wbhart

57 ms·

571.
by wbhart 15y ago
At the risk of carrying on a conversation... I would like to reply to that. I certainly agree with that and appreciate your clarification. However, what is happening is that Wikipedia is attempting to deal with very technical topics. As suc
572.
by wbhart 15y ago
Whilst my posts on this subject are all over the place here. I'm not arguing that Wikipedia is not useful, nor impressive, nor successful. It is all of these. Nor am I suggesting that having "Dr" in front of your name should give you more p
573.
by wbhart 15y ago
"I think it was more the implied laziness of thinking Wikipedia is a great resource but not being willing to fix it." If you spend your life teaching and doing research, laziness is not something you like to be accused of. Some of my papers
574.
by wbhart 15y ago
This is NOT correct. It is highly dependent on the subject matter and what is filtered from Wikipedia before doing the comparison. Take a hard science and take everything that is written and Wikipedia is substantially worse. http://www
575.
by wbhart 15y ago
Quoting from that page: "Don't get upset if your bold edits get deleted." Which is my experience entirely. Sorry, but being bold is a great way to waste my time, not to actually get things fixed.
576.
by wbhart 15y ago
It's not as easy as you say. When the article contains mathematical errors, sourcing your correction is not easy. Wikipedia does not allow personal research. When the article contains "facts" which are in error, which you only know because
577.
by wbhart 15y ago
Oh! The number of articles I have read lately where I have gone and looked up actual books and discovered that the wikipedia content is copied verbatim from the books, yet with sentences that do not correlate strung together in a way that r
578.
by wbhart 15y ago
The thing that struck me first about this was the fact that it is in impeccable English, yet written as a kid would write. Something smells funny about that. What is to stop a competitor of Sony from trying to take them down under the guise
579.
by wbhart 15y ago
Down Syndrome itself is the duplication of all or part of chromosome 21, usually due to improper separation of chromosome pairs during meiosis. I kind of think of this like going around a factory and turning up every 23rd valve. Gene duplic
580.
by wbhart 15y ago
"There are plenty of possible explanations for what we find in nature. And just because we haven't figured things out doesn't mean supernatural forces are responsible." I'm sure I don't need to point out on HN that this is a tautology. If w
581.
by wbhart 15y ago
I heartily agree with your first paragraph. It is precisely the same logical fallacy as a "god of the gaps" argument that we need to watch out for here, but in the guise of a "naturalistic theory of origins of the gaps" argument. We don't k
582.
by wbhart 15y ago
It was clumsily worded, for which I apologise. What I meant to be saying is that many atheists do not dispute the appearance of design, and even some scientists who are atheists do not dispute it. I once sat with a large group of scient
583.
by wbhart 15y ago
The recurrent laryngeal nerve actually gives off several filaments to part of the cardiac plexus. On its way up it gives off fibres to the mucous membrane and muscular coating of the esophagus and similarly for the trachea, and then some ph
584.
by wbhart 15y ago
Here is a quote from Richard Dawkins: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” {Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1996, p. 1} He even uses the word "overwhelming": “Na
585.
by wbhart 15y ago
This is an excellent point. The article is pretty badly written, and oversimplified, I think. If the argument is somehow that this is evidence of evolution (an argument that is never made in the article, but only ever implied), and therefor
586.
by wbhart 15y ago
Listing Godel's incompleteness theorem is a bit unfair to mathematics. What about K-theory, Schemes, Motives, the Langland's programme, Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena on primes, Number Field Sieve, RSA and Elliptic Curve Crytography, all more recent.
587.
by wbhart 15y ago
Well, you didn't say when you were born. But let me have a go: Inflation theory (1980), Gluons (1979), Experimental verification of quarks (mid 1970's), Quantum Chromodynamics (1960, modern version 1975), Quantum Computing (1982), Spintroni
588.
by wbhart 15y ago
Most of these are extreme cases for the C compiler. Usually it produces code 3-12 times slower, depending on how recent the compiler is.
589.
Mining for optimal assembly sequences(thecodecavern.co.uk)
11 points by wbhart 15y ago|2 comments
590.
by wbhart 15y ago
Am I reading this right? Chuck Moore decided that all programming could be done with sourceless coding and his demonstration of this was a graphical application? This is so common, yet so totally wrong. It's akin to the "revelation" that al
591.
by wbhart 15y ago
Forth doesn't interest me as a language any more. I thoroughly recommend learning it as a pathway into various other languages. And indeed, I consider JONESFORTH to be one of the highlights of the coding world. But these days I don't find a
592.
by wbhart 15y ago
To really understand the discrete fourier transform properly you need to understand the mathematical concept of a group. Fortunately, you only need to understand one particular group G, namely the integers mod n. Once one thinks of the inpu
593.
by wbhart 15y ago
Fabrice is a rare genius of immense proportions. Although the summary mentions some of his former work on the FFT and computing Pi, it was written before his more recent record breaking feat: http://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/ The linux kern
594.
by wbhart 15y ago
I'm sorry to be the one to have to bring this up. But not all mathematics can be represented visually. Maths breaks into a number of main branches, among them principally algebra, analysis and geometry. Usually only the third can be represe
595.
by wbhart 15y ago
Well, there are no new ideas. Even if it was a proof, it wouldn't change mathematics. For that to happen, there has to be a genuinely new idea. Just rearranging the order of the chairs at the table isn't going to cut it.
596.
by wbhart 15y ago
The author very carefully avoids the usual problem of a mathematical error on the first page. Some mathematicians receive piles of purported proofs. They usually give them to their graduate students to find the hole, or if they are sufficie
597.
by wbhart 15y ago
Not really. You shouldn't assume you are in the last 5%. Statistically, by definition, it is most likely (though not certain) that you are not.
598.
by wbhart 15y ago
This is an important computation. It's even scarier if you suppose that you are not in any way special. It is likely that you are not one of the first 5% of humans to ever live. Thus, given that such a great proportions of all humans who ha
599.
by wbhart 15y ago
Oh, lovely story. I had precisely this happen in Physics at Uni. I wrote down every piece of data, wrote out my computations in full. When I submitted it, I got a D. I challenged my prof to check any one of the data points or computations a
600.
by wbhart 16y ago
Apparently they're back now!

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