Tin foil hat or not, the "fool me once..." rule applies here. Triplicate DNA tests by independent labs, full audit of the finances of whoever signed the death certificate.
When the project first began, there was a wonderful editorial in Science that basically warned it was going to be a white elephant that would suck dry the budgets of all other space science. The whole thing was essentially a "we can't let the Russians hold the success of Mir over us" ego trip. The whole project ignored the fact that the shuttle program had failed in its primary mission: cutting the cost-to-orbit by a couple of order of manitude. We've essentially wasted an entire generation of research/exploration because of the ISS.
IMHO, space-based science/development can't progress any further unless there is a way to get things into orbit and beyond at a cost on the scale of an airplane rather than a rocket.
I agree about Latin - it survived as the language of academia long after it stopped being used as an every-day language. The same will happen to English if China rises to be the next global superpower and the default language of business changes from English to Mandarin - English would still linger on forever in the depths of tech manuals and scientific journals much as Latin managed for so long.
Also, for a moment there, I was also contemplating the implications of there being more native Klingon speakers than people who had picked it up as a second language.
In these situations you have a critter at point A and a critter at point B and what you're trying to figure out is what path did things take to get there: how did the transition happen?
As you say, it's as simple as A having a bone of length 1 and B having a bone of length 2 and we find a fossil that has a bone of length 1.5, that's boring - it doesn't really tell you anything. What's interesting is where you have two bones on A of length 1,1 and on B of length 2,2. When you find a new fossil, is it 1,2 or 2,1 or 1.5,1.5 or 1,3? That starts to tell you something about what was the pressure point that caused A to change, leading eventually to B.
The term "transitional" has this polite punctuated equilibrium bias that comes from having a big collection of fossils. If your collection already consists of a lot of critter A fossils and a lot of critter B type fossils, then any find not in your collection is probably something that didn't last long, thus it was "transitional".
The defining thing about The Dark Crystal to me was the sense of ecology. It was fun watching a group of biologists start geeking out at a fantasy movie because of all the clever "creature" moments and panning shots of swamps teeming with life. The whole "You have wings?! I don't have wings!" / "Of course not... you're a boy" line that had the entomologists and the feminists of the group both in tears of laughter for days. The Dark Crystal has become the yardstick against which I find I measure the detail of the worlds of fantasy movies.
Although I like the idea, the implementation comes out very ugly - it breaks the flow of the article spacing with what looks to the eye like random noise. I'd rather see them collected at the bottom of the page as a seperate list - if I've read all the front page articles, I can then skim the "next page".
(ok, one last post because I do think you deserve a reply)
I was you once. I hated the idea of having to tolerate a professor who's opinions strayed from the perfectly objective. I hated radicals. I studied long and hard, stuck to the sciences and graduated with distinction. Then I hit the real world. All that I knew was thrown out the window. Nobody wanted to know my grades. Nobody gave my transcript more than a passing glance. Nobody wanted to know my thesis. Nobody cared.
No, I don't really want you to quit. I go over the top in my comments because I want to sincerely warn you that there is more to an education than a textbook and I can see in hindsight that the most important lessons weren't graded. Sometimes a jarring difference of opinion is needed to shake things up. Don't discount the value of the radicals, don't discount the value of courses that are completely irrelevant to your path of study.
Dismiss me as arrogant, ignore me as irrelevant, I know I did to those who tried to warn me. But university is just a brief window, such a tiny speck of one's life that fades so quickly into the rear-view mirror. Don't be afraid of being failed, be afraid of failing to explore all that there is to see. Or at the very least, file away this exchange somewhere in the back of your mind so that 10-15 years from now you can judge me again and see if I am still wrong.
In every idea, no matter how wrong, there is always a grain of truth.
I'm going to college for an education, not to shape my moral/political outlook on life. I formed those opinions long ago and having confrontation with someone who has a fairly strong say in your educational future is not the best course of action.
Leave. Get out. Seriously - if you are so closed minded, so threatened by other points of view, that you're not going to even consider the possibility that you are wrong, not going to even construct a framework that allows you to coexist with other points of view, then you are absolutely wasting your time in a university. Learning how to deal with challenges IS your education. Facts you can learn from a book. Process you will relearn on the job. Four years of work experience will be as good (or better) than four years of university on a resume.
University doesn't come with a safety helmet - it's the extreme sport of the mind.
Now, all that having been said, you can pick a safe route though university, you can avoid confrontation and min/max the scholarships. I did. I avoided facing confrontion and just got my mushy education. Eight years across various degrees. And I've regretted it ever since. Use or ignore my experience as you wish.
But once you got someone pegged as radical, what do you do then? Just warn kids picking classes about him? Or what?
You encourage, strongly encourage, people to take his/her courses. It's a university for crying out loud - students need to have their beliefs challenged and learn how to form and support their own opinions. A university without radicals is a waste of your time.
I believe the MMRPG you are looking for is called "the stock market". I wasn't able to afford the subscription, but I hear its very popular. However, it also has problems with gold farming, griefing and people exploiting bugs in the system.
I tend to see math as a language of patterns, with many dialects for different situations but so ubiquitously used that its become inconceivable that there would be any other way to communicate fundemental ideas. This really struck me back when I was translating evolutionary ecology ideas into equations and simulations - the biologists knew exactly what they were talking about and had very sophisticated concepts, but they didn't speak their ideas in equations and so to other scientists, it looked like they were winging it.
The idea that scares me the most is the threat of viruses tailored to attack (or not attack) a particular racial group. It's not so much that I think such things are really viable weapons, but rather I fear that major militaries in the world will actively research the idea "just in case". Bioweapons strike me as high destablizing - very difficult to disprove that an adversary has them, high deniability in a release (leading to potential paranoia/misplaced accusation; eg: AIDS skeptics), high error in trying to predict the outcome of a release (outbreak might quickly burn itself out Ebola style, might quickly mutate into a non-leathal form, might become a pandemic). Then for fun, throw in movements advocating willful ignorance of basic biology concepts in powerful countries (*cough*ID*cough*).
(of course, the best defence against a potential race-targetting weapon is a highly diverse society, so guess there is potential for some social good)
What I haven't seen much discussion of in the comments here is much discussion of the longevity of the standard. I want to write documents that my grandchildren and their grandchildren will be able to read if they so desire. There seems to be a lot eagerness to design standards with lots of bells and whistles but I want something that will still be viewable in a hundred years without having to spend time every few years reformatting it to the next *TML. Do these new proposals include an "archival layer" (a "people should never, ever, ever change this again" base of codes to which people can safely format documents/data for posterity).
Formats are the new alphabets.
What?! A geek list with no Tolkien?
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 2, Funny
One root to rule them,
One grep to find them,
One cron to bring them all,
And in the subnet bind them.
And how exactly would ruling against a Denmark company like Lego help Canada get back at the USA?
I recognize that logic... omg! Bush has a slashdot account!
( but seriously, except when it comes to enforcing the (relatively young) Charter of Rights, the courts in Canada do a very adept job of staying out of politics )
The catch is that someone has to decide who gets the money. Even if it escapes overt empire-building and fraud, it risks becoming an ivory tower where lots of cool propsals are generated to impress the grant agencies without actually fulfilling a useful purpose efficiently.
But as catches go, it's not too bad. Basically just create a who whack of extra CS postdoc positions with an emphasis on coding over academic papers.
Most serious gamers don't buy games out of a shrink wrapped box any more - they take packages from a number of sources and roll their own rules distro... wait, what was the the article's original question?:)
I think you're thinking ((x^x)^x)^x... instead of x^(x^(x^...))). (*) The original post is ambiguous but I believe it means the later form (it takes a moment to wrap one's head around the difference - consider 3^(3^3)=7625597484987 vs (3^3)^3=19683).
Now, consider g(x)=x^(x^(x^...)) (the limit as the height of the tower reaches infinity). x^g(x)=x^(x^(x^(x^...)))=g(x). (sort of the way 1.11111... = 1+(1.1111111/10). If g(x)=2 then x^g(x)=2 and x^2=2. Thus x=sqrt(2) as the parent put it.
Why doesn't this work for the former formula? Because x^g(x)=x^(((x^x)^x)^...) and isn't g(x). We could naivey try g(x)^x, but this isn't equal to g(x) because of the quirks of where the limit is when we try to define an infinite function (I don't really have a nice simple way to explain that other than to say "the '...'s don't line up").
I hope that's a little clearer? (try calculating with sqrt(2) and it will start to slowly converge to 2)
(*) although then the answer would be undefined if x=0, 1 if 0<x<=1, infinite if x>1
Slashdot Mirror
Tin foil hat or not, the "fool me once..." rule applies here. Triplicate DNA tests by independent labs, full audit of the finances of whoever signed the death certificate.
When the project first began, there was a wonderful editorial in Science that basically warned it was going to be a white elephant that would suck dry the budgets of all other space science. The whole thing was essentially a "we can't let the Russians hold the success of Mir over us" ego trip. The whole project ignored the fact that the shuttle program had failed in its primary mission: cutting the cost-to-orbit by a couple of order of manitude. We've essentially wasted an entire generation of research/exploration because of the ISS. IMHO, space-based science/development can't progress any further unless there is a way to get things into orbit and beyond at a cost on the scale of an airplane rather than a rocket.
But then the terrorists^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers win.
I agree about Latin - it survived as the language of academia long after it stopped being used as an every-day language. The same will happen to English if China rises to be the next global superpower and the default language of business changes from English to Mandarin - English would still linger on forever in the depths of tech manuals and scientific journals much as Latin managed for so long.
Also, for a moment there, I was also contemplating the implications of there being more native Klingon speakers than people who had picked it up as a second language.
In these situations you have a critter at point A and a critter at point B and what you're trying to figure out is what path did things take to get there: how did the transition happen?
As you say, it's as simple as A having a bone of length 1 and B having a bone of length 2 and we find a fossil that has a bone of length 1.5, that's boring - it doesn't really tell you anything. What's interesting is where you have two bones on A of length 1,1 and on B of length 2,2. When you find a new fossil, is it 1,2 or 2,1 or 1.5,1.5 or 1,3? That starts to tell you something about what was the pressure point that caused A to change, leading eventually to B.
The term "transitional" has this polite punctuated equilibrium bias that comes from having a big collection of fossils. If your collection already consists of a lot of critter A fossils and a lot of critter B type fossils, then any find not in your collection is probably something that didn't last long, thus it was "transitional".
The defining thing about The Dark Crystal to me was the sense of ecology. It was fun watching a group of biologists start geeking out at a fantasy movie because of all the clever "creature" moments and panning shots of swamps teeming with life. The whole "You have wings?! I don't have wings!" / "Of course not ... you're a boy" line that had the entomologists and the feminists of the group both in tears of laughter for days. The Dark Crystal has become the yardstick against which I find I measure the detail of the worlds of fantasy movies.
Bzzt! - my machine says you're lying.
Although I like the idea, the implementation comes out very ugly - it breaks the flow of the article spacing with what looks to the eye like random noise. I'd rather see them collected at the bottom of the page as a seperate list - if I've read all the front page articles, I can then skim the "next page".
(ok, one last post because I do think you deserve a reply)
I was you once. I hated the idea of having to tolerate a professor who's opinions strayed from the perfectly objective. I hated radicals. I studied long and hard, stuck to the sciences and graduated with distinction. Then I hit the real world. All that I knew was thrown out the window. Nobody wanted to know my grades. Nobody gave my transcript more than a passing glance. Nobody wanted to know my thesis. Nobody cared.
No, I don't really want you to quit. I go over the top in my comments because I want to sincerely warn you that there is more to an education than a textbook and I can see in hindsight that the most important lessons weren't graded. Sometimes a jarring difference of opinion is needed to shake things up. Don't discount the value of the radicals, don't discount the value of courses that are completely irrelevant to your path of study.
Dismiss me as arrogant, ignore me as irrelevant, I know I did to those who tried to warn me. But university is just a brief window, such a tiny speck of one's life that fades so quickly into the rear-view mirror. Don't be afraid of being failed, be afraid of failing to explore all that there is to see. Or at the very least, file away this exchange somewhere in the back of your mind so that 10-15 years from now you can judge me again and see if I am still wrong.
In every idea, no matter how wrong, there is always a grain of truth.
Christ, you're a damned hypocrite.
Oh Lord, you can show them, but they do not see.
Here endeth the lesson :)
I'm going to college for an education, not to shape my moral/political outlook on life. I formed those opinions long ago and having confrontation with someone who has a fairly strong say in your educational future is not the best course of action.
Leave. Get out. Seriously - if you are so closed minded, so threatened by other points of view, that you're not going to even consider the possibility that you are wrong, not going to even construct a framework that allows you to coexist with other points of view, then you are absolutely wasting your time in a university. Learning how to deal with challenges IS your education. Facts you can learn from a book. Process you will relearn on the job. Four years of work experience will be as good (or better) than four years of university on a resume.
University doesn't come with a safety helmet - it's the extreme sport of the mind.
Now, all that having been said, you can pick a safe route though university, you can avoid confrontation and min/max the scholarships. I did. I avoided facing confrontion and just got my mushy education. Eight years across various degrees. And I've regretted it ever since. Use or ignore my experience as you wish.
But once you got someone pegged as radical, what do you do then? Just warn kids picking classes about him? Or what?
You encourage, strongly encourage, people to take his/her courses. It's a university for crying out loud - students need to have their beliefs challenged and learn how to form and support their own opinions. A university without radicals is a waste of your time.
I believe the MMRPG you are looking for is called "the stock market". I wasn't able to afford the subscription, but I hear its very popular. However, it also has problems with gold farming, griefing and people exploiting bugs in the system.
I tend to see math as a language of patterns, with many dialects for different situations but so ubiquitously used that its become inconceivable that there would be any other way to communicate fundemental ideas. This really struck me back when I was translating evolutionary ecology ideas into equations and simulations - the biologists knew exactly what they were talking about and had very sophisticated concepts, but they didn't speak their ideas in equations and so to other scientists, it looked like they were winging it.
Mathematicians are the grammer nazis of science.
The idea that scares me the most is the threat of viruses tailored to attack (or not attack) a particular racial group. It's not so much that I think such things are really viable weapons, but rather I fear that major militaries in the world will actively research the idea "just in case". Bioweapons strike me as high destablizing - very difficult to disprove that an adversary has them, high deniability in a release (leading to potential paranoia/misplaced accusation; eg: AIDS skeptics), high error in trying to predict the outcome of a release (outbreak might quickly burn itself out Ebola style, might quickly mutate into a non-leathal form, might become a pandemic). Then for fun, throw in movements advocating willful ignorance of basic biology concepts in powerful countries (*cough*ID*cough*).
(of course, the best defence against a potential race-targetting weapon is a highly diverse society, so guess there is potential for some social good)
I for one did indeed expect that physics would be predicted by characterics of animal shape and locomotion :)
I guess Clinton's the only one who bought into the "make love, not war" philosophy? :)
What I haven't seen much discussion of in the comments here is much discussion of the longevity of the standard. I want to write documents that my grandchildren and their grandchildren will be able to read if they so desire. There seems to be a lot eagerness to design standards with lots of bells and whistles but I want something that will still be viewable in a hundred years without having to spend time every few years reformatting it to the next *TML. Do these new proposals include an "archival layer" (a "people should never, ever, ever change this again" base of codes to which people can safely format documents/data for posterity).
Formats are the new alphabets.
One root to rule them,
One grep to find them,
One cron to bring them all,
And in the subnet bind them.
And how exactly would ruling against a Denmark company like Lego help Canada get back at the USA?
I recognize that logic ... omg! Bush has a slashdot account!
( but seriously, except when it comes to enforcing the (relatively young) Charter of Rights, the courts in Canada do a very adept job of staying out of politics )
Figure out the code in a couple of hours? I'd be happy if I could find the code in a couple of hours.
Perhaps he should build a pyramid with the money he has made from this scheme?
What's the catch?
The catch is that someone has to decide who gets the money. Even if it escapes overt empire-building and fraud, it risks becoming an ivory tower where lots of cool propsals are generated to impress the grant agencies without actually fulfilling a useful purpose efficiently.
But as catches go, it's not too bad. Basically just create a who whack of extra CS postdoc positions with an emphasis on coding over academic papers.
Most serious gamers don't buy games out of a shrink wrapped box any more - they take packages from a number of sources and roll their own rules distro ... wait, what was the the article's original question? :)
I think you're thinking ((x^x)^x)^x... instead of x^(x^(x^...))). (*) The original post is ambiguous but I believe it means the later form (it takes a moment to wrap one's head around the difference - consider 3^(3^3)=7625597484987 vs (3^3)^3=19683).
Now, consider g(x)=x^(x^(x^...)) (the limit as the height of the tower reaches infinity). x^g(x)=x^(x^(x^(x^...)))=g(x). (sort of the way 1.11111... = 1+(1.1111111/10). If g(x)=2 then x^g(x)=2 and x^2=2. Thus x=sqrt(2) as the parent put it.
Why doesn't this work for the former formula? Because x^g(x)=x^(((x^x)^x)^...) and isn't g(x). We could naivey try g(x)^x, but this isn't equal to g(x) because of the quirks of where the limit is when we try to define an infinite function (I don't really have a nice simple way to explain that other than to say "the '...'s don't line up").
I hope that's a little clearer? (try calculating with sqrt(2) and it will start to slowly converge to 2)
(*) although then the answer would be undefined if x=0, 1 if 0<x<=1, infinite if x>1