The paper talks about traveling at 0.9999995c, i.e. definitely relativistic speeds but not any kind of hyperspace travel.
They made some fairly straightforward blue-shift and pressure calculations. The bright spot in front of the travelers is actually the Cosmic Background Radiation, normally microwave radiation, but blue shifted towards the visible end of the spectrum. Starlight would be shifted toward X-rays in front of them and microwave behind them.
The authors don't talk about any acceleration phase, they assume the travelers simply travel at that speed and what they would see.
Essentially nothing new in this paper, but just some fun calculations.
I think they would have come about even without them. There were personal computers before IBM and operating systems and BASIC interpreters before Microsoft.
Plenty of choice even, much more than when MS + IBM totally leveled the field after a while.
Thanks, that was very informative and interesting.
However you leave out at least two things:
1- Julian Simon made another bet on the price of timber with David South, professor of the Auburn University School of Forestry, betting that it would go down over a period of 10 years. However it went up to hard that Simon paid up early to cut his losses.
2- On the subject of the Simon-Erlich bet, if it had been taken on the period 1980-2010 instead of 1980-1990, then Erlich would have won since the price of the metal commodities they considered when actually up (in real dollars of course) over that period.
Hello, his video rant is nearly insufferable, however he does have a point.
In his setting, he is using a laptop without a touch screen but with a touchpad.
On a touchpad, one moves the mouse cursor with swiping fingers. By default, W8 interprets these swipes as gestures, and interprets them. Hence W8 keeps switching applications seemingly randomly. This is useful on a tablet but not on a touchpad.
Moreover there is no easy way to turn gestures off. Overall this is pretty terrible of W8. If you are not using either a true mouse or a touchscreen you are stuck.
In fact the reading of the short document http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-intro.html by Bill Venables is enough to cover over 90% of what most people will ever need.
R is an implementation of the S language by John Chambers, for which he got the 1998 ACM Software System award. It is *not* based on LISP in any way even if the FAQ mentions that one difference between the way R and classical S treats global variables can be compared with the way LISP does it. Even if it were, I don't see any problem with this. Your comment relating to people copy-pasting code in the R console mirrors the way I see people use Matlab every day, so I don't see how one can conclude anything from it.
The S language predates Matlab by a few years. It is perfectly fine. Yes it has some quirks compared to C or Java or indeed Matlab, but it has some definite advantages like named arguments for functions, and vector/matrix/data frame handling capabilities that indeed Matlab does not match.
Matlab definitely has a speed advantage but on the other hand R has a fabulous graphics engine. In fact it is in my opinion unmatched except by Splus, another, commercial implementation of S. In fact it is really not fair to compare R, which is a grassroot, free software implementation of a complex language, which is proprietary (and *expensive*)
Matlab has a much more comprehensive library of useful routine for signal and image processing. S has a much more comprehensive library for statistics. This is because it is used by professional statisticians every day.
Contrary to what is being reported here, this story is not a dupe. This story, which I, for one, found very well written, recounts the whole saga of determining whether thermal recoil asymmetry could account for the Pioneer anomaly. It is based on the latest publication on the topic, which is dated June 2012 and is still behind a paywall at PRL.
Basically, previous report on thermal recoil where interesting in theory but insufficiently conclusive, because they were consistent with a constant deceleration over time. This did not make sense, because the thermal output of the radioisotope power generators decays over time, and so should the recoil.
The authors of the study found moldy old tapes under a stair at JPL, which after significant data forensic efforts essentially doubled the amount of telemetry available. With this new data together and with help from JPL data fanatics, retired engineers and pre-CAD old blueprints, the authors were able to model and estimate the recoil orientation and variable intensity over time,. They found that within statistical uncertainty the more precise telemetry data is indeed consistent with thermal recoil, when all other effects are correctly accounted for.
They also say that the Pioneer probes now constitute one the most precise test of GRT available in our solar system.
Huge kudos to the people who made this possible.
BTW, the really truly fine article in IEEE Spectrum is written by the very same people who did the astronomy, math, physics, forensics, modeling and astrogation work, over the course of several years. Instead of whining that the article was a little too long, true geeks among us can only wonder at the dedication and professionalism these guys showed all the way through, not to mention the amazing display of science.
OK, so now we shall have another way to produce parallel programs.
Running things safely in parallel is a very good thing, but it does not by itself guarantee significant improvements in speed. The hard bit is actually to optimize the parallel code.
Of course, malware is making him rich and famous, how could it be otherwise.
Other things E.K. loves: poorly conceived O/Ses ; lack of education in users ; and the status quo in matters of computer security.
I'm personally convinced that anti-malware software is a useless hack. Without it, we would have moved away long ago away from easily hackable systems.
We may agree that a college degree does not guarantee education and that becoming a skilled professional is not strictly conditioned on getting a college degree.
However, ask yourself, when you next go see your doctor. Imagine they say to you: well I studied in a couple of books, sure I can diagnose your condition. Would you trust them? What about your surgeon? Same thing for most fields. When it becomes a little complicated, we have not invented something better than formal education.
In addition to all the lecture and homework, college also gives you a starting network of friends. This is fairly useful as well. Most importantly it is a proving ground, usually the first in a young person's adult life.
It is overpriced in the US though, this is a huge problem. Obviously the education bubble is going to burst at some point, and this means some people are going to get hurt, most likely those who need education the most.
The book is worth reading, it retells many things from the beginning of personal computing, exploring subjects along the way. the 10 PRINT one-liner is the motivation but not the topic.
This is a prime example of a statistic made up on the spot. Between them, North America, Europe not including Russia and Japan are close to 1 billion people, most of whom definitely have computer access, even from a very young age until very late in life. There are 7 billion humans on the planet now, so a conservative estimate puts the number of people with computer access much closer to 10% than 1%.
Advertisers/propagandists don't program individuals, they attempt to program masses of people. If only a small percentage of the mass of people respond to the programming, that is enough to guarantee their revenues/revolution.
Parents and educators, on the other hand, have to precisely program tiny immature individuals in small numbers. Unfortunately there is no know way in human history to do it right for everybody.
I'm typically on Linux, when I do boot under Windows 7 for my kids, once in a while, it's update time! can last a good hour sometimes. Yes, many reboots
In parallel I maintain a fleet of compute Linux servers, they are not on the internet, but of course I update them every time the compute load goes down a bit. I may have hundreds of packages to update every time, but there is only one reboot.
I have a BSOD under W7 every other update on my main home machine, i.e. twice a month or so. Must be a driver of some sort, but still inexcusable. The machine runs perfectly fine with linux and a variety of other OSes with full hardware supported including fully accelerated video, 3D, etc, with no problem.
You may want to read it, however since it is long, I'll summarize it for you:
1- the entertainment industry is small compared with the telecommunications industry; 2- people are more interested in communication than entertainment; 3- therefore entertainment "content" is not the killer app for the Internet.
As content company continue to shoot themselves in the foot by abusing consumers, they will need to learn this lesson soon enough or die.
This is not what progressive tax means. Progressive tax means that people who earn more because of their family situation, or education, or hard work, or because they are old, and mostly through sheer luck contribute a little more to running society, because society gives them more. More ? yes: good quality education systems to put their kids in, safer neighborhood with more police, better hospitals, more opportunity to engage with business, and so on. On the other hand, people who earn less because they are young, or have been sick, or have grown up in a tougher family, or are immigrants from a tough country, or their spouse left them to take care of the kids, or are simply unlucky, society give them a small break by taxing them a little less.
And enough with the "hard work" stuff. Poor people often work very hard, two menial jobs sometimes, jobs that you would not consider doing because they are so hard, boring, dirty and backbreaking.
At the end of the day, the rich guys who is taxed a little more still enjoys a much larger amount of money compared with the poor guy who is taxed a little less.
I just hope for you that someday you will not fall victim to bankruptcy, illness, malicious action or sheer bad luck over which you have no control, so that you would be forced to pay a little less tax.
Slashdot Mirror
The paper talks about traveling at 0.9999995c, i.e. definitely relativistic speeds but not any kind of hyperspace travel.
They made some fairly straightforward blue-shift and pressure calculations. The bright spot in front of the travelers is actually the Cosmic Background Radiation, normally microwave radiation, but blue shifted towards the visible end of the spectrum. Starlight would be shifted toward X-rays in front of them and microwave behind them.
The authors don't talk about any acceleration phase, they assume the travelers simply travel at that speed and what they would see.
Essentially nothing new in this paper, but just some fun calculations.
I think they would have come about even without them. There were personal computers before IBM and operating systems and BASIC interpreters
before Microsoft.
Plenty of choice even, much more than when MS + IBM totally leveled the field after a while.
Thanks, that was very informative and interesting.
However you leave out at least two things:
1- Julian Simon made another bet on the price of timber with David South, professor of the Auburn University School of Forestry, betting that it would go down over a period of 10 years. However it went up to hard that Simon paid up early to cut his losses.
2- On the subject of the Simon-Erlich bet, if it had been taken on the period 1980-2010 instead of 1980-1990, then Erlich would have won since the price of the metal commodities they considered when actually up (in real dollars of course) over that period.
See the "Other Wagers" section in your own wikipedia link.
Also, Simon went on record in his book "The Ultimate Resourse 2" saying that Agent Orange, lead, asbestos and DDT were not toxic. This is pretty bold.
If FB doesn't pay taxes, that doesn't mean that the government is getting less money. It means ordinary people are paying more taxes.
How can that be fair ? Everyone in Ireland is giving tax breaks to FB for what, exactly ?
Hello, his video rant is nearly insufferable, however he does have a point.
In his setting, he is using a laptop without a touch screen but with a touchpad.
On a touchpad, one moves the mouse cursor with swiping fingers. By default, W8 interprets these swipes as gestures, and interprets them. Hence W8 keeps switching applications seemingly randomly. This is useful on a tablet but not on a touchpad.
Moreover there is no easy way to turn gestures off. Overall this is pretty terrible of W8. If you are not using either a true mouse or a touchscreen you are stuck.
Or a scientist working on time series of micro-CT tomographs, i.e 2048^3 image datasets. 16GB per frame. Acquiring 10-15TB of data per run is common.
Modders please up the parent, most informative post ever.
I'm somewhat surprised by this comment.
The R language and associated libraries is completely described by these free books:
http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html
http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html
http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html
In fact the reading of the short document http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-intro.html by Bill Venables is enough to cover over 90% of what most people will ever need.
R is an implementation of the S language by John Chambers, for which he got the 1998 ACM Software System award. It is *not* based on LISP in any way even if the FAQ mentions that one difference between the way R and classical S treats global variables can be compared with the way LISP does it. Even if it were, I don't see any problem with this. Your comment relating to people copy-pasting code in the R console mirrors the way I see people use Matlab every day, so I don't see how one can conclude anything from it.
The S language predates Matlab by a few years. It is perfectly fine. Yes it has some quirks compared to C or Java or indeed Matlab, but it has some definite advantages like named arguments for functions, and vector/matrix/data frame handling capabilities that indeed Matlab does not match.
Matlab definitely has a speed advantage but on the other hand R has a fabulous graphics engine. In fact it is in my opinion unmatched except by Splus, another, commercial implementation of S. In fact it is really not fair to compare R, which is a grassroot, free software implementation of a complex language, which is proprietary (and *expensive*)
Matlab has a much more comprehensive library of useful routine for signal and image processing. S has a much more comprehensive library for statistics. This is because it is used by professional statisticians every day.
Hi everyone,
Contrary to what is being reported here, this story is not a dupe. This story, which I, for one, found very well written, recounts the whole saga of determining whether thermal recoil asymmetry could account for the Pioneer anomaly. It is based on the latest publication on the topic, which is dated June 2012 and is still behind a paywall at PRL.
Basically, previous report on thermal recoil where interesting in theory but insufficiently conclusive, because they were consistent with a constant deceleration over time. This did not make sense, because the thermal output of the radioisotope power generators decays over time, and so should the recoil.
The authors of the study found moldy old tapes under a stair at JPL, which after significant data forensic efforts essentially doubled the amount of telemetry available. With this new data together and with help from JPL data fanatics, retired engineers and pre-CAD old blueprints, the authors were able to model and estimate the recoil orientation and variable intensity over time,. They found that within statistical uncertainty the more precise telemetry data is indeed consistent with thermal recoil, when all other effects are correctly accounted for.
They also say that the Pioneer probes now constitute one the most precise test of GRT available in our solar system.
Huge kudos to the people who made this possible.
BTW, the really truly fine article in IEEE Spectrum is written by the very same people who did the astronomy, math, physics, forensics, modeling and astrogation work, over the course of several years. Instead of whining that the article was a little too long, true geeks among us can only wonder at the dedication and professionalism these guys showed all the way through, not to mention the amazing display of science.
I am more than impressed. Well done !
OK, so now we shall have another way to produce parallel programs.
Running things safely in parallel is a very good thing, but it does not by itself guarantee significant improvements in speed. The hard bit is actually to optimize the parallel code.
Of course, malware is making him rich and famous, how could it be otherwise.
Other things E.K. loves: poorly conceived O/Ses ; lack of education in users ; and the status quo in matters of computer security.
I'm personally convinced that anti-malware software is a useless hack. Without it, we would have moved away long ago away from easily hackable systems.
We may agree that a college degree does not guarantee education and that becoming a skilled professional is not strictly conditioned on getting a college degree.
However, ask yourself, when you next go see your doctor. Imagine they say to you: well I studied in a couple of books, sure I can diagnose your condition. Would you trust them? What about your surgeon? Same thing for most fields. When it becomes a little complicated, we have not invented something better than formal education.
In addition to all the lecture and homework, college also gives you a starting network of friends. This is fairly useful as well. Most importantly it is a proving ground, usually the first in a young person's adult life.
It is overpriced in the US though, this is a huge problem. Obviously the education bubble is going to burst at some point, and this means some people are going to get hurt, most likely those who need education the most.
The book is worth reading, it retells many things from the beginning of personal computing, exploring subjects along the way. the 10 PRINT one-liner is the motivation but not the topic.
Cheers.
I thought you had to provide your win7 key to benefit from the $15 offer.
This is a prime example of a statistic made up on the spot. Between them, North America, Europe not including Russia and Japan are close to 1 billion people, most of whom definitely have computer access, even from a very young age until very late in life. There are 7 billion humans on the planet now, so a conservative estimate puts the number of people with computer access much closer to 10% than 1%.
Advertisers/propagandists don't program individuals, they attempt to program masses of people. If only a small percentage of the mass of people respond to the programming, that is enough to guarantee their revenues/revolution.
Parents and educators, on the other hand, have to precisely program tiny immature individuals in small numbers. Unfortunately there is no know way in human history to do it right for everybody.
They are different problems.
I'm typically on Linux, when I do boot under Windows 7 for my kids, once in a while, it's update time! can last a good hour sometimes. Yes, many reboots
In parallel I maintain a fleet of compute Linux servers, they are not on the internet, but of course I update them every time the compute load goes down a bit. I may have hundreds of packages to update every time, but there is only one reboot.
Seriously the W7 update scheme is not ideal.
Hello,
How do you know ?
I have a BSOD under W7 every other update on my main home machine, i.e. twice a month or so. Must be a driver of some sort, but still inexcusable. The machine runs perfectly fine with linux and a variety of other OSes with full hardware supported including fully accelerated video, 3D, etc, with no problem.
It makes updating the machine a right pain.
Works great on macs. VMWare has gotten good enough to play Skyrim on a 3-year old mac config in a VM.
Please name a few. Thanks.
10,000h to be an expert at anything.
Only the captain needs to be an expert. The co-pilot is still being trained.
Recently I came across this very interesting article:
Content is not king by mathematician Andrew Odlyzko.
You may want to read it, however since it is long, I'll summarize it for you:
1- the entertainment industry is small compared with the telecommunications industry;
2- people are more interested in communication than entertainment;
3- therefore entertainment "content" is not the killer app for the Internet.
As content company continue to shoot themselves in the foot by abusing consumers, they will need to learn this lesson soon enough or die.
So, thank the EU then ?
This is not what progressive tax means. Progressive tax means that people who earn more because of their family situation, or education, or hard work, or because they are old, and mostly through sheer luck contribute a little more to running society, because society gives them more. More ? yes: good quality education systems to put their kids in, safer neighborhood with more police, better hospitals, more opportunity to engage with business, and so on. On the other hand, people who earn less because they are young, or have been sick, or have grown up in a tougher family, or are immigrants from a tough country, or their spouse left them to take care of the kids, or are simply unlucky, society give them a small break by taxing them a little less.
And enough with the "hard work" stuff. Poor people often work very hard, two menial jobs sometimes, jobs that you would not consider doing because they are so hard, boring, dirty and backbreaking.
At the end of the day, the rich guys who is taxed a little more still enjoys a much larger amount of money compared with the poor guy who is taxed a little less.
I just hope for you that someday you will not fall victim to bankruptcy, illness, malicious action or sheer bad luck over which you have no control, so that you would be forced to pay a little less tax.