Top Five boy names:
Jacob
Michael
Matthew
Joshua
Christopher
I was born in 1975 and nary a Jacob was around. It was nice, I was unique. Once about 5th or 6th grade there were 6 Jason's in my class, SIX! I went through elementary and middle school with no other Jacob's. There was only one other Jacob in high school with me.
Needless to say, I'm used to people talking about me when they say, "Jacob..."
Since my name has been in the top 10 since 1993 (and at the top for a few years now) I go to the mall and all around me are people saying, "Jacob don't run..." or, "Jacob come here!" and I tell you, everytime I hear a mother sternly call out for her "Jacob" I turn and look, thinking someone is talking to me!
I especially like this excerpt from the manual. Seems like an ineffective way to communicate key-presses:
USING THE KEYBOARD
To make keyboard operations clear without having to write something like, "in order to type a capital 'A' press and hold the shift key while typing the letter 'a' ", we use a simple shorthand. A backslash after a key name (\) indicates a key going down, and the slash (/) indicates a key going up. Thus, the normal way to type a capital "A", is to perform this sequence of actions:
Shift \ a \ a / Shift/
Inside this notation we do not use quotes around the names of keys, and individual letters always appear in lower case. In the manual we will not need to use either slash in our examples, so there will be no ambiguity.
Also do you have any idea what the button says at the end, I can make out 'Lennord Nimoy?' but not the first two words
It says, "What is a LEONARD NIMOY?" Which I assume goes with the girls wearing buttons that say, "What is a HOBBIT?" and "Bilbo Lives" near the end before Leonard puts hit button on.
What a very liberal comment. The deeds of your past ALWAYS impact your future! People don't live in a vacuum, why do you think they are always telling kids about their "permanent record?" In my high school they had three people tied to be the valedictorian and they went back to SIXTH GRADE RECORDS to settle the matter (I kid you not).
So basically, if you do something like this it WILL follow you through the rest of your life. You might have "paid your debt to society" but you'll still be looked on VERY suspiciously and will probably need to add the phrase, "You want fries with that?" to your career vocabulary. Either that or you'll just suck on the welfare teat and end up costing all the rest of us hard working people more money.
LISA: "Principal Skinner, how's your transportation project coming?"
SKINNER: "Oh excellent, not only are the trains now running on time, they're running on metric time. Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment."
French Physicists' Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of Its Own
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Everyone who ever wondered whether physicists were just making it all up when they talked about extra dimensions, dark matter and even multiple universes might take comfort in hearing that scientists themselves don't always seem to know.
Consider Drs. Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, French mathematical physicists and twins, who have recently been burning up the physics world with a novel and highly speculative theory about what happened before the Big Bang. Scientists have been debating whether the Bogdanov brothers are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense.
The uproar began late last month when rumors, denied by the brothers, began ricocheting around the Internet that they had constructed an elaborate hoax à la that of Dr. Alan Sokal, the New York University physicist who published a nonsense article about quantum gravity in the cultural journal Social Text in 1994. The story was that the pair, who are 53 and better known as the writers and producers of a popular television show in the 1970's and 80's in which they appeared as what might be called science clowns, had posed as string theorists to obtain fraudulent doctorates.
Until then, few physicists had noticed the brothers' theses or their journal articles, which purport to exploit something called the Kubo-Schwinger-Martin condition. It implies a mathematical connection between infinite temperature and imaginary time (don't ask) to probe the state of the universe at its very beginning. Suddenly physicists were trying to figure out what sentences like this meant, if anything: "Then we suggest that the (pre-)spacetime is in thermodynamic equilibrium at the Planck-scale and is therefore subject to the KMS condition."
Dr. Roman W. Jackiw, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who read and approved Igor Bogdanov's Ph.D. thesis, said he found it speculative but "intriguing."
But Dr. John Baez, a physicist and quantum gravity theorist at the University of California at Riverside, who has conducted a dialogue with the Bogdanov brothers on the Web site math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov, said, "One thing that seems pretty clear to me is that the Bogdanovs don't know how to do physics."
Dr. Peter Woit, a mathematician and physicist at Columbia University, said of the brothers' work, "Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature."
Indeed, the problem of distinguishing sense from nonsense goes beyond the Bogdanovs, say some physicists, who worry that far too much junk goes past the referees who vet articles for the scientific journals and the examiners who approve Ph.D's.
"The bigger issue is about scientific integrity, and how theoretical physics gets judged," said Dr. Frank Wilczek, another M.I.T. physicist and editor of Annals of Physics, where one of the Bogdanov papers appeared. "Do people really have a mastery of the field as a whole?"
How the Bogdanovs came to this pass is perhaps a cautionary tale about the way physics is done today. Born in 1949 in a castle in Gascogne, they described themselves as descendants of Russian and Austrian nobility. After studying applied mathematics at the Institute of Political Science and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, the brothers carved out careers for themselves as writers and producers of their science television show, "Temps X" ("Time X").
A particularly murky episode in their careers began in 1991, when they published "God and Science," a book based on conversations with the French philosopher Dr. Jean Guitton. The book was a best seller in France, but the authors were sued for plagiarism by Dr. Trinh Xuan Thuan, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, who claimed they had copied passages from his 1988 book, "The Secret Melody, and Man Created the Universe." The brothers countersued, arguing that Dr. Thuan had borrowed from their earlier writings and Dr. Guitton's.
The case was eventually settled out of court in 1995, according to a settlement document provided by the brothers, with both sides renouncing any damages and paying their own court costs. Dr. Thuan, whose book is being reissued in the United States this winter, failed to respond to requests for an interview.
It was during the writing of the book, the brothers say, that they had a brainstorm for a theory of the so-called initial singularity, the infinitely dense, infinitely hot point into which all space and time were squeezed when the universe began, where normal physics breaks down. They returned to college to pursue Ph.D.'s, something they say they had always intended to do, but had been delayed by the unexpected success of their television show.
After two years at the University of Bordeaux, they moved to the University of Bourgogne and apprenticed themselves to Dr. Moshe Flato, founder of the journal Letters in Mathematical Physics and a prominent theorist known for his unconventional ways. When Dr. Flato died in 1998, a longtime associate, Dr. Daniel Sternheimer, a mathematician at C.N.R.S., the French center for scientific research, took over as the twins' adviser.
For the most part, however, the brothers were left to work on their own without much supervision, "pursuing ideas that are quite a bit out of the mainstream," said Dr. Jacobus Verbaarschot, a physicist now at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and one of the examiners for Grichka Bogdanov's doctoral thesis in 1999.
Dr. Sternheimer described the twins as stubborn "wunderkids" with very high I.Q.'s, who have a hard time understanding that they are not "the Einstein brothers" and prone to shooting themselves in the foot with vague statements and an "impressionistic" style. He called teaching them "like teaching My Fair Lady to speak with an Oxford accent."
Certainly they did not come off as the Einstein brothers in their dissertations. In June 1999, Grichka was granted a Ph.D. in mathematics by the École Polytechnique in Paris but with an "honorable," the lowest passing grade.
Igor, however, failed. The examining committee agreed that he could try again if he had three papers published in peer-reviewed journals, a common litmus test of legitimacy, Dr. Jackiw said.
"One has to have trust in the community," he explained. Igor's thesis had many things Dr. Jackiw didn't understand, but he found it intriguing. "All these were ideas that could possibly make sense," he said. "It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask."
Igor got his degree in theoretical physics from the University of Bourgogne in July, also with the lowest possible grade, one that is seldom given, Dr. Sternheimer said.
"These guys worked for 10 years without pay," he said. "They have the right to have their work recognized with a diploma, which is nothing much these days."
The brothers have since returned to television, producing two-minute spots for a French series called "Rayons-X" ("X-Rays"). That would have been the end of it, except for the hoax rumors.
Dr. Sternheimer called the dispute "a storm in a teacup."
"They don't deserve so much interest, they don't deserve so much hatred," he said.
The aftermath has been bruising for both the Bogdanovs and for physics. Dr. Arkadiusz Jadczyk, a Polish theoretical physicist who has been conducting a dialogue with the brothers and other physicists on his Web site, cassiopaea.org/cass/bog-sternheimer.htm, said it was now his "working hypothesis" that the Bogdanovs had done something interesting.
But the editors of Classical and Quantum Gravity repudiated their publication of a Bogdanov paper, saying it "does not meet the standards expected of articles in this journal," although they declined to retract it, inviting readers to send comments to the journal instead.
Dr. Wilczek stressed that the publication of a paper by the Bogdanovs in Annals of Physics had occurred before his tenure and that he had been raising standards. Describing it as a deeply theoretical work, he said that while it was "not a stellar addition to the physics literature," it was not at first glance clearly nonsensical.
"It's a difficult subject," he said. "The paper has a lot of the right buzz words. Referees rely on the good will of the authors." The paper is essentially impossible to read, like "Finnegans Wake," he added.
His colleague Dr. Jackiw compared modern physics to modern art: "One person looks at a piece of art and says it is gibberish; another person looks and says it's wonderful."
When physics talks about the universe before the Big Bang, it is completely speculative, he said, adding, "I would be very careful before calling something nonsense, especially if I didn't understand it."
Physicists were no more unanimous on the greater lesson of the whole affair. "This says something profound about what happens to theoretical physics in the absence of the discipline of experiment," Dr. Wilczek said.
Dr. Baez and others have suggested that the system administering the brothers' degrees and publishing their papers was lax. "I do think that the examiners, referees and editors do have something to answer for in this case," said Dr. Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario, citing what he said were obvious errors in the referees' reports for the brothers' papers.
But others, especially in France, disagree. "What they did or what they have written seems to show that they are not better (but not worse) than several theoretical physicists friends of ours who often use some mathematical terminology that they do not master well enough," said Dr. Robert Coquereaux, director of research at C.N.R.S., in a statement posted on Dr. Jackiw's Web site.
But Dr. David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., took issue with this view. "It is easy to judge, even from the abstract alone, that these papers are nutty," he said, noting that the physics community had ignored them until the hoax brouhaha.
Dr. Coquereaux and others said that the "publish or perish" ethos of academic research in the United States had contributed to the spread of unintelligible papers.
"There is a tradition of formally obscure but extremely serious and competent theoretical work in Europe," said Dr. Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist and gravitational theorist at the University of Marseille and the University of Pittsburgh. But there was a tradition of letting every wild idea go in the United States, he added. He described the brothers' papers as "really empty."
The Bogdanovs said they were still hopeful that their ideas would be recognized and useful in physics. As they said in an e-mail message: "Nonsense in the morning may make sense in the evening or the following day."
Worker Dismissed as Inquiry Widens Into Big Racing Bet
By JOE DRAPE
As the authorities investigated whether an exotic bet worth $3 million on last Saturday's Breeders' Cup horse races was rigged, the company that processed the wager said yesterday that it had fired a "rogue software engineer" who exploited a weakness in its system.
The company, Scientific Games Corporation of New York, said it had turned over the employee's name and evidence of potential wrongdoing to the state police and state wagering officials.
The employee attended Drexel University in Philadelphia with the winner of the bet, racing officials and a state investigator said.
The head of the company, Lorne Weil, said the worker had the access and know-how to breach the system run by the company's subsidiary Autotote, which processes 65 percent of racing wagers in North America.
Industry and law enforcement officials said that the F.B.I. had joined the police and the New York State Racing and Wagering Board in the inquiry of the wager, known as a pick six, which requires bettors to pick winners in six straight races. Payoff on the bet, made through the Catskill Off-Track Betting hub by telephone from Baltimore, has been held up.
Investigators are also looking into whether there have been questionable payoffs at other tracks. "This goes beyond one afternoon and the East Coast," said an investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Though Mr. Weil tried to calm investors in his conference call yesterday, his disclosures pointed up the vulnerability of the $14.5 billion-a-year betting industry for which consumer confidence is crucial.
As racing has become more reliant on off-track and telephone betting, it is also depending more on a network of computers that link tracks and off-track sites. If the systems are proved flawed, or susceptible to manipulation, it could scare off bettors worried about the integrity of the process.
"There needs to be total review of the system so everyone can feel good and see that these things are not widespread," said Bill Nader, a New York Racing Association vice president. "Without integrity in the way a wager is processed, we don't have a sport."
The case in question involves the pick six bet on the last six races of the Breeders' Cup, horse racing's season-ending championship. The entire winning pool was held by Derrick Davis, a 29-year-old Maryland man who made the bets by phone.
Investigators are looking into whether the computer system was manipulated so that a bet made after several races had been run would appear to have been made beforehand.
Though Mr. Weil did not name the dismissed employee, the state investigator and racing officials identified him as Chris Harn, 29, who worked in Autotote's offices in Newark, Del.
Mr. Davis owns a Baltimore-based computer networking business, Utopian Networks Inc., but said yesterday that he was a knowledgeable bettor whose winning tickets were legitimate. "I didn't do anything wrong here," he said, refusing to elaborate and referring questions to his Baltimore lawyer, Steven A. Allen. Mr. Allen said his client was cooperating with the authorities and had nothing to hide.
"He is caught in the middle of a maelstrom," Mr. Allen said. "As far as he's concerned, he made a legitimate bet. The race was run, and he won, and he should have received his payoff. And that should have been the end of it. Now, instead, there's an investigation, people are making a variety of wild accusations, and his reputation is being sullied for no good reason."
Thomas Davis, Derrick's father, said his son grew up in Baltimore and attended engineering school in Pennsylvania, but would not be more specific. "I just think it's like the equivalent of his hitting the lottery," the father said. "I know in the bottom of my heart that it's a legitimate bet."
Stacy Clifford, a spokeswoman for the state wagering board, would not comment on the personnel involved in the investigation or its progress.
"The board routinely involves other organizations in its investigations and will involve law enforcement if it feels appropriate," she said. "They fired this person in connection with what happened Saturday, and since we're investigating what happened Saturday, we're certainly looking into it."
What started the investigation last Sunday was the configuration of the winning tickets and that they belonged to one bettor, Mr. Davis, who called his bets in by phone to the Catskill OTB hub, one of five regional corporations that, with New York City OTB, handle off-track bets in New York.
The winning tickets featured "singles," or races with only one horse selected, in the first four legs of the ticket, and then every horse in the final two races. On a $2 ticket, those combinations and strategy cost $192.
Mr. Davis bet a $12 pick-six ticket, or played that exact combination six separate times, costing him $1,152. It was a highly unusual strategy for betting the pick six -- horseplayers like to cover as many combinations as possible -- and the configuration raised suspicions of New York Racing Association officials, who alerted Breeders' Cup Ltd. and the state wagering board.
Mr. Davis had opened the Catskill OTB account within two weeks of the Breeders' Cup, had deposited money on five occasions -- four increments of $500 and one of $250 -- but had not made a bet until that pick six, according to investigative sources.
The six winning tickets were each worth $428,392. In addition, by including every horse in the last two races, the bettor collected 108 of the 186 consolation payoffs for hitting five of six winners; each consolation ticket was worth $4,606.20.
After an initial review on Monday, officials for Autotote and Catskill OTB said the tickets were recorded about 20 minutes before the first leg and appeared legitimate. But after further review, Mr. Weil said, the company determined that the fired employee had taken advantage of a weakness in the processing of bets.
While the tickets were logged and totaled at satellite sites such as Catskill OTB, they were not transferred to the host site, Arlington Park outside Chicago, until after the fifth race when the exact bets were verified. In this state of limbo, Mr. Weil said, the employee, who had the password to the data system, was able to alter the ticket after the results of the first four races of the pick six were known.
When Scientific Games announced the firing, trading in its stock was suspended on Nasdaq for more than 20 minutes. The stock closed at $7.62, down 57 cents. Mr. Weil maintained he was confident Autotote's systems were impenetrable to outside hackers.
"I think people see this for what it is -- a rogue individual bound and determined to exploit the only weak link we see in the system so far," he said.
...the fact remains that most people prefer the taste of coke over Pepsi
What fact says this?
There are tons of blind taste tests (done both by Coke and Pepsi) saying that people like, in order of prefrence:
New Coke
Pepsi
Classic Coke
Coke is popular because of the almighty dollar. It's all advertising. They've sold you that their sweet, fizzy water is better than brand xyz's sweet, fizzy water.
Do something good for you body and put the sugar water down!!!
I drive past Scott Jones' house 2 or 3 times a week on my way to my colocation facility.
Scott Jones is just trying to catch up with Steve Hilbert (remember, the ex-CEO of Conseco) who happens to live right across the street.
He just moved his driveway up the hill from Hilbert's last fall (and spent a pretty penny on it too according to local gossip).
Hilbert's place still rocks Jones' though.
Actually, I would live in any house along the street (116th between US 421 and US 31 for those of you who want to go check it out). It's called Millionaires' Row and sports names like Steve Hilbert, Scott Jones, Robert Ursey (owner of the Colts) among others. VERY NICE houses in a VERY HIGH DOLLAR area.
OK, this sounds fine and dandy, but if we're vigorously scrubbing our environment of CO2 isn't there to much of a good thing?
I mean, at what low levels of present CO2 is plant life starting to be affected? I would hate to crank up a system like this and see vast forests just dissapearing because of lack of CO2 levels. I assume there have to be some checks to how much we remove, but if profit is as stake, will there really be those checks?
How can they really simulate this to test all the effects on our environment?
We're looking at MASSIVE changes in our environment if they think they can just rollback the air to pre-industrial revoluiton air quality!
I find it funny and interesting that because the NSA and other TLA agengies are *so* tight lipped we assume their skills and abilities are far ahead of current "joe-sixpack" tech.
I suppose this very well could be the case, but it sure lends itself to great conspiracy theories.
I suppose the TLA agengies don't really need strong crypto to invade on my privacy. They just need a court order.
Sure I use a 2048bit key (soon to be 4096bit I guess), but will that really stop them from making me give up the goods if faced with jail when they come asking for my data?
Nope, because I have nothing really to hide. Maybe I keep my cache of pr0n encrypted so my fiancee doesn't discover it, but I will sure-as-shooting give that information up to keep me out of jail.
> No, you can't just "wander in", much paperwork
> and background checks are required to buy
> firearms in the U.S.
Not for certian firearms. Check your local laws. Here in Indiana I can walk into a Wal-Mart and, as long as I'm 18, walk out with a nice single action 10 gague and a box of shells.
No problem.
I would have to wait for the purchase of a handgun, but if I can walk into K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Meijer, or any local gun shop & pawn shop and walk out 10 minutes later with a.22 or a shotgun who cares?
Awww yeah, 20 years of pr0n binaries to start sucking down!
Seriously, won't this take many terabytes to store? The ISP I used to work for was keeping a dedicated T1 saturated 24x7 just to keep up a newsfeed. And they only keep stuff around for 14 days I believe.
I have a SliMP3 (number 47 actually) and it rocks, hard.
It's not in a flasy case, but it looks sweet sitting amid my other AV gear, it doesn't create an noise and I just leave the perl scripts running on my MP3 server and forget about it.
Plus I can actually read the VFD from the couch.
Oh yeah, I can also control the music from my web browser when I'm out of remote range. So I can be sitting at my computer with the stereo playing in the living room and I can have total control over it.
I wouldn't say the Newton's HWR "sucked." It was actually pretty good if you have legible writing and spend a little time with the device.
I never had any problems with my MP100, MP110, MP120 and with my MP2000 I *never* had to even think about it. It just worked. Even my friend who has REALLY BAD handwriting was able to use my 2000 without problems.
And for the record, Palm didn't dream up gesture recoginition. I was using Grafitti for my MP110 long before palm was around. They simply licensed Grafitti.
Great - The first XP system is shipped. It's not something that I will rush out and upgrade to, it's not something that I will recommend to my customers to rush out and upgrade to.
Unfortunatly the massive crushing machine that is Microsoft will eventually make XP so ubiquitous that I will be forced to either buy a Mac or switch to FreeBSD 100% of the time.
I guess I should switch to FreeBSD 100% and just buy and XBox for my games anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Jacob
Michael
Matthew
Joshua
Christopher
I was born in 1975 and nary a Jacob was around. It was nice, I was unique. Once about 5th or 6th grade there were 6 Jason's in my class, SIX! I went through elementary and middle school with no other Jacob's. There was only one other Jacob in high school with me.
Needless to say, I'm used to people talking about me when they say, "Jacob..."
Since my name has been in the top 10 since 1993 (and at the top for a few years now) I go to the mall and all around me are people saying, "Jacob don't run..." or, "Jacob come here!" and I tell you, everytime I hear a mother sternly call out for her "Jacob" I turn and look, thinking someone is talking to me!
USING THE KEYBOARD
To make keyboard operations clear without having to write something like, "in order to type a capital 'A' press and hold the shift key while typing the letter 'a' ", we use a simple shorthand. A backslash after a key name (\) indicates a key going down, and the slash (/) indicates a key going up. Thus, the normal way to type a capital "A", is to perform this sequence of actions:
Shift \ a \ a / Shift /
Inside this notation we do not use quotes around the names of keys, and individual letters always appear in lower case. In the manual we will not need to use either slash in our examples, so there will be no ambiguity.
It says, "What is a LEONARD NIMOY?" Which I assume goes with the girls wearing buttons that say, "What is a HOBBIT?" and "Bilbo Lives" near the end before Leonard puts hit button on.
What a very liberal comment. The deeds of your past ALWAYS impact your future! People don't live in a vacuum, why do you think they are always telling kids about their "permanent record?" In my high school they had three people tied to be the valedictorian and they went back to SIXTH GRADE RECORDS to settle the matter (I kid you not).
So basically, if you do something like this it WILL follow you through the rest of your life. You might have "paid your debt to society" but you'll still be looked on VERY suspiciously and will probably need to add the phrase, "You want fries with that?" to your career vocabulary. Either that or you'll just suck on the welfare teat and end up costing all the rest of us hard working people more money.
ObSimpsons Quote:
LISA: "Principal Skinner, how's your transportation project coming?"
SKINNER: "Oh excellent, not only are the trains now running on time, they're running on metric time. Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment."
French Physicists' Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of Its Own
.htm, said it was now his "working hypothesis" that the Bogdanovs had done something interesting.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Everyone who ever wondered whether physicists were just making it all up when they talked about extra dimensions, dark matter and even multiple universes might take comfort in hearing that scientists themselves don't always seem to know.
Consider Drs. Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, French mathematical physicists and twins, who have recently been burning up the physics world with a novel and highly speculative theory about what happened before the Big Bang. Scientists have been debating whether the Bogdanov brothers are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense.
The uproar began late last month when rumors, denied by the brothers, began ricocheting around the Internet that they had constructed an elaborate hoax à la that of Dr. Alan Sokal, the New York University physicist who published a nonsense article about quantum gravity in the cultural journal Social Text in 1994. The story was that the pair, who are 53 and better known as the writers and producers of a popular television show in the 1970's and 80's in which they appeared as what might be called science clowns, had posed as string theorists to obtain fraudulent doctorates.
Until then, few physicists had noticed the brothers' theses or their journal articles, which purport to exploit something called the Kubo-Schwinger-Martin condition. It implies a mathematical connection between infinite temperature and imaginary time (don't ask) to probe the state of the universe at its very beginning. Suddenly physicists were trying to figure out what sentences like this meant, if anything: "Then we suggest that the (pre-)spacetime is in thermodynamic equilibrium at the Planck-scale and is therefore subject to the KMS condition."
Dr. Roman W. Jackiw, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who read and approved Igor Bogdanov's Ph.D. thesis, said he found it speculative but "intriguing."
But Dr. John Baez, a physicist and quantum gravity theorist at the University of California at Riverside, who has conducted a dialogue with the Bogdanov brothers on the Web site math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov, said, "One thing that seems pretty clear to me is that the Bogdanovs don't know how to do physics."
Dr. Peter Woit, a mathematician and physicist at Columbia University, said of the brothers' work, "Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature."
Indeed, the problem of distinguishing sense from nonsense goes beyond the Bogdanovs, say some physicists, who worry that far too much junk goes past the referees who vet articles for the scientific journals and the examiners who approve Ph.D's.
"The bigger issue is about scientific integrity, and how theoretical physics gets judged," said Dr. Frank Wilczek, another M.I.T. physicist and editor of Annals of Physics, where one of the Bogdanov papers appeared. "Do people really have a mastery of the field as a whole?"
How the Bogdanovs came to this pass is perhaps a cautionary tale about the way physics is done today. Born in 1949 in a castle in Gascogne, they described themselves as descendants of Russian and Austrian nobility. After studying applied mathematics at the Institute of Political Science and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, the brothers carved out careers for themselves as writers and producers of their science television show, "Temps X" ("Time X").
A particularly murky episode in their careers began in 1991, when they published "God and Science," a book based on conversations with the French philosopher Dr. Jean Guitton. The book was a best seller in France, but the authors were sued for plagiarism by Dr. Trinh Xuan Thuan, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, who claimed they had copied passages from his 1988 book, "The Secret Melody, and Man Created the Universe." The brothers countersued, arguing that Dr. Thuan had borrowed from their earlier writings and Dr. Guitton's.
The case was eventually settled out of court in 1995, according to a settlement document provided by the brothers, with both sides renouncing any damages and paying their own court costs. Dr. Thuan, whose book is being reissued in the United States this winter, failed to respond to requests for an interview.
It was during the writing of the book, the brothers say, that they had a brainstorm for a theory of the so-called initial singularity, the infinitely dense, infinitely hot point into which all space and time were squeezed when the universe began, where normal physics breaks down. They returned to college to pursue Ph.D.'s, something they say they had always intended to do, but had been delayed by the unexpected success of their television show.
After two years at the University of Bordeaux, they moved to the University of Bourgogne and apprenticed themselves to Dr. Moshe Flato, founder of the journal Letters in Mathematical Physics and a prominent theorist known for his unconventional ways. When Dr. Flato died in 1998, a longtime associate, Dr. Daniel Sternheimer, a mathematician at C.N.R.S., the French center for scientific research, took over as the twins' adviser.
For the most part, however, the brothers were left to work on their own without much supervision, "pursuing ideas that are quite a bit out of the mainstream," said Dr. Jacobus Verbaarschot, a physicist now at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and one of the examiners for Grichka Bogdanov's doctoral thesis in 1999.
Dr. Sternheimer described the twins as stubborn "wunderkids" with very high I.Q.'s, who have a hard time understanding that they are not "the Einstein brothers" and prone to shooting themselves in the foot with vague statements and an "impressionistic" style. He called teaching them "like teaching My Fair Lady to speak with an Oxford accent."
Certainly they did not come off as the Einstein brothers in their dissertations. In June 1999, Grichka was granted a Ph.D. in mathematics by the École Polytechnique in Paris but with an "honorable," the lowest passing grade.
Igor, however, failed. The examining committee agreed that he could try again if he had three papers published in peer-reviewed journals, a common litmus test of legitimacy, Dr. Jackiw said.
"One has to have trust in the community," he explained. Igor's thesis had many things Dr. Jackiw didn't understand, but he found it intriguing. "All these were ideas that could possibly make sense," he said. "It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask."
Igor got his degree in theoretical physics from the University of Bourgogne in July, also with the lowest possible grade, one that is seldom given, Dr. Sternheimer said.
"These guys worked for 10 years without pay," he said. "They have the right to have their work recognized with a diploma, which is nothing much these days."
The brothers have since returned to television, producing two-minute spots for a French series called "Rayons-X" ("X-Rays"). That would have been the end of it, except for the hoax rumors.
Dr. Sternheimer called the dispute "a storm in a teacup."
"They don't deserve so much interest, they don't deserve so much hatred," he said.
The aftermath has been bruising for both the Bogdanovs and for physics. Dr. Arkadiusz Jadczyk, a Polish theoretical physicist who has been conducting a dialogue with the brothers and other physicists on his Web site, cassiopaea.org/cass/bog-sternheimer
But the editors of Classical and Quantum Gravity repudiated their publication of a Bogdanov paper, saying it "does not meet the standards expected of articles in this journal," although they declined to retract it, inviting readers to send comments to the journal instead.
Dr. Wilczek stressed that the publication of a paper by the Bogdanovs in Annals of Physics had occurred before his tenure and that he had been raising standards. Describing it as a deeply theoretical work, he said that while it was "not a stellar addition to the physics literature," it was not at first glance clearly nonsensical.
"It's a difficult subject," he said. "The paper has a lot of the right buzz words. Referees rely on the good will of the authors." The paper is essentially impossible to read, like "Finnegans Wake," he added.
His colleague Dr. Jackiw compared modern physics to modern art: "One person looks at a piece of art and says it is gibberish; another person looks and says it's wonderful."
When physics talks about the universe before the Big Bang, it is completely speculative, he said, adding, "I would be very careful before calling something nonsense, especially if I didn't understand it."
Physicists were no more unanimous on the greater lesson of the whole affair. "This says something profound about what happens to theoretical physics in the absence of the discipline of experiment," Dr. Wilczek said.
Dr. Baez and others have suggested that the system administering the brothers' degrees and publishing their papers was lax. "I do think that the examiners, referees and editors do have something to answer for in this case," said Dr. Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario, citing what he said were obvious errors in the referees' reports for the brothers' papers.
But others, especially in France, disagree. "What they did or what they have written seems to show that they are not better (but not worse) than several theoretical physicists friends of ours who often use some mathematical terminology that they do not master well enough," said Dr. Robert Coquereaux, director of research at C.N.R.S., in a statement posted on Dr. Jackiw's Web site.
But Dr. David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., took issue with this view. "It is easy to judge, even from the abstract alone, that these papers are nutty," he said, noting that the physics community had ignored them until the hoax brouhaha.
Dr. Coquereaux and others said that the "publish or perish" ethos of academic research in the United States had contributed to the spread of unintelligible papers.
"There is a tradition of formally obscure but extremely serious and competent theoretical work in Europe," said Dr. Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist and gravitational theorist at the University of Marseille and the University of Pittsburgh. But there was a tradition of letting every wild idea go in the United States, he added. He described the brothers' papers as "really empty."
The Bogdanovs said they were still hopeful that their ideas would be recognized and useful in physics. As they said in an e-mail message: "Nonsense in the morning may make sense in the evening or the following day."
Worker Dismissed as Inquiry Widens Into Big Racing Bet
By JOE DRAPE
As the authorities investigated whether an exotic bet worth $3 million on last Saturday's Breeders' Cup horse races was rigged, the company that processed the wager said yesterday that it had fired a "rogue software engineer" who exploited a weakness in its system.
The company, Scientific Games Corporation of New York, said it had turned over the employee's name and evidence of potential wrongdoing to the state police and state wagering officials.
The employee attended Drexel University in Philadelphia with the winner of the bet, racing officials and a state investigator said.
The head of the company, Lorne Weil, said the worker had the access and know-how to breach the system run by the company's subsidiary Autotote, which processes 65 percent of racing wagers in North America.
Industry and law enforcement officials said that the F.B.I. had joined the police and the New York State Racing and Wagering Board in the inquiry of the wager, known as a pick six, which requires bettors to pick winners in six straight races. Payoff on the bet, made through the Catskill Off-Track Betting hub by telephone from Baltimore, has been held up.
Investigators are also looking into whether there have been questionable payoffs at other tracks. "This goes beyond one afternoon and the East Coast," said an investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Though Mr. Weil tried to calm investors in his conference call yesterday, his disclosures pointed up the vulnerability of the $14.5 billion-a-year betting industry for which consumer confidence is crucial.
As racing has become more reliant on off-track and telephone betting, it is also depending more on a network of computers that link tracks and off-track sites. If the systems are proved flawed, or susceptible to manipulation, it could scare off bettors worried about the integrity of the process.
"There needs to be total review of the system so everyone can feel good and see that these things are not widespread," said Bill Nader, a New York Racing Association vice president. "Without integrity in the way a wager is processed, we don't have a sport."
The case in question involves the pick six bet on the last six races of the Breeders' Cup, horse racing's season-ending championship. The entire winning pool was held by Derrick Davis, a 29-year-old Maryland man who made the bets by phone.
Investigators are looking into whether the computer system was manipulated so that a bet made after several races had been run would appear to have been made beforehand.
Though Mr. Weil did not name the dismissed employee, the state investigator and racing officials identified him as Chris Harn, 29, who worked in Autotote's offices in Newark, Del.
Mr. Davis owns a Baltimore-based computer networking business, Utopian Networks Inc., but said yesterday that he was a knowledgeable bettor whose winning tickets were legitimate. "I didn't do anything wrong here," he said, refusing to elaborate and referring questions to his Baltimore lawyer, Steven A. Allen. Mr. Allen said his client was cooperating with the authorities and had nothing to hide.
"He is caught in the middle of a maelstrom," Mr. Allen said. "As far as he's concerned, he made a legitimate bet. The race was run, and he won, and he should have received his payoff. And that should have been the end of it. Now, instead, there's an investigation, people are making a variety of wild accusations, and his reputation is being sullied for no good reason."
Thomas Davis, Derrick's father, said his son grew up in Baltimore and attended engineering school in Pennsylvania, but would not be more specific. "I just think it's like the equivalent of his hitting the lottery," the father said. "I know in the bottom of my heart that it's a legitimate bet."
Stacy Clifford, a spokeswoman for the state wagering board, would not comment on the personnel involved in the investigation or its progress.
"The board routinely involves other organizations in its investigations and will involve law enforcement if it feels appropriate," she said. "They fired this person in connection with what happened Saturday, and since we're investigating what happened Saturday, we're certainly looking into it."
What started the investigation last Sunday was the configuration of the winning tickets and that they belonged to one bettor, Mr. Davis, who called his bets in by phone to the Catskill OTB hub, one of five regional corporations that, with New York City OTB, handle off-track bets in New York.
The winning tickets featured "singles," or races with only one horse selected, in the first four legs of the ticket, and then every horse in the final two races. On a $2 ticket, those combinations and strategy cost $192.
Mr. Davis bet a $12 pick-six ticket, or played that exact combination six separate times, costing him $1,152. It was a highly unusual strategy for betting the pick six -- horseplayers like to cover as many combinations as possible -- and the configuration raised suspicions of New York Racing Association officials, who alerted Breeders' Cup Ltd. and the state wagering board.
Mr. Davis had opened the Catskill OTB account within two weeks of the Breeders' Cup, had deposited money on five occasions -- four increments of $500 and one of $250 -- but had not made a bet until that pick six, according to investigative sources.
The six winning tickets were each worth $428,392. In addition, by including every horse in the last two races, the bettor collected 108 of the 186 consolation payoffs for hitting five of six winners; each consolation ticket was worth $4,606.20.
After an initial review on Monday, officials for Autotote and Catskill OTB said the tickets were recorded about 20 minutes before the first leg and appeared legitimate. But after further review, Mr. Weil said, the company determined that the fired employee had taken advantage of a weakness in the processing of bets.
While the tickets were logged and totaled at satellite sites such as Catskill OTB, they were not transferred to the host site, Arlington Park outside Chicago, until after the fifth race when the exact bets were verified. In this state of limbo, Mr. Weil said, the employee, who had the password to the data system, was able to alter the ticket after the results of the first four races of the pick six were known.
When Scientific Games announced the firing, trading in its stock was suspended on Nasdaq for more than 20 minutes. The stock closed at $7.62, down 57 cents. Mr. Weil maintained he was confident Autotote's systems were impenetrable to outside hackers.
"I think people see this for what it is -- a rogue individual bound and determined to exploit the only weak link we see in the system so far," he said.
What fact says this?
There are tons of blind taste tests (done both by Coke and Pepsi) saying that people like, in order of prefrence:
New Coke
Pepsi
Classic Coke
Coke is popular because of the almighty dollar. It's all advertising. They've sold you that their sweet, fizzy water is better than brand xyz's sweet, fizzy water.
Do something good for you body and put the sugar water down!!!
I drive past Scott Jones' house 2 or 3 times a week on my way to my colocation facility.
Scott Jones is just trying to catch up with Steve Hilbert (remember, the ex-CEO of Conseco) who happens to live right across the street.
He just moved his driveway up the hill from Hilbert's last fall (and spent a pretty penny on it too according to local gossip).
Hilbert's place still rocks Jones' though.
Actually, I would live in any house along the street (116th between US 421 and US 31 for those of you who want to go check it out). It's called Millionaires' Row and sports names like Steve Hilbert, Scott Jones, Robert Ursey (owner of the Colts) among others. VERY NICE houses in a VERY HIGH DOLLAR area.
OK, this sounds fine and dandy, but if we're vigorously scrubbing our environment of CO2 isn't there to much of a good thing?
I mean, at what low levels of present CO2 is plant life starting to be affected? I would hate to crank up a system like this and see vast forests just dissapearing because of lack of CO2 levels. I assume there have to be some checks to how much we remove, but if profit is as stake, will there really be those checks?
How can they really simulate this to test all the effects on our environment?
We're looking at MASSIVE changes in our environment if they think they can just rollback the air to pre-industrial revoluiton air quality!
It's not stellar, but I can get what I need done. I have the 800Mhz iMac.
I would think the dual 1Ghz G4 Tower would be pretty fast though. :-)
Booting up and shutting down takes me the longest.
Unless someone knows how to write a web server using nothing but vector math! :-)
The book was "The Space Merchants" and the sequal was "Merchant Wars"
Great books. Go check them out of the library and enjoy them. They are pretty quick reads.
Did anyone else think of Chicken Little when reading this story?
*shudder*
The last thing I want is to end up in a world like Mitch Courtenany.
I find it funny and interesting that because the NSA and other TLA agengies are *so* tight lipped we assume their skills and abilities are far ahead of current "joe-sixpack" tech.
I suppose this very well could be the case, but it sure lends itself to great conspiracy theories.
I suppose the TLA agengies don't really need strong crypto to invade on my privacy. They just need a court order.
Sure I use a 2048bit key (soon to be 4096bit I guess), but will that really stop them from making me give up the goods if faced with jail when they come asking for my data?
Nope, because I have nothing really to hide. Maybe I keep my cache of pr0n encrypted so my fiancee doesn't discover it, but I will sure-as-shooting give that information up to keep me out of jail.
I'm to pretty for jail!
Had I mod points, you sir would be modded up!
If I live to be 70 instead of 74.9, but I can enjoy a superb cigar every once in a while, I can assure you I will be happier for it!
> No, you can't just "wander in", much paperwork
.22 or a shotgun who cares?
> and background checks are required to buy
> firearms in the U.S.
Not for certian firearms. Check your local laws. Here in Indiana I can walk into a Wal-Mart and, as long as I'm 18, walk out with a nice single action 10 gague and a box of shells.
No problem.
I would have to wait for the purchase of a handgun, but if I can walk into K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Meijer, or any local gun shop & pawn shop and walk out 10 minutes later with a
Oh yeah, we can carry concealed too!
Bang bang.
Awww yeah, 20 years of pr0n binaries to start sucking down!
Seriously, won't this take many terabytes to store? The ISP I used to work for was keeping a dedicated T1 saturated 24x7 just to keep up a newsfeed. And they only keep stuff around for 14 days I believe.
Insane.
Even if this burns an ultra-clean fuel, you're still going to have problems with exhaust and how to get rid of it.
Does this mean if I play quake on my laptop sitting in the garage I can commit suicide? Hmmm.
Seriously, now in addition to noise polution at my desk, I'll have to deal with smog soon?
I have a SliMP3 (number 47 actually) and it rocks, hard.
It's not in a flasy case, but it looks sweet sitting amid my other AV gear, it doesn't create an noise and I just leave the perl scripts running on my MP3 server and forget about it.
Plus I can actually read the VFD from the couch.
Oh yeah, I can also control the music from my web browser when I'm out of remote range. So I can be sitting at my computer with the stereo playing in the living room and I can have total control over it.
Way to cool!
Actually it's a DSK
Down Stream Key.
There is a little t-bar in almost every master control I've ever been in to control this and they are all marked "DSK" or "Down Stream Key".
DOG's, BUG's, etc. are all "affectionate" names.
I wouldn't say the Newton's HWR "sucked." It was actually pretty good if you have legible writing and spend a little time with the device.
I never had any problems with my MP100, MP110, MP120 and with my MP2000 I *never* had to even think about it. It just worked. Even my friend who has REALLY BAD handwriting was able to use my 2000 without problems.
And for the record, Palm didn't dream up gesture recoginition. I was using Grafitti for my MP110 long before palm was around. They simply licensed Grafitti.
Mac's rock so hard. This is wicked-cool and I can't wait to get my G4 to try this now! 8-)
Great - The first XP system is shipped. It's not something that I will rush out and upgrade to, it's not something that I will recommend to my customers to rush out and upgrade to.
Unfortunatly the massive crushing machine that is Microsoft will eventually make XP so ubiquitous that I will be forced to either buy a Mac or switch to FreeBSD 100% of the time.
I guess I should switch to FreeBSD 100% and just buy and XBox for my games anyway.
It still TOTAL DOMINATION of all computers. They won't rest until even your wrist watch runs Windows for Watches XP..
Scary!