Without even solving the puzzle, but reasoning purely on circumstantial evidence, the answer has to be Mike Hunkapillar's stealth startup Pacific Biosystems.
The reasons are simple... (1) PB's genomic technology is producing a flood of raw data, (2) PB therefore needs programmers to convert that stream into IPO-salable value, and (3) PB is the only one hiring right now!
Mark Twain wrote of a man lacking a conscience in The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut:
... "Out of this with your paupers, your charities, your reforms, your pestilent morals! You behold before you a man whose life-conflict is done, whose soul is at peace; a man whose heart is dead to sorrow, dead to suffering, dead to remorse; a man WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE! In my joy I spare you, though I could throttle you and never feel a pang! Fly!"
She fled. Since that day my life is all bliss. Bliss, unalloyed bliss. Nothing in all the world could persuade me to have a conscience again. I settled all my old outstanding scores, and began the world anew. I killed thirty-eight persons during the first two weeks--all of them on account of ancient grudges. I burned a dwelling that interrupted my view. I swindled a widow and some orphans out of their last cow, which is a very good one, though not thoroughbred, I believe. I have also committed scores of crimes, of various kinds, and have enjoyed my work exceedingly, whereas it would formerly have broken my heart and turned my hair gray, I have no doubt.
It takes a lot of reading to realize that none of these sub-centimeter turbines has actually run yet. Perhaps the laws of combustion physics prevent this? There's a reason why candle flames are the size they are... see Michael Faraday's classic lecture The Chemical History of a Candle.
Our Quantum System Engineering (QSE) Group has immediate need of 80-core teraflop/terabyte processing... it's just what we need to compute the real-time dynamics of imaged biomolecular structures... on the desktop.
Oooh, it's recursive: Of course it is! CWEB's source code (and also, the source code for Knuth's famous TeX program) is of course documented in (what else?) CWEB. This same is true of the much-simpler NUWEB system that our QSE Group uses.
Knuth's celebrated essay Literate Programming is available here. Also, Knuth has written an entire book on this subject whose complete text is available here.
I find that each email read diminishes my IQ by about one point, on average, for the remainder of that day. So if Bill Gates is reading 100 emails per day, then his effective IQ must be, well, about 70 or so. This explains a lot!
The Slashdot Conjecture: All mathematical and physics problems that arise naturally in everyday life are in complexity class NP-hard.
The Slashdot Corollary: All meaningful discussion of these problems will require either oversimplification or humor.
It is
by no means impossible for thoughtful people to predict the future with
impressive accuracy. As evidence, here are some challenges for America
that scientists and diplomats foresaw in 1955, from the
book The Fabulous Future: America in 1980:
C. P. Taft: We may not be able to prevent localized wars in
the coming quarter-century---even ``hot'' wars in which our military forces
will have to participate. Southeast Asia is the most dangerous spot, again
because of the Chinese. The difficult problem there, as in every area, if
to build character, honesty, and responsibility as well as the ordinary
know-how of political method in the leaders of small new nations. These
qualities are earned, not given; we tend to forget how recently---only
seventy years ago---corruption was widespread in our own public life in
Washington.
Earl Warren: For as long as the U.S. leads the forces of
freedom in the world's great ideological struggle, our institutions will be
under a global spotlight, and what we do will speak much louder than what
we say.
John von Neumann: All major weather phenomena [...] are
ultimately controlled by the solar energy that falls on the earth. [...]
"The carbon dioxide released into the atomosphere by industry's burning of
coal and oil---more than half of it during the last generation---may have
changed the atomosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general
warming of the world by about degree Fahrenheit. [...] Intervention in
atmospheric and climatic matters will come in a few decades, and will
unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present. [...] Such actions
would be more directly and truly worldwide than recent, or presumably,
future wars, or the economy at any time. [...] All this will merge each
nation's affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat
of a nuclear or any other war would have done. [...] What safeguard
remains? Apparently only day-to-day---or perhaps
year-to-year---opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct
decisions. And this is not surprising. After all, the crisis is due to the
rapidity of progress, to the probable further acceleration thereof, and to
the reaching of certain critical relationships. Specifically, the effects
that we are now beginning to produce are of the same order of magnitude as
``the great globe itself.'' Indeed, they affect the earth as an entity.
Hence further acceleration can no longer be absorbed as in the past by an
extension of the area of operations. [...] The most hopeful answer is that
the human species has been subjected to similar tests before, and seems to
have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of
trouble.
C. H. Greenwalt (DuPont CEO): How is mankind to supply its
ever-increasing requirements for energy? [...] Over the years, many have
forecast the exhaustion of our sources of coal and oil. [...] It seems
quite certain that they will be exhausted someday, and it is essential for
our survival that we be ready with as good an alternative as possible.
[...] There is much talk these days about atomic energy as the answer to
this problem. So it may be, [but] I am inclined to think that atomic
energy, while important, will be only an interim solution. What we must
devise eventually is some way of utilizing more fully the energy that comes
to us from the sun. [...] The solution of the solar energy problem cannot
fail to be of more lasting benefit to manking [than atomic energy]. Today,
the best thermal efficiency that we can obtain in growing our crops is
perhaps a few tenths of one percent of the energy the sun lavishes on the
land. If this could be increased by a factor of ten, the problem of energy
and food would be solved for many hundreds of years to come.
Given that the Sanger institute has over a billion gene sequence on file, and (according to Wikipedia) the Protein Data Bank has about 30-odd thousand structures, and assuming that structure and sequence are of roughly equal scientific interest, can we conclude that determining a protein structure is 30,000 times harder than determining a gene sequence?
Another thing these projects do is teach the science and engineering community
how to federate their technologies. This federative engineering requires both
advanced technical skills and federative social and political skills (the latter
being what America increasing lacks).
The backup computer for our UW Quantum System Engineering Group is a
Mac G5. It was suborned and used to attack NASA computers. As a result,
the FBI subpoened the entire contents of the computer (Agents came by
and cloned the entire disk at the digital level, and yes, we verified their credentials.).
In response to this, our QSE Group decided that we would run a
completely open research group. This makes it much simpler
for both attackers and friends to learn what we're up to: just
go to http://www.mrfm.org/.
Until you hire a 24-hour security guard, and have no physical connection
of your computer to the outside world whatsoever, you are not secure
against a determined, professional attack.
More broadly, we tell entering students that if you want to keep a
secret, don't tell anyone, don't write it down, and definitely don't
store it on a computer. As the FBI agent told us: that's the only
security plan that's guaranteed to work and affordable by anyone.
We're an Army-sponsored engineering research group that already worries about this. Just take a look at the China Journal of System Simulation for an amazing look at China's emerging technological dominance.
As the graphic says, "open strategic advantage (OSA) strategies are easy to understand, impossible to stop, and yield global strategic advantages". Or as China's books on business strategy say: "Deceive the sky, to cross the ocean."
There's not much doubt that the US is being seriously out-performed by China in system engineering (http://courses.washington.edu/goodall/MRFM/whats_ new.html#n0036). As the web page shows, most of the peer-reviewed articles in system engineering are now written in Mandarin, not English.
This is a new phenomenon: it began about five years ago. And the number of such articles is increasing by about 30 percent per year.
We see that most of the system engineering literature already is written in Mandarin; the Chinese engineering community surpassed the US (and Japan) about five years ago.
The Chinese Journal of System Simulation shows the depth and sophistication (and the military focus) of this literature:
The history of the Jamestown Colony is instructive, because the USA treats its scientists and engineers much like the Jamestown colonists. The colonists were told by their British investors to focus mainly on prospecting for gold, not on the mundane tasks of farming. Result: not much gold was found, few crops were raised, and the members of the colony starved.
Similarly, American scientists and engineers are told by their funding agencies and corporate employers to focus on breakthroughs. Result: not too many breakthroughs, very few new commercial products, and the economy is foundering.
The Chinese are quite open about their strategy of balancing research and engineering more equally. And they make no secret of their intent that this strategy will eventually yield, first, economic dominance, then military and cultural dominance, in accord with the classic Chinese strategy "deceive the sky to cross the ocean".
Obligatory "I for one welcome... " joke omitted, because I've got a son in the USMC.
Steganography is central to Carter Scholz's recent novel
Radiance. In brief, complete engineering descriptions of all US nuclear weapons tests are smuggled out of the US national labs, steganographically conceiled in pornographic *.gif files.
Warning: this novel is a demanding read. It is a higher-brow---and markedly dystopian---treatment of the same themes as Neil Stephensen's Cryptonomicon. In writing it, Mr. Scholz seems to have received considerable help from insiders at the national laboratories.
With luck, the following link to Google Print will show you a sample page that is reasonably representative of the entire book.
This guy *loves* Donald Knuth's literate programming. So does our UW Quantum System Engineering (QSE) Group... we call it "Literate System Engineering".
However, upon consulting the INSPEC database of academic abstracts, 1955 to 2005, we find:
Containing the word "Programming": 124252 abstracts
Containing "Literate Programming": 81 abstracts
So the harsh truth is, only a tiny fraction (1/1500) of academic software projects mention it.
How many (if any) SlashDotters use Literate Programming regularly?
Comments from a surfer newsgroup, on non-cubicle jobs:
OSU Beavers wrote: Peace Corps Anyone?
Has anyone done this? I don't think I'll be finding a job after
I graduate and don't feel like bein a mooch off the parents.
Besides I wanna do something to help others. I'm hopin to get into
the pacific islands region...
PNW Old Guy (me) replied:
My son spent two years teaching in the outer islands of the
Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Then when he came back, he
joined the US Marines, and saw heavy action in Fallujah.
His scorecard: both experiences were enjoyable, but overall, in
the Marine Corps he had more job satisfaction, better pay and
medical benefits, and he felt he did more good for the local
population.
The point being, the Peace Corps is definitely *not* for people
who are wondering what to do with their lives. Life in the third
world is *much* tougher than ordinary life, and in many respects is
much tougher even than life in the Marine Corps.
This is especially true if you sincerely want to make a
difference. Most likely, the third world will chew you up and spit
you out.
A smart strategy is to enlist in the Marines first, and
*afterwards* --- once you are toughened up and have a clue--- do a
stint in the Peace Corps.
Burleigh (from Oz and Norway) replied:
I have both girlfriends and mates that have done several
stretches in Lebanon and Kosovo with the UN Peace Corps. All of
them came from the army prior to joining and were 'ready' for what
awaited in these warstruck areas. It was tough, but they all tell
great stories about how welcome they felt and how appreciative ppl
there were for the help. That said I can say they came back as
different people - quiet and at times withdrawn and not eager to
talk about all the bad things they walked into while in
service.
I think the cameraderi you get with your fellow soldiers b/c of
situation is something very special that will stay with you
forever. My friends are still close to the people they served with
5- 8 years ago. Now they are all rehabilitated and 'normal' and
some even considering of doing it again.
Good money, great experience, and all in all - you really feel
like your making a difference. If your mentally fit for it.
As Darth Vader would say: "Impressive... most impressive."
The author's one-bit-per-photon-absorbed rule of thumb is pretty darn accurate; a more detailed calculation suggest that the maximal channel capacity occurs at around 0.49 bits per photon.
It's always fun to see some creative tension between the physicists and the engineers. The physicists have the first word and the engineers have the last word!
This DVD is supposed to include Noam Chomsky's analysis of LOTR's semiotic significance. Well worth reading;)
The gravity wave is a good bet!
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 1
Our group is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and we think that a 500 to one payoff on gravity waves is terrific odds.
We would put the odds at roughly 50/50, or maybe 10-to-1. It all depends on whether Mother Nature is kind.
The LIGO weekly reports give a good taste
of the real-world science and engineering involved, which is completely awesome. It's humanity's first big quantum system engineering project--very challenging!
Also, LIGO's resident sociologist, Harry Collins, has a new book coming out on LIGO called "Gravity's Shadow". The perfect Christmas 2004 stocking-stuffer for your Slashdot significant other!
The numbers I posted are correct for PhDs to US citizens or permanent residents. These numbers *are* declining dramatically.
The numbers posted above are for *all* US PhDs -- a very different statistic.
To paraphrase Mark Twain: "Therefore, any calm person can see
that starting in 2011, US engineers will have to
start giving their doctorates back to their universities,
in order to make up the deficit!"
If you remember the disaster movie "Meteor", a young reporter uncovers a high-level government coverup known as "Ellie", which turns out to be not a sex scandal, but rather an acronym for "Extinction Level Event".
Well, according to NSF statistics, US science and engineering is pretty clearly heading for an extinction-level event!
Here are total doctoral degrees by US citizens (or permanent residents) for the years 1995 and 2002.
US PhD Electrical Engineers: 971 in 1995, 506 in 2002 (-> extinction
in 2010).
US PhD Mechanical Engineers: 563 in 1995, 343 in 2002 (-> extinction
in 2013).
US PhD Physicists: 1059 in 1995, 586 in 2002 (-> extinction
in 2011).
US PhD Mathematicians: 771 in 1995, 442 in 2002 (-> extinction
in 2011).
The physics and math communities, in particular, need to recognize that companies hiring few American
engineers will be hiring no physicists or mathematicians. Conversely, the engineering communities need to recognize that in the long run, US companies need several PhD-level engineers to justify employing even one physicist or mathematician.
The present system is like an ecosystem with plenty of sea otters (the physicists and mathematicians), but far too few abalone (the engineers). All very beautiful, no doubt, except the young sea otters starve to death. Meanwhile, the senior sea otters -- who are in secure possession of resources protected by tenure -- are slow to recognize that an extinction-level event is underway.
Thus, unless dramatic breakthroughs occur, the numbers seem to indicate that a US techno-Ellie is irreversible and inevitable.
Whoops -- should have been 10^11 Pascal yield stress (not 10^10), for 10% yield strain. Then the rest of the numbers are right.
No matter how you crunch the numbers, an Earth-based nanotube space bridge has to operate very near to outright chemical instability. Yikes!
Bob Forward had the right idea -- emigrate to a planet with less gravity (like Mars, or the Moon). This makes the whole space bridge idea much more feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
Without even solving the puzzle, but reasoning purely on circumstantial evidence, the answer has to be Mike Hunkapillar's stealth startup Pacific Biosystems. The reasons are simple ... (1) PB's genomic technology is producing a flood of raw data, (2) PB therefore needs programmers to convert that stream into IPO-salable value, and (3) PB is the only one hiring right now!
Mark Twain wrote of a man lacking a conscience in The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut:
Available on-line via both file download and html text.
Once again, Art anticipates Science!
It takes a lot of reading to realize that none of these sub-centimeter turbines has actually run yet. Perhaps the laws of combustion physics prevent this? There's a reason why candle flames are the size they are ... see Michael Faraday's classic lecture The Chemical History of a Candle.
Our Quantum System Engineering (QSE) Group has immediate need of 80-core teraflop/terabyte processing ... it's just what we need to compute the real-time dynamics of imaged biomolecular structures ... on the desktop.
Knuth's celebrated essay Literate Programming is available here. Also, Knuth has written an entire book on this subject whose complete text is available here.
Before all else, learn Literature Programming, in the style invented by Don Knuth.
We use nuweb---it works with any language.
I find that each email read diminishes my IQ by about one point, on average, for the remainder of that day. So if Bill Gates is reading 100 emails per day, then his effective IQ must be, well, about 70 or so. This explains a lot!
The Slashdot Conjecture: All mathematical and physics problems that arise naturally in everyday life are in complexity class NP-hard. The Slashdot Corollary: All meaningful discussion of these problems will require either oversimplification or humor.
It is by no means impossible for thoughtful people to predict the future with impressive accuracy. As evidence, here are some challenges for America that scientists and diplomats foresaw in 1955, from the book The Fabulous Future: America in 1980:
I maintain my code in nuweb. Requires: nuweb, tetex, plus the usual linux utilities. Yes, Literate Programming lives!
Given that the Sanger institute has over a billion gene sequence on file, and (according to Wikipedia) the Protein Data Bank has about 30-odd thousand structures, and assuming that structure and sequence are of roughly equal scientific interest, can we conclude that determining a protein structure is 30,000 times harder than determining a gene sequence?
Another thing these projects do is teach the science and engineering community how to federate their technologies. This federative engineering requires both advanced technical skills and federative social and political skills (the latter being what America increasing lacks).
Pop Quiz Question:: which is longer:
-> cell phone manual:http://direct.motorola.com/manuals/v3_manual9491A
-> NASA SA-503 Saturn V flight manual:
http://history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/pdf/sa503-flightma
I could hardly believe it, but the two manuals are of comparable length.
PS: the Saturn V manual is 15 MBytes, so I hope NASA doesn't get too slashdotted.
The backup computer for our UW Quantum System Engineering Group is a Mac G5. It was suborned and used to attack NASA computers. As a result, the FBI subpoened the entire contents of the computer (Agents came by and cloned the entire disk at the digital level, and yes, we verified their credentials.).
In response to this, our QSE Group decided that we would run a completely open research group. This makes it much simpler for both attackers and friends to learn what we're up to: just go to http://www.mrfm.org/ .
Until you hire a 24-hour security guard, and have no physical connection of your computer to the outside world whatsoever, you are not secure against a determined, professional attack.
More broadly, we tell entering students that if you want to keep a secret, don't tell anyone, don't write it down, and definitely don't store it on a computer. As the FBI agent told us: that's the only security plan that's guaranteed to work and affordable by anyone.
We're an Army-sponsored engineering research group that already worries about this. Just take a look at the China Journal of System Simulation for an amazing look at China's emerging technological dominance.
URL: http://www.china-simulation.com/esite/preview/05-0 5.htm n ew_0035.html
Graphic: http://courses.washington.edu/goodall/MRFM/whats_
As the graphic says, "open strategic advantage (OSA) strategies are easy to understand, impossible to stop, and yield global strategic advantages". Or as China's books on business strategy say: "Deceive the sky, to cross the ocean."
There's not much doubt that the US is being seriously out-performed by China in system engineering (http://courses.washington.edu/goodall/MRFM/whats_ new.html#n0036). As the web page shows, most of the peer-reviewed articles in system engineering are now written in Mandarin, not English.
This is a new phenomenon: it began about five years ago. And the number of such articles is increasing by about 30 percent per year.
Graphic here: http://courses.washington.edu/goodall/MRFM/pg_0035 .png
Here is a survey of recent system engineering articles in the INSPEC database:
graphics: http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/SPINS/literat ure.gif
numbers: http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/SPINS (see readme.tex)
We see that most of the system engineering literature already is written in Mandarin; the Chinese engineering community surpassed the US (and Japan) about five years ago.
The Chinese Journal of System Simulation shows the depth and sophistication (and the military focus) of this literature:
http://www.china-simulation.com/esite/preview/absYikes! What to make of this?
The history of the Jamestown Colony is instructive, because the USA treats its scientists and engineers much like the Jamestown colonists. The colonists were told by their British investors to focus mainly on prospecting for gold, not on the mundane tasks of farming. Result: not much gold was found, few crops were raised, and the members of the colony starved.
Similarly, American scientists and engineers are told by their funding agencies and corporate employers to focus on breakthroughs. Result: not too many breakthroughs, very few new commercial products, and the economy is foundering.
The Chinese are quite open about their strategy of balancing research and engineering more equally. And they make no secret of their intent that this strategy will eventually yield, first, economic dominance, then military and cultural dominance, in accord with the classic Chinese strategy "deceive the sky to cross the ocean".
Obligatory "I for one welcome ... " joke omitted, because I've got a son in the USMC.
Warning: this novel is a demanding read. It is a higher-brow---and markedly dystopian---treatment of the same themes as Neil Stephensen's Cryptonomicon. In writing it, Mr. Scholz seems to have received considerable help from insiders at the national laboratories.
With luck, the following link to Google Print will show you a sample page that is reasonably representative of the entire book.
http://print.google.com/print?id=kVP7pIA9TYUC&pg=P A382&lpg=PA382&dq=steganography&prev=http://www.go ogle.com/search%3Fclient%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26 q%3DRadiance%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8&sig=-uyML9j p9G4JsUZOCa59fPI6YpM
This guy *loves* Donald Knuth's literate programming. So does our UW Quantum System Engineering (QSE) Group ... we call it "Literate System Engineering".
However, upon consulting the INSPEC database of academic abstracts, 1955 to 2005, we find:
Containing the word "Programming": 124252 abstracts
Containing "Literate Programming": 81 abstracts
So the harsh truth is, only a tiny fraction (1/1500) of academic software projects mention it.
How many (if any) SlashDotters use Literate Programming regularly?
Comments from a surfer newsgroup, on non-cubicle jobs:
The author's one-bit-per-photon-absorbed rule of thumb is pretty darn accurate; a more detailed calculation suggest that the maximal channel capacity occurs at around 0.49 bits per photon.
It's always fun to see some creative tension between the physicists and the engineers. The physicists have the first word and the engineers have the last word!
This DVD is supposed to include Noam Chomsky's analysis of LOTR's semiotic significance. Well worth reading;)
We would put the odds at roughly 50/50, or maybe 10-to-1. It all depends on whether Mother Nature is kind.
The LIGO weekly reports give a good taste of the real-world science and engineering involved, which is completely awesome. It's humanity's first big quantum system engineering project--very challenging!
Also, LIGO's resident sociologist, Harry Collins, has a new book coming out on LIGO called "Gravity's Shadow". The perfect Christmas 2004 stocking-stuffer for your Slashdot significant other!
To paraphrase Mark Twain: "Therefore, any calm person can see that starting in 2011, US engineers will have to start giving their doctorates back to their universities, in order to make up the deficit!"
Well, according to NSF statistics, US science and engineering is pretty clearly heading for an extinction-level event!
Here are total doctoral degrees by US citizens (or permanent residents) for the years 1995 and 2002.
The physics and math communities, in particular, need to recognize that companies hiring few American engineers will be hiring no physicists or mathematicians. Conversely, the engineering communities need to recognize that in the long run, US companies need several PhD-level engineers to justify employing even one physicist or mathematician.
The present system is like an ecosystem with plenty of sea otters (the physicists and mathematicians), but far too few abalone (the engineers). All very beautiful, no doubt, except the young sea otters starve to death. Meanwhile, the senior sea otters -- who are in secure possession of resources protected by tenure -- are slow to recognize that an extinction-level event is underway.
Thus, unless dramatic breakthroughs occur, the numbers seem to indicate that a US techno-Ellie is irreversible and inevitable.
No matter how you crunch the numbers, an Earth-based nanotube space bridge has to operate very near to outright chemical instability. Yikes!
Bob Forward had the right idea -- emigrate to a planet with less gravity (like Mars, or the Moon). This makes the whole space bridge idea much more feasible.