Some visually impaired users enlarge the font so that they can read the text, and thereby use the application. Preventing them from doing this means they can't use the application. Visually impaired people have a hard enough time with the internet. There's no excuse for making it harder.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god
than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible
gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
--Stephen F. Roberts
Once Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev saw the town apostate approaching.
With a loving smile, he drew near him and embraced him: "Don't worry,"
he told him. "The God whom you don't believe in, I don't believe in
either."
Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
The slide rule is an analog computer. It's probably the best example of an analog computer to show a student curious about analog computers. A slide rule teaches a lot about the nature of calculation, not merely providing the result of the calculation. I have several slide rules, and I still use my Pickett Log Log computer, even though command line Perl or Python would probably be faster in most cases for the kinds of calculations I do at work. Why then do I reach for the slide rule? I like the kinesthetic experience of moving the slide and the cursor, thinking through the result. I also have a Keuffel & Esser compensating polar planimeter. The tracer arm traces around a planar figure, and the cylindrical slide rule mechanism in the base calculates the area of the planar figure. As a math graduate student, I read Felix Klein's remarkable book Elementary Mathematics From An Advanced Standpoint, and there was an essay on how the polar planimeter worked. By measuring a linear measure (dimension one), the planimeter is able to calculate area measure (dimension two). At first glance, it doesn't make any sense. How can the planimeter take one dimensional data as input and render two dimensional data as an output? The answer involves Green's Theorem from calculus. It's subtle and elegant and mind-blowing. Engineers before the digital computer was invented would use the planimeter for numerical integrals, after graphing the function to be integrated at the same scale as the planimeter. Cartographers still use planimeters in map-making for calculating areas of countries. Modern planimeters have a computer in the base, rather than a cylindrical slide rule, but the principle is the same.
People have been smart for much longer than I've been alive. Sometimes it's nice to see examples of the way smart people thought who did not have access to the same tools I have at my disposal. There's something worthwhile about looking at a problem that way. I'll prototype Perl programs in AWK, because if it works in AWK, I know I haven't overPerlified the program. Doing a problem with old tools sometimes shows that you have a deeper understanding of the solution.
While there are exceptions (the Long Tail comes to mind), for the most part, Wired Magazine are a pack of idiots. These clowns are still nattering about the Singularity, for Chrissakes. Remember the Wired article by the woman who was outraged that her company interfered with some data on her company laptop? The magazine is a continual embarassment to geekdom.
Can't anyone create a GNU version of Mathematica
on
Mathematica 6 Launched
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Mathematica has a killer engine (kernel), but a lousy UI, and it costs a shocking amount of money. Mathematica was one of the first pieces of software to scan your computer's MAC address and serial number while you entered the activation key, so it could not be installed on more than one computer (this after the $250-$1000 price tag). A student can get the castrated $250 version, but the real version is considerably pricier. Wolfram's treatment of his users is as distrustful as Micro-Suck.
Why can't the FOSS community beat Wolfram at this? Octave, Maxima, Yacas; they all fail miserably in comparison. The UI for Yacas is so idiotic that the function that transposes a matrix is Transpose[], a nine-character entry for an operation that a real mathematician may use a few hundred times in a given program. At least Mathematica is smart enough to use T (or at least it was when I last used it, at 4.0). Why can't we do better than this?
The best UI of any CAS was the UI for the built-in graphing calculator for Mac OS 9. The current version, NuCalc, is available for Mac and Windows, but it is proprietary, and there is no plan for a Linux/UNIX version. The FOSS community can put a UI like NuCalc over a Maxima engine, use MathML and/or LaTeX for the syntax (like LaTeX input, MathML output). Use code from GNU TeXmacs for the UI, but include the beautiful way that NuCalc simplifies fractions and radicals (and algebraic equations) by clicking on them with the mouse. Brilliant. And possible. Future generations of math and physics and engineering grad students will thank us.
Religious zealots attack the Theory of Evolution because they think they understand it. The premises can be simplified (with requisite loss of meaning of course) to the point where the average uneducated person can poorly paraphrase its basic premises. Clearly, it disagrees with both of the two (yes, two) Genesis creation myths-- the one where "Man and woman, he created them," and the one with Adam created first, and Eve out of Adam's rib.
Take this person, and try to explain the Stern-Gerlach experiment, which first demonstrated the existence of quantum phenomena. I've had more physics professors explain it inadequately than explain it well. Try to explain the twin-slit photon experiment. Try to explain the non-local nature of quantum phenomena, or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Explain how a Feynman Path Integral works. I won't even touch the General Theory of Relativity.
The people who cannot accept the Theory of Evolution would launch a pogrom over the Second Law of Thermodynamics, if they understood it. Physics contains dozens of premises every one of which is much, much scarier than anything in biology. They pick on Evolution because they think they understand it. Once the Nazis twigged to Quantum Mechanics, they began clearing out the universities and filling the concentration camps. Don't think the Religious Right, were they smarter people, wouldn't do the same.
The poor bastards still charged with a crime are charged with planting a hoax object. That term, hoax object, has gotten a lot of airplay here in Boston, because anything can be construed as a hoax object. A laptop is a hoax object. A can of Pepsi is a hoax object. Your little brother is a hoax object. People on CafePress have started selling "Hoax Object" t-shirts. How stupid does the public have to be for planting a hoax object to be considered an act of terrorism?
I have seven computers at home-- two servers, three desktops, and two laptops. The two servers are running Ubuntu Server Edition 6.06 and OpenBSD 4.0. The three desktops are running Kubuntu 6.10, OpenBSD 4.0, and Windows XP SP2 (work gives me Windows-only software, forgive them). The two laptops are running OSX 10.4 and, again, OpenBSD. The Intel laptop was running Ubuntu 6.10 in beta, but Ubuntu didn't sit well with the hardware. OpenBSD has run glitch-free since I installed it.
Even though I love Linux, I resent when "linux" becomes a general noun that encompasses all free unices. The BSD operating systems are more reliable, more coherent, and more rigorous as unices than any version of Linux I have ever run. They deserve a seat at the table, along with Mac (which basically is a BSD) and Windows and Linux. I understand that a general population that barely understands that there are alternatives to Windows cannot grasp that there are different free unices. But surely we can come up with a general term that encompasses Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and such.
There are free operating systems. That fact is very nearly a miracle. What started as a dream fewer than a dozen people on earth could even imagine has become a myriad of viable alternatives to paying a corporation to run your computer hardware. Don't like UNIX? Haiku is looking pretty good, for an alpha OS. The point is not to switch to Linux. The point is to leave proprietary OSes in the dustbin of history, where they belong, without compromising one's computing style or power one iota.
A Scottish physicist two centuries ago sees a strange bump-like waveform in a canal. It persists for over three miles, moving at nearly constant speed along the canal trench. He writes a paper, calling it a soliton wave and two Dutch mathematicians find a nonlinear partial differential equation that describes its motion. The equation, the Korteweg-De Vries Equation, proves fiendishly hard to solve. Finally, the crew working on the hydrogen bomb, finish the job early, so Ulam decides to use ENIAC to help him solve the Korteweg-De Vries Equation. He attains the first analytic solutions, and the study of soliton waves begins in earnest.
How does this earn a quid? Well, solitons model the way that blips of light move down a fiber-optic cable. The military decides that DARPA-net could run on fiber-optic cables, and uses them in building the early internet. Cellular telephone companies begin using fiber-optic cables to pack 100,000 phone conversations into a single pipe in such a way that they all get separated on the other end of the pipe-- one of the great engineering marvels of our time. We owe the modern internet, cell phones, anything that uses fiber-optics, to the solution of the Korteweg-De Vries equation. There was a similar burst of technology earlier in the last century when some closed-form solutions of the Schrödinger Equation were found.
Truth is, when we solve a major math problem like the Poincaré conjecture, billions of dollars of revenue are generated by new technologies that spring into being because of the new scientific understanding that the solution affords us. A thousand Adam Sandlers will not generate the amount of capital that the solution of the Poincaré conjecture will generate, especially considering that Perelman has shown the world that the Millenium Prize Problems are actually solvable.
What kind of singularity are we talking about here? Are we talking about a simple pole? Something along the lines of $\frac{1}{x}$? If we are talking about a multiple pole, then a dipole, quadrapole, what? Give me the multiplicity of the pole. On the other hand, what about a singularity like $\lim_{x \rightarrow 0} e^{-\frac{1}{x^2}}$? An essential singularity is a lot messier than a pole. We lose meromorphic properties like Mittag-Leffler's Theorem and the Riemann-Roch Theorem.
if we are talking about an essential singularity, are we talking about a point singularity, or something nastier? Does the set of singular points have the power of the continuum? Does our set of singular points have nonzero measure?
If you are going to use a mathematical analogy, understand the math. Otherwise you will annoy the hell out of those of us who do.
<crankyoldman>Damn kids! Don't they teach complex analysis in schools anymore? Rassafrassa damn mumble mumble</crankyoldman>
The kids want to program; the administrators don't
on
Do Kids Still Program?
·
· Score: 1
The high school where I work has a math department but no CS department. The only computer classes, outside of the digital design classes the art department runs, are keyboarding classes that use Mavis Beacon(TM). The English department uses Word(TM), and some teachers allow the students to use PowerPoint(TM) for their reports, which I think is obscene.
When I was hired, I offered to teach a LaTeX class, but later, it was cancelled by nervous school administrators. I used Python in a BC Calculus class I taught, to show how power series converge, and I was reprimanded by the head of the math department for wasting class time. I offered to co-teach an Inform-based interactive fiction class with a creative writing teacher, but it was voted down by the curriculum committee.
The senior teachers and administrators at my school are mostly Baby Boomer technophobes. They realized they had to learn how Microsoft Office(TM) worked enough to do their jobs, and learning that much was such a horrible experience for them that they never want to learn anything else about computers ever again. And they project their fears and antipathies onto their students. The students are clamoring for programming classes, especially game design classes (which I would probably teach through PyGame or something similar), but the administration would prefer to flatly refuse. The media literacy classes at the school ignore the medium of web pages, even though our kids probably read more text via a browser than via a book.
The kids want Linux classes, Python, Scheme, C(++), LaTeX, HTML, and other computer classes, but the school insists on its crappy Windows XP (TM) system, with Outlook webmail, with one lone MSCE and his uncertified assistant running the 200+ computers at the school. This is a private boarding school with millions to spend. I've had enough. Next year I will teach CS somewhere else.
I was a math TA both for my Master's Degree and for my Ph.D., and I found students who were not merely functionally illiterate, but totally illiterate. I had one student at Cal State XXXXXXX who left every word problem blank, and never followed written directions if they were longer than a few words. He was failing the course, even though he met with a tutor three times a week, never missed a class, and did all of his homework (albeit inaccurately). I had him in my office one time, and I asked him, on a hunch, to read me one of the word problems he had left blank. He couldn't read it. At all.
There is no shame in adult illiteracy. It happens. It is shame that keeps illiterate adults illiterate. But illiterate people should not be students at a university. It is a waste of their time, the instructor's time, and the other students' time. He had inflated grades in high school because he was a star on the football field, and had earned a football scholarship. Along the way, nobody cared that he couldn't read. I gave him an F, despite his hard work. He could not do mathematics at the eighth-grade level, let alone the university level. Two years later, I saw him again. He was a greeter in a sporting goods store.
He was robbed. He actually did not understand that he was illiterate. He thought that other people faked being able to read the way that he did. He was well-meaning, hard-working, and sincere. He was the first person in the history of his family to go to college, and he had the hopes of his entire family weighing on his shoulders. He was a kitten in a piranha tank, and he had no idea about the reality of his situation. He felt that he let his family, his coach, his teammates, and me down, but he never had the necessary tools to survive college, and he never should have matriculated.
Slashdot Mirror
Some visually impaired users enlarge the font so that they can read the text, and thereby use the application. Preventing them from doing this means they can't use the application. Visually impaired people have a hard enough time with the internet. There's no excuse for making it harder.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
--Stephen F. RobertsOnce Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev saw the town apostate approaching. With a loving smile, he drew near him and embraced him: "Don't worry," he told him. "The God whom you don't believe in, I don't believe in either."
I'm surprised nobody has linked to this definitive essay: Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient: Says it all.
The slide rule is an analog computer. It's probably the best example of an analog computer to show a student curious about analog computers. A slide rule teaches a lot about the nature of calculation, not merely providing the result of the calculation. I have several slide rules, and I still use my Pickett Log Log computer, even though command line Perl or Python would probably be faster in most cases for the kinds of calculations I do at work. Why then do I reach for the slide rule? I like the kinesthetic experience of moving the slide and the cursor, thinking through the result. I also have a Keuffel & Esser compensating polar planimeter. The tracer arm traces around a planar figure, and the cylindrical slide rule mechanism in the base calculates the area of the planar figure. As a math graduate student, I read Felix Klein's remarkable book Elementary Mathematics From An Advanced Standpoint, and there was an essay on how the polar planimeter worked. By measuring a linear measure (dimension one), the planimeter is able to calculate area measure (dimension two). At first glance, it doesn't make any sense. How can the planimeter take one dimensional data as input and render two dimensional data as an output? The answer involves Green's Theorem from calculus. It's subtle and elegant and mind-blowing. Engineers before the digital computer was invented would use the planimeter for numerical integrals, after graphing the function to be integrated at the same scale as the planimeter. Cartographers still use planimeters in map-making for calculating areas of countries. Modern planimeters have a computer in the base, rather than a cylindrical slide rule, but the principle is the same.
People have been smart for much longer than I've been alive. Sometimes it's nice to see examples of the way smart people thought who did not have access to the same tools I have at my disposal. There's something worthwhile about looking at a problem that way. I'll prototype Perl programs in AWK, because if it works in AWK, I know I haven't overPerlified the program. Doing a problem with old tools sometimes shows that you have a deeper understanding of the solution.
While there are exceptions (the Long Tail comes to mind), for the most part, Wired Magazine are a pack of idiots. These clowns are still nattering about the Singularity, for Chrissakes. Remember the Wired article by the woman who was outraged that her company interfered with some data on her company laptop? The magazine is a continual embarassment to geekdom.
Mathematica has a killer engine (kernel), but a lousy UI, and it costs a shocking amount of money. Mathematica was one of the first pieces of software to scan your computer's MAC address and serial number while you entered the activation key, so it could not be installed on more than one computer (this after the $250-$1000 price tag). A student can get the castrated $250 version, but the real version is considerably pricier. Wolfram's treatment of his users is as distrustful as Micro-Suck.
Why can't the FOSS community beat Wolfram at this? Octave, Maxima, Yacas; they all fail miserably in comparison. The UI for Yacas is so idiotic that the function that transposes a matrix is Transpose[], a nine-character entry for an operation that a real mathematician may use a few hundred times in a given program. At least Mathematica is smart enough to use T (or at least it was when I last used it, at 4.0). Why can't we do better than this?
The best UI of any CAS was the UI for the built-in graphing calculator for Mac OS 9. The current version, NuCalc, is available for Mac and Windows, but it is proprietary, and there is no plan for a Linux/UNIX version. The FOSS community can put a UI like NuCalc over a Maxima engine, use MathML and/or LaTeX for the syntax (like LaTeX input, MathML output). Use code from GNU TeXmacs for the UI, but include the beautiful way that NuCalc simplifies fractions and radicals (and algebraic equations) by clicking on them with the mouse. Brilliant. And possible. Future generations of math and physics and engineering grad students will thank us.
Religious zealots attack the Theory of Evolution because they think they understand it. The premises can be simplified (with requisite loss of meaning of course) to the point where the average uneducated person can poorly paraphrase its basic premises. Clearly, it disagrees with both of the two (yes, two) Genesis creation myths-- the one where "Man and woman, he created them," and the one with Adam created first, and Eve out of Adam's rib.
Take this person, and try to explain the Stern-Gerlach experiment, which first demonstrated the existence of quantum phenomena. I've had more physics professors explain it inadequately than explain it well. Try to explain the twin-slit photon experiment. Try to explain the non-local nature of quantum phenomena, or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Explain how a Feynman Path Integral works. I won't even touch the General Theory of Relativity.
The people who cannot accept the Theory of Evolution would launch a pogrom over the Second Law of Thermodynamics, if they understood it. Physics contains dozens of premises every one of which is much, much scarier than anything in biology. They pick on Evolution because they think they understand it. Once the Nazis twigged to Quantum Mechanics, they began clearing out the universities and filling the concentration camps. Don't think the Religious Right, were they smarter people, wouldn't do the same.
The poor bastards still charged with a crime are charged with planting a hoax object. That term, hoax object, has gotten a lot of airplay here in Boston, because anything can be construed as a hoax object. A laptop is a hoax object. A can of Pepsi is a hoax object. Your little brother is a hoax object. People on CafePress have started selling "Hoax Object" t-shirts. How stupid does the public have to be for planting a hoax object to be considered an act of terrorism?
I have seven computers at home-- two servers, three desktops, and two laptops. The two servers are running Ubuntu Server Edition 6.06 and OpenBSD 4.0. The three desktops are running Kubuntu 6.10, OpenBSD 4.0, and Windows XP SP2 (work gives me Windows-only software, forgive them). The two laptops are running OSX 10.4 and, again, OpenBSD. The Intel laptop was running Ubuntu 6.10 in beta, but Ubuntu didn't sit well with the hardware. OpenBSD has run glitch-free since I installed it.
Even though I love Linux, I resent when "linux" becomes a general noun that encompasses all free unices. The BSD operating systems are more reliable, more coherent, and more rigorous as unices than any version of Linux I have ever run. They deserve a seat at the table, along with Mac (which basically is a BSD) and Windows and Linux. I understand that a general population that barely understands that there are alternatives to Windows cannot grasp that there are different free unices. But surely we can come up with a general term that encompasses Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and such.
There are free operating systems. That fact is very nearly a miracle. What started as a dream fewer than a dozen people on earth could even imagine has become a myriad of viable alternatives to paying a corporation to run your computer hardware. Don't like UNIX? Haiku is looking pretty good, for an alpha OS. The point is not to switch to Linux. The point is to leave proprietary OSes in the dustbin of history, where they belong, without compromising one's computing style or power one iota.
A Scottish physicist two centuries ago sees a strange bump-like waveform in a canal. It persists for over three miles, moving at nearly constant speed along the canal trench. He writes a paper, calling it a soliton wave and two Dutch mathematicians find a nonlinear partial differential equation that describes its motion. The equation, the Korteweg-De Vries Equation, proves fiendishly hard to solve. Finally, the crew working on the hydrogen bomb, finish the job early, so Ulam decides to use ENIAC to help him solve the Korteweg-De Vries Equation. He attains the first analytic solutions, and the study of soliton waves begins in earnest.
How does this earn a quid? Well, solitons model the way that blips of light move down a fiber-optic cable. The military decides that DARPA-net could run on fiber-optic cables, and uses them in building the early internet. Cellular telephone companies begin using fiber-optic cables to pack 100,000 phone conversations into a single pipe in such a way that they all get separated on the other end of the pipe-- one of the great engineering marvels of our time. We owe the modern internet, cell phones, anything that uses fiber-optics, to the solution of the Korteweg-De Vries equation. There was a similar burst of technology earlier in the last century when some closed-form solutions of the Schrödinger Equation were found.
Truth is, when we solve a major math problem like the Poincaré conjecture, billions of dollars of revenue are generated by new technologies that spring into being because of the new scientific understanding that the solution affords us. A thousand Adam Sandlers will not generate the amount of capital that the solution of the Poincaré conjecture will generate, especially considering that Perelman has shown the world that the Millenium Prize Problems are actually solvable.
What kind of singularity are we talking about here? Are we talking about a simple pole? Something along the lines of $\frac{1}{x}$? If we are talking about a multiple pole, then a dipole, quadrapole, what? Give me the multiplicity of the pole. On the other hand, what about a singularity like $\lim_{x \rightarrow 0} e^{-\frac{1}{x^2}}$? An essential singularity is a lot messier than a pole. We lose meromorphic properties like Mittag-Leffler's Theorem and the Riemann-Roch Theorem.
if we are talking about an essential singularity, are we talking about a point singularity, or something nastier? Does the set of singular points have the power of the continuum? Does our set of singular points have nonzero measure?
If you are going to use a mathematical analogy, understand the math. Otherwise you will annoy the hell out of those of us who do.
<crankyoldman>Damn kids! Don't they teach complex analysis in schools anymore? Rassafrassa damn mumble mumble</crankyoldman>
The high school where I work has a math department but no CS department. The only computer classes, outside of the digital design classes the art department runs, are keyboarding classes that use Mavis Beacon(TM). The English department uses Word(TM), and some teachers allow the students to use PowerPoint(TM) for their reports, which I think is obscene.
When I was hired, I offered to teach a LaTeX class, but later, it was cancelled by nervous school administrators. I used Python in a BC Calculus class I taught, to show how power series converge, and I was reprimanded by the head of the math department for wasting class time. I offered to co-teach an Inform-based interactive fiction class with a creative writing teacher, but it was voted down by the curriculum committee.
The senior teachers and administrators at my school are mostly Baby Boomer technophobes. They realized they had to learn how Microsoft Office(TM) worked enough to do their jobs, and learning that much was such a horrible experience for them that they never want to learn anything else about computers ever again. And they project their fears and antipathies onto their students. The students are clamoring for programming classes, especially game design classes (which I would probably teach through PyGame or something similar), but the administration would prefer to flatly refuse. The media literacy classes at the school ignore the medium of web pages, even though our kids probably read more text via a browser than via a book.
The kids want Linux classes, Python, Scheme, C(++), LaTeX, HTML, and other computer classes, but the school insists on its crappy Windows XP (TM) system, with Outlook webmail, with one lone MSCE and his uncertified assistant running the 200+ computers at the school. This is a private boarding school with millions to spend. I've had enough. Next year I will teach CS somewhere else.
I was a math TA both for my Master's Degree and for my Ph.D., and I found students who were not merely functionally illiterate, but totally illiterate. I had one student at Cal State XXXXXXX who left every word problem blank, and never followed written directions if they were longer than a few words. He was failing the course, even though he met with a tutor three times a week, never missed a class, and did all of his homework (albeit inaccurately). I had him in my office one time, and I asked him, on a hunch, to read me one of the word problems he had left blank. He couldn't read it. At all.
There is no shame in adult illiteracy. It happens. It is shame that keeps illiterate adults illiterate. But illiterate people should not be students at a university. It is a waste of their time, the instructor's time, and the other students' time. He had inflated grades in high school because he was a star on the football field, and had earned a football scholarship. Along the way, nobody cared that he couldn't read. I gave him an F, despite his hard work. He could not do mathematics at the eighth-grade level, let alone the university level. Two years later, I saw him again. He was a greeter in a sporting goods store.
He was robbed. He actually did not understand that he was illiterate. He thought that other people faked being able to read the way that he did. He was well-meaning, hard-working, and sincere. He was the first person in the history of his family to go to college, and he had the hopes of his entire family weighing on his shoulders. He was a kitten in a piranha tank, and he had no idea about the reality of his situation. He felt that he let his family, his coach, his teammates, and me down, but he never had the necessary tools to survive college, and he never should have matriculated.