a continual repeat of Caliph Omar's infamous command to burn the books of the Library of Alexandria because "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous."
I should deceive the expectation of the reader, if I passed in silence the fate of the Alexandrian library, as it is described by the learned Abulpharagius.
The spirit of Amrou was more curious and liberal than that of his brethren, and in his leisure hours, the Arabian chief was pleased with the conversation of John, the last disciple of Ammonius, and who derived the surname of Philoponus from his laborious studies of grammar and philosophy. Emboldened by this familiar intercourse, Philoponus presumed to solicit a gift, inestimable in his opinion, contemptible in that of the Barbarians -- the royal library, which alone, among the spoils of Alexandria, had not been appropriated by the visit and the seal of the conqueror. Amrou was inclined to gratify the wish of the grammarian, but his rigid integrity refused to alienate the minutest object without the consent of the caliph; and the well-known answer of Omar was inspired by the ignorance of a fanatic. "If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved: if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed." The sentence was executed with blind obedience: the volumes of paper or parchment were distributed to the four thousand baths of the city; and such was their incredible multitude, that six months were barely sufficient for the consumption of this precious fuel.
Since the Dynasties of Abulpharagius have been given to the world in a Latin version, the tale has been repeatedly transcribed; and every scholar, with pious indignation, has deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the learning, the arts, and the genius, of antiquity.
For my own part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and the consequences. The fact is indeed marvelous. "Read and wonder!" says the historian himself: and the solitary report of a stranger who wrote at the end of six hundred years on the confines of Media, is overbalanced by the silence of two annalist of a more early date, both Christians, both natives of Egypt, and the most ancient of whom, the patriarch Eutychius, has amply described the conquest of Alexandria. The rigid sentence of Omar is repugnant to the sound and orthodox precept of the Mohammedan casuists, they expressly declare, that the religious books of the Jews and Christians, which are acquired by the right of war, should never be committed to the flames; and that the works of profane science, historians or poets, physicians or philosophers, may be lawfully applied to the use of the faithful. A more destructive zeal may perhaps be attributed to the first successors of Mohammed; yet in this instance, the conflagration would have speedily expired in the deficiency of materials.
I should not recapitulate the disasters of the Alexandrian library, the involuntary flame that was kindled by Caesar in his own defense, or the mischievous bigotry of the Christians, who studied to destroy the monuments of idolatry. But if we gradually descend from the age of the Antonines to that of Theodosius, we shall learn from a chain of contemporary witnesses, that the royal palace and the temple of Serapis no longer contained the four, or the seven, hundred thousand volumes,
Show me a preacher burnt at the stake (as in real fire and real charred flesh, not metaphorically) by a council of scientists and I'll agree with you.
The Nazi's acted in the name of their science of eugenics. The Communists claimed sanction from their science of history.
You may respond that their so-called sciences were completely unscientific. I would reply that the preachers who burned men were completely unreligious.
Serious note to very funny comment. The first tipoff that this is a spoof is the use of the date 134 A.D. The Christian Era was not defined until the 6th century when Dionysius Exiguous ("Dennis the Little"), identified the epoch of that era as the January 1 following the birth of Jesus on Dec. 25, 753 A.U.C. (the era of the founding of Rome, A.U.C. - Anno Urbis Conditae).
The term A.D. (Year of our Lord) was first used by the Anglo Saxon monk known as the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of England written in the eighth century.
I assume that the question of whether it is better to use cooler chips or to spend more on cooling equipment is one that can be anwered with some degree of objectivity.
There is a computational task which needs to be done. It can be measured in instructions processed. The chips have an up front cost, and it costs so much for the electricity to run them. If mechanical cooling is necessary, the coolers have an upfront cost and also need electricity to run them.
Once you have these facts in hand, all that is required is to calculate the costs over a specified time frame, and present value the cash flows.
IIRC, somebody from Google gave a speech/interview a couple of years ago (which was duly reported on/.), in which he said that he wished chip makers would pay more attention to power usage than speed because his electricity bill was getting way too big.
Note: Raul654 (453029) "Reminds me of an amusing anecdote." I assume the machine in question was the one described in the comments above titled "Cray still has water cooling!"
"The A380 will be used mainly on the longhaul hub routes, such as LA to Hongkong, London to Hongkong, London to Sydney, London to New York, New York to Hongkong etc."
10 years they will be flying 125% of rated capacity to Jeddah for the Hadj.
Re:Dear submitter.... READ THE ARTICLE
on
Who Needs Harvard?
·
· Score: 1
This is not social science either. A lot of CEOs are in their 60s, you would have to go back into the 1950s and look at the numbers of students in that decade, which were way different to factor that out.
You also need to factor out those people who inherited their position (think Ford) and who may have had the money to buy their way into an elite college. There are also a certain number of CEOs who bought their companies with inherited money.
Finally, they were bright ambitious kids before they went to Ivy U., they would have been bright ambitious kids if they had gone to State. If they later become CEO, is that because they went to Ivy or because they were bright and ambitious?
I forget the exact numbers, but B&W negative film has a contrast range of 10 or 11 orders of magnitude. . . But even a color print exceeds 24bpp (8 bits x RGB).
Typically the term orders of magnitude refers to powers of ten. I think that the quoted statement meant to refer to powers of two. Photographers usually use terms such as "stops" or "exposure values." E.G. one stop is a factor of two change in the amount of light.
In a given scene, the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene will determine the range of tones perceived. Perception varies logarithmicaly. A doubling in the amount of light is percieved as a one step change in brightness. Take a picture printed on white paper. The white backround may reflect 98% of the incident light. Dull black ink on that paper might not reflect more than 2% of the incident light. It won't be much less, you can try this at home with a good photo meter. I once tried sooting up a piece of glass. IIRC, that came out around 2% in bright sunlight.
On a printed picture, whether by photographic or mechanical means, therefor the practical limit of tonal gradation is less than a factor of 64 or 2^8 or 8 stops.
Since color pictures are three monochromes printed in separate colors (hush about cymk) 3 x 8 or 24 bits will specify tonal gradation adequately for color prints, unless you feel that you need more half steps in your system. (in a 24 bit system the step between 0 and 1 is enormous a 50% reduction in the amount of light, art directors may want half or quarter steps in there).
Color film and prints cannot have a greater tonal range than monochrome for this reason. Indeed, because of the layering process by which they are made it will always be less.
Because transmitted light is stronger than reflected light. (Do not look at the sun!) And because the human eye can readjust between differently illuminated parts of a scene, slides and movies can use more tonal range than printed material. This is a very limited virtue. The tendency of cinematographers to put most of the scene in shadow (that is to concentrate the tonal range of the scene 3 to 5 stops below the brightest parts, instead of centering them around the 2.5 stop neutral gray) for the past 20 years is just plain annoying.
I neglected to add that when my kids got to middle school many yars latter, there was no more science fair, no more do it yourself science experiments. They did triboards about recycling. I was very disappointed in the science education they got in middle and high school.
Daughter number 2 is catching up now she is taking Organic Chemistry and Partial Differential Equations
I did the same in the early 60's. I was actually able to photograph some trails with the light from a slide projector and an old fshion Polaroid Land camera (the kind with bellows and a squegee for the film). The trick was that the B&W Polaroid film had a very high ASA rating.
I got the project out of the Scientific American Amature scientist book that another poster mentions. I remember the book having the linear accelerator project. I dimly remeber a discussion somewher either in that book or a Scientific American Article about a cyclotron project.
I also recall a pbs show a few years back that featured a kid from Tennesse who built a cyclotron in his backyard. He was going to the University of Chicago.
The McGuffin Delusion arises when someone argues that an instance of technology, and not the individual who controls the technology, represents the source of a problem. This delusion shows up in a lot of technology-related political discussions.
It is named after Alfred Hitchock's description of his plot device, a McGuffin, that every character in the story searches for believing it will solve their problem. In Hitchock's movies, however, the real issues are the relationships between people, not the physical objects they seek.
The real debate is not about the technology. It is about who will be the rider and who will be the horse. Who will have the whip in his hand and who will bear the lash patiently.
My favorite debaters are the environmental advocates (many related to an assassinated President) who feel very strongly that the United States needs renewable energy sources but not where the machines can be seen from their summer homes. Then there are who insist that all of our energy problems can be solved by conservation. Few of them maintain the lifestyles of Bengali Peasants, and some of them own their own airplanes and multiple mansions.
There is no hope of progress until such time, if ever, as there is a recognition that there are problems that need to be solved, that the solutions to these problems will impose costs and create benefits, that the costs must be shared across society on an equitable basis and in proportion to the benefits received (no free riders) and that the benefits must be shared on an equitable basis and in proportion to the costs paid (capitalism is the only economic system).
There can be no sacred cows or caribou or snail darters. The residents of New York will have to bear the (very slim) risk of an adverse event at Indian Point and probably 2 or 3 other nuclear plants as well, the Kennedys will have to look at a bunch of wind machines and the folks in Nevada will have to deal with Yucca Mountain and die in the knowledge that 10,000 years from now it may leak (the Pyramids are only 4500 years old). These are all costs that we will have to bear and there will be more of them and others. Taxes will go up. Energy prices will go up. Prices of appliances, buildings and automobiles will go up.
Technology will not make the cost problem go away. It cannot. There is no such thing as a free lunch, that is a law of both physics and economics. If we want to have energy we will have to incur and allocate costs for it. That is a political and economic, not a technological, problem.
IIRC, Intel was trying for a single chip solution. TI's DLP chip is a solo and the television mfgs' use a rotating color wheel.
I am really kind of amazed that Intel is throwing in the towel on this one. The eventual winner in this category stands to make a lot of money. Yes, TV is a low margin business, but the display chip will be a proprietary high margin part. The FCC has said that it wants the whole country to go HD and quickly.
Rear projection based on a chip seems to be the eventual winner. Plasma's are nice, but they are inherently more expensive (bigger fab area) and burn out more quickly. Transmisson LCD same fab issue. The only thing that keeps me from declaring TI the winner is that they have not yet produced commercial 1920 X 1080 systems, which will be the highest level HDTV defined by the FCC, at least for a while.
Alta Vista published an app just like this when they were riding high about five years ago. It got no traction because they charged $35 a pop for it and they did not promote it well, but it actually worked fairly well.
I assume that the problems with non-M$ browsers are due to the way that IE caches whole pages on a permanent basis in the sub-directories:
C:\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5,
while the Mozilla caches are flushed more frequently. An OO problem may be that the text in OO 1.1.x sxw files is zipped. I would assume that this, like the pdf problem, can be overcome in time.
Here is a link to a page with more, and more balanced information on the Cape Cod wind farm issue.
Whenever anyone raises the idea of solving US energy problems with nuclear power, I just point out the amount of resistance that wind gets.
Whatever the (non-economic) negatives of wind power are, they are less than those of nuclear. yet look at the amount of resistance that any proposal generates.
My take is that we have a lot of people who do not want to solve problems, they want to be problems.
My Wife who is a Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist, told me that when she was in graduate school she worked in a lab run by Dr. Honeydue and that his assistant was Beaker. Those were not their real names, which the Muppets changed to protect themselves from lawsuits, but that was them. They worked at large hospital in New York City and that is the only clue I am going to give you.
My Wife who is a Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist, told me that when she was in graduate school she worked in a lab run by Dr. Honeydue and that his assistant was Beaker. Those were not their real names, which the Muppets changed to protect themselves from lawsuits, but that was them. They worked at large hospital in New York City and that is the only clue I am going to give you.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the master meme plagues of western civilization is the supposed story of the burning of the library of Alexandria. IIRC, Carl Sagan waxed most eloquent about that supposed disaster. Edward Gibbon, to my mind the greatest historian and prosidist the Anglosphere has yet produced, recounts the story in Chapter LI: Conquests By The Arabs -- Part VII of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
Moderators: This deserves a mod up and a Funny!
The Nazi's acted in the name of their science of eugenics. The Communists claimed sanction from their science of history.
You may respond that their so-called sciences were completely unscientific. I would reply that the preachers who burned men were completely unreligious.
Serious note to very funny comment. The first tipoff that this is a spoof is the use of the date 134 A.D. The Christian Era was not defined until the 6th century when Dionysius Exiguous ("Dennis the Little"), identified the epoch of that era as the January 1 following the birth of Jesus on Dec. 25, 753 A.U.C. (the era of the founding of Rome, A.U.C. - Anno Urbis Conditae).
The term A.D. (Year of our Lord) was first used by the Anglo Saxon monk known as the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of England written in the eighth century.
References: Link, Link.
I assume that the question of whether it is better to use cooler chips or to spend more on cooling equipment is one that can be anwered with some degree of objectivity.
/.), in which he said that he wished chip makers would pay more attention to power usage than speed because his electricity bill was getting way too big.
There is a computational task which needs to be done. It can be measured in instructions processed. The chips have an up front cost, and it costs so much for the electricity to run them. If mechanical cooling is necessary, the coolers have an upfront cost and also need electricity to run them.
Once you have these facts in hand, all that is required is to calculate the costs over a specified time frame, and present value the cash flows.
IIRC, somebody from Google gave a speech/interview a couple of years ago (which was duly reported on
Note: Raul654 (453029) "Reminds me of an amusing anecdote." I assume the machine in question was the one described in the comments above titled "Cray still has water cooling!"
Use hack lines from Air America and get modded insightful? GMAB
Mod it up.
Yeah, Whatever. Next.
I think what you mean to say was that they tend not to get cashed, because they tend to get cached.
Most of us swear at Word's facilities.
"The A380 will be used mainly on the longhaul hub routes, such as LA to Hongkong, London to Hongkong, London to Sydney, London to New York, New York to Hongkong etc."
10 years they will be flying 125% of rated capacity to Jeddah for the Hadj.
This is not social science either. A lot of CEOs are in their 60s, you would have to go back into the 1950s and look at the numbers of students in that decade, which were way different to factor that out.
You also need to factor out those people who inherited their position (think Ford) and who may have had the money to buy their way into an elite college. There are also a certain number of CEOs who bought their companies with inherited money.
Finally, they were bright ambitious kids before they went to Ivy U., they would have been bright ambitious kids if they had gone to State. If they later become CEO, is that because they went to Ivy or because they were bright and ambitious?
Typically the term orders of magnitude refers to powers of ten. I think that the quoted statement meant to refer to powers of two. Photographers usually use terms such as "stops" or "exposure values." E.G. one stop is a factor of two change in the amount of light.
In a given scene, the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene will determine the range of tones perceived. Perception varies logarithmicaly. A doubling in the amount of light is percieved as a one step change in brightness. Take a picture printed on white paper. The white backround may reflect 98% of the incident light. Dull black ink on that paper might not reflect more than 2% of the incident light. It won't be much less, you can try this at home with a good photo meter. I once tried sooting up a piece of glass. IIRC, that came out around 2% in bright sunlight.
On a printed picture, whether by photographic or mechanical means, therefor the practical limit of tonal gradation is less than a factor of 64 or 2^8 or 8 stops.
Since color pictures are three monochromes printed in separate colors (hush about cymk) 3 x 8 or 24 bits will specify tonal gradation adequately for color prints, unless you feel that you need more half steps in your system. (in a 24 bit system the step between 0 and 1 is enormous a 50% reduction in the amount of light, art directors may want half or quarter steps in there).
Color film and prints cannot have a greater tonal range than monochrome for this reason. Indeed, because of the layering process by which they are made it will always be less.
Because transmitted light is stronger than reflected light. (Do not look at the sun!) And because the human eye can readjust between differently illuminated parts of a scene, slides and movies can use more tonal range than printed material. This is a very limited virtue. The tendency of cinematographers to put most of the scene in shadow (that is to concentrate the tonal range of the scene 3 to 5 stops below the brightest parts, instead of centering them around the 2.5 stop neutral gray) for the past 20 years is just plain annoying.
I neglected to add that when my kids got to middle school many yars latter, there was no more science fair, no more do it yourself science experiments. They did triboards about recycling. I was very disappointed in the science education they got in middle and high school. Daughter number 2 is catching up now she is taking Organic Chemistry and Partial Differential Equations
I did the same in the early 60's. I was actually able to photograph some trails with the light from a slide projector and an old fshion Polaroid Land camera (the kind with bellows and a squegee for the film). The trick was that the B&W Polaroid film had a very high ASA rating. I got the project out of the Scientific American Amature scientist book that another poster mentions. I remember the book having the linear accelerator project. I dimly remeber a discussion somewher either in that book or a Scientific American Article about a cyclotron project. I also recall a pbs show a few years back that featured a kid from Tennesse who built a cyclotron in his backyard. He was going to the University of Chicago.
When she was upset, my grandmother used to say VASMIR a lot. She would also say OY and OY VASMIR.
Good Post. Energy problems are not technological problems. Technology is a McGuffin:
The real debate is not about the technology. It is about who will be the rider and who will be the horse. Who will have the whip in his hand and who will bear the lash patiently.
My favorite debaters are the environmental advocates (many related to an assassinated President) who feel very strongly that the United States needs renewable energy sources but not where the machines can be seen from their summer homes. Then there are who insist that all of our energy problems can be solved by conservation. Few of them maintain the lifestyles of Bengali Peasants, and some of them own their own airplanes and multiple mansions.
There is no hope of progress until such time, if ever, as there is a recognition that there are problems that need to be solved, that the solutions to these problems will impose costs and create benefits, that the costs must be shared across society on an equitable basis and in proportion to the benefits received (no free riders) and that the benefits must be shared on an equitable basis and in proportion to the costs paid (capitalism is the only economic system).
There can be no sacred cows or caribou or snail darters. The residents of New York will have to bear the (very slim) risk of an adverse event at Indian Point and probably 2 or 3 other nuclear plants as well, the Kennedys will have to look at a bunch of wind machines and the folks in Nevada will have to deal with Yucca Mountain and die in the knowledge that 10,000 years from now it may leak (the Pyramids are only 4500 years old). These are all costs that we will have to bear and there will be more of them and others. Taxes will go up. Energy prices will go up. Prices of appliances, buildings and automobiles will go up.
Technology will not make the cost problem go away. It cannot. There is no such thing as a free lunch, that is a law of both physics and economics. If we want to have energy we will have to incur and allocate costs for it. That is a political and economic, not a technological, problem.
JVC has an LCOS technology, which is not cheap because it uses 3 monochrome chips with separate color light sources, but is supposed to produce very nice pictures. Projectors MSRP $29.9K described here Television MSRP $4.5 -- 6K here.
IIRC, Intel was trying for a single chip solution. TI's DLP chip is a solo and the television mfgs' use a rotating color wheel.
I am really kind of amazed that Intel is throwing in the towel on this one. The eventual winner in this category stands to make a lot of money. Yes, TV is a low margin business, but the display chip will be a proprietary high margin part. The FCC has said that it wants the whole country to go HD and quickly.
Rear projection based on a chip seems to be the eventual winner. Plasma's are nice, but they are inherently more expensive (bigger fab area) and burn out more quickly. Transmisson LCD same fab issue. The only thing that keeps me from declaring TI the winner is that they have not yet produced commercial 1920 X 1080 systems, which will be the highest level HDTV defined by the FCC, at least for a while.
Alta Vista published an app just like this when they were riding high about five years ago. It got no traction because they charged $35 a pop for it and they did not promote it well, but it actually worked fairly well.
I assume that the problems with non-M$ browsers are due to the way that IE caches whole pages on a permanent basis in the sub-directories:
C:\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5,
while the Mozilla caches are flushed more frequently. An OO problem may be that the text in OO 1.1.x sxw files is zipped. I would assume that this, like the pdf problem, can be overcome in time.
BMW 7 series logic is run by Win CE. You Would be on a lot of Trouble.
Here is a link to a page with more, and more balanced information on the Cape Cod wind farm issue.
Whenever anyone raises the idea of solving US energy problems with nuclear power, I just point out the amount of resistance that wind gets. Whatever the (non-economic) negatives of wind power are, they are less than those of nuclear. yet look at the amount of resistance that any proposal generates.
My take is that we have a lot of people who do not want to solve problems, they want to be problems.
A mere $5K. Waiter, A round for the whole house.
Dude! If you don't get leather seats and a moonroof also, on what now costs as much as a BMW 325, It's going to be a tough sell in these parts.
My Wife who is a Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist, told me that when she was in graduate school she worked in a lab run by Dr. Honeydue and that his assistant was Beaker. Those were not their real names, which the Muppets changed to protect themselves from lawsuits, but that was them. They worked at large hospital in New York City and that is the only clue I am going to give you.
My Wife who is a Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist, told me that when she was in graduate school she worked in a lab run by Dr. Honeydue and that his assistant was Beaker. Those were not their real names, which the Muppets changed to protect themselves from lawsuits, but that was them. They worked at large hospital in New York City and that is the only clue I am going to give you.
Allchin: Don't call it 'Shorthorn'
Well, now that you mention it. It seems like an apt moniker.