People in LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program were able to get advance copies a few months ago in return for posting reviews. The length of the reviews runs from really short to fairly long.
Alas, I didn't win one.
While you're there, sign up for a lifetime membership, or, if you're cheap or broke, a free membership. It's only fair, since my posting this might cause all their bandwidth to be eaten up.
Nope, and in fact both of the articles linked in the first slashdot entry about this pc state that it is an Ubuntu variant. The wired blog is in fact titled "$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-mart."
Hear, hear. For example, I first learned Calculus III (vector calc) from a Schaum's. And you really should try to do every problem, or as near as you can do. The books are cheapish (~$15-$20, I think) and in addition to giving you an easy to understand explanation (textbook-style) of the material, every section has lots of problems that they have solved in detail (with steps). If this seems to work for you (I kurtb149's suggestion of trying one first at the store), go to.
I see all this angst about how the Post didn't publish the comic, but it's right here on their website (you might have to register with the Post to see this, which would probably involve cookies, in case you care).
Is "grammer" your nickname for your grandmother? I only ask because it seems so unlikely that someone defending their use of bad *grammar* would misspell the word *grammar*.
Also, for a person who claims to overuse commas as a favorite method of indicating a verbal pause, why did you (incorrectly) use a semi-colon instead of a comma at the end of your third line?
Finally, let's not even get into your mistaken use of the word "where" in lines three and four.
Thanks for the correction on my numbers, budgenator. I hate to admit that sometimes I confuse numbers around in my head, but at least this time the correct data strengthens the argument. I'm sure my number problems are related to all this breathing and cell-phone use...
I also would be interested in such a study, as well as a study of a truly random sample (or as close to such as one can get in this life;) of people with and without brain cancers that actually investigates the problem (I haven't read any of the past studies, so perhaps the most recent ones mentioned above do this).
If you read the study (and know anything about experimental design) you will see that the "results" aren't nearly so impressive as they claim. The short of it: they looked at a bunch of people who already had brain cancer, and then determined how many of them used a cell phone (roughly) an hour per day. I don't know about you, but most people I know use cell phones that often on average, and so it comes as no suprise to me that approx. 85% of the people in the study had high cell phone use. What this shows is ALMOST NOTHING because it doesn't compare what the rate of high cell phone use is among the general population. All it proves is that in a group of people who had brain cancer a lot of them used cell phones. In case it seems like I'm talking circularly, think of this analogous example: if I took a group of people with brain cancer and surveyed them we would probably find that a very high percentage of them (1) drink coffee every day (2) watch television every day (3) breath air every day, but you wouldn't immediately say "OMG, [Coffee, TV, Breathing] causes brain cancer!" Anyone who believed this story without at least reading a description of the study should stop breathing now so that they don't get cancer.
No. Not every mathematician will say this. For instance, this one thinks you don't know what you're talking about. First off, although it is correct that mathematics is formulated abstractly, the notion that you have of 'model' seems to be seriously misguided: in the natural numbers (N, a mathematical construct) there is no possibility that the numbers in N behave any differently than mathematics says they do, no matter how large they are (there's this thing called induction...if I have to say more, then I no longer think you don't know what you're talking about. I'll *know* you don't know what you're talking about). Second, Goedel's proof doesn't show that the 'models' (and again, I reiterate that you don't use the term correctly) break down, only that in any axiomatic system complex enough to formulate its own self-consistency there are statements which can neither be proved true nor untrue (hardly a 'break down', which I would consider something like finding an inconsistency). Third, mathematics doesn't build models and then test them: it formulates statements and then proves those statements true or untrue (or, as already mentioned, proves those statements can be proven neither true nor untrue under the current assumptions). There is no 'testing' in the sense of other natural sciences: no experiments; no analyzing data; no scientific method (although processes similar in nature to these go into the formulation of statements and their proofs).
Finally, mathematics is a natural science principally because of its historic (and contemporary) association with physics and other more obviously natural sciences, although one could easily argue that much of modern mathematics could be placed just as easily in the same group as philosophy (e.g. one might find a course on logic in a philosophy department).
Slashdot Mirror
Alas, I didn't win one.
While you're there, sign up for a lifetime membership, or, if you're cheap or broke, a free membership. It's only fair, since my posting this might cause all their bandwidth to be eaten up.
...an aging desktop such a a low-end Pentium 4, or a high-end Pentium III, with RAM maxed out at 512 MB...
Or an Ultra5 with 128 MB of RAM
Or The Diamond Age.
Nope, and in fact both of the articles linked in the first slashdot entry about this pc state that it is an Ubuntu variant. The wired blog is in fact titled "$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-mart."
Hear, hear. For example, I first learned Calculus III (vector calc) from a Schaum's. And you really should try to do every problem, or as near as you can do. The books are cheapish (~$15-$20, I think) and in addition to giving you an easy to understand explanation (textbook-style) of the material, every section has lots of problems that they have solved in detail (with steps). If this seems to work for you (I kurtb149's suggestion of trying one first at the store), go to.
I see all this angst about how the Post didn't publish the comic, but it's right here on their website (you might have to register with the Post to see this, which would probably involve cookies, in case you care).
Also, for a person who claims to overuse commas as a favorite method of indicating a verbal pause, why did you (incorrectly) use a semi-colon instead of a comma at the end of your third line?
Finally, let's not even get into your mistaken use of the word "where" in lines three and four.
Thanks for the correction on my numbers, budgenator. I hate to admit that sometimes I confuse numbers around in my head, but at least this time the correct data strengthens the argument. I'm sure my number problems are related to all this breathing and cell-phone use... I also would be interested in such a study, as well as a study of a truly random sample (or as close to such as one can get in this life;) of people with and without brain cancers that actually investigates the problem (I haven't read any of the past studies, so perhaps the most recent ones mentioned above do this).
If you read the study (and know anything about experimental design) you will see that the "results" aren't nearly so impressive as they claim. The short of it: they looked at a bunch of people who already had brain cancer, and then determined how many of them used a cell phone (roughly) an hour per day. I don't know about you, but most people I know use cell phones that often on average, and so it comes as no suprise to me that approx. 85% of the people in the study had high cell phone use. What this shows is ALMOST NOTHING because it doesn't compare what the rate of high cell phone use is among the general population. All it proves is that in a group of people who had brain cancer a lot of them used cell phones. In case it seems like I'm talking circularly, think of this analogous example: if I took a group of people with brain cancer and surveyed them we would probably find that a very high percentage of them (1) drink coffee every day (2) watch television every day (3) breath air every day, but you wouldn't immediately say "OMG, [Coffee, TV, Breathing] causes brain cancer!" Anyone who believed this story without at least reading a description of the study should stop breathing now so that they don't get cancer.
No. Not every mathematician will say this. For instance, this one thinks you don't know what you're talking about. First off, although it is correct that mathematics is formulated abstractly, the notion that you have of 'model' seems to be seriously misguided: in the natural numbers (N, a mathematical construct) there is no possibility that the numbers in N behave any differently than mathematics says they do, no matter how large they are (there's this thing called induction...if I have to say more, then I no longer think you don't know what you're talking about. I'll *know* you don't know what you're talking about). Second, Goedel's proof doesn't show that the 'models' (and again, I reiterate that you don't use the term correctly) break down, only that in any axiomatic system complex enough to formulate its own self-consistency there are statements which can neither be proved true nor untrue (hardly a 'break down', which I would consider something like finding an inconsistency). Third, mathematics doesn't build models and then test them: it formulates statements and then proves those statements true or untrue (or, as already mentioned, proves those statements can be proven neither true nor untrue under the current assumptions). There is no 'testing' in the sense of other natural sciences: no experiments; no analyzing data; no scientific method (although processes similar in nature to these go into the formulation of statements and their proofs).
Finally, mathematics is a natural science principally because of its historic (and contemporary) association with physics and other more obviously natural sciences, although one could easily argue that much of modern mathematics could be placed just as easily in the same group as philosophy (e.g. one might find a course on logic in a philosophy department).