There's a REASON there's such a huge pricetag on lifting anything in orbit, and you can't say "well the shuttle's gonna fly anyways so I might as well throw this trinket in", especially when there are a ton of legitimate things waiting YEARS for a chance of being lifted into space.
Too bad they weigh enough that they don't fit in this flight's spare capacity, like the light saber does. There's a limit to how much each flight can carry. They fit as much scientific stuff as they can on each one. But there's often spare capacity.
Accusations of bad faith were flying all around. The consensus after the fact was that there was a miscommunication with David Horowitz. The event was billed as a debate, but he thought he could wing it and showed up essentially unprepared. Steinberger was very prepared.
The point being, accusations of bad faith were launched at an event where both speakers should have been prepared to debate. It would only be worse to try to seriously debate someone who isn't prepared.
(plain) TeX is a programming language for typesetting. LaTeX is a group of related macro packages written in TeX -- a kind of framework so you don't have to keep typing boring things like \vskip 1em or deal with writing your own section/page/footnote numbering routines. Plain TeX is still in use, but mostly for writing personalized macros/packages (or editing existing packages). You can still use plain TeX commands in a LaTeX document, but that isn't encouraged (for the sake of consistent layout and your sanity -- a few TeX commands were redefined in LaTeX and have different semantics).
Note that the 2-pass process is a TeX limitation, not a LaTeX limitation. For instance, say you wrote your own table of contents macro to take in chapter names, numbers, and the pages on which chapters starts. The chapter and page numbers are computed after the pages before each listed page is rendered (including, presumably, the table of contents), so you'd have to cache the chapter and page numbers in a file somewhere for the next run to use. This, in fact, is how LaTeX does it. The problem is more complicated than I outlined. Details are available in the TeXbook.
Except in this case, one party gets to shut the fucking place down and force the owner to concede while the owner gets fucked over if he does the same.
Cry me a river. That's called "negotiating". Should the unions "play nice" for altruistic reasons? Or should they act rationally and be willing to play hard ball for the interests of those they represent? Ultimately, this issue comes down to the freedom of assembly and the rational choice to organize to maximize one's utility, the basis of both business and labor unions.
I love that Libertarians don't see the hypocrisy of opposing labor unions. 'Black mail' often gets thrown around, as if only one party of the supposedly mutually beneficial business relationship is allowed to form an organization for a common goal or re-negotiate.
You sir/madam are a moron. The average is a useful indicator of an overall distribution (even including extremes) when you take into account the likely distribution of strength in a population (binomial which, with a large enough sample size, is very closely approximated by your friendly normal curve).
You're still assuming that the distributions are binomial. It could easily be multi-modal due to socio-economic factors (the object of study in sociology). Weight, for instance, is bimodal in the United States, and obesity is negatively correlated to strength. The torus was a simple example of what a multi-modal distribution could lead to with regards with the approximating quality of the average.
I am perfectly willing to concede that there is a true, statistically precise sentence along the lines of "most men are stronger than most women". I'm not even arguing that the paper's results are invalid. If it turns out that the distribution is normal, an average and standard deviation is perfectly informative. If the distribution isn't normal, but the paper used an appropriate statistical methodology, just citing the average is an abuse of a true, but rather uninformative fact taken out of proper context. (I'd go so far as to say that just citing the average, without the standard deviation or at least an explicit claim of normality, is uninformative in this sense too. It still leaves open the question of whether the average is a meaningful approximation of the distribution.) My argument was always about the informativity of the notion of an average.
The average is the mean. Yes, the median would make a lot more sense to use with such a distribution. But the GGP is arguing for the validity of the mean for approximations.
You would expect weight to be normally distributed "in nature", where events like finding food can be modelled ergodically. But weight is not normally distributed in the United States (it's most obvious when split up by sex), which indicates that there are economic and social factors involved that "organize" these feeding events. And strength has been shown to correlate negatively with obesity. There are many studies on this phenomenon. (I'm looking for references, will post later)
I'm the AC that opened this can of worms, and I don't disagree that there are differences in strength. Though you didn't exactly cite them, you mentioned some studies on the topic, and it appears that they used rather more sophisticated statistical methods than just the mean. My point was merely that there is no a priori reason to assume that women's (or men's) strength distributions are normal, so comparing the averages is not a particularly informative statistical method (at least until it is shown that they are). If the distributions are not normal (or worse yet, aren't convex or symmetrical), more sophisticated statistical methods are required to make a valid (read: informative) comparison.
Turn on your television and leave a window open. Images and sounds escape and are evident from the street. Do the lights and sounds give others permission to stare into your home?
This is the same problem we've been working with on clusters forever...How do you tune and load balance the jobs to the point where you're getting the most out of your hardware, and nothing is sitting idle while other parts of the system are running at 100%?
What's your application domain? In my corner of the clustering field (data mining), having processes use 100% time would be ideal. The job of the scheduler would be to send jobs to idle machines. The tricky part is when processes refuse to use the resources allocated to them, so you end up having to solve a bin packing problem to utilize as much CPU per unit time as possible. It's pretty straightforward if you have good data on the amount of CPU/time an algorithm uses on a data set. (Say, by empirical experimentation automated with a genetic algorithm)
What do you do when the task is already reduced to the simplest level and there is no benefit from throwing extra processors at it?
Much tricker, and it depends on the application domain. For example, some algorithms are faster if given an approximate solution to the problem. Spawning processes/threads to come up with good approximations for the main chain of algorithms to use could prove useful.
Admit it, you've got a huge boner for this Cory Doctorow fellow.
Re:Impenetrable mathematics and terminology
on
YouTube for Science?
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· Score: 1
I always find it interesting that some really simple concepts that could probably be understood by a child become completely unfathomable when presented in mathematical form.
Like? Is the children's description precise and general enough to be used mathematically?
I've read papers that are describing techniques that I myself have implemented and yet still not recognised what was being described.
There are many ways to describe concepts, even mathematically. Some are more general than others. Some are more appropriate when techniques from a specific field are going to be used.
I agree that this happens, and I've even found myself in your position. However, that should be our failing and not the writer's.
You make no sense. First, Marconi EMI's standard could not be implemented without their permission either, due to patents. Second, Microsoft's DRM is clearly the defacto standard for DRM, as it is available for use on 90% of personal computers. It is also well understood by anyone who wants to know how it works. Third, there is no competing cross-platform DRM solution the BBC can use. Until the third issue is addressed, there is little scope for complaining about the BBC using an already existing product to serve the majority of its customers.
And the center of mass and moments of inertia and torque induced by gravity...
You should probably model the bus as a line segment with two privileged points (that represent the wheels). Torque induced by gravity will be the dominant force until the rear wheels come off the asphalt. Obviously, this will cause the bus to pitch forward (a rotation about the CM). It isn't obvious one way or another whether the bus can actually land or will collide with the highway roof-first, as it depends on the mass distribution.
Did you know? In order to watch any BBC television in the late 1930's, you had to use a Marconi EMI television? It's true. The BBC dropped John Baird's 240-line system in 1936, and Marconi EMI was the only manufacturer that could make the 405 line system used.
My point is that while these analogies are appropriate, they ignore the BBC's history. They chose a better standard for broadcast television in 1936. But there aren't even competing standards at play here. Windows DRM is the only standard for DRM at play. Like Apple before it (with regards to the iTMS), the BBC has responsibilities to the content producers, and unless those are fulfilled, the BBC cannot distribute the shows. Perhaps it's time for an open source DRM solution to be created.
I realize how objectionable this sounds to some. To them, I would suggest that the freedom to place your works under any license you chose comes the responsibility to respect other peoples' licensing decisions and thus the terms under which a work is licensed to you. Fair use is always an issue, but it was my understanding that you would be able to download the BBC's content as often as you wanted if you had a valid player. Backups, an oft cited reason for rejecting DRM, is a non-issue if you can just get the content again, for free, from the source. And open source player would also allow porting to nearly any device.
In short, if you don't play ball, you've already lost the game.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a REASON there's such a huge pricetag on lifting anything in orbit, and you can't say "well the shuttle's gonna fly anyways so I might as well throw this trinket in", especially when there are a ton of legitimate things waiting YEARS for a chance of being lifted into space.
Too bad they weigh enough that they don't fit in this flight's spare capacity, like the light saber does. There's a limit to how much each flight can carry. They fit as much scientific stuff as they can on each one. But there's often spare capacity.
You're just wrong.
You need to be very careful when you approach events like these. For example, David Horowitz was invited to Reed College to participate in a "discussion" (read: debate) his "Academic Bill of Rights". See: http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/archive/ 2006/August2006/ReedCollegeSteinbergerDebate082806 .htm. (Yes, TL;DR, I know. But the Ask Slashdotter might want to check it out)
Accusations of bad faith were flying all around. The consensus after the fact was that there was a miscommunication with David Horowitz. The event was billed as a debate, but he thought he could wing it and showed up essentially unprepared. Steinberger was very prepared.
The point being, accusations of bad faith were launched at an event where both speakers should have been prepared to debate. It would only be worse to try to seriously debate someone who isn't prepared.
(plain) TeX is a programming language for typesetting. LaTeX is a group of related macro packages written in TeX -- a kind of framework so you don't have to keep typing boring things like \vskip 1em or deal with writing your own section/page/footnote numbering routines. Plain TeX is still in use, but mostly for writing personalized macros/packages (or editing existing packages). You can still use plain TeX commands in a LaTeX document, but that isn't encouraged (for the sake of consistent layout and your sanity -- a few TeX commands were redefined in LaTeX and have different semantics).
Note that the 2-pass process is a TeX limitation, not a LaTeX limitation. For instance, say you wrote your own table of contents macro to take in chapter names, numbers, and the pages on which chapters starts. The chapter and page numbers are computed after the pages before each listed page is rendered (including, presumably, the table of contents), so you'd have to cache the chapter and page numbers in a file somewhere for the next run to use. This, in fact, is how LaTeX does it. The problem is more complicated than I outlined. Details are available in the TeXbook.
They're using computers instead of razor blades.
Except in this case, one party gets to shut the fucking place down and force the owner to concede while the owner gets fucked over if he does the same.
Cry me a river. That's called "negotiating". Should the unions "play nice" for altruistic reasons? Or should they act rationally and be willing to play hard ball for the interests of those they represent? Ultimately, this issue comes down to the freedom of assembly and the rational choice to organize to maximize one's utility, the basis of both business and labor unions.
I love that Libertarians don't see the hypocrisy of opposing labor unions. 'Black mail' often gets thrown around, as if only one party of the supposedly mutually beneficial business relationship is allowed to form an organization for a common goal or re-negotiate.
You sir/madam are a moron. The average is a useful indicator of an overall distribution (even including extremes) when you take into account the likely distribution of strength in a population (binomial which, with a large enough sample size, is very closely approximated by your friendly normal curve).
You're still assuming that the distributions are binomial. It could easily be multi-modal due to socio-economic factors (the object of study in sociology). Weight, for instance, is bimodal in the United States, and obesity is negatively correlated to strength. The torus was a simple example of what a multi-modal distribution could lead to with regards with the approximating quality of the average.
I am perfectly willing to concede that there is a true, statistically precise sentence along the lines of "most men are stronger than most women". I'm not even arguing that the paper's results are invalid. If it turns out that the distribution is normal, an average and standard deviation is perfectly informative. If the distribution isn't normal, but the paper used an appropriate statistical methodology, just citing the average is an abuse of a true, but rather uninformative fact taken out of proper context. (I'd go so far as to say that just citing the average, without the standard deviation or at least an explicit claim of normality, is uninformative in this sense too. It still leaves open the question of whether the average is a meaningful approximation of the distribution.) My argument was always about the informativity of the notion of an average.
The average is the mean. Yes, the median would make a lot more sense to use with such a distribution. But the GGP is arguing for the validity of the mean for approximations.
You would expect weight to be normally distributed "in nature", where events like finding food can be modelled ergodically. But weight is not normally distributed in the United States (it's most obvious when split up by sex), which indicates that there are economic and social factors involved that "organize" these feeding events. And strength has been shown to correlate negatively with obesity. There are many studies on this phenomenon. (I'm looking for references, will post later)
Think functional language (which gives you concurrency for free) with very strong OO support (using the Actors model).
I'm the AC that opened this can of worms, and I don't disagree that there are differences in strength. Though you didn't exactly cite them, you mentioned some studies on the topic, and it appears that they used rather more sophisticated statistical methods than just the mean. My point was merely that there is no a priori reason to assume that women's (or men's) strength distributions are normal, so comparing the averages is not a particularly informative statistical method (at least until it is shown that they are). If the distributions are not normal (or worse yet, aren't convex or symmetrical), more sophisticated statistical methods are required to make a valid (read: informative) comparison.
Turn on your television and leave a window open. Images and sounds escape and are evident from the street. Do the lights and sounds give others permission to stare into your home?
Psychiatrists give blowjobs now? Good to know.
This is the same problem we've been working with on clusters forever...How do you tune and load balance the jobs to the point where you're getting the most out of your hardware, and nothing is sitting idle while other parts of the system are running at 100%?
What's your application domain? In my corner of the clustering field (data mining), having processes use 100% time would be ideal. The job of the scheduler would be to send jobs to idle machines. The tricky part is when processes refuse to use the resources allocated to them, so you end up having to solve a bin packing problem to utilize as much CPU per unit time as possible. It's pretty straightforward if you have good data on the amount of CPU/time an algorithm uses on a data set. (Say, by empirical experimentation automated with a genetic algorithm)
What do you do when the task is already reduced to the simplest level and there is no benefit from throwing extra processors at it?
Much tricker, and it depends on the application domain. For example, some algorithms are faster if given an approximate solution to the problem. Spawning processes/threads to come up with good approximations for the main chain of algorithms to use could prove useful.
Admit it, you've got a huge boner for this Cory Doctorow fellow.
I always find it interesting that some really simple concepts that could probably be understood by a child become completely unfathomable when presented in mathematical form.
Like? Is the children's description precise and general enough to be used mathematically?
I've read papers that are describing techniques that I myself have implemented and yet still not recognised what was being described.
There are many ways to describe concepts, even mathematically. Some are more general than others. Some are more appropriate when techniques from a specific field are going to be used.
I agree that this happens, and I've even found myself in your position. However, that should be our failing and not the writer's.
Steven Colbert is not famous, or funny for that matter.
You make no sense. First, Marconi EMI's standard could not be implemented without their permission either, due to patents. Second, Microsoft's DRM is clearly the defacto standard for DRM, as it is available for use on 90% of personal computers. It is also well understood by anyone who wants to know how it works. Third, there is no competing cross-platform DRM solution the BBC can use. Until the third issue is addressed, there is little scope for complaining about the BBC using an already existing product to serve the majority of its customers.
And the center of mass and moments of inertia and torque induced by gravity...
You should probably model the bus as a line segment with two privileged points (that represent the wheels). Torque induced by gravity will be the dominant force until the rear wheels come off the asphalt. Obviously, this will cause the bus to pitch forward (a rotation about the CM). It isn't obvious one way or another whether the bus can actually land or will collide with the highway roof-first, as it depends on the mass distribution.
It was a miniature, if I remember my mid-90s Discovery Channel programming correctly.
Did you know? In order to watch any BBC television in the late 1930's, you had to use a Marconi EMI television? It's true. The BBC dropped John Baird's 240-line system in 1936, and Marconi EMI was the only manufacturer that could make the 405 line system used.
My point is that while these analogies are appropriate, they ignore the BBC's history. They chose a better standard for broadcast television in 1936. But there aren't even competing standards at play here. Windows DRM is the only standard for DRM at play. Like Apple before it (with regards to the iTMS), the BBC has responsibilities to the content producers, and unless those are fulfilled, the BBC cannot distribute the shows. Perhaps it's time for an open source DRM solution to be created.
I realize how objectionable this sounds to some. To them, I would suggest that the freedom to place your works under any license you chose comes the responsibility to respect other peoples' licensing decisions and thus the terms under which a work is licensed to you. Fair use is always an issue, but it was my understanding that you would be able to download the BBC's content as often as you wanted if you had a valid player. Backups, an oft cited reason for rejecting DRM, is a non-issue if you can just get the content again, for free, from the source. And open source player would also allow porting to nearly any device.
In short, if you don't play ball, you've already lost the game.
Makes sense, thank you.
(1 ton of wood sequesters roughly 1.2 tons of CO2)
Citation? This seems to violate the Law of Conservation of Mass.
Reeeeaaally... maybe I'll find my old Windows ME license and make a couple of phone calls.
Worthington's Law is the only economics anybody needs to know.