"It works like this: you use an algorithm that puts together in a very orderly fashion every possible note combination. Think of this as Serialism gone buttfuck crazy. If your system has only one note, and only one duration, then it can be represented in binary: 1 = note, 0 = silence. You can arbitrarily limit the duration (set definition) in question. So, let's say it's 8 measures."
This assumption can critically fail later on. When later you assert that your combination of 0s and 1s spans all the possible melodies it relies on this assumption. However, this may not represent actual sound because your system might NOT have at most countably infinite combinations of notes and durations. If either one of these is uncountably infinite, then you can no longer assert that by listing them out you can span all the melodies possible, since you cannot even span all the NOTES or all the DURATIONS possible.
I've spent a little time looking, but I've been unable to find the information I'm looking for. I'm interested in the tectonic activity of other planets, and I realized that it's possible, even probable, that other planets don't have quite the same degree of activity that Earth does. Does the moon have a crust, mantle, and core? Are they similar to those here? What about magnetospheres? Do we even have the information I'm asking for in all of scientific knowledge? Because, it doesn't seem like these would be easy things to discover from here. (Well, except for those moons that have visible volcanoes)
I remember seeing somewhere that Jupiter is an extremely strong magnetic entity, but I can't think of where. Anyway, if someone has a link to where I can find this information, I'd be grateful. Thanks.
Such comments are lingua franca on slashdot, just like RTFA, IANAL or references to the goatse man. That you are emotionally provoked by such a statement surprises me, to say the least.
I'm emotionally provoked by references to the goatse man. They make me cry...
the process potentially [of] expanding the meaning of being human and the possibilities for the species at large...that's interesting.
Absolutely, but it's still not the Olympics. Get some people together and organize another set of athletic competitions that involve whatever technology you can bring to the field (probably needs some restrictions). Then, you'd still have the purist Olympics, but you'd also get the fascinating results of the Technolympics!
Much of tourism to my eye is the ability to go somewhere relatively exotic and see and do things that are generally not included in your everyday lineup. "Space tourism", oddly enough, would be tourists going to space; I think even being in orbit would qualify as being somewhere relatively exotic, and the views from up there are fairly spectacular.
Of course it's expensive. However, you underestimate how much some people want to go to space. There have been five individuals so far who have paid their own way to get into space. There are over a hundred people who have placed down payments to reserve seats on the Virgin Galactic suborbital flights. Those aren't EVEN orbital, but you get the view and you get the microgravity, and that seems to be enough to warrant its $200,000 price tag. Don't underestimate a) how much money some people make, and b) eccentric markets.
Science does require faith for the same reason that accepting the Bible as describing spiritual events requires faith: people do not, for the most part, directly experience the things they read about or are told.
I'm sorry, but I must partially disagree with you. Science does require faith, but it's way back in its roots more than it is in any particular experiment. The faith of science is derived from faith in causality and logic. We are forced to believe that a cause leads to an effect. Science is saying that the more often we see this relationship, the more likely it is to be true. It's fundamentally based on the concept of logical implication. Logical implication was simply something that philosophers thought up and, with very many nods of heads and smiles of satisfaction, it became one of the fundamental concepts in the most common system of logic that we use. However, even IF the universe is logical, then peoples' perception of science is still based on faith. Anyone who's done some basic mathematical or logical proofs can tell that no matter how many times you see Y following from X and you've never so far seen X without Y (assuming a system where an exhaustive approach is impossible), you don't know that an implication exists (even though there's very strong evidence of its existence).
Of course, I said the perception of science, because science is built with this concept as part of it. No amount of experimentation can ever PROVE a theory right. However, to expect that the universe in any way resembles the causal relationships that we've built up using science is, fundamentally, an act of faith.
When one of these satellites is destroyed in an explosive way, particles go careening off into many orbits. Also, they spread out along these orbits as their velocities vary. The ultimate result of a space explosion like that is a ring of dangerous debris. Since every orbit at a given altitude passes through every other orbit at that altitude at two (or infinitely many) points, it's not like we can just avoid it by turning. Admittedly, we could go higher or lower, but the threat shouldn't simply be dismissed as FUD. This event was a warning saying that this is a bad thing to try to avoid in the future.
Worst would be if the same thing happened to a satellite in geostationary orbit. This is a very singular place around the earth that could be rendered entirely inhospitable if it were filled with such debris.
I understand your point that it would take time to build up the production of steel in the country. At the same time, if a quick change were made then all of the workable steel in the country waiting to be made into goods wouldn't all suddenly disappear. It would be used up at a rate at most what it was previously, which may be enough to hold out until steel industry could step in to fill the gap.
almost all of those astronomical images are artificially colored and enhanced to maximize their ascetic appeal
For the monks of Dashuba who scan the sky looking for god? NASA places great importance on making sure that those who give up most things in life are still interested in astronomy, I guess;)
I like it. Maybe the mechanism has changed for us since horrible life-or-death situations are somewhat less common these days than they used to be, but there's a certain elegance to the idea. Also, as a weird thing that happens to creatures, it's nice to have some way of describing why it would come about in evolutionary context. I always think better of ideas about organisms that can be explained through evolutionary advantage; it makes them seem more solid to me.
Of course, not everything should be attributed to natural selection, but it's nice for most biological aspects.
If "change in time" (dt) is going to go in the numerator, what will go in the denominator? Can't be dt, of course. dt/dt=1 is an acceptable rate of change, though I admit that it's not actually changing, so time can hardly be "slowing down". What seems likely to me is that because of the fact that Einstein taught us to not hold time to be absolute, we would define time as a function of one or more independent variables, and THAT is probably flattening if they're to say time is "slowing down"
It seems to me that even as mathematics is an extension of logic (finally shown by Whitehead and Russel, although possibly incomplete... silly Godel), so too is computer science. It started out being taught as a field contained within mathematics, but developed its own tools and problems. Really, it just takes on a different set of definitions and axioms and runs with it, much as mathematics does. In that sense, it's akin to mathematics, but isn't a part of it.
I've spent a while listening to and collecting music from games, and while I do really enjoy the stuff from square games, I think people focus too exclusively. That being said, however, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross have phenomenal soundtracks (I like Frog's Theme).
For other game music that you might enjoy, I recommend the following: "Baba Yetu" by Christopher Tin; it's the main menu theme from Civilization 4, and I think the composer offers it for free on his website if you send him a "thank you" "Still in the Dark" from the Guilty Gear XX soundtrack. I don't know who plays it. "Katamari on the Rock" from Katamari Damacy. I don't know if this really counts, but the choral version of "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber from Homeworld is incredible. Probably the best-PLACED piece I've ever heard. To convince yourself of this, make sure you listen to it while you think about your home planet burning beneath you as you're in orbit.
I want to say some of the Tetris themes, but I have no idea what they're called and again, I'm not sure they count since I believe they're just Russian folksongs.
Mathematics *definitely* needs some new words. Look up the word "homogeneous" and you'll see what I mean. There are ~9 different (and in most cases totally unrelated) meanings for that word in mathematics and then there are other meanings in statistics.
Then, in addition to the lack of vocabulary to draw from, mathematicians also seem to take a funny perspective on meanings. For example, "normal" is used to refer to subgroups that exhibit special properties.
Of course there's such a thing as base 1. Each er... not digit... unit, is just a tally mark. There's no increase in the value of each tally with regards to position, as 1^n is 1 for n in the non-expanded real numbers.
so, the number 8 in base 1 is 11111111, or, if you MUST have some zeroes, I guess you could say 1000100001000100110000101, with arbitrarily placed zeroes, so long as there are 8 '1's. I doubt that the one with zeroes is technically base 1, but it could be interpreted as such. *shrug*
I'd like to start off by saying that I know very little about biology. I'm going to have misconceptions, please correct those that I bring up.
It seems like many people are saying that because this is not a viable working solution now, that it's a terrible thing that these people are even working at it. This seems like a very closed-minded and limited approach to the design of solutions to ANY problem. I think the way things like this work is that someone develops something, and they get excited about the application of their work. They may not actually produce a practical application of their work, but they get the idea out. Probably someone else looks and says "Hey! I know how to solve this problem!" And, by bits and pieces, a working solution gets made. I'm not saying it WILL happen with this technology, but attacking the budding technology because of its lack of immediate practical use seems short-sighted. (For the record, I'm a mathematician... we're not particularly well-known for developing things that get immediately applied to practical use)
It seems like the problems being stated involve the idea that while this could conceivably attack free virii in blood, it would do nothing to infected cells (at best... I guess at worst it could vaporize them with everything around, which I admit is a bad thing). However, do infected cells live forever? If this process is used to prevent viral information from moving through the blood from one cell to another, then hasn't the infection been curbed? The infected cells would eventually die. If I'm wrong, and infected cells can indeed live long enough, then couldn't this be used in conjunction with another technology that might be developed that kills infected cells but, unfortunately, can do nothing to a virus that's floating around in the blood? Even if such a technique doesn't exist now, it might later.
If it works as is stated, then at worst aren't we talking about fewer virii traversing the blood stream and infecting other cells anyway? Even if it's not a cure, slowing down the spread of infection is a desirable consequence of a treatment.
A post had been made indicating that this would simply break up the parts of a virus, which would then potentially re-form from other floating bits around in the blood. However, I thought the body actually had means of cleaning itself. Here's where my very limited knowledge of biology really kicks in. Wouldn't the protection granted by a virus' protein coat be lost if the protein coat were scattered and left to float around? Idly floating proteins are probably on the immune system's target list, no?
Well, tell me where I'm wrong. I'd love to learn a bit about it.
"Nothing is impossible! That's what being a scientist is all about!"
It's quite a stretch, but isn't the best conceivable material in terms of strength to weight that which is obtained by dropping all the "dead weight" of protons and neutrons in the molecular structure? Given some allowances for increasing complexity for this idea, one could conceive of getting some materials that are strong but are FANTASTICALLY light. I seem to recall having read about this in some early idea about space elevators, but I cannot find it anymore.
This is *exactly* what I was thinking. I don't suppose we could broaden it to simply include all politics, could we? I mean, that stuff inclines me to violent thought far more than just about anything else I've ever encountered.
I don't feel that he's really talking about teaching his kids to demand respect in this situation. Respect, as you have said, is something earned. To demand it is an action of great hubris. However, I feel that he's really talking about simple courtesy, which is something that one should expect from everyone. Someone who doesn't offer courtesy, such as any of the offenders named in the argument thus far, can be reasonably met with a certain degree of force of will. In such a case, you're demanding that the other person grant you the common courtesy that you would expect from anyone, which is very different from their respect. Essentially, it's demanding that they don't view you as an inferior instead of demanding that they view you as superior.
Slashdot Mirror
This assumption can critically fail later on. When later you assert that your combination of 0s and 1s spans all the possible melodies it relies on this assumption. However, this may not represent actual sound because your system might NOT have at most countably infinite combinations of notes and durations. If either one of these is uncountably infinite, then you can no longer assert that by listing them out you can span all the melodies possible, since you cannot even span all the NOTES or all the DURATIONS possible.
I remember seeing somewhere that Jupiter is an extremely strong magnetic entity, but I can't think of where. Anyway, if someone has a link to where I can find this information, I'd be grateful. Thanks.
I'm emotionally provoked by references to the goatse man. They make me cry...
Of course it's expensive. However, you underestimate how much some people want to go to space. There have been five individuals so far who have paid their own way to get into space. There are over a hundred people who have placed down payments to reserve seats on the Virgin Galactic suborbital flights. Those aren't EVEN orbital, but you get the view and you get the microgravity, and that seems to be enough to warrant its $200,000 price tag. Don't underestimate a) how much money some people make, and b) eccentric markets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism#List_of_flown_space_tourists
Of course, I said the perception of science, because science is built with this concept as part of it. No amount of experimentation can ever PROVE a theory right. However, to expect that the universe in any way resembles the causal relationships that we've built up using science is, fundamentally, an act of faith.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_Syndrome [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation_cascade [wikipedia.org]
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/science/20070206_ORBIT_GRAPHIC.html [nytimes.com]
When one of these satellites is destroyed in an explosive way, particles go careening off into many orbits. Also, they spread out along these orbits as their velocities vary. The ultimate result of a space explosion like that is a ring of dangerous debris. Since every orbit at a given altitude passes through every other orbit at that altitude at two (or infinitely many) points, it's not like we can just avoid it by turning. Admittedly, we could go higher or lower, but the threat shouldn't simply be dismissed as FUD. This event was a warning saying that this is a bad thing to try to avoid in the future. Worst would be if the same thing happened to a satellite in geostationary orbit. This is a very singular place around the earth that could be rendered entirely inhospitable if it were filled with such debris.
I understand your point that it would take time to build up the production of steel in the country. At the same time, if a quick change were made then all of the workable steel in the country waiting to be made into goods wouldn't all suddenly disappear. It would be used up at a rate at most what it was previously, which may be enough to hold out until steel industry could step in to fill the gap.
I like it. Maybe the mechanism has changed for us since horrible life-or-death situations are somewhat less common these days than they used to be, but there's a certain elegance to the idea. Also, as a weird thing that happens to creatures, it's nice to have some way of describing why it would come about in evolutionary context. I always think better of ideas about organisms that can be explained through evolutionary advantage; it makes them seem more solid to me. Of course, not everything should be attributed to natural selection, but it's nice for most biological aspects.
It seems to me that even as mathematics is an extension of logic (finally shown by Whitehead and Russel, although possibly incomplete... silly Godel), so too is computer science. It started out being taught as a field contained within mathematics, but developed its own tools and problems. Really, it just takes on a different set of definitions and axioms and runs with it, much as mathematics does. In that sense, it's akin to mathematics, but isn't a part of it.
I've spent a while listening to and collecting music from games, and while I do really enjoy the stuff from square games, I think people focus too exclusively. That being said, however, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross have phenomenal soundtracks (I like Frog's Theme).
For other game music that you might enjoy, I recommend the following:
"Baba Yetu" by Christopher Tin; it's the main menu theme from Civilization 4, and I think the composer offers it for free on his website if you send him a "thank you"
"Still in the Dark" from the Guilty Gear XX soundtrack. I don't know who plays it.
"Katamari on the Rock" from Katamari Damacy.
I don't know if this really counts, but the choral version of "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber from Homeworld is incredible. Probably the best-PLACED piece I've ever heard. To convince yourself of this, make sure you listen to it while you think about your home planet burning beneath you as you're in orbit.
I want to say some of the Tetris themes, but I have no idea what they're called and again, I'm not sure they count since I believe they're just Russian folksongs.
Mathematics *definitely* needs some new words. Look up the word "homogeneous" and you'll see what I mean. There are ~9 different (and in most cases totally unrelated) meanings for that word in mathematics and then there are other meanings in statistics.
Then, in addition to the lack of vocabulary to draw from, mathematicians also seem to take a funny perspective on meanings. For example, "normal" is used to refer to subgroups that exhibit special properties.
Of course there's such a thing as base 1. Each er... not digit... unit, is just a tally mark. There's no increase in the value of each tally with regards to position, as 1^n is 1 for n in the non-expanded real numbers. so, the number 8 in base 1 is 11111111, or, if you MUST have some zeroes, I guess you could say 1000100001000100110000101, with arbitrarily placed zeroes, so long as there are 8 '1's. I doubt that the one with zeroes is technically base 1, but it could be interpreted as such. *shrug*
I'd like to start off by saying that I know very little about biology. I'm going to have misconceptions, please correct those that I bring up.
It seems like many people are saying that because this is not a viable working solution now, that it's a terrible thing that these people are even working at it. This seems like a very closed-minded and limited approach to the design of solutions to ANY problem. I think the way things like this work is that someone develops something, and they get excited about the application of their work. They may not actually produce a practical application of their work, but they get the idea out. Probably someone else looks and says "Hey! I know how to solve this problem!" And, by bits and pieces, a working solution gets made. I'm not saying it WILL happen with this technology, but attacking the budding technology because of its lack of immediate practical use seems short-sighted. (For the record, I'm a mathematician... we're not particularly well-known for developing things that get immediately applied to practical use)
It seems like the problems being stated involve the idea that while this could conceivably attack free virii in blood, it would do nothing to infected cells (at best... I guess at worst it could vaporize them with everything around, which I admit is a bad thing). However, do infected cells live forever? If this process is used to prevent viral information from moving through the blood from one cell to another, then hasn't the infection been curbed? The infected cells would eventually die. If I'm wrong, and infected cells can indeed live long enough, then couldn't this be used in conjunction with another technology that might be developed that kills infected cells but, unfortunately, can do nothing to a virus that's floating around in the blood? Even if such a technique doesn't exist now, it might later.
If it works as is stated, then at worst aren't we talking about fewer virii traversing the blood stream and infecting other cells anyway? Even if it's not a cure, slowing down the spread of infection is a desirable consequence of a treatment.
A post had been made indicating that this would simply break up the parts of a virus, which would then potentially re-form from other floating bits around in the blood. However, I thought the body actually had means of cleaning itself. Here's where my very limited knowledge of biology really kicks in. Wouldn't the protection granted by a virus' protein coat be lost if the protein coat were scattered and left to float around? Idly floating proteins are probably on the immune system's target list, no?
Well, tell me where I'm wrong. I'd love to learn a bit about it.
"Nothing is impossible! That's what being a scientist is all about!"
It's quite a stretch, but isn't the best conceivable material in terms of strength to weight that which is obtained by dropping all the "dead weight" of protons and neutrons in the molecular structure? Given some allowances for increasing complexity for this idea, one could conceive of getting some materials that are strong but are FANTASTICALLY light. I seem to recall having read about this in some early idea about space elevators, but I cannot find it anymore.
This is *exactly* what I was thinking. I don't suppose we could broaden it to simply include all politics, could we? I mean, that stuff inclines me to violent thought far more than just about anything else I've ever encountered.
I don't feel that he's really talking about teaching his kids to demand respect in this situation. Respect, as you have said, is something earned. To demand it is an action of great hubris. However, I feel that he's really talking about simple courtesy, which is something that one should expect from everyone. Someone who doesn't offer courtesy, such as any of the offenders named in the argument thus far, can be reasonably met with a certain degree of force of will. In such a case, you're demanding that the other person grant you the common courtesy that you would expect from anyone, which is very different from their respect. Essentially, it's demanding that they don't view you as an inferior instead of demanding that they view you as superior.
Well said, sir. I'm not really sure how applicable Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is to this, but everything you say about Chaos is on the money.