That's exactly my point: why did the guy need to write "his" calculus in the first place. I can't see any reason other than personal profit. Unless he is some genius teacher who invented a novel way of presenting the material that would make learning effortless or something. The truth is exactly what I said: most of the calculus books available today contain nothing original.
Music? Even more.
Yes, of course - if you count all the mp3 files out there.
90% of books available today are not worth the paper they are printed on; most of the rest contain nothing original. It seems like almost all that is worth reading or studying was written before 1900. What masterpieces the 21st century has offered so far? The New Kind of Science? Is that all we, the intelligent species, are capable of now?
It seems that, culturally, we are way behind compared to what we were a hundred years ago. Want to learn geometry? Read Euclid. He wrote his books thousands of years ago. Calculus? Euler is your best teacher, and has been so since 1700s. Fiction? Music? Architecture?... You get the point.
Actually, in my last post I meant the difference between the "real" photon hitting two different targets.
Anyway, here is a news flash: the photon entering the eye (or any light refracting material, for that matter) is not the same as the one reaching the retina. Even if it was, it would have been not a photon that would have reached the "consciousness" (rather, a mediating molecule, perhaps). So: there is no such thing as "conscious observation" of a photon. Instead, there is a more or less complex sequence of events, and whether the sequence includes a taking photograph does not really matter that much.
Yet another, perhaps the easiest, way to show the idiocy of the idea that "conscious observation" affects the universe: imagine one taking a photograph and then "observing" the picture in, say, 10 years.
I have been somewhat bothered by the statement that, in one form or another, is usually made on the first pages of any text on OpenGL:
OpenGL is an interface with the 3-D hardware
1) Isn't OpenGL just an API? If so, then the implementation (whether it is hardware-based or not) is irrelevant.
2) How good is OpenGL for 2-D graphics? Judging, e. g., by what Compiz/Beryl do, it can be successfully used as a base for development of a 2-D user interface as well.
I mean, why would I want to go to another largely inhospitable planet where it would be equally, if not more, possible to die from an "exposure to elements" and other "natural" causes. You know - bad climate, plus things like the molten core, volcanoes, plus asteroids... - those kinds of things. Thank you but no thank you.
Amen to that. It kind of surprises me that people do not realize that it is a mistake to extrapolate the ideas obtained from the everyday experience to things that exist on scales of many orders of magnitude smaller or larger than the ones immediately available to our senses. To me it seems like a form of the old good anthropocentrism; I would think people should have left it far behind by now.
I'd suggest colonizing the inter-galactic space: much safer - far away from planet-killing asteroids, harmful radiation and what not.
It is funny how people tend to extrapolate the ideas obtained from their everyday experiences to areas that have nothing to do with it. Yes, it may make sense to travel to a neighboring village. No, it does not make sense (even if it was possible) to travel to a neighboring galaxy.
Also, at the point when you made yourself capable of doing it, you will most likely find yourself deeply uninterested in seeing another galaxy up close.
There is some asymmetry to this. Speaking of cars, adding cores is, in a sense, like adding more wheels to a car. Simple; but there is an overhead; the performance increase is not proportional to the number of cores, etc. On the other hand, a car that is designed better may not need that many "wheels" anyway.
Yours is a good point, if a bit obvious. Mine was to draw the attention to the tendency of talking more about multi-threading than making individual cores provide radically better support the implicit parallelism.
In a manner of speaking, yes. For a compiler of a programming language to be able to implement the language's constructs efficiently, there must be an adequate support of those constructs by the target hardware.
On a more general note, the boundaries between hardware and software are always blurred, in that you cannot completely abstract one from another without hurting the performance of the system.
What are the alternatives to using filters? I have been wondering how feasible an approach based on spectrum analysis would be, i. e. if it would be possible to build a matrix of arrays of sensors, with each array having, say, a micro-prism on top of it?
why nobody ever came back in time to tell us about it
Because the probability of somebody to come back to our particular timeline is very small. In other words, the number of time travelers is much smaller than the number of timelines they can come back to.
As a side note: in fact, time travel does not create any paradoxes whatsoever. Traveling to the future can be though as "trivial": you just need to put yourself in a sort of a hibernation in a safe place. The important thing to note when you wake up is that you have altered the past (e. g. by the very fact of your disappearing from the active life). Moreover, you change the past regardless of the direction in which you travel. If you go to the past, you affect the timeline at the moment you emerge from the "time machine", so no paradoxes are created, because it is not the time line you came from: you can only prevent your parents from conceiving your copy, not you, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly my point: why did the guy need to write "his" calculus in the first place. I can't see any reason other than personal profit. Unless he is some genius teacher who invented a novel way of presenting the material that would make learning effortless or something. The truth is exactly what I said: most of the calculus books available today contain nothing original.
Music? Even more.
Yes, of course - if you count all the mp3 files out there.
90% of books available today are not worth the paper they are printed on; most of the rest contain nothing original. It seems like almost all that is worth reading or studying was written before 1900. What masterpieces the 21st century has offered so far? The New Kind of Science? Is that all we, the intelligent species, are capable of now?
... You get the point.
It seems that, culturally, we are way behind compared to what we were a hundred years ago. Want to learn geometry? Read Euclid. He wrote his books thousands of years ago. Calculus? Euler is your best teacher, and has been so since 1700s. Fiction? Music? Architecture?
Sometimes I wish we could go back to the gzipped PostScript.
You mean, separate faces?
Actually, in my last post I meant the difference between the "real" photon hitting two different targets.
Anyway, here is a news flash: the photon entering the eye (or any light refracting material, for that matter) is not the same as the one reaching the retina. Even if it was, it would have been not a photon that would have reached the "consciousness" (rather, a mediating molecule, perhaps). So: there is no such thing as "conscious observation" of a photon. Instead, there is a more or less complex sequence of events, and whether the sequence includes a taking photograph does not really matter that much.
I fail to see the difference between a photon hitting the film and a photon hitting the retina.
Yet another, perhaps the easiest, way to show the idiocy of the idea that "conscious observation" affects the universe: imagine one taking a photograph and then "observing" the picture in, say, 10 years.
At least, death prompts political changes. I am afraid to imagine what the world would look like if Stalin was still alive.
Wow, I am now left wondering why they waited so long. (The absence of competition, perhaps.)
burning logs were used
I, too, remember stories about how the Russians used horses to move rockets to the launchpad.
As if Outlook (the Web version) did not suck.
Sorry about the confusion: I was not talking about "interface vs. API"; what I was talking about was "(just) API vs. hardware API".
OpenGL is an interface with the 3-D hardware
1) Isn't OpenGL just an API? If so, then the implementation (whether it is hardware-based or not) is irrelevant.
2) How good is OpenGL for 2-D graphics? Judging, e. g., by what Compiz/Beryl do, it can be successfully used as a base for development of a 2-D user interface as well.
Is there African language?
I mean, why would I want to go to another largely inhospitable planet where it would be equally, if not more, possible to die from an "exposure to elements" and other "natural" causes. You know - bad climate, plus things like the molten core, volcanoes, plus asteroids... - those kinds of things. Thank you but no thank you.
Amen to that. It kind of surprises me that people do not realize that it is a mistake to extrapolate the ideas obtained from the everyday experience to things that exist on scales of many orders of magnitude smaller or larger than the ones immediately available to our senses. To me it seems like a form of the old good anthropocentrism; I would think people should have left it far behind by now.
A text containing "usefull", "ammounts" is not worth reading.
I'd suggest colonizing the inter-galactic space: much safer - far away from planet-killing asteroids, harmful radiation and what not.
It is funny how people tend to extrapolate the ideas obtained from their everyday experiences to areas that have nothing to do with it. Yes, it may make sense to travel to a neighboring village. No, it does not make sense (even if it was possible) to travel to a neighboring galaxy.
Also, at the point when you made yourself capable of doing it, you will most likely find yourself deeply uninterested in seeing another galaxy up close.
There is some asymmetry to this. Speaking of cars, adding cores is, in a sense, like adding more wheels to a car. Simple; but there is an overhead; the performance increase is not proportional to the number of cores, etc. On the other hand, a car that is designed better may not need that many "wheels" anyway.
Yours is a good point, if a bit obvious. Mine was to draw the attention to the tendency of talking more about multi-threading than making individual cores provide radically better support the implicit parallelism.
In a manner of speaking, yes. For a compiler of a programming language to be able to implement the language's constructs efficiently, there must be an adequate support of those constructs by the target hardware.
On a more general note, the boundaries between hardware and software are always blurred, in that you cannot completely abstract one from another without hurting the performance of the system.
What are the alternatives to using filters? I have been wondering how feasible an approach based on spectrum analysis would be, i. e. if it would be possible to build a matrix of arrays of sensors, with each array having, say, a micro-prism on top of it?
While multicores, obviously, have their use, the future belongs to CPUs with massive internal implicit parallelism, IMHO.
Because the probability of somebody to come back to our particular timeline is very small. In other words, the number of time travelers is much smaller than the number of timelines they can come back to.
As a side note: in fact, time travel does not create any paradoxes whatsoever. Traveling to the future can be though as "trivial": you just need to put yourself in a sort of a hibernation in a safe place. The important thing to note when you wake up is that you have altered the past (e. g. by the very fact of your disappearing from the active life). Moreover, you change the past regardless of the direction in which you travel. If you go to the past, you affect the timeline at the moment you emerge from the "time machine", so no paradoxes are created, because it is not the time line you came from: you can only prevent your parents from conceiving your copy, not you, of course.
How about studying "Problems of gay sexuality in mainland China"? What can be more exciting to spend your college years on?
Two billion, huh. Annually. At that rate, you could work just one day and be set for life.