cfgauss

I believe it's proportional to the log of the number of threads. (Bonus physicses to anyone who gets the reference who's initials aren't SoT.)

Originally Posted By: You know that person who...? The Vampyre also has the vampire as a sexual degenerate. The idea came from somewhere. It's not present in all vampire myths, certainly, but it's doubtful that it suddenly appeared in that one novel. It most likely came from the same place the ideas of vampires came from. Remember, the original idea was similar to succubi, etc, that some creature is taking advantage of you at night. The theory is that sleep paralysis is responsible for these kinds of dreams, and the dreams associated with this tend to be sexually oriented due to the areas of the brain active during that stage of sleep (and the, err, increased sensitivities of those areas).

Saying you have a degree in calculus is kinda like saying you have a degree in spelling.

You're my new best friend.

I wouldn't think that the electric field near the ground would be large enough to notice. I could see moving a large aluminum pole under one causing some hilarious problems though. For example, when you drive under power lines while your radio is on, you don't normally notice anything unless they're high-voltage lines, and even then the interference isn't always enough to entirely drown out the radio. And the current induced by radiation in your antenna is pretty small, so the induced current from the lines shouldn't be too much larger than that. I would think it's much more likely that there's some kind of grounding problem, or a downed line touching the ground nearby, and there was actually current flowing through you from the line. So, you might want to call the power company and tell them about this since it seems like a potentially dangerous problem...

Originally Posted By: Monroe That guy's got one hell of an STD if snakes are growing out of it...

And then he'll say: you just got Cthulhu'd!

Mummies are sadly underrepresented in fiction. CUUURRRRRSSE! I voted vampire, though. Because, who wouldn't want vampires' awesome powers? Originally Posted By: Randomizer ...failed his roll to wake up. This is how I feel every morning.

Originally Posted By: Monroe Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel To convey the number 6, for example, you could show them 6 apples. We totally agree here. My original point was that images are better than language, and numbers are indeed a language. I got a bit off track with my last sentence in your quote, both otherwise, I'm glad we agree. Wait, I have a plan. Why don't we replace this clumsy language with pictures. Each idea, we can represent with a picture, instead of words. Or, even better, we can have some pictures that represent atomic ideas, and we can string these pictures together into more complicated ideas! Perfect!

Originally Posted By: Dreaming Under Elderberries He just did. Who knows what it was, though, thanks to the clumsiness of language? Thank god someone got this, I was starting to worry . Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity there are somehow at least two processing cores in my brain, dedicated to text and images respectively. Yes! This is true and very cool. In fact, they process information very differently, and even at different speeds. In fact, there's a famous story about this (but with counting and reading at the same time) due to Feynman. Apparently he'd noticed some people could do these at once, and some couldn't, and eventually figured out that all the people who could pictured the numberline as an actual numberline. Originally Posted By: Dantius Actually, communicating to aliens is much easer than you would think. The trick is to rely on universal constants instead of arbitrary language markers. Well, you have to be careful not to use dimensionful constants, don't you? And you'll of course run into the difficulty of, e.g., how do you tell the aliens what a hydrogen atom is? It's a big step up nothing to even basic physics. For example, check out the hundreds of pages of background material in logic you have to understand in order to properly define addition of two integers axiomatically! Of course, that specific step could be skipped in teaching aliens how to count, but it still serves as a more understandable concrete example of why it's really hard. And then we always run the risk of the aliens saying "oh those silly humans still believe in a particle description of nature, let's do the universe a favor and wipe them all out" .

No, no.

Originally Posted By: Monroe I feel like your attempt to make a point by using semantics proves my earlier point that language is clumsy quite neatly. I got what Dantius was saying, and I got what Dikiyoba was saying. Who needs rules on how to win an argument to decide which one is more appealing? Well, besides you. *High-Fives Dantius* Is it ironic that your argument doesn't make any sense? I can't figure this out at all. Edit: To contribute, formal symbolic logic is the correct way to communicate.

Originally Posted By: Triumph The problem is the movies added a lot of other unnecessary stuff and needlessly changed other stuff to be stupid or strange - from the idiotic line "Give up the halfing, she-elf!" to quasi-evil Faramir in Two Towers to having Elrond randomly show up to deliver Anduril in RotK. They apparently had good reasons for doing all these weird things. I don't remember if it's in the dvd special features or I read it elsewhere, but, well, Tolkien is not the master of Quote: Upon the hearth the fire is red, Beneath the roof there is a bed, But not yet weary are our feet, Still round the corner we may meet: A sudden tree or standing stone That none have seen but we alone. Tree and flower and leaf and grass, Let them pass! Let them pass! Hill and water under sky, Pass them by! Pass them by! Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate And though we pass them by today Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun. Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, Let them go! Let them go! Sand and stone and pool and dell, Fare you well! Fare you well! Home is behind, the world ahead And there are many paths to tread Through shadows to the edge of night Until the stars are all alight. Then world behind and home ahead We'll wander back to home and bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade! Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, And then to bed! And then to bed! err, what was I saying? Oh, yes, not the master of brevity or sensible continuity. (I was also going to describe a tree for 16 pages but I thought this should be sufficient.) Originally Posted By: Randomizer instead of bloating the final version wat

How come the #2 result in google for "vanilla" is the wikipedia article on "vanilla sex"? Why does this even need an article?! At any rate, real vanilla is delicious, but I can't think of too much I can taste it in. Other than the occasional old fashioned vanilla sodas. And I always wondered why no one makes extra-vanilla ice cream that actually has a taste.

We'll invent flying cars when everyone learns to drive regular cars. And home-made Kahlua ice cream is the best kind of ice cream in the world.

Originally Posted By: The Mystic Originally Posted By: Goldenking I am currently reading Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. The book is a fascinating critique of American pop-history, specifically as taught by textbooks, which creates a feel-good sentiment of nationalistic pride. Specifically, Loewen has had a lot to say so far about racism and how the way we teach history is only actually reinforcing racism in our society. My parents could write a whole series based on what they were told by the nuns who taught them in school. I haven't read this book, but I've seen these claims before, and I've always been a little puzzled by these claims. I think they must be coming from the previous generations' textbooks, because most of the ones I recall from high school and university were guilty of at most oversimplifying. And it's odd that he claims that we should rely more on primary sources, since those are often quite biased and lack any context. Politics and government books, on the other hand, I've seen contain fairly seriously strange things, and seem to be a lot more ideologically based. I think some of these books are single-handedly responsible for most politicians not knowing a single thing about how the government works! Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity I've never found Massie's style objectionable. If you buy a 600 page tome on a narrow topic, all that ruminative deep background is what you're paying for. A big fan of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, are we?

Pulses aren't terribly accurate for long observations . And, you're also forgetting, that you need more than clocks to measure time... You really need a standard of time to make sense of things. Otherwise no one can really compare one measurement to another. And the ancients standards of time were based off of the calendar, which doesn't work so well for reasonable measurements. And, I believe the antikythera mechanism was a calendar, not a clock. The actual mechanism behind a clock that makes it run at a predictable rate is actually very complex and wasn't good enough to do science with for quite a while. So it's a big step up from this to a clock. They did have water (and probably sand) clocks, though, but without something to calibrate against, they're more of a qualitative time-keeping device.

Originally Posted By: Kelandon In my last semester in college, I finally came upon some reasonable explanations to a question that is tangentially related to the science in this thread: why didn't the Ancient Greeks invent science, when they had all these astronomers looking at exactly the same things that Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were looking at? Why did the Scientific Revolution happen in the 16th and 17th centuries, and not in the 1st and 2nd centuries? At first I thought that it was something to do with culture. So many ancient writers cared primarily about authority and not data that it was hard to get anybody to care about what was actually going on in reality. The way that Ancient Greeks conducted research was to think about things. They sat down and thought, and they came up with ideas that seemed sensible. They were not terribly empirical. However, this was not universally so. Hipparchus, for one, was emphatic about his models matching the reality of the sky better than other lame natural philosophers who didn't really know what they were talking about. There were empiricists back in the day, just as there were in the Enlightenment. This is a big part of it, I think. There wasn't a real notion of what science was or what it should be. At the time, it was far from clear if one even could describe nature, or if it was somehow indescribable. But I think a lot of the reason they did not invent science was that their notions of math were very primitive. You have to realize that they did not have any concept of algebra at all. Algebra wasn't developed until the ~1000s AD. Things like Cartesian geometry weren't developed until the 1600s. The Greeks didn't even have a sensible notion of numbers. They used Roman numerals, and did not even have a sensible conception of real numbers. They did not even have a sensible system of notation. You can't write something like X+I = XI, because symbols like + and = didn't really exist until algebra. You had to write out things in words, which made even simple expressions incredibly complicated. I think this is also probably why they put so much stock in geometry as opposed to arithmetic. In fact, their notions of arithmetic really were geometry--it makes much more sense to think of 2+1 as a line -- next to a line - than to think of it in terms of a sentence! But I think if the Greeks had a reasonable number system and a reasonable system of notation, they'd have easily developed basic mechanics and calculus. The problem is that to develop a system like that would have required a change in the way they think, from a linguistic describing in words way, to an abstract symbolic way, which is a big step.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity It was argued mostly on philosophical grounds that today seem rather nebulous. Perhaps the strongest ground as far as I can understand was just a feeling that the sun was bigger and more impressive than the earth, and thus made more sense as the planetary boss. That represents at least a sort of proto-axiom that a true cause should be proprtionate to its effects, and that at least a crude kind of causality ought to be relevant to planetary motions. Yeah, that's pretty much the impression I'd gotten, too. I believe this was related to the same philosophical grounds that they used to support the Newtonian idea of impulse, which a lot of early pre-Newtonian and Newtonian mechanics was based off of. Quote: When did people get any idea of the actual distances of the planets from earth? I believe the ancient Greeks calculated not only the size of the Earth, but the distance to the moon within a few (1-10%?) percent. They also calculated the distance to the Sun using similar methods, but got an answer that was much too close (although still very far away). I do not know if these results were known to Renaissance scientists, but I don't see why it wouldn't be. So I would imagine, early on, the distances were based off of rough guesses based on those known scales. My recollection from intro astronomy classes a long time ago, was that they did indeed use parallax to find distances when they started systematically going at things. Although I don't know the exact timeline, and I've long since given my intro books to nieces and nephews! I have a degree in astronomy, but most of my focus was not on teaching intro classes or history so I've forgotten most of these details! Quote: What I want to see is a statement that Tycho Brahe measured the distance from earth to Mars by parallax. He knew and used parallax; he used it to measure the distances to the sun and the moon, and to a comet. He tried and failed to observe stellar parallax, and failed also to draw the correct conclusion that the stars are incredibly far away from earth. I'm not sure why he would not make this conclusion. It may've been due to the poor sensitivity of their observations at the time, which they knew pretty well. A lot of their measurements were easily ~100% level errors, so I could imagine it being written off to just being more difficult to measure, e.g., due to starlight twinkling and appearing to move around more than planet-light. Quote: But nowhere have I been able to find a clear statement of what I think must be a crux of science: that Tycho Brahe made heroic and expensive efforts to measure planetary angles precisely, in order to provide the very first measurements of the distances between earth and other planets. Was this really true? Yes, I believe this is true. Quote: I think the ancients might have had a much harder time measuring distances to planets. They did understand enough trigonometry, and the principle of parallax. But I'm not sure their clocks were good enough for Brahe's technique. I wonder, too, if they had a clear enough concept of the rotation of the earth, to be able to see that waiting between measurements would be as good as making simultaneous measurements from two points far apart. The ancients did not really have clocks, which is a big negative . I believe they also lacked the experimental skills to do measurements like that, just due to their lack of experience doing things like this.

You may want to try getting DOSBOX, and then finding a copy of windows 3.1 somewhere, and playing Exile in that. Exile was written for much older computers, and the way newer operating systems work is totally different than new ones, so there can be unexpected problems.

It's a small huge rat?

I think the old graphics stick better because they're more stylized and cartoony, instead of the pretending to be realistic style we see in the new games.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity The great virtue of Bayesian statistics is that it's really just logic and common sense. That's also its limitation. Well, it's logic with uncertain truth values. All of the most powerful reasoning with uncertain data and AI models are Bayesian for a good reason. It's not just powerful, it's everything. It's literally the most general possible framework for talking about inference (by definition, really). So you can't really ask for a better explanation than that . Although I can provide one in terms of category theory if pressed (well if the forums implemented latex I would). Quote: It's not really worth mentioning in any context where you're not trying to spit out a specific number as a probability, because in qualitative argument, there's nothing you can say with Bayes that you can't say every bit as well without mentioning him. I say this as a great fan of Bayes. This seems to be what most physicists think, since we're influenced heavily by frequency based interpretations, since they're literally the kinds of experiments we do. And although in some sense the two formulations are "equivalent" they aren't identical (technically, the predictions you can make with both agree, and the ones one doesn't make one typically defines to match the other; but Bayesian is more general and there are no frequentest results which are not contained in Bayesian, but the converse is not true). But the examples you can find in terms of fancy AI algorithms, (or image processing algorithms for a far simpler case that's not too different) show that they're fantastic when you need that combination of quantitative and qualitative statements you just can't get any other way. This is exactly why I think they're the most natural way to think about theories, since you have the combination of exact results (we measure "x") and qualitative (this is a good theory). And really some of the Bayesian results just don't make sense in terms of any other interpretation. How do you even talk about the probability of a theory being correct otherwise? It's either right, or it's not. The naive probability is either 100% or 0%, but the Bayesian interpretation naturally not only makes this any number, reflecting something about the "distribution of theories" but includes the fact that a theory can be good in some regions of parameter space and not others. Of course, the full-blown measure theory formulation is just Bayesian stuff; that's really what the measure is specifying. Quote: It's certainly not true that Ptolemaic astronomy said nothing about what wasn't already known. It could predict the future, accurately. To say that the periodic orbits of the planets counted as already known facts is to take far too much for granted, even today. But they did know each planet individually moved through periodic paths in the sky. Knowing that they all move together isn't important since the model did not essentially mix any observations of one thing with observations of anything else. This is why the model couldn't predict, e.g., the orbits of comets reliably. Quote: But it's really not so easy to explain what that more is. Picking Ptolemaic astronomy as an example of what a good theory is not seems to me to be a mistake; I think we learn more by classing it as a good theory, and seeing how it is more than stamp collecting. Well, the specific model is stamp collecting followed by interpolation, but the problem is that the interpolation only works because the system was periodic. So it's better than, e.g., early biology, but not as good as real science.

Well, as a theorist, what I would say makes a "good" theory is, well, theory... The problem is, from a statistical point of view, just making observations, and then generalizing from those other observations to new observations is, by itself, actually a terrible idea. Basically every statistical bias comes from doing exactly this. This method is essentially Greek philosophy. They noticed things, generalized them into generic ideas, and then applied those ideas to other things. Generally speaking, from a scientific point of view, this is a total failure. When you don't know any better, it's the best you can do, and that's great. And it's a necessary requirement to develop science to do this first, but it's still a failure. The transition between collections of observations to "mechanistic" models is really the transition between science and pre-science. What distinguishes modern science (well, at least physics and some others, all sciences won't be modern by this definition!) is not only the mechanistic description, but an "axiomatic" mechanistic description. That is, one that starts with a few basic assumptions and builds exclusively on the logical consequences of those assumptions. Pre-modern science, by this point of view, was not an axiomatic system, but a collection of equations, describing a collection of facts! (read c. 1800s physics and you will definitely get this feeling!!) A necessary step, a big step up, but not the best one can do. From a more formal point of view, one can think of this in terms of Bayesian probabilities: - Pre-science is concerned with basically, choosing prior probability distributions based on what you know. - Pre-modern science is calculating the conditional probability that your model is correct given the measurements you've made and the assumptions your model makes, using (first) the naive priors of pre-science, and then, the revised priors from other experiments and tested theories. - Modern science is concerned with radically reducing the "dimension" of the probability space by excluding to a high degree of confidence (using Bayesian reasoning), areas of the "theory space" not logically spanned by the axioms. That is, pre-science calculates P(result|experiment|theory|observation|model|experiment|...) for each result completely independently. Modern science calculates P(axiom|all experiments) for all axioms, and then any logical consequence of the axioms is guaranteed to be correct within the margins of error given by (basically) error propagation. [edit: And this means that measurements of things implied by the axioms is really increasing the probability that the axioms are correct, making the entire framework more sound, instead of just a single result.] The modern point of view is why theorists put so much importance into symmetries and conservation laws. They're easy to test, they greatly simplify dynamics, they're mathematically well-defined and exist rather generally (the subject of generalized symmetries to ODEs and PDEs is a whole subject in math) and so make the perfect axiomatic building blocks for science! This is why, e.g., Ptolemy's theory (as it stood before Newtonian mechanics) is not such a good theory. The probability of it being right is significantly less than the probability of Newton's theory. In fact, the probability distribution only has support (in the function sense) on 'points' where measurements have been made, and nowhere else (in other words, it can't predict anything you didn't already mostly know) where, e.g., Newton's theory has support on the set of all possible measurements! Meaning, formally, Ptolemy is wrong "almost everywhere" (in the measure theory sense)!

I've already tried the first treatment. I don't think my insurance covers the second.