It's not the eye that's a cliche, it's showing a bit of ankle.
The eyes are always visible anyways.
Every culture has it's boundaries, and men get excited when women cross those boundaries. Remember when Sharon Stone crossed her legs in Basic Instinct, and flashed a bit of hair?
A bit of hair...anything will do the trick for some men, as long as it comes from a woman.
The year 1000, more or less. The father of optics, Ibn al Haitham, wrote "The book of optics" in Cairo, Egypt around then. Newton would have certainly known about him.
Haitham was one of the greatest physicists of medieval times. He was one of the pioneers of the scientific method. One of his discoveries was the concept of momentum, and he knew about acceleration due to gravity.
To get rid of solar wind effects, they could put it on the surface of the Moon?
They would have to blast a huge conical crater to hold the camera and shroud the light though.
Maybe that's what that large circular depression on the side of the death star was...a telescope. We couldn't see the foil in front of it, since the holes made it translucent. It also doubled as a blaster that combined the several laser beams into one, which was used to destroy planets. Perhaps the foil played a role in that, since incident lasers do not just combine into one in free space.
I remember Eddington writing in one essay that if a book was sitting on the table, and all the atoms of the table suddenly started vibrating in the vertical plane, then the book would fly off and hit the ceiling.
So to make a new compact energy source, all you *really* have to do is... break the 2nd law of thermodynamics in one direction, for a small percentage of the atoms, in a small region around your feet.
Actually, if you had 1 coloumb of +charge, and set it 1m apart from a similar ball of -charge, the force of attraction between them would be enough to lift the earth. 1 coloumb of charge could fit into the size of a baseball. Separating the charges from their equilibrium (inside atoms) would be difficult though.
Swords were simpler than muskets. Muskets were simpler than bolt action rifles. Bolt action rifles were simpler than automatic weapons and so on... Yes, but killing someone with a musket is easier than killing them with a sword Killing someone with a rifle...
Concomitant to killing your enemy easier, each new weapon also increased the odds of your own survival.
Ease of use is only secondary on the battlefield. Winning is everything, along with survival.
GPS can be accurate to less than a centimeter, if you track the carrier phase and use that in your measurements.
However it is tough to get absolute accuracy at that level, but you can with differential positioning i.e. if you calibrate yourself first (walk to a marker with a known position), and then walk around within a certain radius.
He got his geography wrong. Butterflies in Brazil do not lead to hurricanes in Texas. As you can see on this graphic on this page, there is practically no hurricane activity in the South Atlantic.
Most hurricanes that would hit Texas all originate as storms over West Africa.
I wonder why Lorenz didn't use Africa in the title of his paper instead of Brazil.
The amount of information they can store is still limited by the Shannon Hartley theorem, and depends on the SNR of the underlying medium among other things.
Once they add more than the channel capacity, it will be impossible to get a 0 BER using any error correcting methods.
Actually you could get sound. The solar wind carries a slightly-dense plasma outwards from the sun, and this gets affected by all solar disturbances on the surface. So the disturbances in this medium, basically a series of compressions/rarefactions will get transmitted to the earth.
So, a few days after the solar event, the "sound" should reach us, and register as disuptions of the earth's magnetosphere. We will be able to perceive this through increased auroral activity, larger numbers of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere, higher DNA mutation rates, cell-phone and satellite signal strength reduction and DRAM errors.
Coincidentally, the guy who works beside me just came back from Churchill, Manitoba where he was monitoring ionospheric conditions for his PhD. He noticed there were aurorae every single day he was there.
Remember, what is called "sound" is only the vibrations between 20 and 20000Hz. Anything below 20Hz is called infrasound, and anything far below about 0.01 Hz is called "weather." The sunspot will surely affect space weather, but whether there is a high frequency sound it emits as well, is something only a space probe far above the magnetosphere could tell us.
In common usage, threading usually implies different "streams" of execution doing independent things, at the same time. If the same function is executing in n different threads then you might call it "parallel" programming. A lot of multithreaded programming involves taking pieces of program functionality and breaking them out into separate threads, each executing independently.
Calling the latter architecture parallel computing is misnomer, it is really "simultaneous" computing i.e. things can happen at the same time, but there is a big difference between the same thread executing n times in parallel, and different threads doing different things simultaneously.
For example, a "Trivial" program which reads in a list of numbers from a file, computes something (say the sum of the magnitudes squared), and prints the result out to the screen might be implemented as follows: while not eof
read n numbers
compute something from them
print result
a multithreaded version might look something like this Thread 1 (Disk IO): read n number from disk, write them to a queue/shared memory, repeat Thread 2 (Outputting): wait for outputs to become available, print them, repeat Thread 3 (Compute): wait for inputs to arrive in a queue, process them, write output to another queue, repeat
A parallel version would just have more than 1 Compute thread, and they would subdivide the work between them (for example 2 threads dividing the input array into stripes, one handling even indices, the other odd...or a bunch of threads computing different slices of the array). Note that the threads would still have to combine their results at the end of the computation, and that is not always simple to do in parallel.
Some problems or algorithms simply cannot execute in parallel. Also issues of memory access patterns, caching, branch divergence (if they threads take different code paths will this affect performance) come into play. It requires a whole new set of issues to worry about, but they are not too difficult. As the professor who teaches the course http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece498/al1/ says, learning parallel programming is not hard, he could teach it to you in 2 hours. But doing parallel programming well and efficiently is difficult. You can write a trivial parallel program which uses just 1 processor and has just 1 thread, which is identical to the sequential version, and it will work logically, although the performance will be severely limited. You can then extend it to use n threads, and it will experience a speedup. But to take full advantage of the hardware on your board, you will need to know a few tricks, and understand the hardware and your program's behavior intimately.
Another issue is that programmers were spoiled by processor upgrades coming along and speeding up their programs "for free" by virtue of their higher clock speed. Now with clock speeds reaching physical limits, the only evolution in new processors will be in the number of cores they have. So the only way to coax more out of a program will be to make it more parallel, and that might be trivial or it might be difficult. We're going to have to think laterally to get more performance out of software.
Unfortunately, due to the passage of time, the voice on the recording sounded petulant, high-pitched, and whiny. Speculation is that this was due to nonlinear degradation of the recording medium itself.
The response to hard drive noise depends on what you are doing at the time. If you are focused on something, HD noise will simply be distracting, or irritating. If you are trying to meditate or establish peace and quiet, then HD noise is an invasion in your space and is therefore pollution, although a better term would be "unwanted noise."
It's not just the amplitude of the noise, it's the irregular and dissonant pattern of it too. It cannot be predicted, therefore the brain automatically get's busy trying to find a pattern to it, and this lack of predictability in your environment puts people on edge.
If the noise was even louder--but more consistent, it would actually sound pleasant, like a waterfall. It's the fact that it has no large-scale structure in the pattern of clicks which makes it unpleasant for people to listen to.
Sorry the second scheme I mentioned should read high-bandwidth/high-latency. High-bw/low latency is what flash offers today, and is something hard disk makers can only dream about.
As far as I know, hard drives encode data on the disk using simple binary waveforms. Communication systems are designed to use elaborate modulation schemes, and employ digital coding methods which make much more efficient use of the communication channel.
Hard drive makers could do something similar, like spreading the data over a number of physical bits on the disk (such as CDMA does.) Essentially, they would not be limited by the density of the data on the disk, but by the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the magnetic medium, which I imagine is very high.
Taking this idea furthur, they could bifurcate their encoding methods into 2: a low latency one that retains the characteristics of existing drives, and a high-bandwidth-low-latency scheme which uses digital coding methods to spread each block of data over an entire cylinder for example, and has requires reading the whole cylinder to retrieve a single bit. This would be useful for storing video and large image data, which is retrieved linearly and usually buffered too, and does not require low-latency access the way normal files on a filesystem do.
Hybrid schemes are always better than simple implementations, if they provide a closer fit to reality.
I agree with your description of the process wholeheartedly, but you're forgetting something. The division of the world into an in-group and an out-group is a basic definition of what life itself is.
ANY organism must have an interior (i.e. "itself") and the external environment, plus a means of selective separation between them (a cell membrane, our skin and digestive systems for example). The living organism expends energy to maintain a low-entropy region on the inside, and increases the entropy of the environment outside itself.
So what you are describring is the process of wikipedia turning itself into a living organism. A few people on the inside, a lot more on the outside. Or in other words, wikipedia is incorporating (i.e. becoming a body, incorporate comes from the Latin "corpus" which means body.) Wikipedia is coming alive, and a few people find themselves on the outside. The secret communication is necessary to reduce the confusion and disagreements among the people on the inside, i.e. letting them maintain a simpler view of the world than the disjointed and fragmented perspective of the people outside. That's low entropy for the insiders.
What the outsiders should do is incorporate themselves, and them compete with the inner circle, and everyone should specialize. It doesn't matter how small the initial groups are, they will fill up as more people join.
The reason why it seems impossible to explain science to the public is because every good piece of writing needs to be addressed to some audience, i.e. one cannot "communicate" objectively with a person who does not share the same context as you do. Writing must be matched to the audience being addressed, but we take this shared background knowledge for granted most of the time.
Most of the public has a very simple conception of the natural world, and this is where the problem lies. They do not have a sufficiently complex understanding of the context in which scientific work is being undertaken. This is why scientific journalism has to first help the reader understand the context in which the discovery is being made, after which it has to show them where the discovery fits within that context...it's history lesson + journalism wrapped into one.
Rather than figuring out why individual scientific stories do not make sense to the public, and leave no imprint on the readers mind like a flash flood in the desert...as opposed to a flood on a grassy plain which has ample soil and plants to soak up the water, we should simple ask whether the popular common understanding of science in our culture is good enough to handle the information coming its way, or not.
A complex system like the earth's climate cannot be modelled by simple extrapolation, since it has both negative *and positive* feedbacks. This means that--without knowing anything else about the earth itself--we should expect that the climate will exhibit a hysteris effect, whereby we have to cross a higher-than-predicted threshold of CO2 levels before we trigger a change, but once we do, the new climate state will be stable and nothing will bring it back to the way it was before.
What would one such state look like? Well, if it includes the greening of the Sahara and the world's deserts, along with glaciers over Europe or something, then that would not be the extinction of the human race, just a political and cultural nightmare.
Once this new state is obtained, the old state of climate would not return even if we reduced CO2 levels in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. There would have to be a major shock to the system to reverse the effects. The whole climate debate is centered around linear or exponential projections of average temperature based on CO2 levels, but they fail to take the self-regulating nature of the earth as a complex system into account. All we have to do is figure out what the High energy state of the planet looks like is, and where the new deserts will be, and what the habital zones will look like without getting into the boundary conditions (which may include flooding, droughts and what not.) There is almost a sadistic tendency in the popular press to assume that warming will be uniform all over the world: so Africa will get hotter and drier, while Europe will become balmier and wetter. One thing they don't acknowledge is that if the average temperature rises, the energy in the atmosphere rises, and temperature variances will increase--both extremes of cold and heat, with the overall average facing only a minor adjustment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the eye that's a cliche, it's showing a bit of ankle.
The eyes are always visible anyways.
Every culture has it's boundaries, and men get excited when women cross those boundaries. Remember when Sharon Stone crossed her legs in Basic Instinct, and flashed a bit of hair?
A bit of hair...anything will do the trick for some men, as long as it comes from a woman.
The year 1000, more or less. The father of optics, Ibn al Haitham, wrote "The book of optics" in Cairo, Egypt around then. Newton would have certainly known about him.
Haitham was one of the greatest physicists of medieval times. He was one of the pioneers of the scientific method. One of his discoveries was the concept of momentum, and he knew about acceleration due to gravity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham
To get rid of solar wind effects, they could put it on the surface of the Moon?
They would have to blast a huge conical crater to hold the camera and shroud the light though.
Maybe that's what that large circular depression on the side of the death star was...a telescope. We couldn't see the foil in front of it, since the holes made it translucent. It also doubled as a blaster that combined the several laser beams into one, which was used to destroy planets. Perhaps the foil played a role in that, since incident lasers do not just combine into one in free space.
I remember Eddington writing in one essay that if a book was sitting on the table, and all the atoms of the table suddenly started vibrating in the vertical plane, then the book would fly off and hit the ceiling.
So to make a new compact energy source, all you *really* have to do is... break the 2nd law of thermodynamics in one direction, for a small percentage of the atoms, in a small region around your feet.
Actually, if you had 1 coloumb of +charge, and set it 1m apart from a similar ball of -charge, the force of attraction between them would be enough to lift the earth. 1 coloumb of charge could fit into the size of a baseball. Separating the charges from their equilibrium (inside atoms) would be difficult though.
Muskets were simpler than bolt action rifles.
Bolt action rifles were simpler than automatic weapons and so on... Yes, but killing someone with a musket is easier than killing them with a sword
Killing someone with a rifle...
Concomitant to killing your enemy easier, each new weapon also increased the odds of your own survival.
Ease of use is only secondary on the battlefield. Winning is everything, along with survival.
You stupid nerds! It's a server, it's meant to generate and stream ogg files, not to play them.! ;)
GPS can be accurate to less than a centimeter, if you track the carrier phase and use that in your measurements.
However it is tough to get absolute accuracy at that level, but you can with differential positioning i.e. if you calibrate yourself first (walk to a marker with a known position), and then walk around within a certain radius.
The main reason is because at 3000 hp, an electrical drive system is easier to build than a mechanical transmission.
It's not a prius. The Tesla does not have an IC engine. Only batteries.
He got his geography wrong. Butterflies in Brazil do not lead to hurricanes in Texas. As you can see on this graphic on this page, there is practically no hurricane activity in the South Atlantic.
Most hurricanes that would hit Texas all originate as storms over West Africa.
I wonder why Lorenz didn't use Africa in the title of his paper instead of Brazil.
The amount of information they can store is still limited by the Shannon Hartley theorem, and depends on the SNR of the underlying medium among other things.
Once they add more than the channel capacity, it will be impossible to get a 0 BER using any error correcting methods.
It was a stone age potentate building a 50 ton astronomical calculator, from 19th century BC plans of an eccentric Englishmen.
It never had to work, it just had to be impressive.
Some nations never change. The English will always have their eccentrics. God I love them.
Actually you could get sound. The solar wind carries a slightly-dense plasma outwards from the sun, and this gets affected by all solar disturbances on the surface. So the disturbances in this medium, basically a series of compressions/rarefactions will get transmitted to the earth.
So, a few days after the solar event, the "sound" should reach us, and register as disuptions of the earth's magnetosphere. We will be able to perceive this through increased auroral activity, larger numbers of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere, higher DNA mutation rates, cell-phone and satellite signal strength reduction and DRAM errors.
Coincidentally, the guy who works beside me just came back from Churchill, Manitoba where he was monitoring ionospheric conditions for his PhD. He noticed there were aurorae every single day he was there.
Remember, what is called "sound" is only the vibrations between 20 and 20000Hz. Anything below 20Hz is called infrasound, and anything far below about 0.01 Hz is called "weather." The sunspot will surely affect space weather, but whether there is a high frequency sound it emits as well, is something only a space probe far above the magnetosphere could tell us.
In common usage, threading usually implies different "streams" of execution doing independent things, at the same time. If the same function is executing in n different threads then you might call it "parallel" programming. A lot of multithreaded programming involves taking pieces of program functionality and breaking them out into separate threads, each executing independently.
Calling the latter architecture parallel computing is misnomer, it is really "simultaneous" computing i.e. things can happen at the same time, but there is a big difference between the same thread executing n times in parallel, and different threads doing different things simultaneously.
For example, a "Trivial" program which reads in a list of numbers from a file, computes something (say the sum of the magnitudes squared), and prints the result out to the screen might be implemented as follows:
while not eof
read n numbers
compute something from them
print result
a multithreaded version might look something like this
Thread 1 (Disk IO): read n number from disk, write them to a queue/shared memory, repeat
Thread 2 (Outputting): wait for outputs to become available, print them, repeat
Thread 3 (Compute): wait for inputs to arrive in a queue, process them, write output to another queue, repeat
A parallel version would just have more than 1 Compute thread, and they would subdivide the work between them (for example 2 threads dividing the input array into stripes, one handling even indices, the other odd...or a bunch of threads computing different slices of the array). Note that the threads would still have to combine their results at the end of the computation, and that is not always simple to do in parallel.
Some problems or algorithms simply cannot execute in parallel. Also issues of memory access patterns, caching, branch divergence (if they threads take different code paths will this affect performance) come into play. It requires a whole new set of issues to worry about, but they are not too difficult. As the professor who teaches the course http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece498/al1/ says, learning parallel programming is not hard, he could teach it to you in 2 hours. But doing parallel programming well and efficiently is difficult. You can write a trivial parallel program which uses just 1 processor and has just 1 thread, which is identical to the sequential version, and it will work logically, although the performance will be severely limited. You can then extend it to use n threads, and it will experience a speedup. But to take full advantage of the hardware on your board, you will need to know a few tricks, and understand the hardware and your program's behavior intimately.
Another issue is that programmers were spoiled by processor upgrades coming along and speeding up their programs "for free" by virtue of their higher clock speed. Now with clock speeds reaching physical limits, the only evolution in new processors will be in the number of cores they have. So the only way to coax more out of a program will be to make it more parallel, and that might be trivial or it might be difficult. We're going to have to think laterally to get more performance out of software.
Unfortunately, due to the passage of time, the voice on the recording sounded petulant, high-pitched, and whiny. Speculation is that this was due to nonlinear degradation of the recording medium itself.
Just last week the University of Calgary announced they would no longer accept tuition payments by credit card.
http://gauntlet.ucalgary.ca/story/12288
Apparently $1,000,000 in credit card processing fees is too much for the top school in a province awash with oil and gas money.
Perhaps the forward-thinking university administrators read the 2008 forecast and decided to revolt against "the future."
The response to hard drive noise depends on what you are doing at the time. If you are focused on something, HD noise will simply be distracting, or irritating. If you are trying to meditate or establish peace and quiet, then HD noise is an invasion in your space and is therefore pollution, although a better term would be "unwanted noise."
It's not just the amplitude of the noise, it's the irregular and dissonant pattern of it too. It cannot be predicted, therefore the brain automatically get's busy trying to find a pattern to it, and this lack of predictability in your environment puts people on edge.
If the noise was even louder--but more consistent, it would actually sound pleasant, like a waterfall. It's the fact that it has no large-scale structure in the pattern of clicks which makes it unpleasant for people to listen to.
Hasan
So will the algorithm try to maximize the annoyance caused by the commercial, or minimize it?
You can get the pictures, but the moment you look at the screen, the cat dies.
Assuming of course, that your hardware and OS do not mind if bytes are stored on disk as 1s, 0s, 1s OR 0s, and 1s AND 0s.
Hasan
Sorry the second scheme I mentioned should read high-bandwidth/high-latency.
High-bw/low latency is what flash offers today, and is something hard disk makers can only dream about.
As far as I know, hard drives encode data on the disk using simple binary waveforms. Communication systems are designed to use elaborate modulation schemes, and employ digital coding methods which make much more efficient use of the communication channel.
Hard drive makers could do something similar, like spreading the data over a number of physical bits on the disk (such as CDMA does.) Essentially, they would not be limited by the density of the data on the disk, but by the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the magnetic medium, which I imagine is very high.
Taking this idea furthur, they could bifurcate their encoding methods into 2: a low latency one that retains the characteristics of existing drives, and a high-bandwidth-low-latency scheme which uses digital coding methods to spread each block of data over an entire cylinder for example, and has requires reading the whole cylinder to retrieve a single bit. This would be useful for storing video and large image data, which is retrieved linearly and usually buffered too, and does not require low-latency access the way normal files on a filesystem do.
Hybrid schemes are always better than simple implementations, if they provide a closer fit to reality.
I agree with your description of the process wholeheartedly, but you're forgetting something. The division of the world into an in-group and an out-group is a basic definition of what life itself is.
ANY organism must have an interior (i.e. "itself") and the external environment, plus a means of selective separation between them (a cell membrane, our skin and digestive systems for example). The living organism expends energy to maintain a low-entropy region on the inside, and increases the entropy of the environment outside itself.
So what you are describring is the process of wikipedia turning itself into a living organism. A few people on the inside, a lot more on the outside. Or in other words, wikipedia is incorporating (i.e. becoming a body, incorporate comes from the Latin "corpus" which means body.) Wikipedia is coming alive, and a few people find themselves on the outside. The secret communication is necessary to reduce the confusion and disagreements among the people on the inside, i.e. letting them maintain a simpler view of the world than the disjointed and fragmented perspective of the people outside. That's low entropy for the insiders.
What the outsiders should do is incorporate themselves, and them compete with the inner circle, and everyone should specialize. It doesn't matter how small the initial groups are, they will fill up as more people join.
The reason why it seems impossible to explain science to the public is because every good piece of writing needs to be addressed to some audience, i.e. one cannot "communicate" objectively with a person who does not share the same context as you do. Writing must be matched to the audience being addressed, but we take this shared background knowledge for granted most of the time.
Most of the public has a very simple conception of the natural world, and this is where the problem lies. They do not have a sufficiently complex understanding of the context in which scientific work is being undertaken. This is why scientific journalism has to first help the reader understand the context in which the discovery is being made, after which it has to show them where the discovery fits within that context...it's history lesson + journalism wrapped into one.
Rather than figuring out why individual scientific stories do not make sense to the public, and leave no imprint on the readers mind like a flash flood in the desert...as opposed to a flood on a grassy plain which has ample soil and plants to soak up the water, we should simple ask whether the popular common understanding of science in our culture is good enough to handle the information coming its way, or not.
What is the sounds of one hand clapping?
What is the sound of a DC field causing oscillations?
It is one and the same thing.
A complex system like the earth's climate cannot be modelled by simple extrapolation, since it has both negative *and positive* feedbacks. This means that--without knowing anything else about the earth itself--we should expect that the climate will exhibit a hysteris effect, whereby we have to cross a higher-than-predicted threshold of CO2 levels before we trigger a change, but once we do, the new climate state will be stable and nothing will bring it back to the way it was before.
What would one such state look like? Well, if it includes the greening of the Sahara and the world's deserts, along with glaciers over Europe or something, then that would not be the extinction of the human race, just a political and cultural nightmare.
Once this new state is obtained, the old state of climate would not return even if we reduced CO2 levels in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. There would have to be a major shock to the system to reverse the effects. The whole climate debate is centered around linear or exponential projections of average temperature based on CO2 levels, but they fail to take the self-regulating nature of the earth as a complex system into account. All we have to do is figure out what the High energy state of the planet looks like is, and where the new deserts will be, and what the habital zones will look like without getting into the boundary conditions (which may include flooding, droughts and what not.) There is almost a sadistic tendency in the popular press to assume that warming will be uniform all over the world: so Africa will get hotter and drier, while Europe will become balmier and wetter. One thing they don't acknowledge is that if the average temperature rises, the energy in the atmosphere rises, and temperature variances will increase--both extremes of cold and heat, with the overall average facing only a minor adjustment.