I first stumbled across Greg Egan's work about ten years ago via another slashdot poster... he writes really good hard science fiction.
My favorite is probably Diaspora. Things start off with a mass extinction event due to a nearby gamma ray burst. Things ramp up from there as the robotic and electronic survivors set out to explore the universe, in a bid to find other potential dangers and ensure survival. Their journey takes them on a grand exploration of the galaxy, simulated virtual universes, and parallel dimensions. Through it all, Egan throws in plenty of real math to make things interesting.
My first impression of AMP was "the thing that suddenly replaced usable links with garbage so broken I couldn't even scroll down to the body of the text I wanted to read."
Thankfully that has been fixed, but talk about a lousy first impression.
Have you actually calculated the amount of CO2 released per distance traveled for a car powered by gasoline, versus one powered by electricity from a coal plant? If so, I'd be genuinely interested in comparing notes. If not, please sit down and do a quick calculation before claiming electric cars "tend to be far more polluting."
Here's my (admittedly rough) calculation:
Gasoline: Approximately 9.5 L/100km (average for 2015 model year) times 2.31 kg CO2 emitted per L gasoline burned = 21.9 kg CO2 per 100 km traveled
Electric: 17.9 kWh/100km (for the 70 kWh Tesla Model S) divided by 80% wall charger efficiency (Tesla claims 95%, some users report 80%) times 0.527 kg CO2 per kWh (EPA average, includes line losses) = 11.8 kg CO2 per 100 km traveled
Mind you, we're unfairly penalizing the electric car here because we're counting transmission losses over the power grid, whereas we're only counting the emissions from the gasoline already in the tank. A fairer comparison would take into account the carbon involved with gasoline distribution, but that goes beyond something I can easily estimate.
I'll admit I'm not factoring in the environmental impact of battery manufacturing. (I suspect it isn't as bad as the anti-EV crowd claim, since lithium isn't a heavy metal.) Perhaps someone more informed than me can speak to the overall impact of manufacturing an electric versus gasoline car... I'd be interested in reading their insights.
Too bad... I remember using telnet to surreptitiously change the message displayed on the little LCD display on the office printer. "Error: out of white toner" "Insert coin to continue" "Help I'm stuck in a printer"... good times...
I once made a list of the usual sites that distracted me from work, and black-holed them in my hosts file. At first I was amazed at how often I would reflexively attempt to visit one of those sites before remembering my self-imposed blockade.
Interestingly, I don't think it made much of a difference in my overall productivity. I find that creative output comes in waves... I have days of pure concentration and peak output, followed by lulls where I occupy myself with busywork. The blockade really only impacted the lulls, since I didn't do much browsing during productivity peaks anyway. If my productivity during the lulls improved, the gain too small to be significant, and it came with the cost of increased annoyance.
I wonder if the app would have done better with a name other than "Milk". Maybe it's just me, but the word evokes thoughts about spoilage instead of music.
I wonder what the advertisers think they'll gain if they manage to win this particular arms race. A wider audience of eager ad consumers?
Ad-block users aren't just people who don't like ads, they are the subset of the population who disliked ads enough to install a blocker. It's like when Microsoft changed the registry settings users had deliberately set to avoid the Win 10 "upgrade"... all they'll succeed in doing is angering those users.
Bypassing my ad-block won't turn me into a happy consumer of ads, but it will turn me away from that site.
You can't spell "idiotic" without IOT. Maybe I've gone prematurely old, but I have yet to come across an IoT feature or device that doesn't strike me as unnecessary, dangerous, or both.
At a minimum, who the hell thought the ability to remotely unlock the door was a good idea? (Yes, sure, I know you can construct some hypothetical scenario where such a thing is useful, but weigh that against risks inherent to such a feature.) I could maaaybe see "remotely lock the door" as a good feature, but the system had better be physically constructed in a way that it can only ever engage the lock.
Over the years I have gotten better at taking notes on a computer, to the point where I can make well-organized, nicely formatted notes in real time. I memorized a few shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-1, 2, or 3 for various headings and subheadings, wrote a few macros to insert code blocks, etc. Since my typing speed is much faster than my handwriting, and the flexibility of being able to go back and edit or rearrange things, the computer is now my preferred method for taking notes during a lecture.
However, the minute I need to think creatively (whether to organize my thoughts, troubleshoot a problem, or create an outline for a new document), I immediately go back to pen and paper. I'm not entirely sure why... one would think that the ease of cutting and pasting on a computer would make it better suited for keeping up with fluid nature of creative thought, but no. Something about the tactile nature of the page makes it easier to think clearly, scribbles and all. I suspect it has to do with thinking habits ingrained from early childhood... or I might just be a Luddite at heart.
Same here. I could almost see a case if the Trump merchandise was branded with overtly hateful messages (and not just something like "Trump 2016"). As far as I can tell, however, this is a case of "I don't like Trump, so no-one should be able to buy his stuff."
The TFA assumes that stylometry gives somewhat reliable results. It doesn't. Something as simple as an editor cleaning up a work can throw off the analysis.
Even in the optimal scenario (an unedited work by a single author who isn't trying to hide or imitate a different style), the best algorithms have abysmally high failure rates.
(KNN)â"50 neighbors: 0.69 success, 0.28 fail Decision Tree 0.58 success, 0.42 fail Mean Margins Tree 0.65 success, 0.36 fail
Stylometry is reasonably effective at correctly identifying when two works by the same author have the same style. It is garbage when it comes to determining when two works have different authors. If I were to guess, I'd say the problem is that the variation in style between authors (compared to the variation within a single author's work) is not always wide enough to allow for reliable identification.
Stylometry is interesting, certainly, but the prospect of such an unreliable method being used for important is alarming.
How about closer to the sun than the L1 point, so that the radiation pressure is balanced by the gravitational pull of the sun?
Of course, L1 isn't a stable Lagrange point, so you'd have to expend energy to counteract gravitational perturbations from the other planets and fluctuations in solar radiation... but given the amount of solar energy you'd be collecting you'd have plenty of power to spare for manoeuvring.
No, the real problem would be the size of the damn thing. L1 is about four times the distance of the moon from the earth, so to block even 1% of the sun's light you'd need a shade almost half the moon's diameter.
I myself was curious, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.
Seems like he educated himself in particle physics when he was very young (started publishing papers at age 15), got accepted early by St. John's College when he applied at age 17, switched to CalTech at age 19, and got his Ph.D. a year later.
Now, obviously he was allowed to fast forward through the years of grinding that are normally required before you can enter college or work on a Ph.D. thesis. Given that he was already publishing widely cited physics papers at the age of 18, that was probably a good call on the part of his instructors.
Even better, companies should stop the rampant collection of non-essential information.
Large databases of sensitive information are just massive breaches waiting to happen. If it's not a SQL injection attack, it will be some other exploit (heartbleed, shellshock, logjam, etc.) Even if you could magically defeat every exploit, the data can get exposed by any malicious or incompetent administrator. If nothing else, authorities with sufficient interest in the data could simply compel the database owners to turn it over.
When it comes to protecting amassed information, the only winning move is not to play.
Nope... even if you got 100% of your electricity from dirty, dirty coal, the efficiency of the electric car is still so much higher than that of a standard gasoline ICE that you'll still end up putting less CO2 in the atmosphere for the same distance driven. A big coal-fired generator is a lot more efficient than a lot of small car motors.
Someone with MOHAMMED in their name carries wires and a circuit board and a clock display around in a box, and it makes noise to boot, what do you expect people to think?
Sadly, I'd expect them to do what you just did... leap to idiotic conclusions based on mindless prejudice. Watching people like you in positions of authority has drastically lowered my expectations over the years.
Will this be useful for solving real-world problems here and now? Probably not.
Does it help us better understand the universe? Absolutely.
The black hole information paradox is important in physics because a pretty fundamental idea of quantum mechanics is that it shouldn't be possible to destroy information. Burn a book? The complete information about all the molecules in the book are still encoded in the wave function of the system. Annihilate it with anti-matter? The information is now carried by the resulting gamma ray photons. You can make it difficult or impossible to recover the information, but the theory says you can't actually destroy the information itself.
This is why black holes are so interesting... having stuff disappear behind a one-way event horizon is basically the same as information destruction. It was a pretty fundamental paradox.
Now, whether you care about advances in theoretical physics is up to you, but to answer your question "who cares?"... I do. Nerds do. Join us... the universe is a wondrous and beautiful place.
In general it's difficult to get excited about Canadian issues, since the news and commentary from our US neighbors tends to be a lot more loud and extreme. However, there are a couple commenters I turn to when I want to catch up on what is happening in my own country:
Michael Geist is an excellent source for tech and intellectual property issues in Canada.
Chantal Hebert is a fantastic political analyst... her columns are regularly insightful and devoid of the partisan screeching that seems to infect a lot of political commentary.
The original designer of the battle flag, William Miles, wrote that slavery was a "divine institution", and the designer of the Confederacy's flag (the battle flag on a white background) wrote that he specifically chose the white background to symbolize the supremacy of the white race.
I suppose you think that the resurgence of the battle flag during the 1950s and 1960s had nothing to do with the reactions to the gains of the Civil Rights movement. That symbol of Southern treason had almost faded into obscurity until Southern whites started to feel threatened, but sure... it's just an innocent symbol, just like the Civil War was all about "states rights" and not slavery, right?
I wonder how rigged the elections are in that province. You'd think that using MAFIA-style tactics would have too much risk of backfiring in any place which is not effectively a single-party dictatorship.
Let's see... in 2014 the BJP and allies won a pretty lopsided victory in Uttar Pradesh (73 out of 80 seats). In the three elections before that the results were much more evenly split, with SP beating the BJP in 2004 and 2009. Looks competitive, at least on paper.
It's weird... quietly killing a troublesome journalist is one thing, but burning them alive is usually reserved for sending a very loud message. It's a terror tactic that normally only organized crime or dictatorships can get away with. The minister who ordered the murder must have felt totally untouchable.
Homosexuals are just as free to marry someone with the opposite set of genitalia as everyone else, and just a restricted from marring someone with the same genitals as everyone else.
That's a funny sort of equality. Do also tell people in wheelchairs that they're just as free to use the stairs as everyone else? Would you tell your Jewish friends to stop complaining and eat the pork roast you served all your dinner guests, because "equality"?
Love has nothing to do with it. There is no law that requires you to love the person to whom you are married or the person you intend to marry.
Speak for yourself... if the freedom to marry someone you love is unimportant to you, that's your choice. The rest of us value the freedom to love and marry who we choose, and I'll continue to work damn hard against bigots like you to ensure that freedom applies to gay and straight alike.
Slashdot Mirror
I first stumbled across Greg Egan's work about ten years ago via another slashdot poster... he writes really good hard science fiction.
My favorite is probably Diaspora. Things start off with a mass extinction event due to a nearby gamma ray burst. Things ramp up from there as the robotic and electronic survivors set out to explore the universe, in a bid to find other potential dangers and ensure survival. Their journey takes them on a grand exploration of the galaxy, simulated virtual universes, and parallel dimensions. Through it all, Egan throws in plenty of real math to make things interesting.
Because you can do anything you want when extrapolating from a single data point.
My first impression of AMP was "the thing that suddenly replaced usable links with garbage so broken I couldn't even scroll down to the body of the text I wanted to read."
Thankfully that has been fixed, but talk about a lousy first impression.
Have you actually calculated the amount of CO2 released per distance traveled for a car powered by gasoline, versus one powered by electricity from a coal plant? If so, I'd be genuinely interested in comparing notes. If not, please sit down and do a quick calculation before claiming electric cars "tend to be far more polluting."
Here's my (admittedly rough) calculation:
Gasoline:
Approximately 9.5 L/100km (average for 2015 model year)
times 2.31 kg CO2 emitted per L gasoline burned
= 21.9 kg CO2 per 100 km traveled
Electric:
17.9 kWh/100km (for the 70 kWh Tesla Model S)
divided by 80% wall charger efficiency (Tesla claims 95%, some users report 80%)
times 0.527 kg CO2 per kWh (EPA average, includes line losses)
= 11.8 kg CO2 per 100 km traveled
Mind you, we're unfairly penalizing the electric car here because we're counting transmission losses over the power grid, whereas we're only counting the emissions from the gasoline already in the tank. A fairer comparison would take into account the carbon involved with gasoline distribution, but that goes beyond something I can easily estimate.
I'll admit I'm not factoring in the environmental impact of battery manufacturing. (I suspect it isn't as bad as the anti-EV crowd claim, since lithium isn't a heavy metal.) Perhaps someone more informed than me can speak to the overall impact of manufacturing an electric versus gasoline car... I'd be interested in reading their insights.
Too bad... I remember using telnet to surreptitiously change the message displayed on the little LCD display on the office printer. "Error: out of white toner" "Insert coin to continue" "Help I'm stuck in a printer"... good times...
Earthquakes cause full moons!
I once made a list of the usual sites that distracted me from work, and black-holed them in my hosts file. At first I was amazed at how often I would reflexively attempt to visit one of those sites before remembering my self-imposed blockade.
Interestingly, I don't think it made much of a difference in my overall productivity. I find that creative output comes in waves... I have days of pure concentration and peak output, followed by lulls where I occupy myself with busywork. The blockade really only impacted the lulls, since I didn't do much browsing during productivity peaks anyway. If my productivity during the lulls improved, the gain too small to be significant, and it came with the cost of increased annoyance.
After a few months, I got rid of the blockade.
I wonder if the app would have done better with a name other than "Milk". Maybe it's just me, but the word evokes thoughts about spoilage instead of music.
I wonder what the advertisers think they'll gain if they manage to win this particular arms race. A wider audience of eager ad consumers?
Ad-block users aren't just people who don't like ads, they are the subset of the population who disliked ads enough to install a blocker. It's like when Microsoft changed the registry settings users had deliberately set to avoid the Win 10 "upgrade"... all they'll succeed in doing is angering those users.
Bypassing my ad-block won't turn me into a happy consumer of ads, but it will turn me away from that site.
You can't spell "idiotic" without IOT. Maybe I've gone prematurely old, but I have yet to come across an IoT feature or device that doesn't strike me as unnecessary, dangerous, or both.
At a minimum, who the hell thought the ability to remotely unlock the door was a good idea? (Yes, sure, I know you can construct some hypothetical scenario where such a thing is useful, but weigh that against risks inherent to such a feature.) I could maaaybe see "remotely lock the door" as a good feature, but the system had better be physically constructed in a way that it can only ever engage the lock.
Over the years I have gotten better at taking notes on a computer, to the point where I can make well-organized, nicely formatted notes in real time. I memorized a few shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-1, 2, or 3 for various headings and subheadings, wrote a few macros to insert code blocks, etc. Since my typing speed is much faster than my handwriting, and the flexibility of being able to go back and edit or rearrange things, the computer is now my preferred method for taking notes during a lecture.
However, the minute I need to think creatively (whether to organize my thoughts, troubleshoot a problem, or create an outline for a new document), I immediately go back to pen and paper. I'm not entirely sure why... one would think that the ease of cutting and pasting on a computer would make it better suited for keeping up with fluid nature of creative thought, but no. Something about the tactile nature of the page makes it easier to think clearly, scribbles and all. I suspect it has to do with thinking habits ingrained from early childhood... or I might just be a Luddite at heart.
Same here. I could almost see a case if the Trump merchandise was branded with overtly hateful messages (and not just something like "Trump 2016"). As far as I can tell, however, this is a case of "I don't like Trump, so no-one should be able to buy his stuff."
The TFA assumes that stylometry gives somewhat reliable results. It doesn't. Something as simple as an editor cleaning up a work can throw off the analysis.
Even in the optimal scenario (an unedited work by a single author who isn't trying to hide or imitate a different style), the best algorithms have abysmally high failure rates.
(KNN)â"50 neighbors: 0.69 success, 0.28 fail
Decision Tree 0.58 success, 0.42 fail
Mean Margins Tree 0.65 success, 0.36 fail
Stylometry is reasonably effective at correctly identifying when two works by the same author have the same style. It is garbage when it comes to determining when two works have different authors. If I were to guess, I'd say the problem is that the variation in style between authors (compared to the variation within a single author's work) is not always wide enough to allow for reliable identification.
Stylometry is interesting, certainly, but the prospect of such an unreliable method being used for important is alarming.
How about closer to the sun than the L1 point, so that the radiation pressure is balanced by the gravitational pull of the sun?
Of course, L1 isn't a stable Lagrange point, so you'd have to expend energy to counteract gravitational perturbations from the other planets and fluctuations in solar radiation... but given the amount of solar energy you'd be collecting you'd have plenty of power to spare for manoeuvring.
No, the real problem would be the size of the damn thing. L1 is about four times the distance of the moon from the earth, so to block even 1% of the sun's light you'd need a shade almost half the moon's diameter.
I myself was curious, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.
Seems like he educated himself in particle physics when he was very young (started publishing papers at age 15), got accepted early by St. John's College when he applied at age 17, switched to CalTech at age 19, and got his Ph.D. a year later.
Now, obviously he was allowed to fast forward through the years of grinding that are normally required before you can enter college or work on a Ph.D. thesis. Given that he was already publishing widely cited physics papers at the age of 18, that was probably a good call on the part of his instructors.
Even better, companies should stop the rampant collection of non-essential information.
Large databases of sensitive information are just massive breaches waiting to happen. If it's not a SQL injection attack, it will be some other exploit (heartbleed, shellshock, logjam, etc.) Even if you could magically defeat every exploit, the data can get exposed by any malicious or incompetent administrator. If nothing else, authorities with sufficient interest in the data could simply compel the database owners to turn it over.
When it comes to protecting amassed information, the only winning move is not to play.
Nope... even if you got 100% of your electricity from dirty, dirty coal, the efficiency of the electric car is still so much higher than that of a standard gasoline ICE that you'll still end up putting less CO2 in the atmosphere for the same distance driven. A big coal-fired generator is a lot more efficient than a lot of small car motors.
Someone with MOHAMMED in their name carries wires and a circuit board and a clock display around in a box, and it makes noise to boot, what do you expect people to think?
Sadly, I'd expect them to do what you just did... leap to idiotic conclusions based on mindless prejudice. Watching people like you in positions of authority has drastically lowered my expectations over the years.
Will this be useful for solving real-world problems here and now? Probably not.
Does it help us better understand the universe? Absolutely.
The black hole information paradox is important in physics because a pretty fundamental idea of quantum mechanics is that it shouldn't be possible to destroy information. Burn a book? The complete information about all the molecules in the book are still encoded in the wave function of the system. Annihilate it with anti-matter? The information is now carried by the resulting gamma ray photons. You can make it difficult or impossible to recover the information, but the theory says you can't actually destroy the information itself.
This is why black holes are so interesting... having stuff disappear behind a one-way event horizon is basically the same as information destruction. It was a pretty fundamental paradox.
Now, whether you care about advances in theoretical physics is up to you, but to answer your question "who cares?"... I do. Nerds do. Join us... the universe is a wondrous and beautiful place.
In general it's difficult to get excited about Canadian issues, since the news and commentary from our US neighbors tends to be a lot more loud and extreme. However, there are a couple commenters I turn to when I want to catch up on what is happening in my own country:
Michael Geist is an excellent source for tech and intellectual property issues in Canada.
Chantal Hebert is a fantastic political analyst... her columns are regularly insightful and devoid of the partisan screeching that seems to infect a lot of political commentary.
Oh please.
The original designer of the battle flag, William Miles, wrote that slavery was a "divine institution", and the designer of the Confederacy's flag (the battle flag on a white background) wrote that he specifically chose the white background to symbolize the supremacy of the white race.
I suppose you think that the resurgence of the battle flag during the 1950s and 1960s had nothing to do with the reactions to the gains of the Civil Rights movement. That symbol of Southern treason had almost faded into obscurity until Southern whites started to feel threatened, but sure... it's just an innocent symbol, just like the Civil War was all about "states rights" and not slavery, right?
I wonder how rigged the elections are in that province. You'd think that using MAFIA-style tactics would have too much risk of backfiring in any place which is not effectively a single-party dictatorship.
Let's see... in 2014 the BJP and allies won a pretty lopsided victory in Uttar Pradesh (73 out of 80 seats). In the three elections before that the results were much more evenly split, with SP beating the BJP in 2004 and 2009. Looks competitive, at least on paper.
It's weird... quietly killing a troublesome journalist is one thing, but burning them alive is usually reserved for sending a very loud message. It's a terror tactic that normally only organized crime or dictatorships can get away with. The minister who ordered the murder must have felt totally untouchable.
How about something that prods me to stop reading /. all the time?
Can I interest you in slashdot beta?
Homosexuals are just as free to marry someone with the opposite set of genitalia as everyone else, and just a restricted from marring someone with the same genitals as everyone else.
That's a funny sort of equality. Do also tell people in wheelchairs that they're just as free to use the stairs as everyone else? Would you tell your Jewish friends to stop complaining and eat the pork roast you served all your dinner guests, because "equality"?
Love has nothing to do with it. There is no law that requires you to love the person to whom you are married or the person you intend to marry.
Speak for yourself... if the freedom to marry someone you love is unimportant to you, that's your choice. The rest of us value the freedom to love and marry who we choose, and I'll continue to work damn hard against bigots like you to ensure that freedom applies to gay and straight alike.
By walking away from the explosion in slow-motion while the music swells, of course.