I'm not sure about whether it's singular or plural in English, but there's an interesting (IMHO) story attached to the French word. When a group of French mathematicians under the group pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki started writing a series of books in which a very large part of mathematics was set up in a very general and formal style, they called it `Éléments de mathématique' (`Elements of mathematic'). Although the French word for mathematics is `mathématiques' (plural), they used the singular version because they thought mathematics should be viewed as a unified subject rather than as a loose collection of sub-subjects.
The idea of a soul (in the dualistic sense, i.e. able to survive apart from the body) is not a Christian invention. In both the Old and the New Testament a person is regarded as a single entity; the idea of an `immortal soul' was a Hellenistic idea that `crept into' the church during the first centuries of its existence. The Roman Catholic Church does (IIRC) teach the existence of a soul, but I'm not sure if that's intended in this `strong' sense.
As a Christian (but not Roman Catholic) I do not think there is either sufficient evidence or any need for the immortal soul. That also means that talk about ``going to Heaven (or Hell) after you die'' strikes me as a somewhat simplistic implementation of belief in an `afterlife'. Then again, that isn't the hope expressed in the Bible either; as the Nicene creed says it, "We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." That's not a proposition that is testable or falsifiable right now (I don't believe in scientism, however); it is the expectation that God will continue to `keep his promises', so to say, in the future as he has done up to now.
Back to the zombie dogs: it's an interesting biological experiment, but if and when it's tried on humans I won't be surprised at all if they recall absolutely nothing of their time between death and resuscitation.
Thanks a lot! When I still used System 7.5.5 I used the Graphing Calculator a lot just to get an idea about the shape of a function (I study mathematics), and when I got a new Mac I wondered if there was a Graphing Calculator for OS X. I just downloaded the OS X version, and it's great! It's much better suited for this kind of quick things than Octave or Maple.
The article contains a link to a letter (in Dutch) to all Dutch municipalities. It is an invitation to join the negotiations between the Ministry of Justice and Microsoft. The deal appears to concern at least 250,000 Windows desktops. However, the first paragraph of the letter clearly states the following (translation and emphasis mine):
To prevent misunderstandings: this is about the continuation of agreements to which many users feel compelled to on the short term; this does not change the fact that on mid and long term, the alternative of open source software receives all attention.
This is absolute madness. Since when is the word "scholar" in any way reserved for the ACS? If you use a generic word in your product, don't be complain when others use the same word, otherwise you are just plain naive.
The same could be said of a well-known operating system, of course...
The tone of most reactions to this article (and to all other recent topics on climate change) seems to be, "Well, apparently natural effects are much more important than human effects, so why bother about the human impact on climate change?"
We should realize that this particular case of natural greenhouse gas emission is not at all representative for the relative importance of human and natural effects. If you restrict to a small enough area and timespan, any effect becomes important. Why say that Mt. St. Helens is WA state's biggest pollutor, and not that volcanic effects dwarf human contributions in the whole US (or the whole world)? Because if you look on a bigger scale than just the area around the volcano, volcanic effects are just not that important. I'm not saying they are unimportant, only that industrial effects are at least as important.
And then I'm not even talking about the extremely short timescale this volcano is active (only for a couple of months, while industrial activity continues 24/7).
By the way, I absolutely do not regard myself as overly green or left-wing. I would like to believe that everything's going to be alright, but the facts are unfortunately too obvious to ignore.
I must say I'm kind of amused by the allergic reaction Americans show when the government wants to put their name and some personal information on a list.
Here in the Netherlands, information about all college/university students (including date of birth, gender, nationality etc.) is kept track of by the national agency which takes care of providing our monthly study financing to us. Every higher education student gets this; it partially depends on the income of your parents (I hear you screaming, "AAGH - do they even keep track of that?!). For me it's slightly more than 100 euros per month; by comparison, the tuition fee is about 180 euros a month, independent of the university.
I have never heard anybody complain about privacy concerns; pretty much the only problems arise when you don't get your study financing and it's a pain to deal with the bureaucratic mess which is this agency.
This has been moderated "Funny", but there is of course a lot of truth in it. The argument "oh, but if we ratify the Kyoto protocol the American economy will suffer!" has been used in frighteningly many replies to this article.
People may believe the BS that retaining a solid economy while reducing the wasting of fuel is impossible; however, the fact that ANY other developed country produces less CO2 per capita than the US cannot be ignored. This is not idealistic environmentalist talk, it's reality.
Another simplistic argument against ratifiying the Kyoto protocol is that it would be impossible to force nations to stick to their quotas. Ehm, self-regulation anybody? Countries are not little kids, and certainly ought not to behave like them in matters like this!
Anyway, this ranting is leading me into a very pessimistic mood. Wanting to have children used to be self-evident to me, but several things (including the fact that they might be going to behave like countries...) make me think twice about that, too.
According to the page you're referring to, Wilczek was involved in fundamental discoveries in quantum chromodynamics when he was only 21 years old, working as a PhD student at Princeton. The talent and energy (don't forget that 10% is inspiration, 90% is perspiration...) that some of these people have is amazing.
In fact, Einstein got the Nobel prize for "his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The Nobel committee seems to have been hesitant to award the prize to him for the theory of relativity, because it was still a bit controversial at that time.
By the way, it has often been said that three of the papers Einstein published in 1905 are all separately worth a Nobel prize (for the photoelectric effect, the explanation of Brownian motion, and the special theory of relativity). Of course, General Relativity is Einstein's most exceptional achievement and would certainly have been worth yet another Nobel prize.
I meant interferometry in the way it is done with radio telescopes, i.e. recording the signal and combining the signals from different telescopes later instead of directing the light from the telescopes directly to the interferometer (as is done in optical interferometry). Perhaps off-line optical interferometry is possible in princible, but it would involve HUGE amounts of data due to the high frequencies involved (THz for optical vs. MHz/GHz for radio telescopes).
For clarification, this is not about an optical telescope, so (as another poster pointed out) this kind of telescopes will not be a replacement for the Hubble. Interferometry of this kind is (with current technology, but even in principle) only conceivable with radio astronomy, not with optical astronomy.
The principle involved is the same principle which has been used for some decades now in radio interferometry: the data (consisting of the electric field as a function of time) from several radio telescopes are recorded (with timestamps) and then sent to a correlator which combines the signals. This means that in contrary to optical interferometry, the interference is not realised in real time, but `simulated' afterwards in a computer.
The difference is in the way the signals are transported; they used to record the data on magnetic tape drives, which are still used but are more and more being replaced with hard disks. Apparently they have now also started to use the Internet to transport the data.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that a two-party system is good because it ensures the winning candidate will have the support of a large part of the population. This support might be only formal for a part of the population (the people who vote for the "lesser of two evils"), however. I think the fundamental problem is that in the US, a great deal of importance is given to the president, a person with considerable power.
In many other democracies, such as in the Netherlands (where I live), there is no single powerful leader. The government is in practice always a coalition, and the most powerful person, the prime minister, in some way has to represent the whole coalition instaed of only his own party. In this way, just about any party has a chance to enter the government; for example, one of the three parties in the government right now is D66, a party which presumably would be the Libertarians if we were the US, although they only have somewhere around ten of the 150 seats in Parliament. This must sound very appealing to a great deal of you US-based Slashdotters (I'm not a fan of D66 at all, but that aside). Yet, how is the parliament elected? With a simple single-vote system.
In short, maybe all these complicated election methods are only necessary because of the need to elect a single person. This may be a more flawed thing than the election system itself.
I probably saw you there then. I don't know you or any of the people involved in the accident personally, but I too want to express my sympathy.
My condolences to his family, friends and others who knew Hans.
That would be completely against the spirit of Free Software. Software should be freely available and free for anyone to extend and modify. By applying for a patent on your software, you are effectively saying that you should be the one who has ultimate control over who may produce software similar to yours. This contradicts the whole idea of free software, and would no doubt be used against the free software movement. Note that this is a different issue than the question whether using copyright to control the spread of your software (like the GPL does) is a good thing; some people may be against both software patents and the GPL, while others are against software patents but for the GPL.
The city of Munich's switching project to an open-source based infrastructure with a standardised Linux base client is eagerly watched worldwide. Meanwhile, attacks are taking place against open-source projects by means of lawsuits against important reference customers. These lawsuits are initiated by companies whose financing clearly stems from declared enemies of the open-source movement (1). We have done a patent search to reveal possible patent risks of the base client in its current form. The indicated patents can be searched at (2) and have for the most part been taken from (3). The patents mentioned below should be understood as being just examples of the 30,000 patents submitted to the European Patent Office. It may be assumed that at least 10-20% of these 30,000 patents are applicable to the client. To point at future threats, a part of patent applications have been taken into account; the acceptance rate for the European Patent Office is greater than 50% (4). In brackets, software packages of the planned base client are indicated.
[Image with a caption about the danger of JPEG and MPEG]
I think it's very probable that the ISS will have some (and maybe even a lot of) positive influence (like the Iraq war may also have its positive effects), both in the advance of technology and as an incentive to adventurous people. However, like the Iraq war, it costs a lot of money. This is in itself not a problem; the problem is IMO that these projects (the ISS, going to the moon and Mars, the Iraq war,...) seem to be largely a matter of prestige, and that some persons in the position to undertake or subsidise them seem to be selectively blind for subsidising projects that could actually improve our world a lot more efficiently, like fighting pollution, AIDS, and poverty. Someone might say that the benefit of such projects is not clear at all, but at least to me it seems a lot clearer than the benefit of the ISS, Mars, and probably Iraq as well.
Because many people (including apparently Van Allen, and I'm inclined to view myself as standing on the same side) doubt whether being adventurous is worth billions of dollars and the risk of human lives. As Van Allen says in the article, comparing human space flight with the journeys of Columbus is not entirely fair; Columbus could be fairly sure to encounter habitable land (in fact, he wanted to reach Japan and China; contrary to a popular myth, the idea that the earth was round was reasonably well spread in his time). The only prospect we have (at least until Zephram Cochrane appears) is to establish a manned base on Mars. I'm wondering if that's a very good prospect in view of the lack of success of the ISS.
The majority of Slashdotters (including myself) seems to find the billions the Bush administration is pouring into Iraq a terrible waste of money. According to Van Allen, the ISS will have cost 80 billion dollars when it is completed, but I doubt it will benefit humanity any more than even the tiny positive aspect of the Iraq war.
Another cool fact about the golden ratio (phi) is that it deserves the name `most irrational number': for any real number it is possible to construct a sequence of fractions that converges to it (using continued fractions). The series of `best' approximations (i.e. the approximation closest to phi that has denominator smaller than a given upper bound) for phi is 1, 1 + 1/1, 1 + 1/(1 + 1/1), 1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/1)), and so on. Because all denominators are 1, the error in these estimates shrinks only very slowly. To approximate the golden ratio within a given error, you need fractions with large numerator and denominator; transcendental numbers such as pi can (perhaps surprisingly) be approximated much better by fractions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure about whether it's singular or plural in English, but there's an interesting (IMHO) story attached to the French word. When a group of French mathematicians under the group pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki started writing a series of books in which a very large part of mathematics was set up in a very general and formal style, they called it `Éléments de mathématique' (`Elements of mathematic'). Although the French word for mathematics is `mathématiques' (plural), they used the singular version because they thought mathematics should be viewed as a unified subject rather than as a loose collection of sub-subjects.
As a Christian (but not Roman Catholic) I do not think there is either sufficient evidence or any need for the immortal soul. That also means that talk about ``going to Heaven (or Hell) after you die'' strikes me as a somewhat simplistic implementation of belief in an `afterlife'. Then again, that isn't the hope expressed in the Bible either; as the Nicene creed says it, "We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." That's not a proposition that is testable or falsifiable right now (I don't believe in scientism, however); it is the expectation that God will continue to `keep his promises', so to say, in the future as he has done up to now.
Back to the zombie dogs: it's an interesting biological experiment, but if and when it's tried on humans I won't be surprised at all if they recall absolutely nothing of their time between death and resuscitation.
Thanks a lot! When I still used System 7.5.5 I used the Graphing Calculator a lot just to get an idea about the shape of a function (I study mathematics), and when I got a new Mac I wondered if there was a Graphing Calculator for OS X. I just downloaded the OS X version, and it's great! It's much better suited for this kind of quick things than Octave or Maple.
To prevent misunderstandings: this is about the continuation of agreements to which many users feel compelled to on the short term; this does not change the fact that on mid and long term, the alternative of open source software receives all attention.
The same could be said of a well-known operating system, of course...
We should realize that this particular case of natural greenhouse gas emission is not at all representative for the relative importance of human and natural effects. If you restrict to a small enough area and timespan, any effect becomes important. Why say that Mt. St. Helens is WA state's biggest pollutor, and not that volcanic effects dwarf human contributions in the whole US (or the whole world)? Because if you look on a bigger scale than just the area around the volcano, volcanic effects are just not that important. I'm not saying they are unimportant, only that industrial effects are at least as important.
And then I'm not even talking about the extremely short timescale this volcano is active (only for a couple of months, while industrial activity continues 24/7).
By the way, I absolutely do not regard myself as overly green or left-wing. I would like to believe that everything's going to be alright, but the facts are unfortunately too obvious to ignore.
Here in the Netherlands, information about all college/university students (including date of birth, gender, nationality etc.) is kept track of by the national agency which takes care of providing our monthly study financing to us. Every higher education student gets this; it partially depends on the income of your parents (I hear you screaming, "AAGH - do they even keep track of that?!). For me it's slightly more than 100 euros per month; by comparison, the tuition fee is about 180 euros a month, independent of the university.
I have never heard anybody complain about privacy concerns; pretty much the only problems arise when you don't get your study financing and it's a pain to deal with the bureaucratic mess which is this agency.
And also at the same time that the US administration is again neglecting to take action to reduce its pollution.
This has been moderated "Funny", but there is of course a lot of truth in it. The argument "oh, but if we ratify the Kyoto protocol the American economy will suffer!" has been used in frighteningly many replies to this article.
People may believe the BS that retaining a solid economy while reducing the wasting of fuel is impossible; however, the fact that ANY other developed country produces less CO2 per capita than the US cannot be ignored. This is not idealistic environmentalist talk, it's reality.
Another simplistic argument against ratifiying the Kyoto protocol is that it would be impossible to force nations to stick to their quotas. Ehm, self-regulation anybody? Countries are not little kids, and certainly ought not to behave like them in matters like this!
Anyway, this ranting is leading me into a very pessimistic mood. Wanting to have children used to be self-evident to me, but several things (including the fact that they might be going to behave like countries...) make me think twice about that, too.
According to the page you're referring to, Wilczek was involved in fundamental discoveries in quantum chromodynamics when he was only 21 years old, working as a PhD student at Princeton. The talent and energy (don't forget that 10% is inspiration, 90% is perspiration...) that some of these people have is amazing.
By the way, it has often been said that three of the papers Einstein published in 1905 are all separately worth a Nobel prize (for the photoelectric effect, the explanation of Brownian motion, and the special theory of relativity). Of course, General Relativity is Einstein's most exceptional achievement and would certainly have been worth yet another Nobel prize.
I meant interferometry in the way it is done with radio telescopes, i.e. recording the signal and combining the signals from different telescopes later instead of directing the light from the telescopes directly to the interferometer (as is done in optical interferometry). Perhaps off-line optical interferometry is possible in princible, but it would involve HUGE amounts of data due to the high frequencies involved (THz for optical vs. MHz/GHz for radio telescopes).
The principle involved is the same principle which has been used for some decades now in radio interferometry: the data (consisting of the electric field as a function of time) from several radio telescopes are recorded (with timestamps) and then sent to a correlator which combines the signals. This means that in contrary to optical interferometry, the interference is not realised in real time, but `simulated' afterwards in a computer.
The difference is in the way the signals are transported; they used to record the data on magnetic tape drives, which are still used but are more and more being replaced with hard disks. Apparently they have now also started to use the Internet to transport the data.
In many other democracies, such as in the Netherlands (where I live), there is no single powerful leader. The government is in practice always a coalition, and the most powerful person, the prime minister, in some way has to represent the whole coalition instaed of only his own party. In this way, just about any party has a chance to enter the government; for example, one of the three parties in the government right now is D66, a party which presumably would be the Libertarians if we were the US, although they only have somewhere around ten of the 150 seats in Parliament. This must sound very appealing to a great deal of you US-based Slashdotters (I'm not a fan of D66 at all, but that aside). Yet, how is the parliament elected? With a simple single-vote system.
In short, maybe all these complicated election methods are only necessary because of the need to elect a single person. This may be a more flawed thing than the election system itself.
I probably saw you there then. I don't know you or any of the people involved in the accident personally, but I too want to express my sympathy. My condolences to his family, friends and others who knew Hans.
The article states that he was 18 in 1991. Do your math.
On the HP VAX site, they recommend to move from VAX to the AlphaServer. What happened to their plans to phase the AlphaServer out?
That would be completely against the spirit of Free Software. Software should be freely available and free for anyone to extend and modify. By applying for a patent on your software, you are effectively saying that you should be the one who has ultimate control over who may produce software similar to yours. This contradicts the whole idea of free software, and would no doubt be used against the free software movement. Note that this is a different issue than the question whether using copyright to control the spread of your software (like the GPL does) is a good thing; some people may be against both software patents and the GPL, while others are against software patents but for the GPL.
The city of Munich's switching project to an open-source based infrastructure with a standardised Linux base client is eagerly watched worldwide. Meanwhile, attacks are taking place against open-source projects by means of lawsuits against important reference customers. These lawsuits are initiated by companies whose financing clearly stems from declared enemies of the open-source movement (1). We have done a patent search to reveal possible patent risks of the base client in its current form. The indicated patents can be searched at (2) and have for the most part been taken from (3). The patents mentioned below should be understood as being just examples of the 30,000 patents submitted to the European Patent Office. It may be assumed that at least 10-20% of these 30,000 patents are applicable to the client. To point at future threats, a part of patent applications have been taken into account; the acceptance rate for the European Patent Office is greater than 50% (4). In brackets, software packages of the planned base client are indicated.
[Image with a caption about the danger of JPEG and MPEG]
I think it's very probable that the ISS will have some (and maybe even a lot of) positive influence (like the Iraq war may also have its positive effects), both in the advance of technology and as an incentive to adventurous people. However, like the Iraq war, it costs a lot of money. This is in itself not a problem; the problem is IMO that these projects (the ISS, going to the moon and Mars, the Iraq war, ...) seem to be largely a matter of prestige, and that some persons in the position to undertake or subsidise them seem to be selectively blind for subsidising projects that could actually improve our world a lot more efficiently, like fighting pollution, AIDS, and poverty. Someone might say that the benefit of such projects is not clear at all, but at least to me it seems a lot clearer than the benefit of the ISS, Mars, and probably Iraq as well.
Because many people (including apparently Van Allen, and I'm inclined to view myself as standing on the same side) doubt whether being adventurous is worth billions of dollars and the risk of human lives. As Van Allen says in the article, comparing human space flight with the journeys of Columbus is not entirely fair; Columbus could be fairly sure to encounter habitable land (in fact, he wanted to reach Japan and China; contrary to a popular myth, the idea that the earth was round was reasonably well spread in his time). The only prospect we have (at least until Zephram Cochrane appears) is to establish a manned base on Mars. I'm wondering if that's a very good prospect in view of the lack of success of the ISS.
The majority of Slashdotters (including myself) seems to find the billions the Bush administration is pouring into Iraq a terrible waste of money. According to Van Allen, the ISS will have cost 80 billion dollars when it is completed, but I doubt it will benefit humanity any more than even the tiny positive aspect of the Iraq war.
(419 bytes; if you see < and > it should be < and >, of course.)
I also made an optimising version of the compiler (not so obscured, though, and a lot bigger).
"Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Another cool fact about the golden ratio (phi) is that it deserves the name `most irrational number': for any real number it is possible to construct a sequence of fractions that converges to it (using continued fractions). The series of `best' approximations (i.e. the approximation closest to phi that has denominator smaller than a given upper bound) for phi is 1, 1 + 1/1, 1 + 1/(1 + 1/1), 1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/1)), and so on. Because all denominators are 1, the error in these estimates shrinks only very slowly. To approximate the golden ratio within a given error, you need fractions with large numerator and denominator; transcendental numbers such as pi can (perhaps surprisingly) be approximated much better by fractions.
Yeah, many computer hackers in recorded history have come in through Windows.