.
That seems cool to me; hope it got you thinking about possibilities.
Reply if you have questions or comments.
What about Magazines, Word of Mouth?
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Why the huge emphasis on textbooks? It's not like PHB's stop listening, learning, and adapting after they leave school.
Don't you think these PHB types talk to each other sometimes? Don't you think they read trade magazines? Word has and will continue to get around about Linux.
Big Companies that use Linux:
* Bank of America * Autozone * J.P. Morgan * Golman-Sachs
Searching on Google for "molecular-manufacturing" turns up a few links, but I don't see much jumping up and down by anyone with objective credentials. Perhaps you'd care to post a link to what convinced you; I'd be interested.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I say the moon's orbit is counter to the Earth's rotation? Whoops; it's rotating in the same direction.
There. Now at least one of my posts is correct about the Moon's orbital direction.
OK, where are the visual geeks? The ones who can model the solar system in their heads?
The moon appears to go around the earth every day, just as the sun does. But it doesn't. So no, the moon is not closer to Mars within every 24 hour period.
Here are some facts you can use to piece together a 3D model in your head:
* The sun appears to rise and set at the same time every day on the earth's equator. That's because it's entirely caused by the earth's rotation.
* The moon rises 45 minutes later every day than it did the day before. That's because the moon is slowly orbiting the Earth in a direction counter to the Earth's rotation.
* Mars appears to slowly "wander" back and forth along a straight line in the sky from day to day. The line is roughly the same as that traveled by the moon and sun (a happy coincidence that's true for most planets, but not all), and it is called the "plane of the ecliptic".
So, if my head is correct, the moon is between Mars and Earth once every 28 days.
More important than the position of the Moon is the position of the two planets relative to each other. Earth's year is shorter than Mars'. They both coincide on the same side of the solar system once every 7 years, I think. And getting to the moon represents less than 0.01% of the trip to Mars; hardly anything distance-wise.
_
* Lindos ( <- Note macron over "o" )
* Lindoors (the windows are closed; open the doors!)
* |_1|\|D0\/\/5
No, II is a reminder of the shape of the appendix when small incisions are made to the top and bottom.
It's not a ponzi scheme. It's evolution.
Sucks doesn't it?
Yes, absolutely it sucks for everyone. Just maybe not right away.
In the short term, a few will do well and be happy. In the long term, everyone will suffer. I guess that's OK because we'll all be long gone. The joke's on our descendants. Ha ha, suckers!
The world is full of examples where "best" short term strategy == very bad long term strategy. In my town, the groundwater is radioactive because some company needed to maximize their profit margins a few decades ago. The island nation of Nauru is 90% wasteland because they allowed mining companies to remove almost all of their potassium-rich topsoil for lots of money in the 70's and 80's. They've now burned through all that money, and they have to import all their food and drinking water from Australia by jet because nothing will grow there.
Oh, and here's a gem from today:
Greenland ice cap 'doomed to meltdown'
I'd suggest not planning on passing any waterfront property down through your family, unless you're planning to have them start a shrimp or oyster farm.
True to a point; the system only works if a good majority of people have hope for a better future. That is not a given.
The source is not enough by itself. It only takes two extra lines of C code to rig an election:
if (some_condition)
votes[0]++;
They should allow people to double-check the veracity of the final product (the binary) by building it themselves.
It would be nice if they would reveal:
* The size of the binary
* The hardware/software configuration of the machine on which the compiling was done.
* The MD5 sum.
, I'm associate it with people that do a lot of talking, yelling, stomping, and yapping, as well as a bit of frothing,...
The loudest person here is clearly yourself. Are you interested in constructive discussion? I take it from your tone that you're more interested in shouting all other opinions down. I wonder why.
I hope others will choose to ignore your loud ranting and get on with idea sharing.
Here's one interesting idea: it takes money to avoid energy comsumption.
The ability to choose lifestyles is often a question of having enough money. The path of least resistance for many poor people involves following short-sighted strategies that get them through the next week, month, or year.
Poor people drive old cars with bad gas mileage, for example, because it costs too much money to buy a better car. TCO might break even in a couple years, but they can't wait that long. Same for appliances, same for preventative health,
To call these people hypocrites, as you did above, is a symptom of too much time in front of the keyboard. Spend more time walking on the fringes of poor neighborhoods. Until then, please refrain from labeling people you clearly know nothing about.
We seem to be having a terminology gap. Unfortunately, this is not unusual for the Grossberg crowd. I'm not trying to flame, but the Cohen-Grossberg Theorem is not enough to rest one's laurels on. For some reason, that whole obsession with the stability/plasticity dilemma is really strange to me and (I believe) a majority of people in the field.
Neurons always have a clearly defined functional behavior. So yes, a neuron with a given set of weights *does* have clearly defined behavior. And no, if you've trained the neural net to do something, the functional behavior of the neurons is not random.
And no, neurons do not (by most people's accounts) perform bitwise computation. I don't know who you've been reading for that one.
I'll resist the temptation to list my credentials, but suffice it to say that I've got a number of publications in peer-reviewed journals. I kind of doubt that in your case.
There are some problems with the article: it makes claims that aren't backed up. So what's new on slashdot? Anyway, here are the gory details from my point of view. The original source reference appears to suffer from the same problem.
The gist of the new idea is a clever way to create a special type of gate whose dynamical threshold value can be modified to implement one of several possible logic gates. An interesting idea, but not computationally revolutionary. These gates would still implement the same chips we use today.
Now, the article goes on to claim that there is a wonderful new horizon of modifiable computation. I see a lot of words and no details. How are those modifiable threshold levels in these gates stored, anyway? Don't tell me it's with something like a flip-flop. It would be asinine to need 6-8 gates to store each bit of the modifiable threshold value for one "chaotic" gate.
Also, there's the small problem that we can MODEL any type of strange new computational paradigm and have been able to for years. We're no closer to a replacement for Turing-style computation than we were decades ago. I've seen one paper about Analog computers being able to compute some esoteric set of functions that discrete computers can't touch, but I haven't seen anyone explain how this helps in any useful way.
Uh, nothing you said in your post makes any sense. I wonder about a moderation system that gives you a +5 score.
Neurons do not "work" by having randomly perturbed input thresholds. Are you talking about some weird computational architecture of your own design, perhaps? Then you should cite it. If it involves "bitwise decisionmaking", then it's a very special architecture indeed.
Tell us more about this "intelligent thought" and how it corresponds to "correct answer rates". Those of us who have studied neural computation for the past 15 years are just dying to know!
Almost nobody I know had a way out provided by their parents. Or in short, in this as in much else, you are wrong.
OK, maybe my wording was too narrow. How did you learn how to drive? Did your parents pay for your car insurance? How did you pay for college? Ever had to borrow money?
If you're being honest, you'll admit that you've had quite a helping hand as you've grown up. Not everyone is as lucky.
I'm not some raging liberal, either. It's what I call common sense that comes over you once you actually make friends with good, hardworking people that just don't happen to have lots of spare savings.
My biggest pet peeve: the uniquely American obsession with owning "pleasure boats" and/or RVs. Yeah, that was a necessity all right...
Sorry, I guess they deserve to get those luxuries if it really makes them happy. Of course, that happiness kind of wears off after a while, doesn't it? Strange, I think someone once said something about true happiness that lasts. I can't remember, though, I'm too busy planning my next purchase to recall or look up what it was.
What are we up to in terms of troops there, somewhere around 100K? That puts your chances of getting killed as a troop at, right now, about 1 in 250 PER YEAR.
i on=104&ar ticle=20478&archive=true
I don't like those odds, personally. I would not be a happy troop. And the prevailing morale among troops is quite low right now:
(From
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?sect
)
Seventy-two percent of the 756 troops surveyed this fall in Iraq and Kuwait reported low or very low unit morale, and 52 percent reported low personal morale, findings in line with an unscientific poll conducted last summer by Stars and Stripes.
The findings were "somewhat" surprising to Patterson. Of the "biased sampling" of surveyed troops, 82 percent had seen combat, Patterson said.
"It was a pretty miserable set of circumstances at the time," Patterson said Thursday at a media briefing. "We speculate that all of those contributed to the factor of low morale." The team conducted the survey between Aug. 27 and Oct. 7.
Factors included austere living conditions, brutal heat, a lack of communications with families back home, combat and traumatic stress and notably barriers in troops' ability to get help in dealing with the stress, Patterson said.
The team was dispatched to Iraq in July following a surge in suicides that month. Between April and June, the Army tallied two suicides a month. The figure climbed to five in July, a number that Lt. Gen. James Peake, surgeon general for the Army, described as a "little bump."
Last summer, 1,935 troops responded to a questionnaire circulated by Stars and Stripes reporters visiting camps throughout Iraq.
It would have been so much funnier if you'd ended with "Get it, you Nazi pig?"
All those raging Daikatana fans, and anyone who loves his thick, gorgeous locks.
Did I even spell Daikatana right? I kind of hope I messed it up.
This didn't start out as a rant, but it kind of turned into one. I hope it ends up being constructive to those who read it.
First of all, remember that most households before 1980 had one wage-earner. Now most have two and have about the same earning power as before. Nobody suffers except the children and the parents' relationships to them and each other.
Second of all, I'm paying over $1000/month for health insurance for my family because my job doesn't cover it. This is standard, no frills Blue Cross/Blue Shield. It raises the hair on my neck because there's no guarantee it's going to stay that "low". I'm lucky that I have an income that allows me to afford it. $400/week, if you know anything about providing for a family, will not come close to covering this and everything else.
Now for some general philosophical points.
Is the parent poster is one of those rare individuals that's never made a mistake that has cost money? How many people do you know like that? I'll bet most people you can think of have made a costly mistake somewhere along their lives. They probably had a way out provided them by their parents such that the blow was softened, in the interest of chalking the mistake up to a "learning experience". Please correct me if I'm wrong about this because I'm pretty darn sure I'm right.
Now, a reality check. Despite their best laid plans, some people get divorced, or their job gets sent overseas, or they have more kids than they can afford, or their work stops paying for insurance, or their house gets flooded, or their child is born with a birth defect that costs tons of money to treat.
I'm guessing none of none of these things has happened to you, or you would not be saying what you're saying.
Now, there are two mindsets about what society should do when bad things happen to good people, or maybe just people in general since there are very few of us who thrive on committing evil acts. One, which I like to call "Compassionate Conservatism" because it makes me chuckle every time I say it, says "That's the breaks. Too bad, if you're worth having in our society, you'll find a way through." The other says, "You'll pay, but we're going to make it possible for you to get back on your feet so you can pull your weight again."
The first mindset seems reasonable to people who have the means to help themselves. It's natural for people to be selfish. The second seems reasonable to people who have that special understanding of reality that life in the American suburbs simply cannot provide. And it's not just poor people. It's people who (gasp) try to help the outcasts in our society, in line with Christ's teachings.
How is it possible to be conservative and a good Christian, again? I guess they're so sure they know God's intent; they know God doesn't really want them throwing their precious money on those undeserving heathen.
There are hidden costs as your workforce size increases.
* More handoff and coordination required between employees
* Lower working standards because there's less personal accountability
* More HR work involved
* Good workers who like a single job with benefits are not going to apply for half-time jobs that may not have benefits.
I didn't make it very clear in my previous post, but my thinking with PySol was that you can get a computer program to play thousands of FreeCell games every minute. Once you have a dataset of wins and losses, you can compute the empirical chances of winning when you use Strategy A, determine if chances are better with Strategy B, and so on.
If you kept modifying your current best strategy and accepting a modification if it improves your chance of winning (after each change in strategy, you play 1000 games with that strategy to see if you're doing better), you could end up converging toward the optimal strategy for winning the game.
I had a similar situation. They allowed employees to bring in laptops, so I ended up getting a cheap laptop. In several months' time, I had written a device driver and started several of my own software projects.
It definitely beats playing Freecell, although I understand the attraction. It is a thinking game.
Hey, you could even spend a little time looking at PySol, a program that allows you to write your own solitaire game! You enter the rules, and the program displays the cards where you want and according to your rules.
You could try to determine the optimal strategy to win at the game of Freecell. I've always wanted to know: what are the chances of winning at Freecell? Is it possible that all games are winnable, or can you actually come up with a game that is not winnable? All these cool questions, and PySol is beckoning for you to answer.
That seems cool to me; hope it got you thinking about possibilities.
Reply if you have questions or comments.
Why the huge emphasis on textbooks? It's not like PHB's stop listening, learning, and adapting after they leave school.
Don't you think these PHB types talk to each other sometimes? Don't you think they read trade magazines? Word has and will continue to get around about Linux.
Big Companies that use Linux:
* Bank of America
* Autozone
* J.P. Morgan
* Golman-Sachs
The list is quite long.
I'd suggest going one step further and wearing the following T-shirt once in a while:
this
* Ability to download/offload messages from the webmail server to your local machine.
My current webmail doesn't let me do this...very frustrating when you want to archive old messages!
Whether this turns out to be a joke or not, are there webmail services out there offering:
* spam blocking
* auto forwarding
* auto filing rules
Anyone out there delighted with their current webmail choice?
It.makes.a.lot.of.sense.
Wow, you've persuaded me. Thanks, AC!
I'll be getting back to you if anything you've said turns out to be wrong, though.
Searching on Google for "molecular-manufacturing" turns up a few links, but I don't see much jumping up and down by anyone with objective credentials. Perhaps you'd care to post a link to what convinced you; I'd be interested.