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.
I agree! I've always felt like the NYT held a good balance between proper (American) English and pedantic grammar rules. Maybe other will follow. It would be nice if more media sources (both print and on-line) would follow the example set by The NYT, The New Yorker, and The Economist.
Is it really necessarily to require every student to have a laptop in order to learn? Are they saying it's nearly impossible to correctly teach students without this technology?
And sure, while technology makes things easier to do, it almost feels like they're blaming the lack of technology for not being able to properly teach the students. But, that's my opinion.
It's amusing isn't it! Yet another example of technology being used to hide inadequate education. The real solution to most teaching problems is to hire good teachers, pay them enough to make them want to keep the job, and keep the class sizes small enough so that the teachers can actually interact with all of the students.
I'm a math prof, and I've found that the best way to present complicated material is a chalk board. Sometimes I get all crazy and use advanced multi-media like "colored chalk".
Really, though. Why do they need Macbooks? If they are teaching them computer science, then part of the learning is figuring out how to handle your own computer (whatever OS it might be). If they want them to typeset their term papers then they should just say that, not require a specific proprietary product. Part of being a savy computer user is developing enough skill with manuals and search engines to figure out how to solve $common_problem on $your_platform.
Microsoft's products are completely secure!! Completely! You don't even need to bother with any more security "research". In fact, I've even seen Bruce Schneier running Windows on his laptop, so it's completely safe!!
Where are the C development jobs? I have strong C skills, but everything is Java/C++/PHP/Ruby/worse.
If you have strong C skills, then you should be able to pick up Java in a week or two. Once you've got the object-oriented approach from Java, teach yourself C++ (which is like a dirty version of Java that lets you do naughty things). After that, all you need to program in an other useful language is a manual. (Functional languages are their own bag of fun, but I've yet to see a job add that says "strong Lisp skills needed".)
Personally, I think the world needs more Ada projects.
As someone who is going through caffeine withdrawal right now (notice that I don't use quotation marks because it's real), I have a really simple answer.
My splitting headache and lethargy are due to the the fact that I consume at least two pots of coffee a day until yesterday.
I do this to myself periodically. I'm usually a straight espresso drinker, but once every year I take a month off of caffeine. The first three days are really painful, but by the end of the first week, I'm fine. For the rest of the month I dream about coffee, and occasionally I'll indulge in a decaf mocha (or some other fat and sugar loaded decaf drink). Now, if you're a caffeine addict, and you've never done this, I highly recommend it. Not because it's good for you or any crap like that... do it because when you start drinking coffee again it feels sooooooo good!!!
The heights of the regions (buildings, terrain, etc.) would make a difference!! For example, in D.C. the heights of buildings are limited by ordinance to be lower than the Capital's dome. This means that D.C. is already at a great disadvantage compared to NY in terms of population per unit area because there is a limit to how many floors you can put in the buildings.
Really, though, I would be much more interested in degrees/population rather than degrees/area in a given region. And, like others have already said, "college degree != being smart".
We always called it "hunger sauce," and it really does make the dried beans that are only partially re-hydrated much tastier. Funny how I could live on $3/day worth of food on the trail, but I spend more than that on coffee some mornings on the way in to work.
Here's a wacky thing: the plural form of someone else is actually someone's else.
Ah, I can see the reason for your disclaimer about not having good grammar. "Someone else's" isn't plural, it's possessive! Still an interesting fact though.. does it mean the possessive form of someone else is someone's else? Looks pretty wrong to me...
Yes, I certainly meant "possessive," not "plural," and I don't claim any expertise at all with language. (I'm a math professor in part because I was always so bad at writing.)
Anyway, an English professor whom I asked about the puzzle explained to me that the correct, although archaic form is indeed someone's else. I pointed out to her that many on-line references use someone else's as the possessive form, and she explained that many on-line references are written by individuals who are catering toward the "business writer."
Evidently, the business audience isn't so much concerned with what is correct grammatically as opposed to what sounds correct because it is used most frequently. Hence, sites like dictionary.com will often list the most common usage even if it isn't technically correct.
For example, if you want to refer to the car belonging to the attorney general, it would be the attorney's general car not the attorney general's car. However, most readers would find the first form off-putting, so a business writer would prefer the second.
Of course, this leads to an endless digression as to grammar being a fixed set of rules to hold the language together as a standard or an amorphous description of common usage which must change with the times.
Well, I should probably stop commenting on this before I get too many more "offtopic" mods.
This is why I long ago resolved to never, ever, ever correct someone else's grammar on slashdot. The risk in inadvertently failing to grammar is unacceptable.
Here's a wacky thing: the plural form of someone else is actually someone's else which I only discovered one day when the the spell checker kept underlining else's. I'm not correcting you, by the way. My own grammar and spelling are atrocious, so I nearly always fail to grammar. I just thought I'd point out an oddity of the language in case anyone else found it humorous.
"Yes, it's hard to see how this particular method would be useful on Earth."
If I was a drug dealer, I would like to know that the cell tower I'm talking through is inside the FBI car behind me.
The surface of the Earth is a rotating, accelerating reference frame located in several gravity wells (Earth's, the Moon's and the Sun's). Hence the proposed mechanism would not work with any transmitter/receiver combination located on Earth.
Cold war era paranoia is worth it's weight in gold. I'm sure every satellite launched back then with anything remotely resembling a secret on it, had a device perfectly capable of destroying it all!
Yep! I think they called them "positioning thrusters," though.
this only works in a perfectly flat space-time, if unknown or changing (known or caused by hostile party) curvatures are present the whole thing falls apart
You beat me to it. Yes, it's hard to see how this particular method would be useful on Earth. Of course, the research results are academically interesting even if there is no (immediate) practical application.
If there really is going to be some "tail-to-tooth" transfer of spending, it'll be a very welcome change.
However, I am a bit peeved at the mention of "military healthcare". Given the atrocious cuts in services for veterans who've been injured in combat, I think that is the one area where the government needs to do more.
After all, if we ask people to lose limbs for us, it's only fair if we at least take care of them, when they come back from the battlefield with life-altering disabilities. It doesn't really matter what wars they were fighting. They are OUR soldiers, and it's our duty as a nation to support them, regardless of whether we support the politics that brought them to the battlefield.
I firmly agree. One important point that Gates misses is that military personnel and civilian employees of the military often have much lower salaries than the equivalent private sector positions. One of the main reasons that many people make the choice to serve directly rather than as, say, a contractor is that the government promises job security and health benefits. In other words, many people are choosing stability over paycheck. If Gates is going to reduce the "stability" portion of that equation, then he will need to either increase the pay for those remaining or be prepared to hire more contractors to get the job done.
If you define enough real world processes as calculation, you prove none of our laws of physics are the real ones.
For just one example, Nature can't be storing irrational numbers as infinite series expressions (where would the infinitely large registers to store them be?). Another way to put this is, if some process in Nature counts as a calculation, Nature can't be doing that calculation using numbers such as pi or e, but rather finite approximations of such numbers, that allow results in finite time.
There exists a small number of physicists who are willing to entertain the idea that Nature does not, in fact, deal with any irrational numbers. If all measurable values are quantized (including time and space), then Nature need not bother with "real" numbers. Nature might be perfectly content to get by with, say, some large algebraic extension of the rationals.
Without net neutrality regulation, I fear that providers will have far too much power to censor content. In my area, there is only one choice for broadband: Comcast. My provider has already demonstrated a willingness to censor based on protocol and re-direct DNS lookup failures to their own search engine. I don't trust them at all to act in the best interest of the consumer when sites like Hulu and iTunes start directly competing against cable TV offerings for content.
From what I've seen of Theora, it's the performance limit, not the open source nature of it, which makes it a non-starter for many platforms. I've read some rumors about Google supposedly pushing their own open-source codec, but I haven't seen any actual products. Do they exist? Is there an open alternative that can compete with H.264 on a wide range of platforms?
Thanks for that post! I hadn't heard of "mechanical jurisprudence" before, so I found that very informative. I'd mod you up, but I've never had mod points... so you have to settle for this post instead.
SO you would rather the insurance companies be the only ones with unfettered access to your information?
I think the REAL reason Dr.s aren't too keen on the E-records is lawyers and liability. Every person who sees that data is another risk of a malpractice suit in their eyes.
And let's get over this E-Records" thing already... Face it.. you doctor is already using computers, and storing your information on them... The real issue is data portability. Info from Dr. A should be accessible to Dr. B when needed, and we should ALWAYS have access to our own data...
My doctors, and my kids' doctors, certainly are NOT using sophisticated computer storage. In fact, the last time I was in the pediatrician's office, the Dr. was complaining that she couldn't read the other Dr.'s handwriting, so she called him at home and asked him what he had written. They take all their notes by hand and refer to the hand written notes rather than anything computerized. I'm sure that the office secretaries have to compile some sort of computer-based reports for the insurance companies, but the Dr.'s are using handwritten notes.
Oddly enough, I'm glad that the Dr.'s I see are using hand written notes and direct conversations. I've done enough software development in my time that I'm not comfortable with applications written in the "standard method" for the "market-leading OS" to keep track of vital health information for my family.
If we could have some sort of quality assurance for the applications, OS, and hardware that are keeping track of these records, then I'd be more comfortable.
I'm amazed that the country producing so many crocodile-based alpha males has such a collective nanny-me attitude.
Where is that classic Australian manly-man stereotype? Where are the beer-swigging, rare-steak-eating, dingo-punching heroes of lore? Did they all get banned, too?
Pardon my laziness for not investigating this myself, but doesn't the Prius have a mechanical (hydraulic) link to the brakes that engages when the pedal is pushed down far enough? I realize that the first portion of the braking is done electronically (for the regenerative braking system), but in an emergency wouldn't a full application of the brakes slow down the vehicle?
I tell my students that they can do whatever they like provided it doesn't distract others. I also don't take attendance because my students are adults and they can decide for themselves if they want to attend or not. Normally, there's a pretty high correlation between participation and final grade, but having been a student who skipped every (non-test) class meeting of Freshman Psych and still got an 'A', I'm not about to penalize students who have a better use for their time.
So, why waste your time surfing in my class when you can do it from a much more comfortable location?
Here's a hint for the rest of you who do attend class and take notes: don't write down every damn thing! Especially when a course is based from a textbook, or the notes are on-line, you should use the class time to interact with the professor. Learn during class. When the professor puts something on the board that you don't understand, don't just blindly copy it down; ask the professor to explain it. A good professor will be happy to have the interaction and will take the time to answer you. (Granted, this is much more difficult in one of those giant lecture hall settings, but you should avoid those classes anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
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!
I agree! I've always felt like the NYT held a good balance between proper (American) English and pedantic grammar rules. Maybe other will follow. It would be nice if more media sources (both print and on-line) would follow the example set by The NYT, The New Yorker, and The Economist.
Is it really necessarily to require every student to have a laptop in order to learn? Are they saying it's nearly impossible to correctly teach students without this technology?
And sure, while technology makes things easier to do, it almost feels like they're blaming the lack of technology for not being able to properly teach the students. But, that's my opinion.
It's amusing isn't it! Yet another example of technology being used to hide inadequate education. The real solution to most teaching problems is to hire good teachers, pay them enough to make them want to keep the job, and keep the class sizes small enough so that the teachers can actually interact with all of the students.
I'm a math prof, and I've found that the best way to present complicated material is a chalk board. Sometimes I get all crazy and use advanced multi-media like "colored chalk".
Really, though. Why do they need Macbooks? If they are teaching them computer science, then part of the learning is figuring out how to handle your own computer (whatever OS it might be). If they want them to typeset their term papers then they should just say that, not require a specific proprietary product. Part of being a savy computer user is developing enough skill with manuals and search engines to figure out how to solve $common_problem on $your_platform.
Microsoft's products are completely secure!! Completely! You don't even need to bother with any more security "research". In fact, I've even seen Bruce Schneier running Windows on his laptop, so it's completely safe!!
Where are the C development jobs? I have strong C skills, but everything is Java/C++/PHP/Ruby/worse.
If you have strong C skills, then you should be able to pick up Java in a week or two. Once you've got the object-oriented approach from Java, teach yourself C++ (which is like a dirty version of Java that lets you do naughty things). After that, all you need to program in an other useful language is a manual. (Functional languages are their own bag of fun, but I've yet to see a job add that says "strong Lisp skills needed".)
Personally, I think the world needs more Ada projects.
As someone who is going through caffeine withdrawal right now (notice that I don't use quotation marks because it's real), I have a really simple answer.
My splitting headache and lethargy are due to the the fact that I consume at least two pots of coffee a day until yesterday.
I do this to myself periodically. I'm usually a straight espresso drinker, but once every year I take a month off of caffeine. The first three days are really painful, but by the end of the first week, I'm fine. For the rest of the month I dream about coffee, and occasionally I'll indulge in a decaf mocha (or some other fat and sugar loaded decaf drink). Now, if you're a caffeine addict, and you've never done this, I highly recommend it. Not because it's good for you or any crap like that... do it because when you start drinking coffee again it feels sooooooo good!!!
you must factor in average height as well.
The heights of the regions (buildings, terrain, etc.) would make a difference!! For example, in D.C. the heights of buildings are limited by ordinance to be lower than the Capital's dome. This means that D.C. is already at a great disadvantage compared to NY in terms of population per unit area because there is a limit to how many floors you can put in the buildings.
Really, though, I would be much more interested in degrees/population rather than degrees/area in a given region. And, like others have already said, "college degree != being smart".
We always called it "hunger sauce," and it really does make the dried beans that are only partially re-hydrated much tastier. Funny how I could live on $3/day worth of food on the trail, but I spend more than that on coffee some mornings on the way in to work.
I have no sense of smell, you insensitive clod! *
*That's not a joke.
Why is this modded "Troll"? I know someone with no sense of smell, and it seems to be a minor handicap.
I've also met far too many people with no sense of taste!
Here's a wacky thing: the plural form of someone else is actually someone's else .
Ah, I can see the reason for your disclaimer about not having good grammar. "Someone else's" isn't plural, it's possessive! Still an interesting fact though.. does it mean the possessive form of someone else is someone's else? Looks pretty wrong to me...
Yes, I certainly meant "possessive," not "plural," and I don't claim any expertise at all with language. (I'm a math professor in part because I was always so bad at writing.)
Anyway, an English professor whom I asked about the puzzle explained to me that the correct, although archaic form is indeed someone's else. I pointed out to her that many on-line references use someone else's as the possessive form, and she explained that many on-line references are written by individuals who are catering toward the "business writer."
Evidently, the business audience isn't so much concerned with what is correct grammatically as opposed to what sounds correct because it is used most frequently. Hence, sites like dictionary.com will often list the most common usage even if it isn't technically correct.
For example, if you want to refer to the car belonging to the attorney general, it would be the attorney's general car not the attorney general's car. However, most readers would find the first form off-putting, so a business writer would prefer the second.
Of course, this leads to an endless digression as to grammar being a fixed set of rules to hold the language together as a standard or an amorphous description of common usage which must change with the times.
Well, I should probably stop commenting on this before I get too many more "offtopic" mods.
This is why I long ago resolved to never, ever, ever correct someone else's grammar on slashdot. The risk in inadvertently failing to grammar is unacceptable.
Here's a wacky thing: the plural form of someone else is actually someone's else which I only discovered one day when the the spell checker kept underlining else's. I'm not correcting you, by the way. My own grammar and spelling are atrocious, so I nearly always fail to grammar. I just thought I'd point out an oddity of the language in case anyone else found it humorous.
"Yes, it's hard to see how this particular method would be useful on Earth."
If I was a drug dealer, I would like to know that the cell tower I'm talking through is inside the FBI car behind me.
The surface of the Earth is a rotating, accelerating reference frame located in several gravity wells (Earth's, the Moon's and the Sun's). Hence the proposed mechanism would not work with any transmitter/receiver combination located on Earth.
Cold war era paranoia is worth it's weight in gold. I'm sure every satellite launched back then with anything remotely resembling a secret on it, had a device perfectly capable of destroying it all!
Yep! I think they called them "positioning thrusters," though.
this only works in a perfectly flat space-time, if unknown or changing (known or caused by hostile party) curvatures are present the whole thing falls apart
You beat me to it. Yes, it's hard to see how this particular method would be useful on Earth. Of course, the research results are academically interesting even if there is no (immediate) practical application.
Here's the link: http://www.nsa.gov
Indeed.
If there really is going to be some "tail-to-tooth" transfer of spending, it'll be a very welcome change.
However, I am a bit peeved at the mention of "military healthcare". Given the atrocious cuts in services for veterans who've been injured in combat, I think that is the one area where the government needs to do more.
After all, if we ask people to lose limbs for us, it's only fair if we at least take care of them, when they come back from the battlefield with life-altering disabilities. It doesn't really matter what wars they were fighting. They are OUR soldiers, and it's our duty as a nation to support them, regardless of whether we support the politics that brought them to the battlefield.
I firmly agree. One important point that Gates misses is that military personnel and civilian employees of the military often have much lower salaries than the equivalent private sector positions. One of the main reasons that many people make the choice to serve directly rather than as, say, a contractor is that the government promises job security and health benefits. In other words, many people are choosing stability over paycheck. If Gates is going to reduce the "stability" portion of that equation, then he will need to either increase the pay for those remaining or be prepared to hire more contractors to get the job done.
If you define enough real world processes as calculation, you prove none of our laws of physics are the real ones.
For just one example, Nature can't be storing irrational numbers as infinite series expressions (where would the infinitely large registers to store them be?). Another way to put this is, if some process in Nature counts as a calculation, Nature can't be doing that calculation using numbers such as pi or e, but rather finite approximations of such numbers, that allow results in finite time.
There exists a small number of physicists who are willing to entertain the idea that Nature does not, in fact, deal with any irrational numbers. If all measurable values are quantized (including time and space), then Nature need not bother with "real" numbers. Nature might be perfectly content to get by with, say, some large algebraic extension of the rationals.
Without net neutrality regulation, I fear that providers will have far too much power to censor content. In my area, there is only one choice for broadband: Comcast. My provider has already demonstrated a willingness to censor based on protocol and re-direct DNS lookup failures to their own search engine. I don't trust them at all to act in the best interest of the consumer when sites like Hulu and iTunes start directly competing against cable TV offerings for content.
From what I've seen of Theora, it's the performance limit, not the open source nature of it, which makes it a non-starter for many platforms. I've read some rumors about Google supposedly pushing their own open-source codec, but I haven't seen any actual products. Do they exist? Is there an open alternative that can compete with H.264 on a wide range of platforms?
Regardless of your opinion of the FSF and the (L)GPL, the Stallman quote is very sad!
Hey, RMS, if you're reading this, then just know that I'm glad you're here!!! Stick around, buddy! You've touched many lives in a good way.
Thanks for that post! I hadn't heard of "mechanical jurisprudence" before, so I found that very informative. I'd mod you up, but I've never had mod points... so you have to settle for this post instead.
SO you would rather the insurance companies be the only ones with unfettered access to your information?
I think the REAL reason Dr.s aren't too keen on the E-records is lawyers and liability. Every person who sees that data is another risk of a malpractice suit in their eyes.
And let's get over this E-Records" thing already... Face it.. you doctor is already using computers, and storing your information on them... The real issue is data portability. Info from Dr. A should be accessible to Dr. B when needed, and we should ALWAYS have access to our own data...
My doctors, and my kids' doctors, certainly are NOT using sophisticated computer storage. In fact, the last time I was in the pediatrician's office, the Dr. was complaining that she couldn't read the other Dr.'s handwriting, so she called him at home and asked him what he had written. They take all their notes by hand and refer to the hand written notes rather than anything computerized. I'm sure that the office secretaries have to compile some sort of computer-based reports for the insurance companies, but the Dr.'s are using handwritten notes.
Oddly enough, I'm glad that the Dr.'s I see are using hand written notes and direct conversations. I've done enough software development in my time that I'm not comfortable with applications written in the "standard method" for the "market-leading OS" to keep track of vital health information for my family.
If we could have some sort of quality assurance for the applications, OS, and hardware that are keeping track of these records, then I'd be more comfortable.
I'm amazed that the country producing so many crocodile-based alpha males has such a collective nanny-me attitude.
Where is that classic Australian manly-man stereotype? Where are the beer-swigging, rare-steak-eating, dingo-punching heroes of lore? Did they all get banned, too?
Pardon my laziness for not investigating this myself, but doesn't the Prius have a mechanical (hydraulic) link to the brakes that engages when the pedal is pushed down far enough? I realize that the first portion of the braking is done electronically (for the regenerative braking system), but in an emergency wouldn't a full application of the brakes slow down the vehicle?
I tell my students that they can do whatever they like provided it doesn't distract others. I also don't take attendance because my students are adults and they can decide for themselves if they want to attend or not. Normally, there's a pretty high correlation between participation and final grade, but having been a student who skipped every (non-test) class meeting of Freshman Psych and still got an 'A', I'm not about to penalize students who have a better use for their time.
So, why waste your time surfing in my class when you can do it from a much more comfortable location?
Here's a hint for the rest of you who do attend class and take notes: don't write down every damn thing! Especially when a course is based from a textbook, or the notes are on-line, you should use the class time to interact with the professor. Learn during class. When the professor puts something on the board that you don't understand, don't just blindly copy it down; ask the professor to explain it. A good professor will be happy to have the interaction and will take the time to answer you. (Granted, this is much more difficult in one of those giant lecture hall settings, but you should avoid those classes anyway.)