Problem with the beautiful future of Trek is that there's no real evidence that we're becoming better people. And exploiting space would permit us to continue an extractive existence.

That's exactly what the first algae said when it washed up on a stony beach. And so it was, until some algal cell with a shiny dome particularly free from cilia ascended to the very top of a stony outcropping.

1. If its warm its global warming, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world.
2. If its cold its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world.
3. If it rains its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world.
4. If it doesn't rain its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world.
5. If its humid its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world.
6. If its dry its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world.
7. If we get a breeze its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world.

By my scoring, I get this:

1. 0 for 3
2. 0 for 3
3. 0 for 2
4. 1 for 3
5. 0 for 3
6. 0 for 3
7. 0 for 2

There must be some great examples of 'too-clever APL' out there unless the mag tapes and IBM 2311s they were saved on have all Gone South by now.

Learning APL as my first high level programming language (at age 18) was one of the best things I ever did.

The vast majority of "cleverness" in APL one-liners involved exploiting deep mathematical identities which were completely obvious once mentally unpacked. If you used the language enough, you started to recognize certain chunks of symbols as idioms, and you could pretty quickly guess which mathematical mother sauce had been tarted up with carrots and pine nuts. You practically felt your IQ growing as you gained fluency.

The human mind is amazingly sophisticated as some very difficult tasks (ask anyone who has ever studied human vision) but at the same time we stumble over double negatives (to say nothing of triple negatives) which involves nothing more than determining the parity of a small integer.

Anyone who has ever assembled a BBQ knows just how badly the human brain handles the dihedral group D_4. If every piece in the kit was marked with its symmetry code, there would be far fewer BBQ assembly nightmares (like not initially noticing a small asymmetric drill hole in a strut that is otherwise completely reversible).

And why is it possible to tell someone to head north, turn right, go a bit, turn left, go another bit, turn left again, pass the church, then turn right and look for your destination and not have the person immediately know the direction of the final street? It's vastly easier than many other mental functions that we do do effortlessly.

APL makes one small step of logical necessity which involves one giant leap of man's brain: that we really can be taught not to be ignoramuses about the orientation of a multidimensional array after it is transposed in three different ways as it works it's way through an expression operating along different subsets of axes.

The bad kind of cleverness is relying on something that's kind of arbitrary about your data structure or its arrangement. "Well, in that case, it just falls through to the zero that terminates the following data object after walking a few extra bytes." (Don't suppose that assembly language coders working with just a few hundred bytes of RAM or ROM didn't regularly do exactly this kind of thing.)

You never get that kind of thing in APL, because that language is stripped down to mathematical essentials and almost completely devoid of weird-arbitrary-thingness.

If your application domain was full of weird arbitrary thingness, APL was a pretty poor match as a choice of programming language. You wanted to use APL to solve problems where some kind of deep order was in there screaming to rise to the surface.

You might think something was kind of too cleverish on first pass, but 90% of the time your final verdict escalated from clever to deep.

Everything I programmed in APL assumed that the vast majority of working data lived in system memory, like some kind of calculator on steroids. It was far from a great systems language.

It's because of my early experience with APL that I began permanently immune to certain kinds of fuzzy thinking. The only way to program a computer to pass the Turing test where it's as bad as the human mind at simple parity or tracking compass directions or mapping BBQ parts onto D_4 is to use neural networks that mimic the construction of the human brain.

Do you really think that Robocop cares if he's holding a book upside down? There might be situations where a book balances better with the fat side on the right, regardless of text orientation. When he gets to the mid point, he rotates the book 180 degrees and starts flipping the pages in the opposite direction.

Is he being too clever, or is he just being sensible, without the encumbrance of a ridiculous human perceptual asymmetry?

Human cognitive limitations are rather Byzantine. Our programming languages get so bound up with catering to our cognitive limitations that we succumb to writing algorithms that are less than pure or fully general, and we hardly notice.

Commander Data would not agree that APL was peculiarly amenable to excess cleverness. In truth, he would argue the complete opposite—unless he had his weird human cognitive limitations chip installed and fully activated.

This entire article too silly to bother comprehending so far as I can see, but one fundamental aspect of source text they clearly aren't thinking about (which can be determined without even comprehending the text) is that program texts form an evolution space, highly suggestive of similar programs that might be constructed within a short edit distance. Part of the function of program text is to correctly specify what it doesn't yet do, but could reasonably be made to do. (Bad code bases fail in this essential function, as you can never tell if what appears to be a reasonable change will work as expected until you actually try it.)

APL was a tiny language best described as the anti-PHP.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
                                                        — Aldous Huxley

Who knew programmers and farmers had so much in common?

So it's you Phil Johnson—if that's even your real name—who is the last-sentence-gnome for every story posted at Slashdot for the past several years now.

As a consumable, one lottery ticket lets you dream of winning the lottery - hope is a powerful thing, you can talk compound interest and balanced portfolio all you want but only the lottery gives you the chance of instantly getting $175 million.

You're leaving out meteor strikes with a solid gold core. No need to calculate exact odds. This is a found-money thought experiment. They're just as much fun to think through as a lottery ticket, without involving the kinds of ark-B people who enrich themselves selling losing propositions to poor people.

Or, if you don't have your own back yard, you can always use a cheap Chinese wok to pan for gold in the bath tub, on the principle of transfluoridation. The real reason people buy lottery tickets is to avoid the domestic strife of everyone trying to monopole-ize the bathtub at the same time. Plus the fact that hot water costs real money.

Or, if you don't even have your own bath tub, you can believe that you're a trillionaire on planet Tresfunadore and you're taken there every night on the ethersubwarp, only for some very good reason that's presently slipped your mind, you can't remember all the joys and wonders while you're awake in your earthling body in your mysterious but very important mission here on planet earth.

then they jumped ship to deal with Yahoo instead for some ungodly reason

Considering that Firefox had the power to compel Google to throw giant sums of money at them indefinitely and for all time as per the DOJ's premonic Google anti-trust settlement, it is truly inexplicable that they would turn to a pittance from Yahoo instead.

No, the real joke is that someone actually thought "one of the greatest collaborative efforts in history" would somehow NOT to be riddled with politics at every level.

It's no joke that people think this is the real joke. No person with half a brain thought that Wikipedia was immune to politics, just as no person with half a brain thought that democracy would prove immune to politics.

What thinking people thought is that Wikipedia politics would be different from ordinary politics, and perhaps orthogonal in certain interesting dimensions. Adding orthogonality to a hidebound system is generally a net win. Democracy hasn't made the world a worse place just because it failed. Most likely it did bring us closer to taking the next step.

In my opinion, Wikipedia politics were substantially orthogonal to regular politics until too much of the admin dialog began to occur in unrecorded side channels, which neuters the transparency of a permanent and transparent record of who advocated what and why and with what justification.

Apparently (on the basis of much carping, though I myself have never had to deal with it) many of the admins have aggregated themselves into circle-jerk sock puppets behind the scenes. Exactly the same problem potentially exists at any poker table with more than two players. There are obvious ways to collude and there are subtle ways to collude. This problem is in no way peculiar to Wikipedia.

Strong Nash equilibrium

The strong Nash concept is criticized as too "strong" in that the environment allows for unlimited private communication. In fact, strong Nash equilibrium has to be Pareto-efficient. As a result of these requirements, Strong Nash rarely exists in games interesting enough to deserve study.

Here's an attempt to delineate a middle ground (which strikes me as not-so-middle):

Coalition-proof Nash equilibrium

Any contribution you can make to this body of knowledge will be hugely appreciated.

I haven't seen the original articles.

I think I did read the original articles, but I'm not certain and now it's going to take some work to dig them up again so I can re-evaluate my original conclusions in light of this law suit. How very clever of Mr Weaver to aggressively remove the undo key from my mental keyboard.

Somehow it's way more cool to call this 'another universe' than to call this another part of the same universe, isn't it?

I wonder what the official ISO Linnaeus number is for extreme weakness of physical interaction below which universes are properly botanized.

Dude, you're posting on Slasbergers with people who read The Fountainhead as teenagers and it totally blew their minds, and been assburgers types they can't grow out of the mindset.

Funny, in my experience it's the people who aren't blessed with Asperger's syndrome who are particularly prone to pontificate on the basis of choir-pleasing ass-pluck.

Perhaps we should really rename it obsessive factual reality disorder.

Furthermore, a great many people who read The Fountainhead at a young age and found it mind blowing went into politics. How I wish more of these people had enough Asperchlorians in their bloodstream to balance their own chequebooks.

Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, it works, bitches.

Starvation causes death and human fat metabolism has a dominant linear term? Huh, fuck me gently, who knew?

Just for the record, one could construct an equally impressive linear regression concerning weight loss and water intake. Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, the Desierto de Atacama diet works, bitches.

While we're at it, why don't we point out that humanity has possessed a viable means of birth control for six million years now (+/- one)?

Or it could it be that these aren't the droids we're looking for?

Turbo Pascal became insanely popular on single-tasking systems because it was much easier to use.

Many aspiring programmers were ruined by precisely this ease of use, getting into the habit of massaging compiler complaints out of their code base with their fingers instead of their brains.

In C, if your compiler complains about an unsafe comparison between signed and unsigned, one can eliminate that complaint pretty quickly by tossing in a cast operator. Eliminating a braino ... not so fast.

GUI-facing code often benefited from the rapid turn-around cycle of a "turbo" IDE, whereas algorithmic code typically didn't.

NVIDIA has also demonstrated more commitment to capturing GPGPU business than AMD.

FTFY.

Once captured, twice cry.

If you don't notice a flashing green light barely in your peripheral vision I would start to wonder if you ought to be driving at all.

At my height, the steering wheel blocks out half the dashboard. And, no, I can't fix this problem with a phone book (even if such a thing was still available).

My problem is that I'm forced to recline to a halfway recumbent position to keep from mashing my head into the ceiling.

In many vehicles I end up reclined so far back that I can barely reach the steering wheel. And, no, this is not because I have short arms. It's because the rear passenger window has now entered my peripheral vision. If this strikes you as strange, then I suspect it's been a long while since you spent any quality time with sin/cosine. (I have a wine bottle a mere 2" too tall for one of my cupboard shelves. If I tilt it to 45 degrees it fits just fine.)

So then I have to crank the seat forward until my knees are striking the front dashboard. Strangely, I don't find this uncomfortable for my legs, unless I wish to move them.

My peripheral vision is now roughly oriented toward the driver's seat-belt pulley, and my eye level is horizontal to the tint line on the windscreen. By the time I get the steering adjusted to a comfortable position, it's almost a certainty that half the dashboard is occluded by the top half of the steering wheel.

I can't see stop lights, either, if I'm first to the light and I've pulled up to the stop line, unless I use the old ear-to-shoulder trick—or I spot some other aspect of the intersection control synchronized to the light I'm waiting on.

What look like large vehicles from the outside are usually just as bad. Sure, the cabin height is increased, but usually they take most of it away with a higher seat height (to better accommodate all those fancy seat motors whose very existence makes the seating position you most desire impossible to achieve).

You should book a week sometime in the Hobbit Hotel. It will do wonders for your imagination concerning the circumstances that others face. Probably you should do this before participating in the design of any mechanical thing to be used by anyone other than a jet fighter pilot (whose physiques are carefully restricted to the design environment).

Actions sometimes send messages, but they are not speech.

Non-verbal actions are not speech (excepting deaf people and Italians and anyone with secure tenure in hard rock D-block and postural nuance of a clever hostage being photographed by his or her kidnapper), but often they are speech acts (in cases too far multitudinous to list here).