"Greek and Latin are still the most useful languages available for educated speakers of English because they allow you to decode almost any term in the English language, especially technical terms."
That requires knowledge of a few word stems, prefixes and suffixes from Latin and Greek. It requires knowing none of the grammar of Latin and especially the difficult grammar of ancient Greek.
The mathematics on the entrance examination was rather elementary compared to modern standards. And of course there was no statistics, geology, chemistry, physics or biology, and the history oddly focused on narrow areas of antiquity. And no English or American literature of all things.
The exam was pretty clearly a class & diligence filter: accept the people who had the families to send them to the Proper Schools and those who were intelligent and diligent enough to do well at the subjects these schools taught.
"The overwhelming majority of Nazi party members were not what you attempt to paint them to be. They were regular people, you know, like Democrats and Republicans"
Whose leader happened to have written Mein Kampf, and guess what---he meant every word of it.
The button called "I'm feeling lucky" would look like a "Go" in some exotic font which cost $500,000 to make.
It would be the only button.
The button presently called "Google Search" wouldn't exist, and he'd fire anybody who suggested it.
Quoth Steve Jobs With Goatee: "Customers don't want to search! They don't want pages of all that crap on the Internet! They want to Go. Google is pronounced Go-gle. Not Goo-gle."
Pretty poorly, but the problem wasn't that they emphasized the welfare of the national community, but decided that only some their own people were part of that community and their welfare could be maximized by racism and invasion.
"racial union of "Aryan" Germans transcending class, religion, and region"
Aka "We ALL gang up and kill our inferiors together."
It's bizzare that they reject established credentialing of people and then virulently insist on only certain classes of credentials for materials, without recognizing the link from one to the other.
When a scientist submits something to an actual journal and receives a bizzare or an uninformed negative response in a review, the editor --- who presumably knows something about the content matter of the field --- will make a reasonable judgment about the quality of the review, and if necessary, the reviewer. Usually this means sending the manuscript out to other reviewers who are known experts and making a decision on consensus and the quality of the arguments. If it looks like a reviewer is not giving useful or insightful reviews, that reviewer doesn't get called any more. If one journal gets a really bad editor who can't be dislodged, then the experts in any given field start submitting manuscripts to other journals and the managers of the first journal start to look into the problem.
In Wikipedia, the editor is often a reviewer. And when such editor/sole reviewer is ignorant, misinformed and stubborn there isn't anything to be done about it. That is problem.
"Its not dynamic typing. Its implicit typing. Its syntax sugar. The compiler looks at your "var" and says based on context decides what it should be."
Based on the static declared type of the right hand side. Which it had to check already.
I remember using a language with this a long time ago (Sather---beautilful and useful) and found it exceptionally useful, and essentially trivial for the compiler to implement.
It is most important when you want to declare something to to be "something that can hold a result of foo()", and that really is the most cognitively informative and useful type annotation. In fairly complicated generic libraries (C++ STL, e.g.) this is not a trivial win when types could be T,weird_functor_frobozz>
After all, you can already do bar(foo()) without having to declare the type of the implicitly created temporary, like bar( return_type_of_foo foo() );
The real win comes when you change the return type of foo (which may happen because of some other generic changes). Using local type inference all those explicit dependencies were cut---the program will still compile instead of you having to tediously trace down all sorts of implementation details, because 'var x = Something()', is what you meant to say in the first place---the fact that Something() happened to be declared a footype then was not particularly meaningful.
"But as he grew older, his emotions did not. He was incapable of keeping a job, incapable of holding onto money and incapable of keeping friends. He was extremely and unbelievably good at music and not much else.
How did that end for Mozart?"
Actually he got some pretty good gigs pretty consistently though he spent his money pretty fast. He also had a very hot and sexy wife. He died from an illness like many other people.
"Einstein always struggled with the mathematics and didn't consider himself to be very good at it."
Yes, but his 'reference frame' in this matter was his collaborator/friend/rival David Hilbert who is the most important mathemetician of the 20th century (maybe with Kolmogorov).
He is obviously very smart and motivated, but the smartest person is not going to know more than the combined experience of a civilization, in particular, the work products of a few thousand people, quite a few of whom were pretty talented when they were 12 years old, but have now read papers describing the observational evidence.
Pretty soon he will be in a domain (early universe modeling) where you cannot figure it out "in your head", though your head is certainly necessary. Scientists have to make hypotheses, program and run dynamical simulations---and then compare to observed facts.
These simulations are hard *work*, and are the types of labor that graduate students and postdocs do. They aren't fun, but they're necessary.
Yes. In truth, over multiple investigations there has been no evidence of any actual scientific fraud.
It is as if, say, Nixon never ordered any breakin to the DNC, no staffer had any cover up, there was no 'enemies list', and after review of all the recordings (which had no excluded section) the only thing possibly 'scandalous' was frustrations at the Washington Post for lying and distorting everything they said.
"The Democrats have *always* been interfering with science, because any government intervention into science is by its very definition interference."
Any intervention by humans is by defnition interference. Clearly science should be performed by incorporeal angels.
" Imagining the Republicans as "anti-science" and "anti-intellectual", and the Democrats as somehow "pro-science" and "pro-intellectual" is just as bad as stereotyping Democrats as the founders of the KKK, and Republicans as "the party of Lincoln". Both parties suck, and the naive belief that either of them is a "good guy" or "bad guy" fails to recognize what they really are -> politicians who will do anything to get elected again, with electoral bases that are biased, ugly and brutish."
In practice, in recent years, the powerful politicians who have been railing at and acting against standard science have been virtually all Republican. This was not previously the case (say before 1994), when neither side did this.
"Actually, LISP is a good language to express algorithms."
Yes, if you're a compiler and not an instance of homo sapiens.
When humans write cognitively dense material describing algorithms to other humans (journal articles), does it look remotely like LISP?
No.
The nature of languages which humans find to be easier to understand is not arbitrary---it is influenced by neurobiology. The modes of expression which humans naturally use between one another are more likely to be idomatic (nearly axiomatically so) than ones which aren't.
"The part I don't get is how Android, Chrome and Chrome OS is "scorching the earth for 250 miles around Google". What are those offerings doing that prevent a viable search competitor from rising?"
a) Because they are free, they are preventing other businesses from creating a new and cool front-end or traffic redirector to search engines---because they can't compete against free and make money. If some other business arose which turned out to produce a popular piece of software, some other business could be paid, for instance, to flip a switch from Google to Bingle.
b) They increase the expectations of ancillary-stuff-that-works-with-the-search-engine that a competitor in search would also have to create.
"In C++0x, you can just use lambdas for that. Or if you insist, you could use variadic templates to implement a function that'd take a type, and return you a function object that is a factory for that type, for a given set of ctor argument types."
"I want to hire people who take jobs because they love them and consider the money making to be the thing that allows them to continue doing what they love."
And when they have to do something that they don't particularly love---which is inevitable---how will they act? Insulted, or mature? Will they just get around and do it?
In my present job (analytical modeling) there are parts I really like (cool things in machine learning) and other stuff. When I'm doing the other stuff I think, "this is what the paycheck is for". It keeps me in a good mood.
It's cleverer, and assholeyer than just saying that.
Old Lawyer's trick.
Instead of saying the obvious, i.e. "We won't support our competitor's (HP) fastest computers because we make hardware now" Oracle spreads FUD about the longevity of their competitor's product line by virtue of leaking information from anonymous sources in their competitors' sole supplier.
Even if Intel and HP completely deny it, their customers will be thinking it all along.
'I couldn't imagine that the US intelligence apparatus with all it's funding, hardware and employees could manage a program like this in the US, how does China do it?"
Outsourcing!
Seriously, the lack of it.
A large fraction of the US expenditure is making well connected contractors wealthy, delivering mediocre service at very high cost. Sure, in China a large portion of governmental decisions are designed to make well connected private contractors (e.g. real estate developers) wealthy, but not when it comes to state security---they don't allow such garbage
Slashdot Mirror
"Greek and Latin are still the most useful languages available for educated speakers of English because they allow you to decode almost any term in the English language, especially technical terms."
That requires knowledge of a few word stems, prefixes and suffixes from Latin and Greek. It requires knowing none of the grammar of Latin and especially the difficult grammar of ancient Greek.
The mathematics on the entrance examination was rather elementary compared to modern standards. And of course there was no statistics, geology, chemistry, physics or biology, and the history oddly focused on narrow areas of antiquity. And no English or American literature of all things.
The exam was pretty clearly a class & diligence filter: accept the people who had the families to send them to the Proper Schools and those who were intelligent and diligent enough to do well at the subjects these schools taught.
"The overwhelming majority of Nazi party members were not what you attempt to paint them to be. They were regular people, you know, like Democrats and Republicans"
Whose leader happened to have written Mein Kampf, and guess what---he meant every word of it.
Not quite. If Steve Jobs ran Google:
The button called "I'm feeling lucky" would look like a "Go" in some exotic font which cost $500,000 to make.
It would be the only button.
The button presently called "Google Search" wouldn't exist, and he'd fire anybody who suggested it.
Quoth Steve Jobs With Goatee: "Customers don't want to search! They don't want pages of all that crap on the Internet! They want to Go. Google is pronounced Go-gle. Not Goo-gle."
In Soviet Russia, black hole falls into you!
Simple application of revolutionary relativistic dialectical physics, too advanced for capitalist bourgeoisie obsessed with reference frame status.
Pretty poorly, but the problem wasn't that they emphasized the welfare of the national community, but decided that only some their own people were part of that community and their welfare could be maximized by racism and invasion.
"racial union of "Aryan" Germans transcending class, religion, and region"
Aka "We ALL gang up and kill our inferiors together."
It's bizzare that they reject established credentialing of people and then virulently insist on only certain classes of credentials for materials, without recognizing the link from one to the other.
When a scientist submits something to an actual journal and receives a bizzare or an uninformed negative response in a review, the editor --- who presumably knows something about the content matter of the field --- will make a reasonable judgment about the quality of the review, and if necessary, the reviewer. Usually this means sending the manuscript out to other reviewers who are known experts and making a decision on consensus and the quality of the arguments. If it looks like a reviewer is not giving useful or insightful reviews, that reviewer doesn't get called any more. If one journal gets a really bad editor who can't be dislodged, then the experts in any given field start submitting manuscripts to other journals and the managers of the first journal start to look into the problem.
In Wikipedia, the editor is often a reviewer. And when such editor/sole reviewer is ignorant, misinformed and stubborn there isn't anything to be done about it. That is problem.
They'll be sure to hang the liberals for it.
"Isn't Google getting sued by Oracle, the owner of Java for a re-implementation.
What Google's getting sued for is specifically legal and encouraged with C#."
Is there an *irrevocable*, universal, comprehensive, royalty-free patent grant to all reimplementors of C# for past, present and all future versions?
If not, then anybody is just as sueable as with Java.
"Its not dynamic typing. Its implicit typing. Its syntax sugar. The compiler looks at your "var" and says based on context decides what it should be."
Based on the static declared type of the right hand side. Which it had to check already.
I remember using a language with this a long time ago (Sather---beautilful and useful) and found it exceptionally useful, and essentially trivial for the compiler to implement.
It is most important when you want to declare something to to be "something that can hold a result of foo()", and that really is the most cognitively informative and useful type annotation. In fairly complicated generic libraries (C++ STL, e.g.) this is not a trivial win when types could be
T,weird_functor_frobozz>
After all, you can already do bar(foo()) without having to declare the type of the implicitly created temporary, like bar( return_type_of_foo foo() );
The real win comes when you change the return type of foo (which may happen because of some other generic changes). Using local type inference all those explicit dependencies were cut---the program will still compile instead of you having to tediously trace down all sorts of implementation details, because 'var x = Something()', is what you meant to say in the first place---the fact that Something() happened to be declared a footype then was not particularly meaningful.
"But as he grew older, his emotions did not. He was incapable of keeping a job, incapable of holding onto money and incapable of keeping friends. He was extremely and unbelievably good at music and not much else.
How did that end for Mozart?"
Actually he got some pretty good gigs pretty consistently though he spent his money pretty fast. He also had a very hot and sexy wife. He died from an illness like many other people.
"Wait... when did 12 become a "teen"???
In *this* reference frame, about a year from now, but that depends on the observer.
Chat rooms clearly have a strong non-Newtonian metric, as 57 becomes 19 with additional thermodynamic effects, judging by how "hot" they are.
"Einstein always struggled with the mathematics and didn't consider himself to be very good at it."
Yes, but his 'reference frame' in this matter was his collaborator/friend/rival David Hilbert who is the most important mathemetician of the 20th century (maybe with Kolmogorov).
He is obviously very smart and motivated, but the smartest person is not going to know more than the combined experience of a civilization, in particular, the work products of a few thousand people, quite a few of whom were pretty talented when they were 12 years old, but have now read papers describing the observational evidence.
Pretty soon he will be in a domain (early universe modeling) where you cannot figure it out "in your head", though your head is certainly necessary.
Scientists have to make hypotheses, program and run dynamical simulations---and then compare to observed facts.
These simulations are hard *work*, and are the types of labor that graduate students and postdocs do. They aren't fun, but they're necessary.
The "trace amounts" are newsworthy because they indicate that the inner steel containment has been cracked and so have a few of the fuel pellets.
In particular, these isotopes are fission products, which are supposed to stay solid and encased in their cladding.
Previous radioactive materials were probably a consequence of neutron activation and had short half-lives, but weren't long term cause for concern.
"Umm, Climategate anyone?"
Yes. In truth, over multiple investigations there has been no evidence of any actual scientific fraud.
It is as if, say, Nixon never ordered any breakin to the DNC, no staffer had any cover up, there was no 'enemies list', and after review of all the recordings (which had no excluded section) the only thing possibly 'scandalous' was frustrations at the Washington Post for lying and distorting everything they said.
"The Democrats have *always* been interfering with science, because any government intervention into science is by its very definition interference."
Any intervention by humans is by defnition interference. Clearly science should be performed by incorporeal angels.
" Imagining the Republicans as "anti-science" and "anti-intellectual", and the Democrats as somehow "pro-science" and "pro-intellectual" is just as bad as stereotyping Democrats as the founders of the KKK, and Republicans as "the party of Lincoln". Both parties suck, and the naive belief that either of them is a "good guy" or "bad guy" fails to recognize what they really are -> politicians who will do anything to get elected again, with electoral bases that are biased, ugly and brutish."
In practice, in recent years, the powerful politicians who have been railing at and acting against standard science have been virtually all Republican. This was not previously the case (say before 1994), when neither side did this.
"Actually, LISP is a good language to express algorithms."
Yes, if you're a compiler and not an instance of homo sapiens.
When humans write cognitively dense material describing algorithms to other humans (journal articles), does it look remotely like LISP?
No.
The nature of languages which humans find to be easier to understand is not arbitrary---it is influenced by neurobiology. The modes of expression which humans naturally use between one another are more likely to be idomatic (nearly axiomatically so) than ones which aren't.
"The part I don't get is how Android, Chrome and Chrome OS is "scorching the earth for 250 miles around Google". What are those offerings doing that prevent a viable search competitor from rising?"
a) Because they are free, they are preventing other businesses from creating a new and cool front-end or traffic redirector to search engines---because they can't compete against free and make money. If some other business arose which turned out to produce a popular piece of software, some other business could be paid, for instance, to flip a switch from Google to Bingle.
b) They increase the expectations of ancillary-stuff-that-works-with-the-search-engine that a competitor in search would also have to create.
"In C++0x, you can just use lambdas for that. Or if you insist, you could use variadic templates to implement a function that'd take a type, and return you a function object that is a factory for that type, for a given set of ctor argument types."
Fascinating.
Suppose, instead, constructors had names?
"I want to hire people who take jobs because they love them and consider the money making to be the thing that allows them to continue doing what they love."
And when they have to do something that they don't particularly love---which is inevitable---how will they act? Insulted, or mature? Will they just get around and do it?
In my present job (analytical modeling) there are parts I really like (cool things in machine learning) and other stuff. When I'm doing the other stuff I think, "this is what the paycheck is for". It keeps me in a good mood.
The truth of the matter is that NeXT---not Apple---solved the problem of Unix on the desktop by 1989.
Really.
"On top of that Intel only sold Itaniums to enterprise, screeching compiler development for it to a hault."
except for maybe Intel's compilers?
Intel's compilers are very very good. Intel inherited the old DEC compiler group (which was very skilled) after some woeful time at Compaq.
It's cleverer, and assholeyer than just saying that.
Old Lawyer's trick.
Instead of saying the obvious, i.e. "We won't support our competitor's (HP) fastest computers because we make hardware now" Oracle spreads FUD about the longevity of their competitor's product line by virtue of leaking information from anonymous sources in their competitors' sole supplier.
Even if Intel and HP completely deny it, their customers will be thinking it all along.
Lean Manufacturing Secrets of the Secret Haitian Masters!
'I couldn't imagine that the US intelligence apparatus with all it's funding, hardware and employees could manage a program like this in the US, how does China do it?"
Outsourcing!
Seriously, the lack of it.
A large fraction of the US expenditure is making well connected contractors wealthy, delivering mediocre service at very high cost. Sure, in China a large portion of governmental decisions are designed to make well connected private contractors (e.g. real estate developers) wealthy, but not when it comes to state security---they don't allow such garbage