And what the grandparent was trying to explain to you is that it has been officially renamed. Fortran 90, Fortran 95, Fortran 2003, Fortran 2008, and the still-draft Fortran 2015 all used the name Fortran in ISO standards. That was in response to an ISO recommendation made shortly after FORTRAN 77 was standardized that names pronounced as words (Pascal, Fortran, Python) be title-capitalized, and only names pronounced by spelling out the acronym (APL, PL/1) were all caps. It is official, not casual or colloquial.
I happened to be at the National Zoo in DC this weekend. Please be nicer to orangutans and don't compare them to the current Oval Office occupant. They are intelligent, interesting, and they seem to have a sense of humor.
OK, caught me with too little coffee. My main point is that this is not an "international" pi day because seeing it as 3/14 is not necessarily a majority point of view. I was also trying to remember what the months were in Julian, which would have been in force outside of Catholic countries at the time. If you want it totally nerded out, a pi day existed best when there was a leap month in the old roman calendar, in which 31 March would have been 31st day of 4th month, except it wouldn't have existed unless the Romans were using decimal notation. Then it would have been more special by being every four years.
Early views of state versus federal powers were tested and tweaked for 80 years and then settled by the Civil War. We have had a sovereign federal government for 150 years. The views of Jefferson, Madison, and the other founders on this subject are no longer particularly relevant, and have not been in a very long time.
Walls? You had walls? Why, in my day, when we hadn't crawled out of the ocean yet, we had to position ourselves under the computer, blow an air bubble for 0 and make a little vortex for 1, and watch them rise into the reader. A large fish passing by could cause a transmission error that would make us start over from scratch.
The GGP has a.sig that identifies a UK domain name. Use of plural for corporate names as collective nouns is the most common form in British English, or at least it is far more common than in American English. Rather than arguing about what is correct, it is worth noting that grammar is a social consensus that drifts with time and varies with location.
SInce you won't listen to people who weren't alive in the 80s, let me give you the point of view of someone who was already studying this stuff professionally in the 1970s. You are full of it; if anyone was indoctrinating you otherwise back then they were probably misunderstanding the huge scatter of exploratory results from climate modeling in its infancy -- the half dozen years after Budyko and Sellers in 1969 independently calculated an iceline stability problem using models so simple you would think a spreadsheet program is overkill now. The GP is correct in all points except a slight inaccuracy about the ozone hole. The catalytic ozone depletion cycle had been worked out in the early 70s by Crutzen, Rowland, and Molina (who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for that) but the Antarctic ozone hole was not noticed until the mid 80s, (Farman et al).
The idea that light was a wave moving through the ether was consistent with all available data, especially given the limitations of 19th century measurement, until the Michelson-Morley experiments. Maxwell's equations are still consistent with pre-relativity understanding, and I certainly had to learn how to work with them. The old way of thinking is not so much wrong as limited to a certain level of measurement, just as with Newton's laws and pretty much everything else before relativity and quantum mechanics. The old ways of thinking are still useful and generally correct within their assumptions. I begin to think that we need some kind of Godwin's Law against bringing up Kuhn and paradigms in an actual scientific discussion -- it seldom leads anywhere useful but usually is used just like this post to say "just because everyone who knows something thinks so doesn't mean it's right."
A minor addition to the previous responses: most of the not-electric-guitarist (normal?) kind of people I talk to don't realize that most of us are getting our overdrive or distortion by overdriving the pre-amp, and the differences among the main amplifier types are much more obvious when they are lightly distorted from slight overdrive than when they are clean or in full metal mode. Many of the better distortion pedals are designed to emulate a particular type of amplifier's distortion, e.g., Rothwell Hellbender to sound like a Marshall Plexi or Lovepedal Les Lius to sound like an old Fender.
This kind of story, where they can go seriously meta about how they fact-check their stories and how they were misled, set to mournful music, is an almost perfect This American Life setup. They will probably want to goof like this every year now.
OK, I'm being very snarky, but Ira Glass is just way too sincere for my taste.
TFA is a Bloomberg summary of a Nature commentary about a survey among permafrost scientists, and the main article isn't even linked by Nature. If this was just an excuse to fire up the global warming flame thread, go for it. However, the same issue of Nature has a far more important (for global change) paper that dismisses the CLAW hypothesis in which dimethyl sulfate released from marine organisms is hugely important for creating clouds. In looking for fluff, the meat got missed.
You're lying in bed at night in a cool room with one blanket on. The blanket is warmer on the bottom next to you and cooler on the top. The top of the blanket is still warmer than the air in the room and it loses heat. Put on a second blanket. You get warmer underneath the two blankets, the top of the blanket layer is cooler than before, and less heat escapes into the room. The troposphere without additional CO2 already has about a dozen blankets on, because we're 33K or so warmer at the surface than our effective radiative temperature into space, and the recent excess CO2 is just adding another blanket to add a few more K to the surface warming. But the main point for this is that the stratosphere is mostly outside the blankets and is getting less heat.
After the fall of communism, the Russians learned that "everything Lenin said about communism was false and everything he said about capitalism was true."
Paraphrase and partial quote from William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.
What I find amusing is how completely Pascal has disappeared from both historical memory and current usage. Some of you may remember the 80s for Basic on a C64, but I remember a huge bandwagon for Pascal both as a teaching language and as a working language. (I am not advocating Pascal, just reminiscing.)
And, I think the judge's almost glib comment near the end that this plaintiff has pursued over 100 previous suits to trial of this sort and can handle another one could indicate that she recognizes Righthaven's business model is Troll, which I take to be a (possibly unwarranted) good sign.
Sigh.
The full, legal, proper name of my country is "United States of America," it is the only country with "America" in its name, and we refer to its people as "Americans" by the same construction that we (in English) refer to people from the Federal Republic of Germany as Germans or the Peoples Republic of China as Chinese.
This might be one of the oldest stupid arguments on the internet -- it certainly was common on Usenet > 20 years ago.
Well stated. A complicated feedback diagram in climatology from 25 years could have served as a model for the Afghan diagram (Robock, 1985, Bull. A.M.S.) and its complexity is the message -- you can't understand this system without understanding all these connections. Gen. McChrystal should not have been laughed at for recognizing the problem. PowerPoint has nothing to do with this aspect. If anything the point should be that PowerPoint discourages diagrams and thoughts of this level of complexity, and thus encourages oversimplified thinking (which was also Tufte's point, mentioned by someone else). We probably need more diagrams like this.
That is so bogus. There are many fields of scientific study where all we can do is observe what happens now, try to reconstruct, often from proxy data, what has happened in the past before the era of human observation, and use extrapolations from physical principles (i.e., numerical models) to try to better understand processes. Climatology, geology, ecology, paleontology, much of astronomy, much of what we think we know about evolution, and a lot of oceanography -- in other words most things having to do with the large scale, have the same observational, not lab-experimental, basis. Climatology is at least physically based enough that we can try to project the future (arguing about accuracy of those predictions is fair, and that argument is a robust part of current climate research).
The canard about what we know in the 1970s is getting really stale. In the early 1970s, climate modeling was in its infancy and we were trying to nail down what, among many possible climate problems, was most likely. If your library has a copy of S.H.Schneider's The Genesis Strategy, look it up for a view of the uncertainty we had back then. News magazines picked up on the ice age side of things more back then, not because there was any scientific consensus at all, but because it sold magazines. By the early 1980s, the scientific consensus was that CO2-greenhouse gases were the imminent concern. Nobody has been seriously pushing the encroaching ice age as a problem for 30 years. This is how science works: hypotheses lead to research which leads to corrections and improvements.
It would help if you recognized the difference between talking to American humans and talking to fast-food life-forms working from a script where "you just want the sandwich" is equivalent to "you don't want the 'meal' (drink and fries) with that?" Because the sort of people who work there (which no doubt includes the past lives of a huge number of slashdotters -- no insult intended here because it's an entry level high-school job) need a simple, one-size-fits-all script, and sandwich is considered all-encompassing.
As the comments have come in, you have shifted your position from "the burger only refers to the patty" which is seriously wrong to "it's not a sandwich, regardless of filling, if it comes on a bun." That is more regionally variable. If you travel the world, expect that sandwich is something added to some kind of bread. In parts of Europe, the bread could be an open-face half of a baguette. In America, you'll often get a choice of various flavors of sliced breads or a sandwich bun (aka Kaiser roll in my usual lunch counter).
None of that redeems your original comment that a burger is just the patty in America. You are still dead wrong there and are just trying to change the argument.
Allow me to put in a serious, but negative, reply.
Math is a game for the young. Mathematicians trying to prove things talk about the fact that no-one who hasn't gotten a major result before the age of 30 ever gets tenure, and really 25 is the age limit for showing real talent. In my experience (college teaching, science, outside of mathematics) no-one who didn't get calculus as a teenager every really gets it. (There are inevitably exceptions out there, some of whom will flame me.)
Cope with the fact that you'll never be really good, and learn what you need.
Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
And what the grandparent was trying to explain to you is that it has been officially renamed. Fortran 90, Fortran 95, Fortran 2003, Fortran 2008, and the still-draft Fortran 2015 all used the name Fortran in ISO standards. That was in response to an ISO recommendation made shortly after FORTRAN 77 was standardized that names pronounced as words (Pascal, Fortran, Python) be title-capitalized, and only names pronounced by spelling out the acronym (APL, PL/1) were all caps. It is official, not casual or colloquial.
I happened to be at the National Zoo in DC this weekend. Please be nicer to orangutans and don't compare them to the current Oval Office occupant. They are intelligent, interesting, and they seem to have a sense of humor.
OK, caught me with too little coffee. My main point is that this is not an "international" pi day because seeing it as 3/14 is not necessarily a majority point of view. I was also trying to remember what the months were in Julian, which would have been in force outside of Catholic countries at the time. If you want it totally nerded out, a pi day existed best when there was a leap month in the old roman calendar, in which 31 March would have been 31st day of 4th month, except it wouldn't have existed unless the Romans were using decimal notation. Then it would have been more special by being every four years.
Considering where any mathematicians who used this calendar were at the time, I suggest that it was actually 31 April 1592.
Early views of state versus federal powers were tested and tweaked for 80 years and then settled by the Civil War. We have had a sovereign federal government for 150 years. The views of Jefferson, Madison, and the other founders on this subject are no longer particularly relevant, and have not been in a very long time.
Walls? You had walls? Why, in my day, when we hadn't crawled out of the ocean yet, we had to position ourselves under the computer, blow an air bubble for 0 and make a little vortex for 1, and watch them rise into the reader. A large fish passing by could cause a transmission error that would make us start over from scratch.
The GGP has a .sig that identifies a UK domain name. Use of plural for corporate names as collective nouns is the most common form in British English, or at least it is far more common than in American English. Rather than arguing about what is correct, it is worth noting that grammar is a social consensus that drifts with time and varies with location.
SInce you won't listen to people who weren't alive in the 80s, let me give you the point of view of someone who was already studying this stuff professionally in the 1970s. You are full of it; if anyone was indoctrinating you otherwise back then they were probably misunderstanding the huge scatter of exploratory results from climate modeling in its infancy -- the half dozen years after Budyko and Sellers in 1969 independently calculated an iceline stability problem using models so simple you would think a spreadsheet program is overkill now. The GP is correct in all points except a slight inaccuracy about the ozone hole. The catalytic ozone depletion cycle had been worked out in the early 70s by Crutzen, Rowland, and Molina (who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for that) but the Antarctic ozone hole was not noticed until the mid 80s, (Farman et al).
The idea that light was a wave moving through the ether was consistent with all available data, especially given the limitations of 19th century measurement, until the Michelson-Morley experiments. Maxwell's equations are still consistent with pre-relativity understanding, and I certainly had to learn how to work with them. The old way of thinking is not so much wrong as limited to a certain level of measurement, just as with Newton's laws and pretty much everything else before relativity and quantum mechanics. The old ways of thinking are still useful and generally correct within their assumptions. I begin to think that we need some kind of Godwin's Law against bringing up Kuhn and paradigms in an actual scientific discussion -- it seldom leads anywhere useful but usually is used just like this post to say "just because everyone who knows something thinks so doesn't mean it's right."
They lowered it to 80% of its former value? A sure sign that they're planning to give them to women this year.
I'm the parent poster and didn't realize I was not logged in -- sorry about that; I never post AC (on purpose).
A minor addition to the previous responses: most of the not-electric-guitarist (normal?) kind of people I talk to don't realize that most of us are getting our overdrive or distortion by overdriving the pre-amp, and the differences among the main amplifier types are much more obvious when they are lightly distorted from slight overdrive than when they are clean or in full metal mode. Many of the better distortion pedals are designed to emulate a particular type of amplifier's distortion, e.g., Rothwell Hellbender to sound like a Marshall Plexi or Lovepedal Les Lius to sound like an old Fender.
RTFA, they worked on English, Spanish, and Hebrew for precisely that reason.
This kind of story, where they can go seriously meta about how they fact-check their stories and how they were misled, set to mournful music, is an almost perfect This American Life setup. They will probably want to goof like this every year now. OK, I'm being very snarky, but Ira Glass is just way too sincere for my taste.
TFA is a Bloomberg summary of a Nature commentary about a survey among permafrost scientists, and the main article isn't even linked by Nature. If this was just an excuse to fire up the global warming flame thread, go for it. However, the same issue of Nature has a far more important (for global change) paper that dismisses the CLAW hypothesis in which dimethyl sulfate released from marine organisms is hugely important for creating clouds. In looking for fluff, the meat got missed.
You're lying in bed at night in a cool room with one blanket on. The blanket is warmer on the bottom next to you and cooler on the top. The top of the blanket is still warmer than the air in the room and it loses heat. Put on a second blanket. You get warmer underneath the two blankets, the top of the blanket layer is cooler than before, and less heat escapes into the room. The troposphere without additional CO2 already has about a dozen blankets on, because we're 33K or so warmer at the surface than our effective radiative temperature into space, and the recent excess CO2 is just adding another blanket to add a few more K to the surface warming. But the main point for this is that the stratosphere is mostly outside the blankets and is getting less heat.
After the fall of communism, the Russians learned that "everything Lenin said about communism was false and everything he said about capitalism was true." Paraphrase and partial quote from William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.
What I find amusing is how completely Pascal has disappeared from both historical memory and current usage. Some of you may remember the 80s for Basic on a C64, but I remember a huge bandwagon for Pascal both as a teaching language and as a working language. (I am not advocating Pascal, just reminiscing.)
And, I think the judge's almost glib comment near the end that this plaintiff has pursued over 100 previous suits to trial of this sort and can handle another one could indicate that she recognizes Righthaven's business model is Troll, which I take to be a (possibly unwarranted) good sign.
Sigh. The full, legal, proper name of my country is "United States of America," it is the only country with "America" in its name, and we refer to its people as "Americans" by the same construction that we (in English) refer to people from the Federal Republic of Germany as Germans or the Peoples Republic of China as Chinese. This might be one of the oldest stupid arguments on the internet -- it certainly was common on Usenet > 20 years ago.
Well stated. A complicated feedback diagram in climatology from 25 years could have served as a model for the Afghan diagram (Robock, 1985, Bull. A.M.S.) and its complexity is the message -- you can't understand this system without understanding all these connections. Gen. McChrystal should not have been laughed at for recognizing the problem. PowerPoint has nothing to do with this aspect. If anything the point should be that PowerPoint discourages diagrams and thoughts of this level of complexity, and thus encourages oversimplified thinking (which was also Tufte's point, mentioned by someone else). We probably need more diagrams like this.
The canard about what we know in the 1970s is getting really stale. In the early 1970s, climate modeling was in its infancy and we were trying to nail down what, among many possible climate problems, was most likely. If your library has a copy of S.H.Schneider's The Genesis Strategy, look it up for a view of the uncertainty we had back then. News magazines picked up on the ice age side of things more back then, not because there was any scientific consensus at all, but because it sold magazines. By the early 1980s, the scientific consensus was that CO2-greenhouse gases were the imminent concern. Nobody has been seriously pushing the encroaching ice age as a problem for 30 years. This is how science works: hypotheses lead to research which leads to corrections and improvements.
It would help if you recognized the difference between talking to American humans and talking to fast-food life-forms working from a script where "you just want the sandwich" is equivalent to "you don't want the 'meal' (drink and fries) with that?" Because the sort of people who work there (which no doubt includes the past lives of a huge number of slashdotters -- no insult intended here because it's an entry level high-school job) need a simple, one-size-fits-all script, and sandwich is considered all-encompassing. As the comments have come in, you have shifted your position from "the burger only refers to the patty" which is seriously wrong to "it's not a sandwich, regardless of filling, if it comes on a bun." That is more regionally variable. If you travel the world, expect that sandwich is something added to some kind of bread. In parts of Europe, the bread could be an open-face half of a baguette. In America, you'll often get a choice of various flavors of sliced breads or a sandwich bun (aka Kaiser roll in my usual lunch counter). None of that redeems your original comment that a burger is just the patty in America. You are still dead wrong there and are just trying to change the argument.
Americans refer "burgers" as "sandwiches".. reserving the word "burger" to refer to just the patty.
Speaking as a life-long American, no, we don't. America has dialect regions and I've only lived in three, but I've never thought of things this way.
Allow me to put in a serious, but negative, reply. Math is a game for the young. Mathematicians trying to prove things talk about the fact that no-one who hasn't gotten a major result before the age of 30 ever gets tenure, and really 25 is the age limit for showing real talent. In my experience (college teaching, science, outside of mathematics) no-one who didn't get calculus as a teenager every really gets it. (There are inevitably exceptions out there, some of whom will flame me.) Cope with the fact that you'll never be really good, and learn what you need. Sorry.