Let's see. 4 letters beginning with 'A' and ending with a vowel. One consonant and 3 vowels. Renders a GUI using graphics hardware. Named after one of the four elements. Hmmmm...it's on the tip of my tongue...but I can't quite place it...
...be "gradual" or "sudden" is a function of the granularity you work at. If you take a broad overview of evolutionary history then it looks very gradual. An expert in bivalves might consider the lengthening of a shell by 2mm in a time too small to discern from the fossil record as something sudden whereas most people, in particular those studying evolution for the first time, would be entirely justified in considering the change to be gradual. So please, if you're going to argue about this, define your terms.
Dunno if you're still there...but by strange coincidence, yesterday I received a late Xmas present in the mail: the book "Oliver Heaviside : The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age" by Paul Nahin. It has a section on the "Great Quaternion War" or something like that. Looks like something you might be interested in.
Now that makes more sense.
I can't figure out what an analytic animation is, even after looking at your web site. They look kinda interesting too. Oh well.
I'm not sure I need to read that book as I'm pretty fluent with relativity and know what a Lorentz invariant interval is. You're not really answering my question. I think that dgamma should be replaced by dtau where tau is proper distance along the path of motion. I have no idea what dgamma means. If you think that there is a sensible interpretation that can be attached to dgamma please tell me.
Hey, I know you Mr Quaternion man. Keep up the good work! I'm a fan of quaternions myself, though not of crackpot proportions.
dx/dgamma? So if we travel at constant velocity, gamma remains constant. How can we differentiate the varying x with respect to constant gamma? One of us has no clue what you are talking about and my money is on it being you.
And what's the common feature of almost all of the links you give? They are to American, Canadian, European and even New Zealand Muslims condemning terrorism. It still seems pretty clear to me that the Muslim nations of the Middle and Far east support terrorism. We see that terrorism has broad backing among Muslims, and isn't just supported by fringe groups and governments, simply by looking at the election of Hamas and Ahmadinejad. Attempts to blame governments are laughable - in many cases Middle Eastern governments are actually holding back popular extremism. People can try to tell us all they like that the apparent connection between Islam and terrorism is a result of media bias, but I still see very little evidence to the contrary. There is also the well-known fact that extremist Muslims exploit the language barrier and present one story in English and another in Arabic so as to give the impression of being more moderate to Westerners.
String theory is many, many things, but elegant it is not.
String theory is the most beautiful thing made by humans in the history of humans making beautiful things. The core is stunningly beautiful and simple, making a minimum of assumptions, and it's an amazing confluence of deep and beautiful mathematical results that allow it to work. Sure, you can take that core simplicity and make a mess of it by trying to work on some icky manifold tailored in some ad hoc manner to fit imaginary experiments. But the same is true of, say, Maxwell's equations, which start beautiful, and turn into an ugly mess when you start trying to compute real things. What could be lovelier than the way the classical mathematics of Riemann surfaces, elliptic functions, theta functions, Jacobi products and so on that appear in String Theory? What could be more amazing than the conformal anomaly cancelations that only work in certain dimensions and their connection to deep results in algebraic geometry? What could be prettier than the connections to sporadic simple groups and the fact that Borcherds used vertex algebras to prove Monstrous Moonshine? How can you say this stuff isn't elegant?
IANAStringTheorist but I am a mathematician who spent a good few years looking at the mathematics of String Theory.
Really, that is absolutely the worst bit of science journalism I have ever read in my entire life. No other science writing comes even close to the awful level of writing there. Just of the names of the hypotheses "Good" and "Bad" are unbelievably egregious.
"that the cells stay in the mom and try to protect her for the rest of her life"
is one of the worst anthropomorphisms I have read.
"if the Good Hypothesis turns out to be true and every child leaves a posse of good soldiers in their mothers".
That makes me want to vomit.
"There are no published studies that definitively show baby cells floating to, say, a liver cancer site and then turning themselves into healthy liver cells"
You mean there's no actual evidence for anything. This is just some stupid feel good story for mothers?
If she's got a bad heart, they can be healthy heart cells.
And this, I guess, is an extrapolation from what was already a wishful fantasy.
The whole thing is written in that horrible style that you get in magazines called things like "You and Your Baby". I can almost smell the perfumed baby products wafting up from the text.
Viruses probably mutate at similar rates regardless of whether or not they are subjected to antiviral drugs. The whole point about antibiotics, say, is that antibiotic-resistant mutant bacteria are preferentially selected for as a result of antibiotic abuse. The same might happen with viruses. But to describe this as "mutat[ing] to get around this" is a horrible abuse of evolutionary terminology and has unwarranted teleological implications. I guess one could talk about the population mutating as opposed to the individuals, but that is non-standard terminology.
(What I say isn't strictly true as some bacteria will mutate at higher rates when subject to certain types of stresse, but that isn't an important part of the mechanism of antibiotic resistance.)
People have enjoyed killing each other since time began and they will continue to enjoy killing each other in the future. Should the rest of us who have higher aspirations just give up because of what these people want to do to each other? There's enough room in this world for people who like killing and people who want to explore the 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999% that is the rest of the universe.
Land at 45 degree latitude. Hmmm...that gives an unfair bias towards the poles because there's less are at the equator. Ideally it should be at whatever latitude splits the area between 0 degrees and 90 degrees equally.
Humans change throughout their lives - whether it's puberty, menopause or old-age grumpiness due to hormonal changes. So when someone decides to investigate when "maturity" happens they are introducing a cutoff. In such a situation the important question is to ask why they are doing this - it's almost certainly not a pure research issue if they are giving it a name like "maturity". For example they may be trying to justify a political position: maybe something about the age of consent or the age of majority. It might not be apparent from their research but you can be sure it's there.
I think we ought to have more stories about flower arranging. The mental calm that this hobby can bring may enhance your ability to concentrate on difficult programming tasks and so is of the utmost interest to/. readers.
...clueless about anything as to believe this? I'm not talking about physics cluelessness here. If you could heat an egg with a pair of cellphones then everyone's brains would be brain stew by now. Do people not put two and two together? Oh right...I get it...you've already used your skull as a brain stew pressure cooker.
This article reminds me of Moliè's doctor who explained the soporific effect of morphine through its "dormitive effect". In particular I refer to the sentence:
what it suggests is that we have in our brains some mechanism that may induce some form of immediate behavior..."
We know very little about the workings of the human brain. We do have some high level models which don't tell us much more than folk psychology. And we have some detailed low level models. But we don't really have the tools to connect between these descriptions of the brain. What we do have is a long way from being able to make any kind of deduction from the pattern of firing in some neurons to actual behaviour. All this researcher has done is invent his own "dormitive principle" (some mechanism that my induce some form of immediate behaviour...) and then use some research about neurons, whose connection is only tenuous, to lend it apparent legitimacy.
I'm not one to defend Bush - I have no doubt whatsoever that the pretexts for war were a hoax. But I'm not totally convinced that this was a war solely over oil. Sure, oil was a factor. But I'm also sure that many neocons sincerely believed that by bringing democracy to Iraq they could lead the way for widespread democratisation of the Middle-East. When someone is as 'successful' as Bush I'm not convinced that money is the only consideration. I think Bush really did want to go down in the history books as the President that liberated the Middle-East. He believed that the success of post-WWII policies such as the Marshall Plan showed that this was possible. Before the invasion of Iraq many neocons accused liberals of racism for implying that somehow the population of the Middle-East were less amenable to democratisation than the populations of the fascist European countries. Unfortunately I don't think they understood the long tradition of liberty in Europe that made the transition to democracy, even in countries like Spain, a smooth one.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see. 4 letters beginning with 'A' and ending with a vowel. One consonant and 3 vowels. Renders a GUI using graphics hardware. Named after one of the four elements. Hmmmm...it's on the tip of my tongue...but I can't quite place it...
...be "gradual" or "sudden" is a function of the granularity you work at. If you take a broad overview of evolutionary history then it looks very gradual. An expert in bivalves might consider the lengthening of a shell by 2mm in a time too small to discern from the fossil record as something sudden whereas most people, in particular those studying evolution for the first time, would be entirely justified in considering the change to be gradual. So please, if you're going to argue about this, define your terms.
800AD is a bit early for that, you're off by many centuries. And I'm not sure if Catholics or Protestants burnt more witches.
Dunno if you're still there...but by strange coincidence, yesterday I received a late Xmas present in the mail: the book "Oliver Heaviside : The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age" by Paul Nahin. It has a section on the "Great Quaternion War" or something like that. Looks like something you might be interested in.
What were the human industries in 800AD that contributed to global warming then?
Yet another condescending comment on /. on how geeks are so much superior to mere mortals - this time because their taste in music is so much better.
Now that makes more sense. I can't figure out what an analytic animation is, even after looking at your web site. They look kinda interesting too. Oh well.
Hey, I know you Mr Quaternion man. Keep up the good work! I'm a fan of quaternions myself, though not of crackpot proportions.
dx/dgamma? So if we travel at constant velocity, gamma remains constant. How can we differentiate the varying x with respect to constant gamma? One of us has no clue what you are talking about and my money is on it being you.
You're missing the point. The presence of the word "Crackpot" in the URL is not intended as a comment on the author's own work.
...400 crackpots. Really, why is this a front page /. story?
And what's the common feature of almost all of the links you give? They are to American, Canadian, European and even New Zealand Muslims condemning terrorism. It still seems pretty clear to me that the Muslim nations of the Middle and Far east support terrorism. We see that terrorism has broad backing among Muslims, and isn't just supported by fringe groups and governments, simply by looking at the election of Hamas and Ahmadinejad. Attempts to blame governments are laughable - in many cases Middle Eastern governments are actually holding back popular extremism. People can try to tell us all they like that the apparent connection between Islam and terrorism is a result of media bias, but I still see very little evidence to the contrary. There is also the well-known fact that extremist Muslims exploit the language barrier and present one story in English and another in Arabic so as to give the impression of being more moderate to Westerners.
IANAStringTheorist but I am a mathematician who spent a good few years looking at the mathematics of String Theory.
The whole thing is written in that horrible style that you get in magazines called things like "You and Your Baby". I can almost smell the perfumed baby products wafting up from the text.
I think I'd rather read Creationist writing.
I already have a shiny white iPilot, except it's called a Z22. Looks lovely next to my nano.
You talk about indirect measurement and come out with a statement like "we only see the output via the photons that our retina catches"!
(What I say isn't strictly true as some bacteria will mutate at higher rates when subject to certain types of stresse, but that isn't an important part of the mechanism of antibiotic resistance.)
Land at 45 degree latitude. Hmmm...that gives an unfair bias towards the poles because there's less are at the equator. Ideally it should be at whatever latitude splits the area between 0 degrees and 90 degrees equally.
A field trip in Indonesia that turns up a few dozen is hardly newsworthy.
Humans change throughout their lives - whether it's puberty, menopause or old-age grumpiness due to hormonal changes. So when someone decides to investigate when "maturity" happens they are introducing a cutoff. In such a situation the important question is to ask why they are doing this - it's almost certainly not a pure research issue if they are giving it a name like "maturity". For example they may be trying to justify a political position: maybe something about the age of consent or the age of majority. It might not be apparent from their research but you can be sure it's there.
I think we ought to have more stories about flower arranging. The mental calm that this hobby can bring may enhance your ability to concentrate on difficult programming tasks and so is of the utmost interest to /. readers.
...clueless about anything as to believe this? I'm not talking about physics cluelessness here. If you could heat an egg with a pair of cellphones then everyone's brains would be brain stew by now. Do people not put two and two together? Oh right...I get it...you've already used your skull as a brain stew pressure cooker.
I'm not one to defend Bush - I have no doubt whatsoever that the pretexts for war were a hoax. But I'm not totally convinced that this was a war solely over oil. Sure, oil was a factor. But I'm also sure that many neocons sincerely believed that by bringing democracy to Iraq they could lead the way for widespread democratisation of the Middle-East. When someone is as 'successful' as Bush I'm not convinced that money is the only consideration. I think Bush really did want to go down in the history books as the President that liberated the Middle-East. He believed that the success of post-WWII policies such as the Marshall Plan showed that this was possible. Before the invasion of Iraq many neocons accused liberals of racism for implying that somehow the population of the Middle-East were less amenable to democratisation than the populations of the fascist European countries. Unfortunately I don't think they understood the long tradition of liberty in Europe that made the transition to democracy, even in countries like Spain, a smooth one.