I love the smell of ammonium perchlorate in the morning
Packs a punch (or two)
4245 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Coffee went everywhere when I read this "In quantum parlance, the "wave function" of the particle is said to "collapse" into a specific state (or flask) due to the act of observing. Incidentally, this is why cats resent people staring at them: the constant collapse of their wave function is a strain on their delicate senses". Worthy of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.
WAY too much honour, you are making me blush
I might have a spare keyboard somewhere that I could send you
I wonder whether believers in homeopathy ever worry about the "memory of water" theory. It would certainly worry me, if I believed in it, because one of water's persistent memories must be being piss at many times during its existence.
I once wrote a paper on a quantum mechanical theory homeopathy. It got accepted in Annals of Improbable research. A preprint is here.
As HAL would say, or as Sirius Cybernetics would have it "Share and Enjoy!!", which does sound better than "Go stick your head in a pig!" but amounts to much the same.
This is my problem with several LaTeX offerings available for Android. All the ones I know require you to be online to actually compile the LaTeX source. Not easy (or affordable if available) somewhere outback in Uganda or the like.
Even if the system was designed with a limited altitude range in mind, it still should be able to cope with input outside that range, e.g. by flagging an error in the input. My very first job as a programmer was to write a (half) decent UI for a DOS image processing package written mostly in Pascal. The previous programmer's effort used READ and READLN to get floating point values from the (mainly Dutch) users, which resulted in frequent crashes when users entered 0,23 instead of 0.23. I wrote a simple parser that only assumed it was getting a string of characters, tried to parse it, and flagged syntax and other errors to the user. Not rocket science, but simply going back to basics: does the string of characters entered as input meet the preconditions of the code that is going to use that data, if so, use it, if not, flag an error. This very basic approach ensured that medics could use the program without swearing at the computer several times each day.
I have yet to see patents so patently absurd awarded in the Netherlands or indeed the EU. I have one patent to my name, and the process appeared to be quite thorough. There may certainly be the odd one that slipped through (would love to see one), but not the spate of silliness coming out of the USPTO.
Note that the USPTO gets funded based on how many patents it awards not how many it processes. That is a perverse incentive if ever there was one.
that quite a bit of global warming is clearly anthropogenic. It is all the hot air emanating from politicians and commentards alike. Most models fail to take that into account
On a serious note, I do not know (i.e. with 100.0000% scientific certainty) whether global warming or climate change is anthropogenic or not. Climate has changed a lot over earth's history, and CO2 levels are quite low at the moment, as compared to the mesozoic era AFAIK. It is also rather cold compared to e.g. the Jurassic. That suited a bunch of big lizards (OK, not really lizards), but not our current society, which has adapted to the current climate. Climate change may therefore disrupt our cosy lifestyle. To me it does not matter so much whether we are to blame. It is more important to see how we can get by, using fewer non-renewable resources, and how we can deal with a potential crisis, preferably without bloodshed. Mankind's performance in the latter case is not stellar, I agree, but maybe we can work things out this time.
Just my tuppence
"The real sell of Atom is the synthesis of a lot of different things that no one editor does well."
Marches back to the Church of Emacs in a huff
I think it is wrong to hack pages (freedom of speech and all that), and linking the LGBT community to this honourable gentleman (phrase used without prejudice) might seriously offend members of said LGBT community.
Besides, the honourable gentleman (phrase used without prejudice) is much better at making a fool of himself than any parody could ever manage.
But they don't have the resumé that was hidden in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard", and that might (or might not be) the correct one.
Besides, if they know so much about everybody, they already know who is perfect for the job, don't they?
I think my tinfoil hat is on too tight
Just like every living organism today! After all, we are all the product of an unbroken line (or actually, massive numbers of twisting interwoven lines *) of survivors reaching back until the first organisms.
Comforting thought, I always find
* Makes a squadron of Arcturan stunt apples look tame
Please note the sarcasm I intended with "quite a bit of sense". ;-)
I do not buy into his anarchistic ideal. I do not like over-intrusive government either, the best we can manage in the sublunary is some compromise.
Lower crime rates might also depend on what you consider crime. If you do not consider shooting somebody who appears to be threatening a crime, then guns are not a problem I suppose. I do see shooting people because they appear to be threatening as a crime.
Gun availability in itself need not even be the core of the issue. The core of the issue on the astronomical gun related killings may have something to do with a culture that has less problems with violence in movies than with sex.
until I can fit my 85mm F/1.4 Carl Zeiss Planar to my phone (fits my EOS through an adapter). My smartphone is fine for every day shots, but in low light conditions (theatre, animals around dusk, astronomy) I need to catch more photons than the puny lenses of camera phones can catch. Simple physics: double the aperture in diameter for a given pixel count, double the signal to noise ratio (when photon-noise limited). Nothing can alter that. What could change is the maximum electron density per unit of area on photosites of CCDs or CMOS chips. That would allow better dynamic range on small photosites, provided the number of photons captured allows that increase in dynamic range.
This does not mean I do not applaud the improvements in camera phones. They have come a long way from being a barely usable gimmick to a pretty decent instrument for everyday photography. The only downside is the sheer number of selfies produced. Finally, I would not like to carry the bulk of said 85mm lens (close to 900 gr) on a daily basis, of course.
In my experience hiding memory complexity is a mixed blessing. To gain maximum performance I need to understand the architecture the code runs on, to avoid costly operations, as others have said. I will get my code up an running sooner, but it will not necessarily be as fast as hand-tuned code. Where I do see use is in getting more-or-less machine independent code up and running quickly. If it does not run fast enough, you can then tune it to get the most out of the hardware and reduce costly copying from one part of memory to another, and so avoiding bandwidth and latency problems.
Nothing beats better bandwidth and lower latency, of course, but that is something the hardware guys must do for us software guys (and I know they are working on it). If the GPU and CPU truly share memory (i.e. the memory is physically unified), many difficulties will drop away, but that is something to dream about, for now