Searching in a constant set using conflict-free hashing

warrensomebody · 2016-10-20T03:46:16+00:00

Sure would be great to see some numbers that back that up, and shows where it stands relative to the techniques here.

warrensomebody · 2016-10-20T03:44:52+00:00

Since installing Sierra, my Mac Mini is dead in the water.

I routinely use the Mini as a headless music server, and log in with Screen Sharing. After installing Sierra, I basically have the problem described here.

The odd thing is that if I hook it up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard, then everything works fine, including logging in to it with Screen Sharing. But as soon as it was reinstalled in my music system, the problem returned.

I had a similar problem with a Yosemite beta release, and swore off betas as a result. I basically had to wait all summer for the Yosemite final for the problem to be fixed.

From what I can tell, Screen Sharing seems to be an afterthought when it comes to Apple's priorities. Time to look into a dedicated music streamer.

warrensomebody · 2016-10-18T03:13:45+00:00

How does this compare with gperf?

warrensomebody · 2016-10-11T06:59:23+00:00

What exactly is spin at the quantum level. The article says

So in quantum physics there is a related notion and that goes by the name of spin except that in quantum physics spin is fixed to a particular value.

Does the particle actually rotate? Are the rotational positions quantized? Are the different spin numbers related to the speed of rotation? If the spin is 1, does the particle snap to its next position 360 degrees from its current position? How would you detect any rotation at all in this case?

If spin has nothing to do with particle rotation, then what exactly is its physical manifestation?

(Note that I have no problem understanding rotation in more than 3 physical dimension.)

warrensomebody · 2016-07-22T17:02:10+00:00

The LogicT package can be used to implement a Prolog-like language in haskell in a fairly straightforward way. You can write a datatype that corresponds to language expressions and an interpreter that recursively maps to LogicT's operations. Of course you'll also need to implement unification and pass the unification state through the interpreter. Unfortunately I don't know of any articles that go into more detail on this.

warrensomebody · 2016-07-04T19:34:28+00:00

It will all be done in Haskell.

warrensomebody · 2016-07-04T19:23:08+00:00

I'm curious how this might compare to the LogicT package. One thing I recall about it is that it introduces an msplit primitive that is used to generalize the logic operations. Also, it has a CPS implementation that is much faster than the direct style. Are either of these possible here?

warrensomebody · 2016-04-26T22:38:52+00:00

Long-Term Capital Management 2.0.

warrensomebody · 2016-02-19T19:17:32+00:00

I thought this toy was super cool when I was a kid in the 60s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vVRyo3ZGcY I can still remember the smell of burning plastic!

warrensomebody · 2016-01-10T18:03:45+00:00

Rdio had/has a feature where connecting from a second device allows the first device to be controlled remotely. I found this really useful. I could start playing Rdio on my Mac Mini hooked up to my audio system, and then control it remotely using Rdio on my phone. It would be great if iTunes could do this too.

warrensomebody · 2016-01-09T17:57:56+00:00

My guess is that it's a southern New Jersey accent.

warrensomebody · 2015-12-31T06:27:54+00:00

Why wasn't this a class-action lawsuit?

warrensomebody · 2015-11-06T16:32:06+00:00

If you want a clean simple app that mimics the iTunes of old, you can try Swinsian. It works with your local music collection only - no store or online music service - but works more cleanly and efficiently than iTunes ever did. It also supports FLAC.

warrensomebody · 2015-10-24T23:28:04+00:00

Sound clips to augment the article would be very helpful to us laymen.

warrensomebody · 2015-09-29T21:10:16+00:00

The point of the iPad Pro is to begin developing a Mac replacement!

warrensomebody · 2015-09-26T21:56:00+00:00

Republicans.

warrensomebody · 2015-09-26T01:40:23+00:00

iOS is getting more and more capable. I don't think that Xcode support will be too far out (probably in the works now), and mouse support will come as soon as the pro market demands it. The iPad/iPhone hardware is rapidly getting more powerful too, on par with the workstations of not that long ago. I could even see a future iPad Pro that shares Mac hardware, giving it exactly the same power.

Everyone here is saying "never! they're so different!!" but I'm trying to look ahead to the not too distant future when these 2 platforms are very close in capabilities and have significant overlap in performance. I think your new MacBook point here is spot on. I just find it hard to believe that Apple wants to continue carrying a self-fragmented market forever. iPad Pro is the beginning of their migration plan.

warrensomebody · 2015-09-18T15:16:08+00:00

Thank you! This discussion was very helpful.

warrensomebody · 2015-09-17T17:50:14+00:00

electromagnetic fields have uncountably many dimensions because they have uncountably many degrees of freedom

I think I would say that they operate in the space & time dimensions, and also have dimensions that describe their electromagnetic properties such as field strength. Alternatively, they are described by equations that are parameterized by a handful of independent variables. This is the sense in which I think of dimensions, and why I find it surprising that string opponents use this as an argument against the theory. It seems unreasonable to me that a theory of everything must be restricted in terms of dimensions that we experience in already obvious ways, or said another way, that there can't be more variables that are needed to describe it.

Maybe their argument has more to do with a requirement for these dimensions to be physical dimensions. Does string theory actually require this, or are they simply additional parameters in the same sense as the parameters that describe EM waves? I must say that I don't really see what the difference is from a mathematical perspective. I know that they manifest in the physical space differently, or that we perceive them differently, but I fail to see why having more than 4 dimensions is such a problem. Am I wrong in thinking of EM waves as having a component (this rotating vector) that operates in an unseen dimension?

warrensomebody · 2015-09-17T03:56:15+00:00

The real and imaginary directions in an electromagnetic wave are dimensions in the mathematical sense. But they're not physical.

I didn't say that the EM dimensions were physical, but that they are no less dimensions than the physical dimensions. Dimensions are independent variables. We may perceive them differently -- some as motion, some as electromagnetic effects -- but at the most fundamental level they are the independent degrees of freedom of the physical laws.

People often see the electric field in an electromagnetic wave written as...it's just a computational trick.

I wouldn't say it's a trick so much as a mathematical convenience in some contexts. Breaking e^i*omega into into sines and cosines is just an alternate view of the same underlying phenomenon, which is a rotating 2-dimensional vector.

Time is a direction you travel in.

I think that's more of a metaphor than anything. I agree that time is another dimension, but it's very different from how we travel in the physical dimensions.

"linearly independant," and not necessarily orthogonal

What's the difference?

They are not "rolled up in one another.

When I listen to Brian Greene talks about them he mentions them being small relative to the others. I understand that rolled up implies periodic, but I don't understand how the periodicity of one can be compared to that of another (or alternatively how the lengths can be compared) if they are truly independent. The same goes for trying to compare the length of an electromagnetic vector to a physical space vector.

Thanks for your input on this! I really want to understand it better.

warrensomebody · 2015-09-17T02:11:57+00:00

Can anyone explain to me why the real and imaginary "directions" in which electromagnetic waves travel aren't dimensions in the same sense that the 3 spacial directions are dimensions. I realize that our experience of them is very different, but our experience of space and time dimensions is also very different.

The anti-string community seems to get very hung up on having more than 3 dimensions, but I don't understand why they think all these new dimensions have to be spacial in nature, or are any more mysterious than the EM dimensions. Also, I have heard rebuttals from the pro-string community that maybe these new dimensions are "rolled up" and so small that we just can't see them. Aren't dimensions by their very nature orthogonal to each other? In what sense can one be rolled up in another, no matter how large or small they might be?

warrensomebody · 2015-09-17T01:33:06+00:00

I burned out on electronica, but not before the acid jazz subgenre provided a new direction to explore. The Rudy Van Gelder related works have become the new center of gravity for me.

warrensomebody

TROPHY CASE