High Def, huh? That's cool, but all you've gotta do for a high-def DVR is get the hd-3000
card (http://www.pchdtv.com/) , with Linux compatibility pretty much
off the box and a special vendor build of xine supplied that's
compatible with high def, and then build a mythtv box
& you are good to go.
you might change your mind. Plus, multithreading using OpenMP
(http://www.openmp.org/ is relatively easy. Message Passing (MPI) is
trickier, but much more powerful.
I'm just running a proggie on the champion grid (above)
that's using just about all 96 cpus off-and-on for 3 days straight
(Floquet time evolution of a 2-boson interacting system). On a single
cpu system it would've taken months to make just one run.
[quote]
Uhmmm I am not sure
which world you live in, not the same one as me.
I have lived in both Australia and the UK over the last 10 years and
from what I see our governments may be all chummy with America but the
majority of the population in these countries are not exactly happy
with the way America is stirring up the next world war.
[/quote]
If you look at the pew global stats (which a parent or
grandparent had posted in this thread), you will see that 71% of
India's population supports America and her War on Terror. I can't help
it if Europeans are ingrates.
[quote]
Any country
that can with a straight face say you can't have what we have got or we
will invade/bomb you cannot expect to be liked.
[/quote]
The Americans may be arrogant assholes, but damn it they have
a LOT to be arrogant assholes about!
This was the first truly modern democracy in the world.
This was a country that rescued you Europeans from surviving by giving
blow jobs to Wehrermacht soldiers in WW-II.
America has been a great supporter of Israel, and have defended the
country against Islamofascist aggression. All the while the useless
United Napunsaks turned against the Jewish State and spread lies about
it and secretly funded terrorists in the West Bank.
I may not always agree with what they are doing in the name
of democracy, but at least they are doing something. Because of
Americans, the terrorists are confined in shitholes like Iraq and Iran
and the desert which nobody cares about really.
What are you Poms and Aussies doing? Oh yeah, NOTHING!!! Only
rising Neo-Nazism and islamofascist sympathy in your countries. "White
Australia" and the British division of the KKK are on the rise. These
buggers love bin-Laden and the Islamists more than the Islamists
themselves.
[quote]
fewer arrogant individuals such as yourself who believe in the undying
glory of your country this would be different
[/quote]
1. I'm not an American.
2. I'm an Indian Hindu. I proudly voted for the BJP/RSS alliance in
every election since I was of voting age.
3. I have no animosity, hatred or mistrust towards the United
States or the conservative republican party. I can criticize some of
their ideologies and actions, but not to the point of mania.
4. We have been dealing with the terrorist burden in our own soil
(Maoists in the mainland, Islamic militants like JKLF, Lashkar-e-Toiba,
Jamat-al-Mujahiddeen etc. in J&K) for a long time and thinking
people (not the fucked up commie scum of the U.P.A. government
presently raping our country and giving in to the terrorists' demands
whenever they muck about, fucking communist cowards...) fully
sympathize with America's overall reaction to the terrorists. These
terrorists are barbaric savage swine and ruthless thugs who hate
America, Israel, India and the entire cvilized modern world and none of
our societies will survive their onslaught unless we are EQUALLY
ruthless to them. The republicans get that. The American "Democrats",
with their mindless Orwellian duckspeaker propaganda, are more
interested in catering to "political correctedness" and other such
rubbish than defending their rightful homeland.
5. The Liberal "Democrat" (read communist) party that has been running
things in the US have had more cock-ups wrt foreign relations than the
republicans.
6. Leftists in America (particularly in Academia) have carried out more
acts of Racism, (new) Anti-Semetism, and Hinduphobia in the US than
moderate republican politicians in recent years, despite what you may
see on television.
6. The Liberal socialists own the US media, the US academia, and thus
any statistical data from biased sources are suspect.
In conclusion, don't think "published" data says anything
reliable. American efforts in combating terrorism are appreciated by
many non-Americans.
Anything that the Americans may have done in Afghanistan,
Iraq, or wherever, including the overhyped Abu-Ghraib and Gitmo-bay
stuff (which supposedly are the reasons why America is so 'unpopular'),
is preferable to the civilized world being overrun by terrorists.
What the hell gives you the right to speak for the "Rest of the World"? Do you know how everybody in the world thinks? There are many outside America who support American troops against the bloody terrorist swine that threaten to wipe out all unbelievers. Only a new-age European hippie would be crazy enough to think that his dogmatic narrow arrogant anti-American view would be accepted by "the world". "The world" doesn't hate The United States, only the enemies of the world hate the United States (which is more of a pluralist and multicultural nation than the racist skinheads in Ukraine, the Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists in England, the anti-semites in France, or the ISKON murderers in Russia). Why don't you take the Liberal idiots in America that give the country such a bad name and stuff them in your wretched chilly continent? Like begets like, right?
I was at a seminar by an APS (American Physical Society)
editing committee guy once, and he said that certain typesets render
better on their mass printing systems than others (we are talking a
worldwide distribution numbering in the hundreds of thousands), so they
have been known to reject latex submissions with unnecessarily long or
redundant typesettings (like people who use lots of $$ $$ instead of
eqnarray{} and so on). He did not provide details.
Don't look at me. He said so. Usually, they try to make the
changes themselves. However, for very long papers (review articles etc)
they don't bother, they just send 'em back until the author(s) fix them.
I wrote my first paper in Lyx, converted it to Latex and
submitted it
to elsevier science in 1999. The rendering into dvi and postscript was fine . They sent it back,
saying that the
latex 'formatting' was poor and I had to do it 'better'. I took it to
my
research group secretary and he said the latex has to be much cleaner
(I was only an undergrad back then and was new to latex). He re-edited
the typesets and made it render the same content in the same way only
the source was much cleaner and
more organized (properly tabulated figures according to global
templates, instead of what Lyx does, which is just \includegraphics
followed by lots of \hspace* \vspace* for indentation).
Of course, bear in mind that this was way back in 1999. I
haven't used Lyx since, preferring to stick to original latex. I dunno
if the latex export thingie in Lyx has improved or not. It's not a big
deal for me anymore since I have a lot of predefined stuff in latex for
my papers and just recycle those.
The problem with Lyx is that it's basically a frontend for
latex, which is a frontend for Tex.
Too many frontends. The markup elegance gets lost somewhere.
You'll have to convert Lyx to latex before sending it to some journals,
and the conversion is horrible, and a mess for mass printing (using
\overrightarrow instead of \vec and so forth).
Get kile (Latex frontend for KDE) from http://kile.sourceforge.net/ . It's latex rendering is clean, and you can look up latex markups from the menus (instead of having to break out Leslie Lamport's book every time you forget how to include well-indented graphics or whatever).
FYI, in legal jargon, things that are "just wrong" are called "malum
in-se", and things that are illegal but not necessarily wrong are
called "malum prohibitum". It's from English common law, or something.
That is the most singularly insightful thing I have ever heard about
al-qaeda in an internet forum. Bravo!
Their being terrorists is not what makes them so bloody dangerous. What
makes them so bloody dangerous is that they are SMART terrorists. They
use the internet as a propaganda tool to portray themselves as
"Romantic Desperadoes" trying to rid the world of poverty, disease,
crime, secularists, socialists etc. Then they subtly change that to
"America, Canada, Britain, Spain, Israel, India, China, Jews,
Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Freedom of women, etc. ".
They create the muslim version of the concept that it's "cool to die
for Allah" and butcher people like cattle on television.
They are a lot like drug pushers that way, slithering their way into
the minds of impressionable teenagers in the Muslim world and
converting them into suicide bombers.
Wasn't there an article on slashdot some days ago about an
al-qaeda black hat hacker who got caught?
Why don't racists have the guts to speak their views in public instead of posting as AC's in slashdot forums? Sorry about the offtopic, I just got sick of all the pointless rubbish from fringe nutcases on slashdor (thankfully a minority here).
>For a game, the best way to solve ODEs is numerically. Since
you don't
need the >precision of the exact solution, the solutions are
considerably simpler >computationally once you've linearized
them. Doing
RK4 on the fly is precisely >the best solution to the problem.
While RK4 is a good general purpose integrator, it's better to use
embedded methods that will speed up the runtime due to adaptive
stepsizing.
Also, I would speculate that most games might involve
functions that evolve with a steady stiffness. For such methods, it's
faster better to do a Jacobian based Rosenbrock Method (Kaps Wanner
basically) on large intervals and then do a Bulirsch-Stoer rational
extrpolation.
I can't find any good references to this online, but I'm just
parrotting Numerical Recipes Chapter 16.
>solving
a linearized ODE is just plain ol' ordinary matrix math, very
>parallelizeable
Well linearization will only work well near a fixed point of the phase space.
Generic ODEs are not as simple to parallelize it as one may think. Data parallelization is
trivial (provided your libraries/subroutines are thread-safe). However,
really solid function parallelization of the integration of a
particular set of IC's across one time interval is very difficult as a
differential equation evolves causally through time. Thus, in order to
know what's what at time T, you'll need to know all the values at
earlier times t<T so a parallel thread has to wait for those
other parallel threads to finish, making it pointless.
What you CAN do of course is parallelize the step
incrementation process itself, however you run into the same problem
during the calculation of each term in a particular RK step increment.
If you look at the formulae
(http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Runge-KuttaMethod.ht ml)
You need k1 to calculate k2, k2 to calculate k3 & so
on. Thus, the k2 calculating thread has to wait for the k1 thread to
finish etc etc.
So I don't think parallelizing this will help much.
I'll admit that I have never done any functional parallelization of
ODE's myself, as I use GSL/numerical recipes that are not multithreaded
(though thread-safe) , so I do not have any first hand info on how much
it's going to speed up the program.
There has been some talk of parallelizing GSL itself
>I wouldn't bet on your statement. Look at the
Alcubierre metric. The
>Alcubierre metric essentially warps spacetime around a ship so
that
while the >ship is not traveling at a velocity greater than the
speed of
light locally, it is >traveling at a speed greather than that of
light
to someone outside the >spacetime (i.e. you on Earth).
Sorry, but it just goes to show that a little knowledge is a
dangerous thing. The Alcubierre metric does not satisfy Einstein's
Field equations.
Anyone who reads Stephen Baxter can claim to build a fancy metric by
dump ing exotic matter into it or whatever. That doesn't mean existing
physical paradigms allow for it.
In quantum field theory, acausal events do happen (in the sense of
particles interacting with their own past selves). The reason why this
is possible is because of the indeterminacy of all the degrees of
freedom in QM. If interacting with the electron's earlier self creates
a Green's Function that's more spread out over a particular degree of
freedom, that is allowed. It does not produce a "paradox", because
physical quantities can't be determined to arbitrary precision anyway,
and quantum theory takes care of that.
These indeterminacies, however, will average out in the
classical world (because these occur in the scale of hbar, which is
very very small, like 10^-34).
In the classical world, acausal events cannot happen over classical
length scales because hbar is practically zero now, and all
indeterminacies vanish.
>Now granted, we don't have FTL travel yet. But I think
there's a
good chance >we'll figure it out eventually.
Yeah, well. Don't hold your breath. People who try to do science based
on Star Trek reruns invariable fail.
Sure it is. It's called "Proof by counterexample". His implicit claim was:
"Following through on all exotic crackpot theories will accelerate the progress of science" and inversely, not doing so will impede it badly.
I showed by counterexample that the inverse is not true.Of course, that means that the original statement may or may not be true, but on that issue I'm providing a managerial argument, not a simple logical one.
>People are effectively banned because of doing
research in "unserious" fields. I >don't even mean stuff like
perpetuum
mobiles - take electrogravity as an >example. Anyone theorizing
with
electricity/gravity connections and usage of>his
connection is viewed
as a crackpot and "ruined his reputation". Mind you, >this is
JUST for
toying with such theories, not even remotely considering
>attempts at
getting money for experiment.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'electrogravity'. If you mean
an attempt to unify the 4 forces (electromagnetism & gravity)
then I don't think you understand the situation, since many string
theorists & quantum gravity people are constantly working on
trying to unify them.
>This
is something I really dont like; scientists with ruined reputation
equal >banned heretics.
That happens sometimes. This is true. It just shows that science is a
profession like any other, and works like a real world machine that has
a few flaws, but we muddle along regardless. I think the remarkable
progress that has taken place in physics over the last 50 years negates
your position that such things impede scientific research in general.
>One should
be banned when the great free-energy device X will be ready in
>two
years and you can preorder it now, or because the entire work was a
hoax >(like that Hwang guy did), not because one said that "it
might be
possible that >ABC is possible, I'm quite skeptical though, I'm
looking
into this".
People who put it forth like that are almost never "banned"
or have their reputations fscked up in modern academia. The problem is
that crackpots who tout crackpot theories almost invariably go from
drawing board stage to infomercial stage in a few days. Crackpots think
that they are right, and everybody else is wrong. It's people like that
who are ignored.
>The problem is: with this thinking you kill off many
breakthroughs.
That is possible, but the risk isn't worth it. Look at the
statistics. Let's say, there are 9 crackpot theories cooked up every
year. Each will cost several million dollars in research. Money that
legit researchers will not get. Even if one crackpot theory turns out
to be right, the knowledge lost to us from the regular research that
will not happen is greater.
Compare that to the senario where the 9 crackpot theories are
axed and money invested in legit research. We may lose some knowledge.
However, the academia grows, and in the future that crackpot theory (If
correct) should make it to the mainstream. If there is one thing that
science tells us is that the truth always prevails in the end. So, it
is better to invest in things we know will work out well right now and
incrementally add to the knowledge pool.
No,no. It's far batter to progress in steady and stable baby steps than
in glamorous bouts of insane ones.
I think you have a rather silly and romantic view of how real
science works. It's almost never about some pointy-haired lab coated
mad scientist who is ridiculed by everybody who performs a great
experiment using spit and bailing wire and proves the whole world
wrong. Usually it's about using well established methodologies and
existing models to advance knowledge, occasionally with a conceptual
revolution that changes those models.
Bear in mind that Physics has gone through THREE such revolutions in
the twentieth century (relativity, quantum mechanics, standard model of
elementary particles/partial unification of the fundamental forces)
withoutdiverting from this methodology.
>Remember
that theories are just models. Now if by any chance one model is
>false,
and a guy thinks he can prove it AND fix it, he won't get any support
>because the established model doesn't predict his claims. To
prove his
claims, >he might need some pretty expensive equipment, with the
NSF
has, for example.
FYI, the National Science Foundation does not provide
equipment, only money. Equipment is either made in a lab or bought from
manufacturers.
Anywho, most theories that are readily flawed have already
shown to be flawed and adequately debunked (in physics anyways). It's
highly unlikely that some village savant from Tenessee will come up
with a miraculous homebrewn apparatus that will suddenly defy the
existing models of physical phenomena and magically open a wormhole to
Narnia or Middle Earth or wherever. That's just foolish romanticism and belongs in the fantasies cooked up by Hollywierd.
>Sometimes even the false and impossible ideas are what work.
Consider
that >nearly all of society at one time knew that the universe
rotated
around Earth. In >fact, to preach otherwise was a death sentence.
There is a big difference between condemning free thought
through religious mania and debunking a hare-brained idea that a
college freshman can easily prove to be false (the pursuit of
which wastes tax dollars that can be used to feed hungry people).
FTL is not bunk because gawd/allah/odin/yahweh/ram said so. FTL is bunk
because it ameaningless state in a classical timelike metric. I won't burn you at the stake for trying to work on FTL. However, I will write a sternly worded letter to the NSF recommending that they don't give you any money for it.
>Now adays, we have cold Fusion
What?!?!?!?! Where? Nobody in the legit academia has produced "cold
fusion" (because it's also meaningless). What they have done is achieve
"table-top fusion", which is to concentrate high energies in subatomic
length scales to create fusion. It's not the same thing as cold fusion.
To say so is merely a ploy to get media attention by using zeitgeist
buzzwords.
Slashdot Mirror
High Def, huh? That's cool, but all you've gotta do for a high-def DVR is get the hd-3000 card (http://www.pchdtv.com/) , with Linux compatibility pretty much off the box and a special vendor build of xine supplied that's compatible with high def, and then build a mythtv box & you are good to go.
c _id=11 c _id=10
http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/album_page.php?pi
http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/album_page.php?pi
Easy as pie (well, not really, but if you use something like knoppmyth from http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html in your dedicated box, or follow Jarod's Howto for Fedora on http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ , it isn't too difficult.)
Maybe if you were using kick-ass parallel grids like the ones I am for my simulations:
n estar/ a mpion/
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/services/userguides/lo
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/services/userguides/ch
you might change your mind. Plus, multithreading using OpenMP (http://www.openmp.org/ is relatively easy. Message Passing (MPI) is trickier, but much more powerful.
I'm just running a proggie on the champion grid (above) that's using just about all 96 cpus off-and-on for 3 days straight (Floquet time evolution of a 2-boson interacting system). On a single cpu system it would've taken months to make just one run.
[quote]
Uhmmm I am not sure which world you live in, not the same one as me. I have lived in both Australia and the UK over the last 10 years and from what I see our governments may be all chummy with America but the majority of the population in these countries are not exactly happy with the way America is stirring up the next world war.
[/quote]
If you look at the pew global stats (which a parent or grandparent had posted in this thread), you will see that 71% of India's population supports America and her War on Terror. I can't help it if Europeans are ingrates.
[quote]
Any country that can with a straight face say you can't have what we have got or we will invade/bomb you cannot expect to be liked.
[/quote]
The Americans may be arrogant assholes, but damn it they have a LOT to be arrogant assholes about!
This was the first truly modern democracy in the world.
This was a country that rescued you Europeans from surviving by giving blow jobs to Wehrermacht soldiers in WW-II.
America has been a great supporter of Israel, and have defended the country against Islamofascist aggression. All the while the useless United Napunsaks turned against the Jewish State and spread lies about it and secretly funded terrorists in the West Bank.
I may not always agree with what they are doing in the name of democracy, but at least they are doing something. Because of Americans, the terrorists are confined in shitholes like Iraq and Iran and the desert which nobody cares about really.
What are you Poms and Aussies doing? Oh yeah, NOTHING!!! Only rising Neo-Nazism and islamofascist sympathy in your countries. "White Australia" and the British division of the KKK are on the rise. These buggers love bin-Laden and the Islamists more than the Islamists themselves.
[quote]
fewer arrogant individuals such as yourself who believe in the undying glory of your country this would be different
[/quote]
1. I'm not an American.
2. I'm an Indian Hindu. I proudly voted for the BJP/RSS alliance in every election since I was of voting age.
3. I have no animosity, hatred or mistrust towards the United States or the conservative republican party. I can criticize some of their ideologies and actions, but not to the point of mania.
4. We have been dealing with the terrorist burden in our own soil (Maoists in the mainland, Islamic militants like JKLF, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jamat-al-Mujahiddeen etc. in J&K) for a long time and thinking people (not the fucked up commie scum of the U.P.A. government presently raping our country and giving in to the terrorists' demands whenever they muck about, fucking communist cowards...) fully sympathize with America's overall reaction to the terrorists. These terrorists are barbaric savage swine and ruthless thugs who hate America, Israel, India and the entire cvilized modern world and none of our societies will survive their onslaught unless we are EQUALLY ruthless to them. The republicans get that. The American "Democrats", with their mindless Orwellian duckspeaker propaganda, are more interested in catering to "political correctedness" and other such rubbish than defending their rightful homeland.
5. The Liberal "Democrat" (read communist) party that has been running things in the US have had more cock-ups wrt foreign relations than the republicans.
6. Leftists in America (particularly in Academia) have carried out more acts of Racism, (new) Anti-Semetism, and Hinduphobia in the US than moderate republican politicians in recent years, despite what you may see on television.
6. The Liberal socialists own the US media, the US academia, and thus any statistical data from biased sources are suspect.
In conclusion, don't think "published" data says anything reliable. American efforts in combating terrorism are appreciated by many non-Americans.
Anything that the Americans may have done in Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever, including the overhyped Abu-Ghraib and Gitmo-bay stuff (which supposedly are the reasons why America is so 'unpopular'), is preferable to the civilized world being overrun by terrorists.
What the hell gives you the right to speak for the "Rest of the World"? Do you know how everybody in the world thinks? There are many outside America who support American troops against the bloody terrorist swine that threaten to wipe out all unbelievers. Only a new-age European hippie would be crazy enough to think that his dogmatic narrow arrogant anti-American view would be accepted by "the world". "The world" doesn't hate The United States, only the enemies of the world hate the United States (which is more of a pluralist and multicultural nation than the racist skinheads in Ukraine, the Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists in England, the anti-semites in France, or the ISKON murderers in Russia). Why don't you take the Liberal idiots in America that give the country such a bad name and stuff them in your wretched chilly continent? Like begets like, right?
Now that I have a chance to painlessly dip into the Windows world, what I'd like to ask you is, what Windows software amazes you?
http://osswin.sourceforge.net/
http://www.theopencd.org/
http://osscd.sunsite.dk/
http://www.winlibre.com/en/index.php
Enjoy.
Well, let me elaborate.
I was at a seminar by an APS (American Physical Society) editing committee guy once, and he said that certain typesets render better on their mass printing systems than others (we are talking a worldwide distribution numbering in the hundreds of thousands), so they have been known to reject latex submissions with unnecessarily long or redundant typesettings (like people who use lots of $$ $$ instead of eqnarray{} and so on). He did not provide details.
Don't look at me. He said so. Usually, they try to make the changes themselves. However, for very long papers (review articles etc) they don't bother, they just send 'em back until the author(s) fix them.
I wrote my first paper in Lyx, converted it to Latex and submitted it to elsevier science in 1999. The rendering into dvi and postscript was fine . They sent it back, saying that the latex 'formatting' was poor and I had to do it 'better'. I took it to my research group secretary and he said the latex has to be much cleaner (I was only an undergrad back then and was new to latex). He re-edited the typesets and made it render the same content in the same way only the source was much cleaner and more organized (properly tabulated figures according to global templates, instead of what Lyx does, which is just \includegraphics followed by lots of \hspace* \vspace* for indentation).
Of course, bear in mind that this was way back in 1999. I haven't used Lyx since, preferring to stick to original latex. I dunno if the latex export thingie in Lyx has improved or not. It's not a big deal for me anymore since I have a lot of predefined stuff in latex for my papers and just recycle those.
It was a bad JOKE! Not ad-hominem flamebait!
The problem with Lyx is that it's basically a frontend for latex, which is a frontend for Tex.
Too many frontends. The markup elegance gets lost somewhere. You'll have to convert Lyx to latex before sending it to some journals, and the conversion is horrible, and a mess for mass printing (using \overrightarrow instead of \vec and so forth).
Better to stick to a simple environment for latex, like kile (http://kile.sourceforge.net./ Worked for me so far.
Get kile (Latex frontend for KDE) from http://kile.sourceforge.net/ . It's latex rendering is clean, and you can look up latex markups from the menus (instead of having to break out Leslie Lamport's book every time you forget how to include well-indented graphics or whatever).
For even faster caching (on linux), Do this:
/etc/fstab:
/mnt/ramdisk tmpfs defaults,gid=<whatever> 0 0
/mnt/ramdisk"
/ mnt/ramdisk");
Make a ramdisk by putting this line in
none
on shell prompt type "mount
Then, in the firefox user profile directory (typically ~/.mozilla/firefox/<arbitrary>), open the file user.js and add the line:
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory","
restart firefox
The cache loads in ramdisk, much faster that doing disk I/O for caching.
Also, it may be possible to do about:config in firefox and enter the new string
"browser.cache.disk.parent_directory"
and put the ramdisk path as the value.
The source of these lies is called "bullshit" for a reason, whitey.
FYI, in legal jargon, things that are "just wrong" are called "malum in-se", and things that are illegal but not necessarily wrong are called "malum prohibitum". It's from English common law, or something.
Just in case you get into an argument with a lawyer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malum_in_se
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malum_prohibitum
That is the most singularly insightful thing I have ever heard about al-qaeda in an internet forum. Bravo!
3 0206
Their being terrorists is not what makes them so bloody dangerous. What makes them so bloody dangerous is that they are SMART terrorists. They use the internet as a propaganda tool to portray themselves as "Romantic Desperadoes" trying to rid the world of poverty, disease, crime, secularists, socialists etc. Then they subtly change that to "America, Canada, Britain, Spain, Israel, India, China, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Freedom of women, etc. ".
They create the muslim version of the concept that it's "cool to die for Allah" and butcher people like cattle on television.
They are a lot like drug pushers that way, slithering their way into the minds of impressionable teenagers in the Muslim world and converting them into suicide bombers.
Wasn't there an article on slashdot some days ago about an al-qaeda black hat hacker who got caught?
Found it:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/26/05
Okay. You're a fruitcake.
To paraphrase the parent:
"ALALALALALALALALALALAIIIIII! Yeshu Christha! Yeshu Cristha! Kill all heathens!"
And this dangerous iealogue gets modded up. I'll bookmark this post for proof of nutjob groupthinking.
Why don't racists have the guts to speak their views in public instead of posting as AC's in slashdot forums? Sorry about the offtopic, I just got sick of all the pointless rubbish from fringe nutcases on slashdor (thankfully a minority here).
>For a game, the best way to solve ODEs is numerically. Since you don't need the >precision of the exact solution, the solutions are considerably simpler >computationally once you've linearized them. Doing RK4 on the fly is precisely >the best solution to the problem.
n
t ml)
.
u e_s_quintana/enrique_s_quintana.html
While RK4 is a good general purpose integrator, it's better to use embedded methods that will speed up the runtime due to adaptive stepsizing.
http://beige.ucs.indiana.edu/B673/node54.html
Also, I would speculate that most games might involve functions that evolve with a steady stiffness. For such methods, it's faster better to do a Jacobian based Rosenbrock Method (Kaps Wanner basically) on large intervals and then do a Bulirsch-Stoer rational extrpolation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_integratio
I can't find any good references to this online, but I'm just parrotting Numerical Recipes Chapter 16.
>solving a linearized ODE is just plain ol' ordinary matrix math, very >parallelizeable
Well linearization will only work well near a fixed point of the phase space. Generic ODEs are not as simple to parallelize it as one may think. Data parallelization is trivial (provided your libraries/subroutines are thread-safe). However, really solid function parallelization of the integration of a particular set of IC's across one time interval is very difficult as a differential equation evolves causally through time. Thus, in order to know what's what at time T, you'll need to know all the values at earlier times t<T so a parallel thread has to wait for those other parallel threads to finish, making it pointless.
What you CAN do of course is parallelize the step incrementation process itself, however you run into the same problem during the calculation of each term in a particular RK step increment. If you look at the formulae (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Runge-KuttaMethod.h
You need k1 to calculate k2, k2 to calculate k3 & so on. Thus, the k2 calculating thread has to wait for the k1 thread to finish etc etc.
So I don't think parallelizing this will help much.
I'll admit that I have never done any functional parallelization of ODE's myself, as I use GSL/numerical recipes that are not multithreaded (though thread-safe) , so I do not have any first hand info on how much it's going to speed up the program
There has been some talk of parallelizing GSL itself
( http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/~jw/para04/Abstracts/enriq
)
though again I don't know if there has been any concrete progress.
>>Paddy is short for Patrick
Tell that to "Pat" Robertson.
>I wouldn't bet on your statement. Look at the Alcubierre metric. The >Alcubierre metric essentially warps spacetime around a ship so that while the >ship is not traveling at a velocity greater than the speed of light locally, it is >traveling at a speed greather than that of light to someone outside the >spacetime (i.e. you on Earth).
Sorry, but it just goes to show that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The Alcubierre metric does not satisfy Einstein's Field equations.
Anyone who reads Stephen Baxter can claim to build a fancy metric by dump ing exotic matter into it or whatever. That doesn't mean existing physical paradigms allow for it.In quantum field theory, acausal events do happen (in the sense of particles interacting with their own past selves). The reason why this is possible is because of the indeterminacy of all the degrees of freedom in QM. If interacting with the electron's earlier self creates a Green's Function that's more spread out over a particular degree of freedom, that is allowed. It does not produce a "paradox", because physical quantities can't be determined to arbitrary precision anyway, and quantum theory takes care of that.
These indeterminacies, however, will average out in the classical world (because these occur in the scale of hbar, which is very very small, like 10^-34).
In the classical world, acausal events cannot happen over classical length scales because hbar is practically zero now, and all indeterminacies vanish.
>Now granted, we don't have FTL travel yet. But I think there's a good chance >we'll figure it out eventually.
Yeah, well. Don't hold your breath. People who try to do science based on Star Trek reruns invariable fail.
>It is impossible to show a negative
Sure it is. It's called "Proof by counterexample". His implicit claim was:
"Following through on all exotic crackpot theories will accelerate the progress of science" and inversely, not doing so will impede it badly.
I showed by counterexample that the inverse is not true.Of course, that means that the original statement may or may not be true, but on that issue I'm providing a managerial argument, not a simple logical one.
>Again. No one should spend one minute in jail for what they believe.
Tell that to Jawaharlal Nehru
"Great" Britain, "mother" of democracy.
Don't make me laugh!
>People are effectively banned because of doing research in "unserious" fields. I >don't even mean stuff like perpetuum mobiles - take electrogravity as an >example. Anyone theorizing with electricity/gravity connections and usage of>his connection is viewed as a crackpot and "ruined his reputation". Mind you, >this is JUST for toying with such theories, not even remotely considering >attempts at getting money for experiment.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'electrogravity'. If you mean an attempt to unify the 4 forces (electromagnetism & gravity) then I don't think you understand the situation, since many string theorists & quantum gravity people are constantly working on trying to unify them.
>This is something I really dont like; scientists with ruined reputation equal >banned heretics.
That happens sometimes. This is true. It just shows that science is a profession like any other, and works like a real world machine that has a few flaws, but we muddle along regardless. I think the remarkable progress that has taken place in physics over the last 50 years negates your position that such things impede scientific research in general.
>One should be banned when the great free-energy device X will be ready in >two years and you can preorder it now, or because the entire work was a hoax >(like that Hwang guy did), not because one said that "it might be possible that >ABC is possible, I'm quite skeptical though, I'm looking into this".
People who put it forth like that are almost never "banned" or have their reputations fscked up in modern academia. The problem is that crackpots who tout crackpot theories almost invariably go from drawing board stage to infomercial stage in a few days. Crackpots think that they are right, and everybody else is wrong. It's people like that who are ignored.
>The problem is: with this thinking you kill off many breakthroughs.
That is possible, but the risk isn't worth it. Look at the statistics. Let's say, there are 9 crackpot theories cooked up every year. Each will cost several million dollars in research. Money that legit researchers will not get. Even if one crackpot theory turns out to be right, the knowledge lost to us from the regular research that will not happen is greater.
Compare that to the senario where the 9 crackpot theories are axed and money invested in legit research. We may lose some knowledge. However, the academia grows, and in the future that crackpot theory (If correct) should make it to the mainstream. If there is one thing that science tells us is that the truth always prevails in the end. So, it is better to invest in things we know will work out well right now and incrementally add to the knowledge pool.
No,no. It's far batter to progress in steady and stable baby steps than in glamorous bouts of insane ones.
I think you have a rather silly and romantic view of how real science works. It's almost never about some pointy-haired lab coated mad scientist who is ridiculed by everybody who performs a great experiment using spit and bailing wire and proves the whole world wrong. Usually it's about using well established methodologies and existing models to advance knowledge, occasionally with a conceptual revolution that changes those models.
Bear in mind that Physics has gone through THREE such revolutions in the twentieth century (relativity, quantum mechanics, standard model of elementary particles/partial unification of the fundamental forces) withoutdiverting from this methodology.
>Remember that theories are just models. Now if by any chance one model is >false, and a guy thinks he can prove it AND fix it, he won't get any support >because the established model doesn't predict his claims. To prove his claims, >he might need some pretty expensive equipment, with the NSF has, for example.
FYI, the National Science Foundation does not provide equipment, only money. Equipment is either made in a lab or bought from manufacturers.
Anywho, most theories that are readily flawed have already shown to be flawed and adequately debunked (in physics anyways). It's highly unlikely that some village savant from Tenessee will come up with a miraculous homebrewn apparatus that will suddenly defy the existing models of physical phenomena and magically open a wormhole to Narnia or Middle Earth or wherever. That's just foolish romanticism and belongs in the fantasies cooked up by Hollywierd.
>Sometimes even the false and impossible ideas are what work. Consider that >nearly all of society at one time knew that the universe rotated around Earth. In >fact, to preach otherwise was a death sentence.
There is a big difference between condemning free thought through religious mania and debunking a hare-brained idea that a college freshman can easily prove to be false (the pursuit of which wastes tax dollars that can be used to feed hungry people).
FTL is not bunk because gawd/allah/odin/yahweh/ram said so. FTL is bunk because it ameaningless state in a classical timelike metric. I won't burn you at the stake for trying to work on FTL. However, I will write a sternly worded letter to the NSF recommending that they don't give you any money for it.
>Now adays, we have cold Fusion
What?!?!?!?! Where? Nobody in the legit academia has produced "cold fusion" (because it's also meaningless). What they have done is achieve "table-top fusion", which is to concentrate high energies in subatomic length scales to create fusion. It's not the same thing as cold fusion. To say so is merely a ploy to get media attention by using zeitgeist buzzwords.