No signal is significant if it cannot be distinguished from the background noise. What signal do you suppose Macdonald's sees in the fact that I didn't buy a BigMac yesterday?

There's a basic problem in trying to interpret the lack of something as a strong signal. Last week noone, anywhere in the world, bought an iPad. You can't get a much stronger signal than that, if not buying an iPad is a signal. Of course, I could be wrong, perhaps that's why Apple announced one yesterday?

Do you suppose "They" don't like something we're doing, because, even though SETI has been looking for years, no alien has contacted them? How strong a signal is that?

Unfortunately, that's probably right. Except in unusual circumstances, the organization / person looking for a professional volunteer doesn't understand the problem they're trying to solve, and it will take you more than a week to figure that out yourself.

If you stay long enough to figure it out it may well turn out not to be in your area of expertise.

You laugh.

My management once praised my work because an idea of mine had led to a situation where each line a programmer wrote generated 8 lines of C, so I'd done a great thing for productivity...

I, on the other hand, felt rather disheartened about my management...

would you argue that "about a million" is NOT "Over Nine Thousand"? If not, what is your argument?

I know -- why don't we all go to travelocity and check on flights to Pakistan, and then start encrypting all our email?

Or maybe someone could develop a web page that will set us up for encrypted email, and check for flights to Pakistan behind the scenes the first time, first...

Then we might have an interesting test of the security of encryption...

That's cool. I wouldn't want to work for a company that judged me by my email address.

Above all, don't think it has any connection to this story from last week.

I agree. Many of the questions and answers surrounding "which math course" seem to be thinking about the question wrong.

In 35 years of programming I probably never used Calculus directly in developing a program or wrote a program to solve a problem that required calculus. Would I argue against including Calculus in a Comp. Sci. curriculum then? Absolutely NOT.

When I look at what I do every day as a software designer / developer and I ask where did I learn to do that, the answer is often "in Calculus class". Why? "Limits"! -- not Limits themselves, but I think the concept of Limits as used in calc was the first real abstraction I had to grapple with.

If you ask me what High School class was most useful in preparing to be a programmer, I'd say "Geometry". Why? Proofs!

When did you ever need to know some factoid you picked up in a history class? Should you not take history?

The important aspect of most classes is NOT the facts or fomulae you might learn, but the ways of thinking you learn.

Geometry / Proofs in general teach you logical thinking and step by step progression. Constructing a proof and constructing a program are quite similar. That should make it clear that is important that you actually do the proofs, not just read someone else's proof -- you won't learn to program by reading about someone else writing a program.

I agree with the "take 'em both" school of thought -- not only are the thinking processes different, but the concepts in both subjects are also useful to you.

I'm a big fan of automata theory and formal languages, too. You'd be surprised how often you can set out to solve the Halting Problem without recognizing it -- and if you don't know what it is and why it's not worth trying to solve ... It's also useful to know the limitations of regular expressions and how to write problem oriented languages that are easy to parse...

But the most important aspect of both courses is how they stretch your mind if you can get your head around the proofs. You learn to spot weaknesses / holes in proofs and it's amazing what sorts of problems you can spot in requirements. And debugging proofs is good practice for debugging programs.

I don't know about the ETF, but I found that the $1.99/MB was charged when I turned on my new phone and pushed the button looking for the tool menu. I reprogrammed the buttons to avoid that, but it was clear that accidentally turning on the "standard" service was going to cost me $2 each time. It's obviously "$1.99 per (MB or fraction thereof)" and that includes the splash screen, without a data plan.

Precisely!

One only needs to look at what was done in Hypercard to see that this will actually be useful to many people, especially with modern hardware underneath it.

It will be used for inappropriately complex systems, of course, but so it goes. Many people will find it's wonderful for the problem they want to solve, for which they'd never hire a "real" programmer.

When I was designing a scripting language for testing wireless protocols I modeled parts of it on Hypertalk -- I allowed programmers to use either message[id] or 'id of message', for instance. It wasn't particularly fast, compared to what one could do in C, but it was certainly more usable by someone who understood the domain but wasn't a programmer.

The testers found it very useful. The people writing the protocols weren't interested in using it to produce realtime efficient implementations, but nobody expected it to be used that way. I was surprised to find some testers, who were also programmers, using it to write load generating tests, though.

Very few people need to extract every bit of efficiency out of a dual core CPU in order to manage their model railroad and train collection, or their knitting pattern collection, but the relatively inexpensive computer they might buy will certainly have such a CPU in the near future. Such a machine will run such an application very satisfactorily, and they'll be able to make it do just what they want.

Go find a copy of Danny Goodman's Hypercard Handbook and see how well it explained how to use the language. People did great things with it -- but they weren't interested in writing operating systems.

joe

Good luck making it that far with the pension & company intact.

Defined benefit plans are a vanishing breed; I'm assuming that's what you started with, anyway.

Given it's purpose, to be the glue that fastens functionality to web pages, it should be called "Goo"...

Of course, the makers of ShoeGoo may think people will be confused, and those who clean their hands with Goop may also have some difficulty being clear, if it should stick to their fingers...

joe

I wonder if the ant feels that way when a boy finds how to use magnifying glass to increase the energy available to it...

I suspect the human energy needs (on earth) will peak and decline within the next century or so, because the human population will. I suspect we'll also learn we need to focus on sustainability of the planetary system -- looks like we're beginning to see that need WRT the ocean fish stocks, for instance ...

joe

It's an interesting question -- might be fun to try to calculate orbital parameters both to maximize (sunshade) and to minimize it -- can you make an orbit precess so it is always in the plane that contains the day/night boundary?

Otherwise, worst case would be if you put the collector in L4 or L5 so it's in solar orbit, rather than earth orbit, I guess.

joe