Not really, no. It's pattern recognition. There's a reason these people practice constantly. You watch a ball fly up in a general direction at a general speed a couple hundred times a day, and after a while you'll get a sense of where a ball's headed. Get close to the approximate landing point, watch it come down, make minor corrections as it gets closer.
I am very, very, very skeptical that this in any way involves the brain doing calculus on any level.
Actually, in modern math pretty much everything is numbers and letters and symbols. Pictures can lie and mislead, as Gauss, Bolyai and Lobochevsky discovered (and others, but them most famous). A picture does not replace or serve as a proof, unless it's been proven that the picture is rigorous, in which case it's probably superfluous.
Basically, what the article's saying is that the branch of geometry that deals with the world as our brain perceives it is hardwired into our brain. There's a reason geometry came first. I don't really see how that's news.
Caucasians in America don't really have a common bonding experience. They never really had any inherent disadvantages just because of their skin color. Black people were treated like shit en masse, legally, up until about 40-50 years ago. There's still residual of that left over, and it will take a while to die down.
That said, I think the best way to get it to die down is to drop some of the PC bullshit and address the actual issues. I was so trained to automatically repeat "African-American" that it wasn't even until I got to college that I really considered that there were black people that didn't even fall into that category. Black people should be identified as black people, white people should be identified as white people. I still cringe when professors stumble over African-American to identify students that I know aren't even of African descent.
But even deeper than that, let's just stop defining ourselves by our heritage. Culture is fine. Celebrating it is fine. Making it one of the core elements of your being is what leads to half of the crap that's out there. You are not your father, or his father's father, or his father before him. You're an individual person, with individual ideas, and your heritage doesn't matter compared to what you have in front of you now. If America fucked you over, then you're responsible for some reparation. Maybe if it fucked over your father, even. If America fucked over your great-grandfather, then no, you're not. And I'm not talking specifically black or white, a couple acres and a mule, any of that shit. One of the things I'm actually thinking of specifically is the estate tax.
As with anything, it depends on where you get your degree. My school's compsci program was such a braindead waste of time that I dropped it after the first semester. Their facilities were worse than the engineering lab's compsci classroom, the professors sat in a traditional classroom painstakingly copying out C++ on the board from the book. I stopped attending except on tests and turned in all my assignments online with the effort of a few hours a week, and this is from someone who had never programmed before.
So, yeah, it depends on the program. A lot more heavily than with other subjects, too, because it deals with constantly changing technology and there are a bunch of different approaches to it, and you're expected to be able to deal with it on both an abstract and practical level. Whereas a subject like undergraduate math basically hasn't changed in the last century, and stuff like undergraduate polisci has a lot to do with classical theory.
Take a bunch of Star Trek fans. Take their beloved franchise and brutally drive it into the ground. They need something else sci-fi to latch onto...
Also, if you don't watch much TV (and you watched it particularly because a friend was talking about this), you may simply be complaining about TV in general. TV plots are, in general, pretty simplistic and bad. They're designed for the least-common-denominator, and they have a small fixed timeblock to set up, tell a story, and wrap up. They have to allow Average Joe to relate to them, they have to not be offensive, and they have to conform to a ton of other requirements.
I honestly don't think this is a case of Star Trek fans looking for something to latch onto. If anything, Firefly is a home for disgruntled Star Wars fans. The people that were irate when Lucas castrated Solo's character in the cantina remake, and always were more interested in his smuggling days than any amount of Jedi mumbo jumbo.
But in reality, Firefly appeals to a large number of people who enjoy witty dialogue, great characterization, and mature plot lines. It's funny you mention offensiveness, because Firefly has some of the most provocative content I've seen in a long time. I can't imagine how some of this stuff was shown on FOX. I mean, you have brutal torture, pretty savage fight scenes, one of the crew members is a prostitute-for-hire, the reavers leave huge piles of twisted bodies wrapped around each other...
The storylines (barring just... two episodes) were some of the best I've seen on any medium, let alone television. Most were self-contained, but there were recurring characters and arcs that carried across episodes. Characters made reference to events that we saw previously. They also behave realistically. The cold-blooded mercenary does not have a heart of gold -- he says, right from the outset, if the money's better somewhere else, he'll sell out the ship. It takes a good deal of time and a couple life-shattering events before he even considers a selfless action, and even then it's doubtful. The captain is fiercely protective of his ship and crew, and sticks to his honor code. But his attitude towards protecting his crew is borderline neurotic, and it leads him to make decisions that are certainly not in the best interest of most parties involved. The chronically immature pilot has problems with his normally-overbearing wife acting subservient to the captain, who was her officer in the army. The borderline psychotic girl actually behaves in borderline psychotic ways -- for every cute little one-liner she spurts out, there's a moment where she does something that's actually violent or frightening.
And for every saccharine kitschy scene, there's at least one more with real impact. One of my personal favorites was with the psychotic girl flipping through the preacher's bible, marking it up and ripping out pages because "it's broken." She mentions that they'll have to attribute Noah's Ark to early quantum-state phenomena to get all the animals onto the ark. This is the basis for an ongoing discussion of faith, which easily could have descended into drivel.
If anything, you can complain that some of the coincidences in the plotlines were a bit contrived. Some of the dialogue was cringe-worthy. But despite occasional problems, the first season DVD is one of the best things I've had the pleasure of watching in a very long time, and not just in comparison to other television shows.
Some of the farmers on AB have actually started forming guilds, hehe. I never understood why they didn't take the ten second effort to make their characters look legit. Half of them run around with names like Ababbhahshbhz.
I have actually run into farmers that were decent people, too. A couple let us join their named group in RoV and roll on loot, things like that. I honestly don't have a problem with farmers in general, it's the ones that are petty and horde content that annoy me.
Whew! I'm glad you tried 'pretty much every server' to see what the sentiments were like, because I thought that to be a pretty intesive duty and never undertook it myself.
No, but I read through all the server forums, and on posts whining about the Chinese there was usually a representative claiming they were ruining his game on a variety of different servers.
"What people seem to fail to realize is also that plat farmers don't want to group with non-plat farmers"
Oh, yeah? Thanks for that bit of irrelevant information. How the pricks make their money is an issue, but the issue at hand is the exchange of game currency for real-life currency.
Somebody forgot to RTFA. Both of them.
And I need to say this...
"What people seem to fail to realize is also that" This, folks, is a good example of someone who is emersed in WoWglish and tried to formulate a bonafide sentence.
emersed (adj) - Rising above the surface of water.
This was actually a decently big problem in EQ2. On pretty much every server there's an underlying current of hatred towards the mysterious plat farmers, which degenerates very quickly into a rant about Chinese players.
There were a couple communities I actually left because I was sick of people talking about "those damn Chinese players" and crap like that, except descending into more slurs and epithets. Yeah, a lot of plat farmers are Chinese, but I found the backlash to be much more offensive than the initial "problem."
What people seem to fail to realize is also that plat farmers don't want to group with non-plat farmers. I have no idea why someone turning a profit wouldn't buy five more accounts (or whatever fills a group in WoW) and gain the ability to loot everything that drops, and efficiently. Finding a group can already be hell, and then if you turn up incompetent companions, or you don't win the roll... forget about it. Chances are you're just running into an idiot ninjalooter of the garden variety if someone with poor english skills up and offs with your loot.
Not necessarily true. Not all scientists believe in Objective Truth.
Science, to me, proceeds thusly: Here's a result that I, personally, perceived in my course of experiments. Let's see if you all will see the same thing. If we all tend to agree on it, we will use it to underlie our theory. Our theories exist to form a predictive basis for what most humans tend to percieve in a given situation.
It's crude, and it's majority rules, but it's all we have. As for Truth, I don't really think it exists, and I'm still trying to come to terms with what exactly that means. But it's things like the latter that are the basis of philosophy and religion, which are the things that most people can't seem to agree on.
What, exactly, is a scientifically observable God? What makes something God and not just another being in the universe?
If god were scientifically observable, then that aspect of god would cease to be based on faith. It would fall into the domain of science. It would also reject the notion of god that most religions have: incapable of being comprehended by human understanding, completely removed from the universe, etc.
In essence, I would argue that would not be God with a capital letter, but rather some sort of creator or powerful being that exists as part of the universe. I mean, imagine we discover some sort of alien creature had created us and our planet and was constantly playing with our genes to drive evolution, just for shits and giggles. Would you call said alien God?
The mistake here is the idea that there can be absolute truth determined by humans. There can't. If there is some Ultimate Truth in the universe, humans might guess right, but there's no external evidence that will make everyone agree that it is Truth. The only thing available to us is a consensus based on some sort of agreed-upon system.
Evolutionists make positive arguments based on data that 99% of the scientists in the field agree on. ID tends to make negative arguments about evolution -- essentially, not-evolution, which doesn't really support ID. The arguments in favor of ID tend to be intuited or not widely supported by other people's perceptions.
I would just ask you to be careful about how you use mathematics.
In every field of study, there is the robotic, procedural aspect, and then there is the creative aspect. Undergrad Calculus courses are to mathematics as paint-by-numbers is to art.
Real research mathematics is about imagining a logically consistent world that may be as dissimilar as you want from our tangible experience and poking around inside. Results are judged on their utility, but they're also judged on their unexpectedness and the elegance of their proof. As Hardy said, "There is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics."
I love reading comments like this, because it's pretty apparent you either didn't play the game or didn't understand it. The grind was almost non-existent, the phat loot was crafter-made, the classes had very loose templates, and the action revolved entirely around using specials. In short, it was pretty much as far away from EQ as you get.
The Combat Revamp made it more like EQ insofar as the grinding and the certs, but it was still nothing like EQ.
Now that it has static classes, we'll see... well, I won't, because I'm not giving SWG another dime no matter what they revamp.
I'd like to think the Simpsons decide to take a trip to the Grand Canyon, where Bart and Lisa meet some friendly Native Americans who are taking part in their annual Festival of the Spaghetti Western Stereotype.
The author ignores the fact that computers have completely saturated our society and are integral for communication and work. Given a choice between having a computer with no gaming capabilities and a gaming machine, I would choose the computer any day of the week, and I'm a hardcore gamer. With that established, playing modern games at an acceptable framerate is only $200 away, maybe $300 if you throw some extra RAM in.
PC games give you more bang for the buck in general; I'm still playing HL1, a game I paid $40 for some time ago, through various community mods. As opposed to new console games, which want to bleed $50 out of you for an experience that will likely not last you more than a couple months.
The author points to royalties as a method for ensuring the initial hardware costs less. But that's one investment, and the royalties for games add up to a lot more cost for the consumer in the end. Furthermore, you're a small developer with some great ideas -- are you more likely to develop on a platform where you have full access to do whatever you want for free, or one where you need expensive development tools just to make anything? Would you rather have both a publisher and the game company eating your profits, or just a publisher?
But this is feeding the troll, because I'm sure everyone else here, including myself, has been responding to the same bogus articles for a decade now.
True, but the upshot of this treadmill is that I can still play my favorite DOS and games. Almost every console game of import comes to the PC, while PC games tend to have pale imitations on the console.
Furthermore, I've never had to upgrade a driver except at installation, and massive patches are usually good. New levels, new gameplay modes, bug fixes, etc. And let's not forget player-made content, including mods, which has kept HL1 fresh for me since its release.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy consoles as much as the next guy (I have a shelf full of PS2 games right behind me), but compared to the majority of PC games, they feel so limited in scope. I can sit down with my console for maybe an hour or two at a go now, three hours if I'm really getting into it, whereas computer games can keep my attention for crazy marathon sessions.
I don't know if you tried The Longest Journey. It's an amazing game and a pure graphic adventure. The sequel will apparently have action elements, so I dunno...
Also, there's Syberia, but I didn't like it nearly so much as TLJ. The last two Myst games were pretty good, but I don't think it's quite the experience you're aiming for.
I am not a statistician, nor have I taken a statistics class, but I can help explain what makes Pi "random" in the sense they're talking about.
In lower level statistics courses, to pick random numbers, you use a line from a random number table. These numbers were generated using some pseudo-random methodology like observing a process that's nearly random.
Now, Pi comes into this because it's an irrational, so it has a non-repeating decimal expansion. You can use that decimal expansion to cherry pick numbers without fear of getting a periodic sequence every time. What makes this more useful than observing random natural phenomenon? Well, for one, it's a lot more easily accessible.
What separates Pi from other irrationals, like sqrt(2)? It's transcendental, but I'm honestly not sure if that plays into it at all. I assume there's other properties that predict how useful Pi is as a random number generator, and this study is purporting that perhaps it's not as useful as some thought.
I'm going to take "not exact" to mean transcendental, which is probably the strongest "weird" condition that's commonly accessible. In that case, it has nothing to do with our choice of coordinate system, rather our choice of metric and, even more fundamentally, number system.
What I mean by metric is that, after change of coordinates into the polar system, points are still the same distances apart from each other (the mapping from the cartesian plane to the polar plane is an isometry). Therefore, any circle still has the same length (circumference) and diameter, so Pi still has the same value.
If we define Pi by infinite series rather than the ratio of circumference to diameter of circles in Euclidean geometry, however, it's still transcendental because of the real number system. Transcendental, for the non-math people, means it's not a solution to any polynomial equation with rational (i.e., p/q, where p and q are integers) coefficients. So, for example, sqrt(2) is irrational, but it's not transcendental, because it's the solution to x^2 - 2 = 0. Pi is transcendental because of the properties of the real numbers as a field, which takes the problem even deeper than the geometry.
Now, I think what you might've been getting at is we can go back and look at our number system and define the Pi-rationals (rational multiples of Pi) as our new rationals, because our choice of the "regular" rationals was arbitrary. However, if our circle has Pi-rational radius and diameter, their dividend is going to be in the "regular" rationals. This is impossible, so at least one of the two must be irrational in our new number system. Therefore, you still have an irrational number involved somewhere in the process, no matter how you slice it.
This is wrong. If photorealism and an incredible physics engine are the only two motivators, then explain why so many are still playing the original Half-Life's mods as opposed to moving onto HL2, which has far superior graphics and the most advanced physics engine out there. The answer is that there are plenty of innovations left in gameplay, and those are really what the long-time players are looking for.
Graphics engines come and go, physics engines are starting to have a bigger presence, but the core gameplay will always be the most important. Even among the much larger group of less dedicated, generally console gamers, I know a bunch of people who still play the original Halo as opposed to Halo 2.
I think it's pretty much accepted that Fermat didn't have a proof. He had claimed the same thing about several mistaken proofs in the past, and I believe he proved a specific case in later correspondence, which would be wasted effort if he had already proved the general case.
Just to make it clear, there's two fairly distinct branches of mathematics, pure and applied.
Pure is what follows from the process that involves postulating axioms, defining new objects abstractly, and proving things about them. Applied mathematics takes these abstract mathematical concepts and applies them to the real world. Sometimes, technically pure math that's pretty clearly derived explicitly to apply in "real world" contexts (i.e., good approximation methods, solutions to certain diff eqs, etc) is also labelled applied, but that's on the edge.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that geometry and pure math are certainly not mutually exclusive categories. I hope to do geometry in grad school, and I sure as hell am not planning on doing applied math unless something changes radically.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really, no. It's pattern recognition. There's a reason these people practice constantly. You watch a ball fly up in a general direction at a general speed a couple hundred times a day, and after a while you'll get a sense of where a ball's headed. Get close to the approximate landing point, watch it come down, make minor corrections as it gets closer.
I am very, very, very skeptical that this in any way involves the brain doing calculus on any level.
Logic isn't math? Guess I'll have to break the news to my logician friend.
Actually, in modern math pretty much everything is numbers and letters and symbols. Pictures can lie and mislead, as Gauss, Bolyai and Lobochevsky discovered (and others, but them most famous). A picture does not replace or serve as a proof, unless it's been proven that the picture is rigorous, in which case it's probably superfluous.
Basically, what the article's saying is that the branch of geometry that deals with the world as our brain perceives it is hardwired into our brain. There's a reason geometry came first. I don't really see how that's news.
There's a difference.
Caucasians in America don't really have a common bonding experience. They never really had any inherent disadvantages just because of their skin color. Black people were treated like shit en masse, legally, up until about 40-50 years ago. There's still residual of that left over, and it will take a while to die down.
That said, I think the best way to get it to die down is to drop some of the PC bullshit and address the actual issues. I was so trained to automatically repeat "African-American" that it wasn't even until I got to college that I really considered that there were black people that didn't even fall into that category. Black people should be identified as black people, white people should be identified as white people. I still cringe when professors stumble over African-American to identify students that I know aren't even of African descent.
But even deeper than that, let's just stop defining ourselves by our heritage. Culture is fine. Celebrating it is fine. Making it one of the core elements of your being is what leads to half of the crap that's out there. You are not your father, or his father's father, or his father before him. You're an individual person, with individual ideas, and your heritage doesn't matter compared to what you have in front of you now. If America fucked you over, then you're responsible for some reparation. Maybe if it fucked over your father, even. If America fucked over your great-grandfather, then no, you're not. And I'm not talking specifically black or white, a couple acres and a mule, any of that shit. One of the things I'm actually thinking of specifically is the estate tax.
As with anything, it depends on where you get your degree. My school's compsci program was such a braindead waste of time that I dropped it after the first semester. Their facilities were worse than the engineering lab's compsci classroom, the professors sat in a traditional classroom painstakingly copying out C++ on the board from the book. I stopped attending except on tests and turned in all my assignments online with the effort of a few hours a week, and this is from someone who had never programmed before.
So, yeah, it depends on the program. A lot more heavily than with other subjects, too, because it deals with constantly changing technology and there are a bunch of different approaches to it, and you're expected to be able to deal with it on both an abstract and practical level. Whereas a subject like undergraduate math basically hasn't changed in the last century, and stuff like undergraduate polisci has a lot to do with classical theory.
I think it's kind of like Babylon 5.
Take a bunch of Star Trek fans. Take their beloved franchise and brutally drive it into the ground. They need something else sci-fi to latch onto...
Also, if you don't watch much TV (and you watched it particularly because a friend was talking about this), you may simply be complaining about TV in general. TV plots are, in general, pretty simplistic and bad. They're designed for the least-common-denominator, and they have a small fixed timeblock to set up, tell a story, and wrap up. They have to allow Average Joe to relate to them, they have to not be offensive, and they have to conform to a ton of other requirements.
I honestly don't think this is a case of Star Trek fans looking for something to latch onto. If anything, Firefly is a home for disgruntled Star Wars fans. The people that were irate when Lucas castrated Solo's character in the cantina remake, and always were more interested in his smuggling days than any amount of Jedi mumbo jumbo.
But in reality, Firefly appeals to a large number of people who enjoy witty dialogue, great characterization, and mature plot lines. It's funny you mention offensiveness, because Firefly has some of the most provocative content I've seen in a long time. I can't imagine how some of this stuff was shown on FOX. I mean, you have brutal torture, pretty savage fight scenes, one of the crew members is a prostitute-for-hire, the reavers leave huge piles of twisted bodies wrapped around each other...
The storylines (barring just... two episodes) were some of the best I've seen on any medium, let alone television. Most were self-contained, but there were recurring characters and arcs that carried across episodes. Characters made reference to events that we saw previously. They also behave realistically. The cold-blooded mercenary does not have a heart of gold -- he says, right from the outset, if the money's better somewhere else, he'll sell out the ship. It takes a good deal of time and a couple life-shattering events before he even considers a selfless action, and even then it's doubtful. The captain is fiercely protective of his ship and crew, and sticks to his honor code. But his attitude towards protecting his crew is borderline neurotic, and it leads him to make decisions that are certainly not in the best interest of most parties involved. The chronically immature pilot has problems with his normally-overbearing wife acting subservient to the captain, who was her officer in the army. The borderline psychotic girl actually behaves in borderline psychotic ways -- for every cute little one-liner she spurts out, there's a moment where she does something that's actually violent or frightening.
And for every saccharine kitschy scene, there's at least one more with real impact. One of my personal favorites was with the psychotic girl flipping through the preacher's bible, marking it up and ripping out pages because "it's broken." She mentions that they'll have to attribute Noah's Ark to early quantum-state phenomena to get all the animals onto the ark. This is the basis for an ongoing discussion of faith, which easily could have descended into drivel.
If anything, you can complain that some of the coincidences in the plotlines were a bit contrived. Some of the dialogue was cringe-worthy. But despite occasional problems, the first season DVD is one of the best things I've had the pleasure of watching in a very long time, and not just in comparison to other television shows.
Some of the farmers on AB have actually started forming guilds, hehe. I never understood why they didn't take the ten second effort to make their characters look legit. Half of them run around with names like Ababbhahshbhz.
I have actually run into farmers that were decent people, too. A couple let us join their named group in RoV and roll on loot, things like that. I honestly don't have a problem with farmers in general, it's the ones that are petty and horde content that annoy me.
Whew! I'm glad you tried 'pretty much every server' to see what the sentiments were like, because I thought that to be a pretty intesive duty and never undertook it myself.
No, but I read through all the server forums, and on posts whining about the Chinese there was usually a representative claiming they were ruining his game on a variety of different servers.
"What people seem to fail to realize is also that plat farmers don't want to group with non-plat farmers"
Oh, yeah? Thanks for that bit of irrelevant information. How the pricks make their money is an issue, but the issue at hand is the exchange of game currency for real-life currency.
Somebody forgot to RTFA. Both of them.
And I need to say this...
"What people seem to fail to realize is also that" This, folks, is a good example of someone who is emersed in WoWglish and tried to formulate a bonafide sentence.
emersed (adj) - Rising above the surface of water.
This was actually a decently big problem in EQ2. On pretty much every server there's an underlying current of hatred towards the mysterious plat farmers, which degenerates very quickly into a rant about Chinese players.
There were a couple communities I actually left because I was sick of people talking about "those damn Chinese players" and crap like that, except descending into more slurs and epithets. Yeah, a lot of plat farmers are Chinese, but I found the backlash to be much more offensive than the initial "problem."
What people seem to fail to realize is also that plat farmers don't want to group with non-plat farmers. I have no idea why someone turning a profit wouldn't buy five more accounts (or whatever fills a group in WoW) and gain the ability to loot everything that drops, and efficiently. Finding a group can already be hell, and then if you turn up incompetent companions, or you don't win the roll... forget about it. Chances are you're just running into an idiot ninjalooter of the garden variety if someone with poor english skills up and offs with your loot.
Not necessarily true. Not all scientists believe in Objective Truth.
Science, to me, proceeds thusly: Here's a result that I, personally, perceived in my course of experiments. Let's see if you all will see the same thing. If we all tend to agree on it, we will use it to underlie our theory. Our theories exist to form a predictive basis for what most humans tend to percieve in a given situation.
It's crude, and it's majority rules, but it's all we have. As for Truth, I don't really think it exists, and I'm still trying to come to terms with what exactly that means. But it's things like the latter that are the basis of philosophy and religion, which are the things that most people can't seem to agree on.
What, exactly, is a scientifically observable God? What makes something God and not just another being in the universe?
If god were scientifically observable, then that aspect of god would cease to be based on faith. It would fall into the domain of science. It would also reject the notion of god that most religions have: incapable of being comprehended by human understanding, completely removed from the universe, etc.
In essence, I would argue that would not be God with a capital letter, but rather some sort of creator or powerful being that exists as part of the universe. I mean, imagine we discover some sort of alien creature had created us and our planet and was constantly playing with our genes to drive evolution, just for shits and giggles. Would you call said alien God?
The mistake here is the idea that there can be absolute truth determined by humans. There can't. If there is some Ultimate Truth in the universe, humans might guess right, but there's no external evidence that will make everyone agree that it is Truth. The only thing available to us is a consensus based on some sort of agreed-upon system.
Evolutionists make positive arguments based on data that 99% of the scientists in the field agree on. ID tends to make negative arguments about evolution -- essentially, not-evolution, which doesn't really support ID. The arguments in favor of ID tend to be intuited or not widely supported by other people's perceptions.
I would just ask you to be careful about how you use mathematics.
In every field of study, there is the robotic, procedural aspect, and then there is the creative aspect. Undergrad Calculus courses are to mathematics as paint-by-numbers is to art.
Real research mathematics is about imagining a logically consistent world that may be as dissimilar as you want from our tangible experience and poking around inside. Results are judged on their utility, but they're also judged on their unexpectedness and the elegance of their proof. As Hardy said, "There is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics."
I love reading comments like this, because it's pretty apparent you either didn't play the game or didn't understand it. The grind was almost non-existent, the phat loot was crafter-made, the classes had very loose templates, and the action revolved entirely around using specials. In short, it was pretty much as far away from EQ as you get.
The Combat Revamp made it more like EQ insofar as the grinding and the certs, but it was still nothing like EQ.
Now that it has static classes, we'll see... well, I won't, because I'm not giving SWG another dime no matter what they revamp.
Let Natural selection decide who is the victor
Great idea! I'm fading, who's got the hive?
When a woman poses for Playboy, does she have the right to censor herself out of back issues?
Yeah, it sucks, but you can't magic yourself out of every situation on the internet any more than you can in physical reality.
I'd like to think the Simpsons decide to take a trip to the Grand Canyon, where Bart and Lisa meet some friendly Native Americans who are taking part in their annual Festival of the Spaghetti Western Stereotype.
Or maybe Hawaii... yes, Hawaii...
Exactly.
The author ignores the fact that computers have completely saturated our society and are integral for communication and work. Given a choice between having a computer with no gaming capabilities and a gaming machine, I would choose the computer any day of the week, and I'm a hardcore gamer. With that established, playing modern games at an acceptable framerate is only $200 away, maybe $300 if you throw some extra RAM in.
PC games give you more bang for the buck in general; I'm still playing HL1, a game I paid $40 for some time ago, through various community mods. As opposed to new console games, which want to bleed $50 out of you for an experience that will likely not last you more than a couple months.
The author points to royalties as a method for ensuring the initial hardware costs less. But that's one investment, and the royalties for games add up to a lot more cost for the consumer in the end. Furthermore, you're a small developer with some great ideas -- are you more likely to develop on a platform where you have full access to do whatever you want for free, or one where you need expensive development tools just to make anything? Would you rather have both a publisher and the game company eating your profits, or just a publisher?
But this is feeding the troll, because I'm sure everyone else here, including myself, has been responding to the same bogus articles for a decade now.
True, but the upshot of this treadmill is that I can still play my favorite DOS and games. Almost every console game of import comes to the PC, while PC games tend to have pale imitations on the console.
Furthermore, I've never had to upgrade a driver except at installation, and massive patches are usually good. New levels, new gameplay modes, bug fixes, etc. And let's not forget player-made content, including mods, which has kept HL1 fresh for me since its release.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy consoles as much as the next guy (I have a shelf full of PS2 games right behind me), but compared to the majority of PC games, they feel so limited in scope. I can sit down with my console for maybe an hour or two at a go now, three hours if I'm really getting into it, whereas computer games can keep my attention for crazy marathon sessions.
I don't know if you tried The Longest Journey. It's an amazing game and a pure graphic adventure. The sequel will apparently have action elements, so I dunno...
Also, there's Syberia, but I didn't like it nearly so much as TLJ. The last two Myst games were pretty good, but I don't think it's quite the experience you're aiming for.
I am not a statistician, nor have I taken a statistics class, but I can help explain what makes Pi "random" in the sense they're talking about.
In lower level statistics courses, to pick random numbers, you use a line from a random number table. These numbers were generated using some pseudo-random methodology like observing a process that's nearly random.
Now, Pi comes into this because it's an irrational, so it has a non-repeating decimal expansion. You can use that decimal expansion to cherry pick numbers without fear of getting a periodic sequence every time. What makes this more useful than observing random natural phenomenon? Well, for one, it's a lot more easily accessible.
What separates Pi from other irrationals, like sqrt(2)? It's transcendental, but I'm honestly not sure if that plays into it at all. I assume there's other properties that predict how useful Pi is as a random number generator, and this study is purporting that perhaps it's not as useful as some thought.
I'm going to take "not exact" to mean transcendental, which is probably the strongest "weird" condition that's commonly accessible. In that case, it has nothing to do with our choice of coordinate system, rather our choice of metric and, even more fundamentally, number system.
What I mean by metric is that, after change of coordinates into the polar system, points are still the same distances apart from each other (the mapping from the cartesian plane to the polar plane is an isometry). Therefore, any circle still has the same length (circumference) and diameter, so Pi still has the same value.
If we define Pi by infinite series rather than the ratio of circumference to diameter of circles in Euclidean geometry, however, it's still transcendental because of the real number system. Transcendental, for the non-math people, means it's not a solution to any polynomial equation with rational (i.e., p/q, where p and q are integers) coefficients. So, for example, sqrt(2) is irrational, but it's not transcendental, because it's the solution to x^2 - 2 = 0. Pi is transcendental because of the properties of the real numbers as a field, which takes the problem even deeper than the geometry.
Now, I think what you might've been getting at is we can go back and look at our number system and define the Pi-rationals (rational multiples of Pi) as our new rationals, because our choice of the "regular" rationals was arbitrary. However, if our circle has Pi-rational radius and diameter, their dividend is going to be in the "regular" rationals. This is impossible, so at least one of the two must be irrational in our new number system. Therefore, you still have an irrational number involved somewhere in the process, no matter how you slice it.
This is wrong. If photorealism and an incredible physics engine are the only two motivators, then explain why so many are still playing the original Half-Life's mods as opposed to moving onto HL2, which has far superior graphics and the most advanced physics engine out there. The answer is that there are plenty of innovations left in gameplay, and those are really what the long-time players are looking for.
Graphics engines come and go, physics engines are starting to have a bigger presence, but the core gameplay will always be the most important. Even among the much larger group of less dedicated, generally console gamers, I know a bunch of people who still play the original Halo as opposed to Halo 2.
I think it's pretty much accepted that Fermat didn't have a proof. He had claimed the same thing about several mistaken proofs in the past, and I believe he proved a specific case in later correspondence, which would be wasted effort if he had already proved the general case.
Just to make it clear, there's two fairly distinct branches of mathematics, pure and applied.
Pure is what follows from the process that involves postulating axioms, defining new objects abstractly, and proving things about them. Applied mathematics takes these abstract mathematical concepts and applies them to the real world. Sometimes, technically pure math that's pretty clearly derived explicitly to apply in "real world" contexts (i.e., good approximation methods, solutions to certain diff eqs, etc) is also labelled applied, but that's on the edge.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that geometry and pure math are certainly not mutually exclusive categories. I hope to do geometry in grad school, and I sure as hell am not planning on doing applied math unless something changes radically.