Instead, they propose a "family of interconnected theories" might emerge
Which, if you read them all at the same sitting and follow all the connections, just might read like one big...unified theory.
This seems very, very close to a distinction without a difference.
No, there is a very important difference. Hawking is stating that there may be "locally everywhere solutions" without a "global solution." This is a very important concept in advanced mathematics. Go read about the mathematical terms "sheaf" and "local-global principle."
Hawking is essentially saying that there very well may not be one single theory which explains everything. Instead, there may be a bunch of theories, each of which is valid only in certain areas, and which agree with one another where they overlap, even without a global solution.
For a simple example which many readers may already be familiar with, consider the complex logarithm (e.g. the natural log on the complex numbers). To make it well defined, you must make a "branch cut" and decide which branch you want to take. Different branches agree where they overlap, but there is no single global solutions... just a patchwork of solutions that agree where needed (blah, blah lift to a covering space). Pick up a book on complex analysis for details.
Care to point out what new problems autotools creates?
The fact that I can't use them on Windows. Seriously, I can't see how we call a build system "cross platform" when it doesn't cooperate with the most widely deployed build environment.
It seems to me that it might be possible for a Python-based build system to have enough platform independence that it could build projects on Linux, Mac, and Windows. SCons looks like it's coming along. I'd really like to see more developers get behind it, but on the open source projects that I've worked on many of the developers are antagonistic toward any OS other than Linux.
It is done as you've guessed, but it's still often obvious who the author is. Don't forget that sometimes a bad review has nothing to do with knowing who the author is. If you come across a paper that's done almost exactly the same work as you have done, or criticises your work, you could choose to give it a false bad review to try to prevent it from being published. I've seen papers that have received three reviews, two that say it's good, and one that says it's nowhere near worthy of being published. You often question the outliers.
This is an unfortunate side-effect of human nature, and it occurs even in the "uncontroversial" subjects such as math.
I once submitted a paper to {a well known math journal}. My paper took an {established result} by a {well known researcher} and made a {reasonable improvement}. I received two referee reports. The first referee said that it was an important result and gave me a list of minor corrections for typos and clarity. The second referee report only said something like, "All work on {these types of problems} is inconsequential because the problem was adequately resolved by {well known researcher}."
I got the distinct impression that the second referee was either {well known researcher} or someone who was only one hop away from {well known researcher}. It was pretty discouraging.
HP will destroy them. What other products are out there these days? Anyone have any experience in other products?/has over a million dollars in this thing... does not want to be an HP customer.
Now, now, let's not be hasty. I'm sure that HP has learned from the whole "Itanium will be sooo much better than Alpha debacle."
Wow. 3Par and now ArcSight? They are going to need to call a credit counseling company after this shopping binge!:D
Actually, now is a good time to buy! The current recession has depressed prices throughout the tech sector (well, and in almost every other sector as well), so it makes good business sense for HP to use the opportunity to diversify by purchasing smaller companies that have already gained some traction in niche markets.
Assuming, of course, that HP has enough liquid assets to cover the purchases.
Of course, I was generalizing. Different people learn in different ways. What I have observed seems to apply to most, but certainly not all, students.
One of the reasons I don't bother taking attendance is because I know that there are some students who will learn perfectly well on their own. As long as they are doing well in the class, there is no reason to force them to show up.
It wasn't me! However, I think you'll find that there are a number of math professors who use this method. It usually works best in small, upper-level classes.
Please, for your students sanity, small numbers of very hard problems is better than lots and lots of problems of any difficulty.
Actually, I completely agree with you. I was oversimplifying in my original post, partially for brevity, and partially because if I describe too much more about myself then I will loose what little anonymity is available here.
I assign a lot of hard problems, but I don't require my students to do all of them. I will usually have a small number of problems that I want everyone to do, then I'll let the students pick from the others. For example, I might have 10 hard problems on a weekly assignment. I'll indicate 3-4 problems that I want everyone to do, then I might have the students pick 1-2 others to work. So, a given student might only have to work 5 problems, but when we present the problems in class everyone has the advantage of seeing a solution to each problem worked out.
Hang in there jmerlin! I certainly have felt your pain. My best advise is go talk to your professors. Even the research-focused professors are usually willing to spare time to talk with grad students. Show them that you have mastered the material by going over the HW problems with them, and they will realize that you are learning and adjust their grading accordingly.
Funny that you'd mention that teaching style on/.. Not only does it force students to come to class, effectively marking attendance which irritates many/most of us. But in front of class on the fly answers would FAIL a large number of us regardless of math ability. And to top it off, the other thing you mark is homework? Which is hilariously easy to cheat on and therefore no indicator of intellect or understand, it only harms those that are honest and won't cheat/work together.
Your system effectively destroys the average/.er even though many of them may be a LOT better at math than the average. Oh goody.
Those are misconceptions that many of my students come in with.
Even for the nerdy introvert, there is great value in learning how to present your solutions in front of an audience on the fly. This is a skill that is far better learned in college where it is okay to mess up a lot than on the job where messing up in front of an important client can be a career ending move.
As for cheating on my homework... It doesn't matter if you've worked with other people or found a solution on the internet. I've had students do both all the time. It's EASY for a real mathematician to see.The way I explain it to my students is like this: I'm a parent. I have little kids. I can tell when they're lying because try as they might the pieces of their stories don't fit together. It's just as easy for me to tell when a student hasn't developed a proof of a theorem on his or her own. The students see this happen to other students during the first couple classes, and they stop trying to cheat. They also learn that I don't care about the "final answer." I care about how they solved the problem. I care about how they are thinking! I expect mistakes, that's part of the learning process.
By the way, this is why most graduate schools have some sort of oral qualifiers. You can't cheat your way through an oral exam administered by experts. It just isn't possible.
"The whole fucking point of a professor is to INTERACT with the students."
Not. That's what our current moronic spoon-feeding society thinks, wants and expects. The whole fucking point of a professor is to TEACH. Students are already quite good by themselves about INTERACTing... in campus parties.
You sound really bitter. Are you an un-tenured professor at a big research school who feels so much pressure to publish that you don't want to spend any time dealing with students? I know how you feel. I used to be you. I went to a better place, and now I'm much happier.
The point of the professor at my lowly school is to TEACH. Not to lecture, but to TEACH. How can you teach your students if you refuse to interact with them? I think you might be confusing "lecturing + testing" with "teaching." The two are not equivalent.
Go read the Socratic dialogues. The best method of teaching hasn't changed in several thousand years. It's really simple human to human interaction. The teacher gives the student a challenging problem. The student struggles. The teacher gives hints and corrections, but forces the student to solve the problem.
Ultimately, many of my students will never need all the math I teach them. That's okay. The most important thing is that they go through the process of learning it. They must learn how to learn, how to solve problems, how to think independently. Once they have mastered that, they don't need the teacher anymore. Then they can learn on their own from books or other non-interactive sources.
There are teaching assistants and smaller "discussion" sections in which to interact and grade papers.
Ah, I work at a lowly school. We don't have teaching assistants. The professors do all the teaching, all the discussing, and all of the grading.
Of course, in grad school I was one of those TAs leading discussion sections like you've just described. What I realized then was that most of the learning took place either in the discussion sessions or while the students were working on their homework. Really, those giant lectures could have been video presentations and it wouldn't have made any difference to the students.
"it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus."
30 students is a lot? I guess it wouldn't work with 200 then..
What's the point in teaching a 200 person class? You can't interact with them at all, you can't actually grade their papers, and you can't judge the knowledge of a student in any meaningful way. Universities that run ridiculous classes like that are just stealing the students' money and wasting the professor's time. The professor might as well just video the lectures and put them on the web... which I think is what Khan is doing.
The whole fucking point of a professor is to INTERACT with the students.
i mean if you can trust the professor without testing the student, why not trust the student directly? why make the student get out of their car?
Well, I am a math professor (although at a much lowlier school than Harvard) and I've never had a great opinion of in-class testing. The simple fact is that in the short duration of an in-class test you can't give the students substantive problems to work on. Thus, in-class tests (or any other short-duration timed test) is really an exercise in "how quickly can you work lots of relatively shallow problems".
I far prefer to give my students lots and lots of really hard take-home problems. I call on them randomly in class to present their solutions at the board and explain their work. This is virtually cheat-proof... if you copy from someone, then it is obvious when I'm quizzing you at the board to prove your assertions. The only draw back of this method is that it takes a lot of effort on the professor's part, and it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus.
My guess is that Harvard is the type of place where class size isn't an issue. When you've got really small classes (under 10 students) then you can really gauge the knowledge level of each student because you are engaging each one individually in every class meeting. That's the ideal learning environment, but it's expensive.
Blow dryer is the best. Melts the glue and no residue.
I was working in the lab once and need to remove some stickers. A colleague made your suggestion about a hair dryer. We didn't have a hair dryer, but we did have a heat gun (for shrink wrapping stuff). It turns out that a heat gun will melt your monitor about two seconds after it gets the stickers hot enough to slide off.
There are companies that pay millions of dollars to have their machines in the same room as the stock exchange computers just so that they can have that millisecond trading advantage over their competitors who have to endure network lag. Seems like this is exactly the type of hardware they might want to buy.
* Sorry, can't resist the opportunity to start a flame war:)
There's nothing to fight over. You're wrong.
Since Israel was a theocracy, the king and the god were the same, and hence both copies went into the tabernacle.
If you actually KNEW the story that you're opining about, you'd know that Moses received the tablets before they reached Israel. They were wandering in the desert. There was no palace, there was no temple. Most importantly, there was no Israel.
They had just fled Egypt, where the king was considered a God. The Israelites didn't believe that. God was God and the King was the King.
If you took the time to get to know what the fuck you were talking about before opining, you'd know that.
Full disclosure, I do not subscribe to any of the Abrahamic religions; however I do know and understand their beliefs.
LK
Historically, the term "Israel" is often used for Jacob (son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham) and his descendants. So, in this context, the term "Israel" refers to the people (i.e. the Israelites), not the land that is currently known as Israel.
I'm pretty sure they do that already. If they don't, then they are simply enabling the stupidity. I can't speak for other areas, but I can speak to mine where ambulance service is concerned. Many many years ago, I had an 8 month old baby die. When we checked on him, he wasn't breathing but he was still warm. We called 9-1-1, they came out, restored a pulse but he died later at the hospital. A few days later, a rather large and unwelcome bill arrived in the mail for the services rendered.
I was angry as hell. Consider this: If I hadn't called 9-1-1, I would have been a criminal. And by calling 9-1-1, I make myself liable for an emergency services bill. This defines "damned if you do and damned if you don't." I would be okay with billing someone for "false" or "needless" calls. It makes sense. But when it's an actual need, an actual emergency, and even death has occurred in the end, you would think some sympathy would result from the system. But yeah, I never paid that bill... though I think some insurance coverage might have. I don't remember that time period too well as you might imagine -- it was extremely emotional.
First, let me offer my condolences. As a parent myself, my greatest fear is something happening to my kids. I'm very sympathetic to your case, and I agree that it is a moral outrage that you were charged a fee in this instance.
That said, I do believe that the NPS and other land management agencies should be able to charge a reasonable fee in cases where the requesting party is clearly behaving negligently. However, it must be very clear that honest, well-prepared, land users who just happen to have some bad luck should not be charged for calling in a rescue. Otherwise, no ordinary citizens will bother calling in a rescue that might leave them $100,000 or more in debt. This will effectively lock the middle class out of our public lands. (The very rich can afford it, but the rest of us can't.) Also, even the rescue fee for the grossest negligence should be capped and publicized at entry to the area.
It seems like a pretty good buy to me. Those Monster cables have prevented any Monsters from infesting my home audio equipment. My anti-shark rock is working well in the living room, too.
It's remarkable that high performance computing is driven by video games. So, legions of PC enthusiasts and uber-gamers, I salute you for your contributions to technology! P0wn on.
It's already widely known that Relativity is just a model... much like the rest of physics. It's extremely accurate and useful for dealing with many areas, but breaks down somewhat when dealing with very very small things. Hence the great desire to develop a more unified theory! So, the summary is a little bit on the sensationalist side of the street.
The research is very important, though!
That's a gross misunderstanding of the problems of relativity.
"Just a model" is not what physicists seek. The aim is to seek laws of physics that are absolute, inviolable, and a complete description of space, time, and mass-energy. Some of our models are basically there, like the "conservation" laws, which are based on rigorous mathematics.
The problem with relativity isn't that it's "just a model", it's that it is explicitly known to be incomplete. It simply doesn't "extend" down to small scales. This was known by Einstein himself, he sought to complete his theory, but failed.
Sorry, but I'm a mathematician... so everything you physicists do is just a model to me. Ever since I realized (via Goedel) that there aren't even any complete and consistent theories for logic, I sort of figured that there would never be a complete and consistent theory for physics. (Let me know if you find one.) In the mean time, I'm still really impressed with the work physicists do! I really should finish working through Gravitation some day... that's cool stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, they propose a "family of interconnected theories" might emerge
Which, if you read them all at the same sitting and follow all the connections, just might read like one big...unified theory.
This seems very, very close to a distinction without a difference.
No, there is a very important difference. Hawking is stating that there may be "locally everywhere solutions" without a "global solution." This is a very important concept in advanced mathematics. Go read about the mathematical terms "sheaf" and "local-global principle."
Hawking is essentially saying that there very well may not be one single theory which explains everything. Instead, there may be a bunch of theories, each of which is valid only in certain areas, and which agree with one another where they overlap, even without a global solution.
For a simple example which many readers may already be familiar with, consider the complex logarithm (e.g. the natural log on the complex numbers). To make it well defined, you must make a "branch cut" and decide which branch you want to take. Different branches agree where they overlap, but there is no single global solutions... just a patchwork of solutions that agree where needed (blah, blah lift to a covering space). Pick up a book on complex analysis for details.
Care to point out what new problems autotools creates?
The fact that I can't use them on Windows. Seriously, I can't see how we call a build system "cross platform" when it doesn't cooperate with the most widely deployed build environment.
It seems to me that it might be possible for a Python-based build system to have enough platform independence that it could build projects on Linux, Mac, and Windows. SCons looks like it's coming along. I'd really like to see more developers get behind it, but on the open source projects that I've worked on many of the developers are antagonistic toward any OS other than Linux.
It is done as you've guessed, but it's still often obvious who the author is. Don't forget that sometimes a bad review has nothing to do with knowing who the author is. If you come across a paper that's done almost exactly the same work as you have done, or criticises your work, you could choose to give it a false bad review to try to prevent it from being published. I've seen papers that have received three reviews, two that say it's good, and one that says it's nowhere near worthy of being published. You often question the outliers.
This is an unfortunate side-effect of human nature, and it occurs even in the "uncontroversial" subjects such as math.
I once submitted a paper to {a well known math journal}. My paper took an {established result} by a {well known researcher} and made a {reasonable improvement}. I received two referee reports. The first referee said that it was an important result and gave me a list of minor corrections for typos and clarity. The second referee report only said something like, "All work on {these types of problems} is inconsequential because the problem was adequately resolved by {well known researcher}."
I got the distinct impression that the second referee was either {well known researcher} or someone who was only one hop away from {well known researcher}. It was pretty discouraging.
*sigh*
HP will destroy them. What other products are out there these days? Anyone have any experience in other products? /has over a million dollars in this thing... does not want to be an HP customer.
Now, now, let's not be hasty. I'm sure that HP has learned from the whole "Itanium will be sooo much better than Alpha debacle."
Wow. 3Par and now ArcSight? They are going to need to call a credit counseling company after this shopping binge! :D
Actually, now is a good time to buy! The current recession has depressed prices throughout the tech sector (well, and in almost every other sector as well), so it makes good business sense for HP to use the opportunity to diversify by purchasing smaller companies that have already gained some traction in niche markets.
Assuming, of course, that HP has enough liquid assets to cover the purchases.
Good luck with your PhD!
Of course, I was generalizing. Different people learn in different ways. What I have observed seems to apply to most, but certainly not all, students.
One of the reasons I don't bother taking attendance is because I know that there are some students who will learn perfectly well on their own. As long as they are doing well in the class, there is no reason to force them to show up.
It wasn't me! However, I think you'll find that there are a number of math professors who use this method. It usually works best in small, upper-level classes.
lots and lots of really hard take-home problems.
Please, for your students sanity, small numbers of very hard problems is better than lots and lots of problems of any difficulty.
Actually, I completely agree with you. I was oversimplifying in my original post, partially for brevity, and partially because if I describe too much more about myself then I will loose what little anonymity is available here.
I assign a lot of hard problems, but I don't require my students to do all of them. I will usually have a small number of problems that I want everyone to do, then I'll let the students pick from the others. For example, I might have 10 hard problems on a weekly assignment. I'll indicate 3-4 problems that I want everyone to do, then I might have the students pick 1-2 others to work. So, a given student might only have to work 5 problems, but when we present the problems in class everyone has the advantage of seeing a solution to each problem worked out.
Hang in there jmerlin! I certainly have felt your pain. My best advise is go talk to your professors. Even the research-focused professors are usually willing to spare time to talk with grad students. Show them that you have mastered the material by going over the HW problems with them, and they will realize that you are learning and adjust their grading accordingly.
Funny that you'd mention that teaching style on /.. Not only does it force students to come to class, effectively marking attendance which irritates many/most of us. But in front of class on the fly answers would FAIL a large number of us regardless of math ability. And to top it off, the other thing you mark is homework? Which is hilariously easy to cheat on and therefore no indicator of intellect or understand, it only harms those that are honest and won't cheat/work together.
Your system effectively destroys the average /.er even though many of them may be a LOT better at math than the average. Oh goody.
Those are misconceptions that many of my students come in with.
Even for the nerdy introvert, there is great value in learning how to present your solutions in front of an audience on the fly. This is a skill that is far better learned in college where it is okay to mess up a lot than on the job where messing up in front of an important client can be a career ending move.
As for cheating on my homework... It doesn't matter if you've worked with other people or found a solution on the internet. I've had students do both all the time. It's EASY for a real mathematician to see.The way I explain it to my students is like this: I'm a parent. I have little kids. I can tell when they're lying because try as they might the pieces of their stories don't fit together. It's just as easy for me to tell when a student hasn't developed a proof of a theorem on his or her own. The students see this happen to other students during the first couple classes, and they stop trying to cheat. They also learn that I don't care about the "final answer." I care about how they solved the problem. I care about how they are thinking! I expect mistakes, that's part of the learning process.
By the way, this is why most graduate schools have some sort of oral qualifiers. You can't cheat your way through an oral exam administered by experts. It just isn't possible.
"The whole fucking point of a professor is to INTERACT with the students."
Not. That's what our current moronic spoon-feeding society thinks, wants and expects. The whole fucking point of a professor is to TEACH. Students are already quite good by themselves about INTERACTing... in campus parties.
You sound really bitter. Are you an un-tenured professor at a big research school who feels so much pressure to publish that you don't want to spend any time dealing with students? I know how you feel. I used to be you. I went to a better place, and now I'm much happier.
The point of the professor at my lowly school is to TEACH. Not to lecture, but to TEACH. How can you teach your students if you refuse to interact with them? I think you might be confusing "lecturing + testing" with "teaching." The two are not equivalent.
Go read the Socratic dialogues. The best method of teaching hasn't changed in several thousand years. It's really simple human to human interaction. The teacher gives the student a challenging problem. The student struggles. The teacher gives hints and corrections, but forces the student to solve the problem.
Ultimately, many of my students will never need all the math I teach them. That's okay. The most important thing is that they go through the process of learning it. They must learn how to learn, how to solve problems, how to think independently. Once they have mastered that, they don't need the teacher anymore. Then they can learn on their own from books or other non-interactive sources.
There are teaching assistants and smaller "discussion" sections in which to interact and grade papers.
Ah, I work at a lowly school. We don't have teaching assistants. The professors do all the teaching, all the discussing, and all of the grading.
Of course, in grad school I was one of those TAs leading discussion sections like you've just described. What I realized then was that most of the learning took place either in the discussion sessions or while the students were working on their homework. Really, those giant lectures could have been video presentations and it wouldn't have made any difference to the students.
"it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus."
30 students is a lot? I guess it wouldn't work with 200 then..
What's the point in teaching a 200 person class? You can't interact with them at all, you can't actually grade their papers, and you can't judge the knowledge of a student in any meaningful way. Universities that run ridiculous classes like that are just stealing the students' money and wasting the professor's time. The professor might as well just video the lectures and put them on the web... which I think is what Khan is doing.
The whole fucking point of a professor is to INTERACT with the students.
i mean if you can trust the professor without testing the student, why not trust the student directly? why make the student get out of their car?
Well, I am a math professor (although at a much lowlier school than Harvard) and I've never had a great opinion of in-class testing. The simple fact is that in the short duration of an in-class test you can't give the students substantive problems to work on. Thus, in-class tests (or any other short-duration timed test) is really an exercise in "how quickly can you work lots of relatively shallow problems".
I far prefer to give my students lots and lots of really hard take-home problems. I call on them randomly in class to present their solutions at the board and explain their work. This is virtually cheat-proof... if you copy from someone, then it is obvious when I'm quizzing you at the board to prove your assertions. The only draw back of this method is that it takes a lot of effort on the professor's part, and it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus.
My guess is that Harvard is the type of place where class size isn't an issue. When you've got really small classes (under 10 students) then you can really gauge the knowledge level of each student because you are engaging each one individually in every class meeting. That's the ideal learning environment, but it's expensive.
Blow dryer is the best. Melts the glue and no residue.
I was working in the lab once and need to remove some stickers. A colleague made your suggestion about a hair dryer. We didn't have a hair dryer, but we did have a heat gun (for shrink wrapping stuff). It turns out that a heat gun will melt your monitor about two seconds after it gets the stickers hot enough to slide off.
Certainly seems like Google saw this coming from a long way off given that they have been working hard to integrate Skype-like features into gmail.
It makes me wonder how many Cisco/Skype executives were using gmail accounts...
Sorry to ask but who does IBM see using this?
Options traders, arbitrage firms, etc.
There are companies that pay millions of dollars to have their machines in the same room as the stock exchange computers just so that they can have that millisecond trading advantage over their competitors who have to endure network lag. Seems like this is exactly the type of hardware they might want to buy.
* Sorry, can't resist the opportunity to start a flame war :)
There's nothing to fight over. You're wrong.
Since Israel was a theocracy, the king and the god were the same, and hence both copies went into the tabernacle.
If you actually KNEW the story that you're opining about, you'd know that Moses received the tablets before they reached Israel. They were wandering in the desert. There was no palace, there was no temple. Most importantly, there was no Israel.
They had just fled Egypt, where the king was considered a God. The Israelites didn't believe that. God was God and the King was the King.
If you took the time to get to know what the fuck you were talking about before opining, you'd know that.
Full disclosure, I do not subscribe to any of the Abrahamic religions; however I do know and understand their beliefs.
LK
Historically, the term "Israel" is often used for Jacob (son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham) and his descendants. So, in this context, the term "Israel" refers to the people (i.e. the Israelites), not the land that is currently known as Israel.
I'm pretty sure they do that already. If they don't, then they are simply enabling the stupidity. I can't speak for other areas, but I can speak to mine where ambulance service is concerned. Many many years ago, I had an 8 month old baby die. When we checked on him, he wasn't breathing but he was still warm. We called 9-1-1, they came out, restored a pulse but he died later at the hospital. A few days later, a rather large and unwelcome bill arrived in the mail for the services rendered.
I was angry as hell. Consider this: If I hadn't called 9-1-1, I would have been a criminal. And by calling 9-1-1, I make myself liable for an emergency services bill. This defines "damned if you do and damned if you don't." I would be okay with billing someone for "false" or "needless" calls. It makes sense. But when it's an actual need, an actual emergency, and even death has occurred in the end, you would think some sympathy would result from the system. But yeah, I never paid that bill... though I think some insurance coverage might have. I don't remember that time period too well as you might imagine -- it was extremely emotional.
First, let me offer my condolences. As a parent myself, my greatest fear is something happening to my kids. I'm very sympathetic to your case, and I agree that it is a moral outrage that you were charged a fee in this instance.
That said, I do believe that the NPS and other land management agencies should be able to charge a reasonable fee in cases where the requesting party is clearly behaving negligently. However, it must be very clear that honest, well-prepared, land users who just happen to have some bad luck should not be charged for calling in a rescue. Otherwise, no ordinary citizens will bother calling in a rescue that might leave them $100,000 or more in debt. This will effectively lock the middle class out of our public lands. (The very rich can afford it, but the rest of us can't.) Also, even the rescue fee for the grossest negligence should be capped and publicized at entry to the area.
It seems like a pretty good buy to me. Those Monster cables have prevented any Monsters from infesting my home audio equipment. My anti-shark rock is working well in the living room, too.
Good to hear that AT&T is actually doing the "right thing" and hopefully learning from the research instead of attempting to suppress it.
What is this ASSCAP organization of which you speak?
It's remarkable that high performance computing is driven by video games. So, legions of PC enthusiasts and uber-gamers, I salute you for your contributions to technology! P0wn on.
I thought Knuth was already retired... as in, I think he explicitly retired so that he would have time to finish the books!
It's already widely known that Relativity is just a model... much like the rest of physics. It's extremely accurate and useful for dealing with many areas, but breaks down somewhat when dealing with very very small things. Hence the great desire to develop a more unified theory! So, the summary is a little bit on the sensationalist side of the street.
The research is very important, though!
That's a gross misunderstanding of the problems of relativity.
"Just a model" is not what physicists seek. The aim is to seek laws of physics that are absolute, inviolable, and a complete description of space, time, and mass-energy. Some of our models are basically there, like the "conservation" laws, which are based on rigorous mathematics.
The problem with relativity isn't that it's "just a model", it's that it is explicitly known to be incomplete. It simply doesn't "extend" down to small scales. This was known by Einstein himself, he sought to complete his theory, but failed.
Sorry, but I'm a mathematician... so everything you physicists do is just a model to me. Ever since I realized (via Goedel) that there aren't even any complete and consistent theories for logic, I sort of figured that there would never be a complete and consistent theory for physics. (Let me know if you find one.) In the mean time, I'm still really impressed with the work physicists do! I really should finish working through Gravitation some day... that's cool stuff.