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User: martiojd

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  1. Re:People who like this kind of thing... on Traversing the "Googlearchy" · · Score: 1
    It reminds me of the quote (not sure the origin): People who like this kind of thing will find that this is the kind of thing that they like.

    Well out of all the places where you can find out who wrote this... Google!!
    According to the quotations page it was written by Abraham Lincoln in a book review (I wonder which book that was). They give the precise quote as "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like".

  2. Re:name change? on Poincare Conjecture Proof Completed · · Score: 1
    Things that are proven, are called theorems.

    Thanks for clarifying this, though you answer a different question than the one that was asked. The guy is confusing 'theorem' and 'theory', but I think this is simply due to the fact that the words kind of sound the same in certain people's mouth. When I used to teach in English, my students would often talk about the 'Pythagorean theory'...
    It's kind of similar to the frequent confusion between 'principal' and 'principle', etc.

  3. Re:Disagree - Damned /. newbies on Open Source Alternative for Skype · · Score: 1

    Oops, posted this message in the wrong place, meant it as a reply yo 'The real power of Skype'...

  4. Re:Disagree on Open Source Alternative for Skype · · Score: 1

    Well have you had any luck using SkypeOut? For 3/4 of the calls I tried, the people on the phone couldn't hear me. Even when they did hear me, the quality of sound and the delay were just awful. I now have a big SkypeOut credit I'm probably never going to use (the usual PC to PC works fantastically well though).

  5. The idea of extra dimensions is... on Evidence of 6 Dimensions or More? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... not new! String theory has been around for decades (Kaluza-Klein theory dates back to about 1920). For all my time in grad school, about four years ago, the fashionable space-time had dimension 10, 4 for "usual" space time plus 6 for a tiny little compact Calabi-Yau threefold (this is a complex manifold of dimension three, hence six real dimensions). Of course I was sitting around with algebraic geometers too much, and it might have just been a way to get the NSF to fund their projects by creating some applications for their abstract nonsense (time will tell...) One of my favorite memories from that time is a series of lectures given by a colleague on the basics of string theory. She gave a heuristic derivation of the dimension of space time (that time the dimension was 11, I apologize if it sounds inconsistent). She wrote down the series of all integers (the sum of n, for n from -infinity to +infinity, n being an integer) and said it was equal to -1/23; she took a short pause, thinking... then apologized, she forgot to mention: one should take the sum over n being a NONZERO integer! From that day on I quit going to that seminar (shouldn't that sum be -1/... 42 anyway?)