parent is dead on. you can't do anything beyond basic geometry with this method. i don't know about any of you, but my usual use of trig functions is for waves, which this stuff just shits all over. even working with a simple harmonic oscillator will become overly cumbersome. and let's not get into working with sin(wt-kx+p)... i'm not even sure how the author would define things for "angles" greater than pi.
oh, and as for sin and cos... they really shouldn't be taught as fundamental functions--they're just projections on the real axis of exponentials in the complex plane: sin(x) = (e^ix - e^-ix)/2i
if you look closely at the left side of dr. winfree's webpage: http://www.dna.caltech.edu/~winfree/ you'll see the dna blocks. what he does is has custom paterns of bases put along the strands so that they form those blocks in solution, then each 'corner' of the block has a five base tail. he just has the tails chosen in such a way that the blocks can only combine if the upper left corner and the upper right corner of a block are correct... one type of block is a '1' and the other is a '0', the tails are set to that xor is computed.
if you read some of the papers linked from his website, he has a beautiful binary counter built from wang tiles.
http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/SierpinskiDNA_PL oS2004.pdf
http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/SAcircuits_DNA9. pdf
both of those are highly interesting reads.
the error rate is actually rather low, the high number reported comes from error propagation. if you get a single site error, the next generation of cells below it will be computed using that error, and will thus also be erroneous. the actual number of genuine errors is rather small.
winfree also has done work in error-correcting self assembly of wang tiles (which is what this really is).
the key point to his generating the sierpinski gasket is that it proves that one can computer elemetary cellular automata with this dna blocks, and that includes eca rule 110, which has been proven to be universal by matthew cook.
dr. winfree gave a talk about all these findings early last semester at my university.
SLAX using unionFS has been in development for months now. it would be out, but unionfs still has a lot of weird little bugs that need to be worked out before the whole thing will work well. fabian (from knoppix) has been posted a bit with tomas (from slax) at the unionfs bugzilla, as well as on the slax forums: http://slax.linux-live.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3 790&start=15. as can be seen from that link, an alpha using unionFS has been released. careful though, it doesn't include ALL of the apps that are normally in SLAX, it's mostly a check if it will boot and load KDE on a wide range of hardware.
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i believe the correct response to that is "HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS"
Actually, ELinks has had experimental built-in bittorrent for a little while now.
parent is dead on. you can't do anything beyond basic geometry with this method. i don't know about any of you, but my usual use of trig functions is for waves, which this stuff just shits all over. even working with a simple harmonic oscillator will become overly cumbersome. and let's not get into working with sin(wt-kx+p)... i'm not even sure how the author would define things for "angles" greater than pi. oh, and as for sin and cos... they really shouldn't be taught as fundamental functions--they're just projections on the real axis of exponentials in the complex plane: sin(x) = (e^ix - e^-ix)/2i
if you look closely at the left side of dr. winfree's webpage: http://www.dna.caltech.edu/~winfree/ you'll see the dna blocks. what he does is has custom paterns of bases put along the strands so that they form those blocks in solution, then each 'corner' of the block has a five base tail. he just has the tails chosen in such a way that the blocks can only combine if the upper left corner and the upper right corner of a block are correct... one type of block is a '1' and the other is a '0', the tails are set to that xor is computed. if you read some of the papers linked from his website, he has a beautiful binary counter built from wang tiles. http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/SierpinskiDNA_PL oS2004.pdf
http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/SAcircuits_DNA9. pdf
both of those are highly interesting reads.
the error rate is actually rather low, the high number reported comes from error propagation. if you get a single site error, the next generation of cells below it will be computed using that error, and will thus also be erroneous. the actual number of genuine errors is rather small. winfree also has done work in error-correcting self assembly of wang tiles (which is what this really is). the key point to his generating the sierpinski gasket is that it proves that one can computer elemetary cellular automata with this dna blocks, and that includes eca rule 110, which has been proven to be universal by matthew cook. dr. winfree gave a talk about all these findings early last semester at my university.
SLAX using unionFS has been in development for months now. it would be out, but unionfs still has a lot of weird little bugs that need to be worked out before the whole thing will work well. fabian (from knoppix) has been posted a bit with tomas (from slax) at the unionfs bugzilla, as well as on the slax forums: http://slax.linux-live.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3 790&start=15. as can be seen from that link, an alpha using unionFS has been released. careful though, it doesn't include ALL of the apps that are normally in SLAX, it's mostly a check if it will boot and load KDE on a wide range of hardware.
We can't forget the beauty that is The Etherkiller, can we?
Nvu!