Didn't he stop coding several years ago because of a bad case of Carpal's Tunnels? IIRC, he even hired people to type for him as he coded, but as you can imagine, it was too frustrating to communicate code to a typer like this. You may want to double-check me on this, though.
I like the matrix's ideas and thought-provokingness, but I can only hope the sequel doesn't "cheese out" as much as the first one did. I just cringe at much of the dialog, it's so corny, even though their ideas are cool. It also would be interesting to hear them refer to various philosophers, because many of the ideas presented are not new, but been around for hundreds of years.
Hopefully the sequel won't also give in to hollywood-esque boring-plots that are commonplace with many sequels. And no more of Keanu's "Whoa." Haha, they just had to slip in a Bill&Ted-ism, didn't they?
But you need a copy of windows for VMWare to work. Not all of us have that "luxury". Plus, why install this alternate OS just to run in an emulator? Of course, if it works under wine/dosemu that's a whole different story.:-)
What is(was?) the status of Harmony, which I've heard about in the OpenSources O'Reilly book, but never heard about on these lists? From what I understand, it's meant to be a GPL version of QT compatible toolkit. Is this project still underway?
haha, good point. However, if it REALLY fails, it may melt, and then reform as a globular mass, thus drastically reducing the surface area, and ultimately failing as a heat sink. However, if you're in danger of melting a heat sink, you've got some serious design issues to consider;-)
It depends what applications you're doing. If you are doing 64 bit multiplies and divides, for instance, the 64 bit CPU will blow the pants off the 32 bit CPU (clock speeds within a factor of 2 or so). This is because the 32-bit CPU must spend many more clock cycles than the 64 bit CPU on high math operations. For instance, a 64-bit multiply is processed as successive 32-bit multiplies, shifts, and adds, amounting to many more cycles than the 64-bit CPU must undergo.
Of course, not many people are doing 64-bit math on their computers, but from a research environment this matters alot.
Obviously MIDI is already widely used to record real time sequences from live musicians (we've had MIDI sequencers for years, right?). Naturally, MIDI is quite a sufficient protocol to faithfully record all of the nuances that a human could put into music.
Not completely true. There are often times when including lots of data, that the MIDI data lines becomes saturated. This can happen, for example, during glissandos (sp) and lots of change data (eg. pitch bend). There are far too many events occuring for the lines to handle the data throughput. The events can occur at their max frequency until the lines are more quiet, or sometimes events can be skipped. The point is that the MIDI specs aren't globally useful for large multi-channel very eventful music sequencing.
There are ways around this, usually by running a MIDI thinning program through MIDI data files to reduce successive events (ie, change pitch bend from 88 positions to 12, without much noticable differences). However, this may not be suitable for all purposes.
I've gotten similar responses to you for the last ones, but different for the first few. I already sent in my solutions, maybe they right, maybe they ain't. They do form gramatically correct sentences at least, but the meaning is kind of vague and strange. Combined words, like "Information Age" seem too connected to be chance, but then again it could be a ruse to throw us all off.
Oh well, they'll probably have 129387 submissions, maybe i have a remote chance to get a lego mindstorm kit. But you never know.
There was a GAMES magazine puzzle a few years back that I solved, with a potential prize of up to several hundred dollars of games and stuff. I never bothered to send in the answer, because it seemed too easy. In the next issue, they mentioned that they only received a handful of answers. So - you never know...
You're off with the last 5 digits of pi in your sig. You know pi to the same precision that I know it, namely 50 digits after the decimal point, however you messed up at the end.
It's really (well, more accurately, that is) 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10
Actually, if you read some electronics mags (Circuit Cellar did this awhile back), a hardware hacker named Don Lancaster uses printers as computational devices! You laugh, but that is what the postscript driver is, in a sense. He has written many articles about the postscript language, and even programs it directly. And he has done mathematical simultions on the printer, and ported the results back to the computer! Kind of ironic but cool stuff. Check out his page .
base 10 is suitable for math, because that's the base we've grown up using. If from the start we used base 13, we'd feel so much more secure seeing 13^2 written as 100 instead of 169.
The metric system is arbitary in it's own ways, but as long as we're using base 10 numerals, 100 looks a lot rounder then 144.
144 looks strange because it is a base-twelve factor written out in base ten. Let's see, in base-twelve (assuming 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B for the digits), one hundred would be written as 84, and one hundred forty-four would be written as 100.
Oops, now upon re-reading your quote for the third time I see this is precisely what you were pointing out:-)
The good thing about using the metric system is that it's logarithmic, and very very easy to do order-of-magnitude of calculation in your head. I wouldn't want to try that with English/American/Whateveryouwannacallit. I'd take 10^8 meters vs. 5 miles, 2 furlongs, 14 rods, 2 yards, 1 foot, and 3 inches any day! I do, however, agree with the notion that divvying up numbers does come out nicely in some non-base-ten scenarios.
There's nothing about that wrench, or the units used, that's in any way human-oriented! Now if you could accurately apply some specifed number of foot-pounds of torque, for example, by POUNDing on the wrench at an "average" strength, at a distance equal to the measure of your FOOT, then it could be truly human-gauged. But otherwise, it's just as arbitrary as a kg-cm.
That is NOT true, kg-cm is not a measure of torque, it would be N-m. Kilogram is a measure of mass, pound is a measure of force.
You are correct, however, in relating the arbitrariness. One who is used to his/her weight in Newtons would do just as well in that same situation.
So tell me, why are you doing all your math in base 10 and THEN converting to whatever godawful system you choose? To me, nothing could possibly make more sense then base 10. It's how we count. It's how many digits we (usually) have.
The only reason base 10 (or A, if you prefer) makes sense is because we have 10 fingers. The reason we count in base ten stems from this fact from long ago. The number one-hundred makes sense to you as an obvious marking point, because this is the rollover to the 3rd digit, and all it is is 10^2. It's just as arbitrary as using 144 or 169, which would be 100 and 100 in base 12 and base 13 respectively.
What the original poster was implying with base twelve is that you can easily divide things by two,three,four,and six. I heartily agree with this notion. That way, if you had a system where 1 bar equals 12 foo, a third of a bar is now 4 foo. Nice and simple. With base ten, one bar equals 10 foo, and a third of a bar is now 3.3333 foo, which gets tedious.
Base sixty is especially nice, because things are now divisible by 2,3,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30. Did I miss any? Talk about flexible! That's why it's so great that a circle has 360 degrees, it is divisible by so many numbers cleanly. I think this number stems from the Babylonian calendar, which had 360 days.
In response to the gist of these systems, the English system, while ugly in many ways, does have some sense in that it's people-units. Ie, feet, hands. For a while I was a mechanic, and we used foot-pounds as units of torque. It's pretty cool, nice and quick I can get an estime that if I want to torque a lug nut to 90 foot-pounds, I can apply 90 pounds of force 1 foot down the wrench.
Of course, it is horrible inconsistent in other respects as some things arre broken into 4, some into 12, some into 60, etc. If it were consistent, like 12 inches to the foot, twelve feet to the blah, twelve blahs to the blahblah, that would be better, but now it is approaching the metric system.
Even the metric system is arbitrary, so they both their goods and bads. In general, people are not so easy to discard their old notions. A funny Simpson's quote is when the town is thinking of going metric, and grandpa simpson says, "my car gets 14 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it". And in a different one, Principal Skinner said he converted the new school clocks to metric time, and you see the clock with 10 divisions across the face. He said, "We're meeting at 89 minutes past 4 oclock" or something like that.
I don't really like these chess matches because it judges who has mastered this particular game more, and who has a better feel for how the pieces move and different strategies. It does not judge who is better at abstract thought and general strategi thinking. IMHO, of course.
I have a different idea of a wits game, and I've talked with some serious chess players who say this would be a very interesting test. What you do is to have a chess match like this, but change the rules, maybe even only slightly. This would more adequately match wits against wits. For example, let's say you change the moves, such that knights cannot jump over other pieces, or that the queen can only extend moves up to a range of 4 squares, or that you can teleport from the left side of the board to the right, a la pacman. You get the idea. It would drastically change the strategies that many chess players have already memorized.
Even more interesting would be a human vs. computer match like this. Say you give each party maybe a few days or 1 week to prepare for the game. The human tries to get a feel for the game, the computer guys re-program the computer's code during this time. I bet you'd find in this case that the computer demolish the humans. Kasparov has had 30 someodd years to memorize all these strategies and moves, but given only 1 week I think he'd be just as much a newbie in a changed game as I currently am at normal chess.
Has anybody ever heard of competitions like this, or do you think people would be willing to try them? I'd be very curious to know how chess masters compare to newbies at the altered games.
Any two objects held apart from each other posses potential energy governed by the strength of the field and the distance. If the force was repulsive the efective distance the objects could travel would be infinite rather than finite (as it is with normal gravity) thus the potential energy in the bodies would be infinite. Since the force between two objects never reaches zero they would constantly repel each other, with increasing amounts of the infinite potential energy being converted to kinetic. The result, everything traveling at speeds infinitly close to light speed.
not true. As a poster after you on the original parent thread noted, repulsive forces do exist, as you'll study in any E&M class. You basically forgot a negative sign in your account. You're correct in observing that these two particles (if repulsive) will travel to infinite distance from each other (in a closed system). However, it is this infinite distance which has relative zero potential energy. You INCREASE your potential energy as you bring the two particles together (for this hypothetical repulsive case). Just like with two attractive bodies, potential energy increases as you separate them, here potential energy decreases as you separate them.
As a final note, if everything was repulsive, you wouldn't eventually have everything travelling at speeds of light, but instead equally and infinitely spread out from each other. Everything would be at rest relatively to everything else.
Oops, typo. That final sentence should be "so it's getting more and more LIKELY to be something correlated with these long-range craft!" Sorry about that.
But why is it that these scientists get a number, and beleive it to be correct under conditions they beleive are correct, and then complain about it when either one of the numbers can be very wrong? Because that's their job as scientists! If their theories and observations don't agree, then one or the other is fundamentally flawed. This particular example is rather disturbing, because Newton's Laws(and yes, the scientists at JPL have accounted for General Relativity as well) are remarkably precise for moving bodies, and this constant deceleration is much larger than any uncertainties in their measurements. The scientists are very willing to accept that perhaps it's a measurement error, but then their previously well-understood measurement theories and practices will have to be amended.
There's just something not right with the whole picture as they currently know it. It happened with 3 spacecraft so far, so it's getting more and more unlikely to be something correlated with these long-range craft!
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Didn't he stop coding several years ago because of a bad case of Carpal's Tunnels? IIRC, he even hired people to type for him as he coded, but as you can imagine, it was too frustrating to communicate code to a typer like this. You may want to double-check me on this, though.
Hopefully the sequel won't also give in to hollywood-esque boring-plots that are commonplace with many sequels. And no more of Keanu's "Whoa." Haha, they just had to slip in a Bill&Ted-ism, didn't they?
But you need a copy of windows for VMWare to work. Not all of us have that "luxury". Plus, why install this alternate OS just to run in an emulator? Of course, if it works under wine/dosemu that's a whole different story. :-)
What is(was?) the status of Harmony, which I've heard about in the OpenSources O'Reilly book, but never heard about on these lists? From what I understand, it's meant to be a GPL version of QT compatible toolkit. Is this project still underway?
haha, good point. However, if it REALLY fails, it may melt, and then reform as a globular mass, thus drastically reducing the surface area, and ultimately failing as a heat sink. However, if you're in danger of melting a heat sink, you've got some serious design issues to consider ;-)
Of course, not many people are doing 64-bit math on their computers, but from a research environment this matters alot.
Not completely true. There are often times when including lots of data, that the MIDI data lines becomes saturated. This can happen, for example, during glissandos (sp) and lots of change data (eg. pitch bend). There are far too many events occuring for the lines to handle the data throughput. The events can occur at their max frequency until the lines are more quiet, or sometimes events can be skipped. The point is that the MIDI specs aren't globally useful for large multi-channel very eventful music sequencing.
There are ways around this, usually by running a MIDI thinning program through MIDI data files to reduce successive events (ie, change pitch bend from 88 positions to 12, without much noticable differences). However, this may not be suitable for all purposes.
Oh well, they'll probably have 129387 submissions, maybe i have a remote chance to get a lego mindstorm kit. But you never know.
There was a GAMES magazine puzzle a few years back that I solved, with a potential prize of up to several hundred dollars of games and stuff. I never bothered to send in the answer, because it seemed too easy. In the next issue, they mentioned that they only received a handful of answers. So - you never know...
It's really (well, more accurately, that is) 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10
check out here as one of several pi repositories.
Actually, if you read some electronics mags (Circuit Cellar did this awhile back), a hardware hacker named Don Lancaster uses printers as computational devices! You laugh, but that is what the postscript driver is, in a sense. He has written many articles about the postscript language, and even programs it directly. And he has done mathematical simultions on the printer, and ported the results back to the computer! Kind of ironic but cool stuff. Check out his page .
I think \ is much harder to say than /, as well.
Thanks, I just knew I would miss one of them! :-) I actually wrote out the prime-factorization, but just missed one of the combinations of factors.
The metric system is arbitary in it's own ways, but as long as we're using base 10 numerals, 100 looks a lot rounder then 144.
144 looks strange because it is a base-twelve factor written out in base ten. Let's see, in base-twelve (assuming 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B for the digits), one hundred would be written as 84, and one hundred forty-four would be written as 100.
Oops, now upon re-reading your quote for the third time I see this is precisely what you were pointing out
The good thing about using the metric system is that it's logarithmic, and very very easy to do order-of-magnitude of calculation in your head. I wouldn't want to try that with English/American/Whateveryouwannacallit.
I'd take 10^8 meters vs. 5 miles, 2 furlongs, 14 rods, 2 yards, 1 foot, and 3 inches any day! I do, however, agree with the notion that divvying up numbers does come out nicely in some non-base-ten scenarios.
That is NOT true, kg-cm is not a measure of torque, it would be N-m. Kilogram is a measure of mass, pound is a measure of force.
You are correct, however, in relating the arbitrariness. One who is used to his/her weight in Newtons would do just as well in that same situation.
As far as the 'drag', 1/4 mile translates very neatly into 400 meters (give or take a meter or so). not a bad round number.
The only reason base 10 (or A, if you prefer) makes sense is because we have 10 fingers. The reason we count in base ten stems from this fact from long ago. The number one-hundred makes sense to you as an obvious marking point, because this is the rollover to the 3rd digit, and all it is is 10^2. It's just as arbitrary as using 144 or 169, which would be 100 and 100 in base 12 and base 13 respectively.
What the original poster was implying with base twelve is that you can easily divide things by two,three,four,and six. I heartily agree with this notion. That way, if you had a system where 1 bar equals 12 foo, a third of a bar is now 4 foo. Nice and simple. With base ten, one bar equals 10 foo, and a third of a bar is now 3.3333 foo, which gets tedious.
Base sixty is especially nice, because things are now divisible by 2,3,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30. Did I miss any? Talk about flexible! That's why it's so great that a circle has 360 degrees, it is divisible by so many numbers cleanly. I think this number stems from the Babylonian calendar, which had 360 days.
In response to the gist of these systems, the English system, while ugly in many ways, does have some sense in that it's people-units. Ie, feet, hands. For a while I was a mechanic, and we used foot-pounds as units of torque. It's pretty cool, nice and quick I can get an estime that if I want to torque a lug nut to 90 foot-pounds, I can apply 90 pounds of force 1 foot down the wrench.
Of course, it is horrible inconsistent in other respects as some things arre broken into 4, some into 12, some into 60, etc. If it were consistent, like 12 inches to the foot, twelve feet to the blah, twelve blahs to the blahblah, that would be better, but now it is approaching the metric system.
Even the metric system is arbitrary, so they both their goods and bads. In general, people are not so easy to discard their old notions. A funny Simpson's quote is when the town is thinking of going metric, and grandpa simpson says, "my car gets 14 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it". And in a different one, Principal Skinner said he converted the new school clocks to metric time, and you see the clock with 10 divisions across the face. He said, "We're meeting at 89 minutes past 4 oclock" or something like that.
I have a different idea of a wits game, and I've talked with some serious chess players who say this would be a very interesting test. What you do is to have a chess match like this, but change the rules, maybe even only slightly. This would more adequately match wits against wits. For example, let's say you change the moves, such that knights cannot jump over other pieces, or that the queen can only extend moves up to a range of 4 squares, or that you can teleport from the left side of the board to the right, a la pacman. You get the idea. It would drastically change the strategies that many chess players have already memorized.
Even more interesting would be a human vs. computer match like this. Say you give each party maybe a few days or 1 week to prepare for the game. The human tries to get a feel for the game, the computer guys re-program the computer's code during this time. I bet you'd find in this case that the computer demolish the humans. Kasparov has had 30 someodd years to memorize all these strategies and moves, but given only 1 week I think he'd be just as much a newbie in a changed game as I currently am at normal chess.
Has anybody ever heard of competitions like this, or do you think people would be willing to try them? I'd be very curious to know how chess masters compare to newbies at the altered games.
not true. As a poster after you on the original parent thread noted, repulsive forces do exist, as you'll study in any E&M class. You basically forgot a negative sign in your account. You're correct in observing that these two particles (if repulsive) will travel to infinite distance from each other (in a closed system). However, it is this infinite distance which has relative zero potential energy. You INCREASE your potential energy as you bring the two particles together (for this hypothetical repulsive case). Just like with two attractive bodies, potential energy increases as you separate them, here potential energy decreases as you separate them.
As a final note, if everything was repulsive, you wouldn't eventually have everything travelling at speeds of light, but instead equally and infinitely spread out from each other. Everything would be at rest relatively to everything else.
Oops, typo. That final sentence should be "so it's getting more and more LIKELY to be something correlated with these long-range craft!" Sorry about that.
There's just something not right with the whole picture as they currently know it. It happened with 3 spacecraft so far, so it's getting more and more unlikely to be something correlated with these long-range craft!