imatfaal

Alka Seltzar before you go to sleep - and a Bloody Mary for breakfast. I am British - and I am typing after the benefit of a liquid lunch in the sun!

Lemur - sorry, but both Moontanman and Jackson have it right that speculation on the futures markets are the nub of the matter. The connection with availability at the well-head or demand at the refinery is passing and illusory in the short term - and these movements are all short term. Log on to the Intercontinental Exchange (theice.com) here in London or the New York Merc (Nymex) to see the unimaginable volumes of commodities being traded with only a passing nod to the underlying physical market. I am a oil-tanker charterer and have a pretty good handle on the amount of oil on the water and in the pipelines at any one time - it is several orders of magnitude smaller than the oil traded at ICE or the Merc in any one day. In the long term supply and demand will reassert themselves and they set a baseline for the market to follow - but the changes in the oil price that affect all our wallets and make the headlines at the moment are fluctuations due to trading not macroeconomic trends.

I am very anti-gambling in a purely instinctive manner, it doesn't appeal to me, I can't see it as anything but harmful, its a waste of time and money etc. but I would recommend reading to The Road to Wigan Pier - by George Orwell who in a very short passage describes the way that gambling in general and a lottery in particular creates a licence to day-dream for many very poor people with absolutely no hope of remission from poverty apart from the lottery. They knew the chances were tiny, and rationally held no hope for the day they would be lifted out of poverty by some lucky numbers, but the lottery created the possibility, no matter how slight, that this might happen, and that vanishingly small chance was worth it.

lemur

The interpretation of text is highly cultural and not a mechanistic process that is objective and value free. Whilst you are right to argue that a reader in English has no less access to works translated from the German than a native - the implied corollary to your question that they have the same access is incorrect. Your use of the word "better" implies the existence of a canonical interpretation that all readers must aspire to reach - this is simply not the case. Each interpretive community will give different weighting and importance to the themes, language, and construction of a piece. Whilst we may fantasize of a correct interpretation, a direct link from the consciousness of the author to the reader, in reality as soon as the work is published the authors interpretation is immaterial and it is the reader's that is privileged.

It was directed at you. I don't care what God you believe in. They are ALL illogical. There is NO god/are no gods that are logical and rational. It's as simple as that. Any psuedospiritual definition you want to ascribe to YOUR god will be just as illogical as the Judeo-Christian God, or Zeus, or Thor.

Trip

Great post - reminds me of comment of Julian Huxley I heard on the radio a few days ago in which he said that attempting to prove religion scientifically was like attempting to prove the world was flat musically. It has struck me recently that many of your posts on religion are strangely similar to those of Tom Swanson on the physics boards; both sets of replies are saying "just because you are unable to reconcile quantum mechanics/relativity/religious belief (delete as applicable) with your internal model of how the world and universe works does not necessarily mean that these ideas are wrong". On the physics boards it is experimental proof that is the final arbiter, in religion is is faith and belief ; but in neither science nor religion is a personal preconception of the underpinning logic of the universe useful.

And Thor is irrational - both in actions and belief, but who would neg-rep for saying it!!

Stefan if you don't use it to signify something why are you saying it? Is it merely verbal padding? As if so, is it not a little bit intolerant to use as a mere space filler a word that some find offensive, even if you disagree about their reasons for finding it offensive. Personally I find your sig more offensive than the swear word under discussion, but I don't swear unless I either lose complete control or I am in the company only of other people who swear.

We have also been practising the suppression of women, the maltreatment of children, and the violent exploitation of races and creeds that are not our own; that we have been doing something for a long time is only really proof that we have been doing it for a long time. the standard model is founded on theory and experimentation, it is predictive and logically sound; on the other hand the monogamous nuclear family is not the only existing answer to the problem, is far from common outside our own species and is a societal construct rather than a logical one.

Whilst some equations will allow you pluck a factor straight out from an equation with two or more sets of brackets added together, most of the time you need to carefully multiply out completely, collect similar terms, and start from there. the needless complexity of the above makes me think that this long winded route is exactly what the setter wanted to test. make sure you follow rules for brackets and multiplication closely and keep firm track of minus signs.

Edit

after a bit of crunching - this is not a bad one! Follow method above - factors/roots should be easily guessable once you have simple cubic. Remember that the term with no powers of x must be the multiple of all of the three numbers in the brackets ie

y=(x+a)(x+b)(x+c) = x^3 + (a+b+c)x^2 + (ab+ac+bc)x + abc

In this case there are only a very small number of ways of making abc

If you are gonna redefine everything to make it harmful then; Yes, you are right all sin is harmful.

If all human beings were immortal then family growth would probably not be a good idea.

I hadn't read the question properly

Here is an easier explanation of Shor's algorithm by MIT's Scott Aaronson (nb the third comment!) Shtetl-Optimized

 

Are you sure about that? Maybe you're just not aware of the damage you caused. Can you give an example of harmless sin?

 

Taking the name of the lord your god in vain, fornication, worshipping false idols, onanism

Personally, I think the chance to witness long term changes in society and culture would be worth almost any cost (excepting permanent physical torture or mental incapacitance). We cannot imagine what it would be like to witness change 300 years into our future, but we can start to envisage how an individual would have perceived the last 300 years of our past. The perspective gained from watching from the beginnings of the enlightenment to the nuclear age, hearing both Mozart and the Stones performing live, watching from a distance as your family grows to the size of a small state etc

Nice simple but explanatory post Spyman - I think something along these lines might be a good idea to make as a sticky; there is so much confusion (caused in part by the naming) in the realms of dark matter / dark energy and anti-matter and loads of posts are premised on simple misunderstandings

The latest meme doing the rounds is that the raid on Usama Bin Ladin's compound in Pakistan leading to his death was brought forward because of the leak of a document by Wikileaks that 'might' have been enough to spook UBL to change location. Seems a bit far-fetched - but I suppose someone who had till a few days ago remained at large with a 27mill bounty on his head does not take chances.

Here is a link to the released document https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/87933-interrogation-file-of-abu-faraj-al-libi.html#document/p5/a17091

I wouldnt have wanted to be Assange's shoes if UBL had done a runner last week!

DocRock - of course you're correct.

As a corollary; has there been any further talk of Romanov's claim of solution to 3-SAT. I saw quite a lot about it at the beginning of this year in the popular science press, but very quickly it disappeared from view. I realise that it had to be very rigorously checked, do you happen to know if this process is still on going or that it was found to be lacking very quickly and died quietly? The mathematicians I read on the subject at the time were pretty certain it would be found to be incomplete and that the paper was poorly presented/on tenuous logical ground - but still felt that it merited proper research. I wonder if the academic maths press (which I do not read/ could not understand) have published any news.

Vladimir Romanov has released source code for an algorithm which he claims can solve 3-SAT problems. The 3-SAT problem is NP-complete - and Romanov claims his algorithm will solve in polynomial time, this would prove that P==NP as all NP problems can be mapped within polynomial time to the satisfiability problem.

 

With such a seemingly easily falsifiable claim Romanov might be proved wrong quite quickly - for any with the maths and compsci skill here is Romanov's announcement and links to the source code and article - and for those who need a bit more background here is a link to a long slashdot ramble that has some good stuff in it

A French correspondent might be able to clarify, but I believe that to be recognized as a rural town/village (and thus get certain benefits of determination and rule) within parts of France that you must have a public camp site with minimum level of facilities. Whilst these do get booked up - with a little foresight or off-season you can have a very cheap holiday as they cost a four or five euro per night. Du vin, du pain etc

It is quite difficult to limit/waive liability for personal injury caused by negligence in general - but I am sure there is settled law on this matter, I just don't know what it is.

Teggle - that's cool. To expand on what I meant on layout, (BTW I quite agree it can be a pain to type a nicely aligned piece of work for the browser/printer to reformat it) I will just give you an idea on your last answer

dv/dt= pi^2/16*0.3-cos (pi/4*t)

1. the minus sign needs to move - whilst in context you can see what's happening, anyone coming to that equation will read it as having two parts

pi^2/16*0.3 LESS cos (pi/4*t)

2. in pi^2/16*0.3 - is the .3 multiplying the 16 or the whole thing. similarly is the t multiplying the 4 or the pi/4

3. personally I would try and either use decimals or fractions but not both

You could use latex on line which is very neat

[math]-\frac{3}{160} \pi^2 cos\frac{\pi t}{4}[/math]

Or at least rearrange and use brackets to make it clear. The multiplication thing in point 2 might well go away when written by hand - but the minus sign is just bad!

Jimmy - apart from healthy scientific scepticism why do you see the need to re-evaluate the current state of knowledge? Is there any major gap that a new theory is needed to fill, or a glaring error that present thinking cannot explain? I am not doggedly defending dogma - just curious why the creation of oil is being re-problematized.

Generally. Critical thinking. Appreciation of literature rather than analysis. Earlier engagement with foreign languages. Compulsory core sciences, humanities, and mathematics. Politics - in a functional sense how does my country run?

From personal perspective/education. Far to much specialisation early on - by 12-y-o I had given up all history and geography - and others had given up all sciences. I think this has changed - well at least I hope it has.

If you don't know what a torrent client is do not search on the term and find/use one with out beefing up all your security measures.

If you want to download specific music by chosen artists then there probably isn't a legal way to do this; whilst some artists put their work on the net for free most require some form of remuneration for their efforts. If you are really strapped for cash - yet want to listen to varied music then can I suggest internet radio and where it is broadcast analogue or DAB radio. For a specific artist you can try their myspace page/website if they have one - that will often have a few track that will stream. There is also spotify - but I am not sure if that still works.

That's one hell of a one-way-system you have there - 4 times longer to return from C2->C1 than the outbound journey C1->C2. The travelling salesman problem does not canonically have different distances for outbound and inbound to a city (ie it forms a symmetric graph) , and also cities are only visited once; but I presume that these are new parts of the version you are looking at.

the very point TSP is discussed is that it is prototypically np - that means that the solution time does not scale polynomially with the number of variables. I don't believe that removing the symmetry or the proviso tha cities are only visited once will stop the problem being NP-hard. The canonical version does have algorithms that can help - search on Nikos Christofides - his algorithm algorithm will get you within 50% of the actual best distance.

The permutation method that you are looking at scales in the order of n! 30 cities would require over 10^34 operations.

For your guidance a solution that solves TSP in polynomial time would get you, at least, a million bucks in prize money

Teggle

Your differentiation of s = .3 Cos(u) to find ds/du is incorrect. Your layout isn't best in world either - I was always told to use one line for each equation unless there was a good reason to put two on one line - and try and group your ideas more logically, it really helps in the maths to have an easily followed piece of work.

Try looking here for the correct way to differentiate Cos(x)

It's worth reading the writers dot net thread - most amusing. Oh, and to those named as chinese Bad Man above; two aussie girls seem to be forming a club of chinese bad men - and clubs with two aussie girls in tend to be fun

[puerile_smut]

To satisfy Lemur's quest for a pareidoliac geographical representation of male genitalia - the entire Baltic Sea looks like a man kneeling down with an enourmous...

[/puerile_smut]

Bright sunshine - not a problem.

PDFs - if you just copy the pdf to the kindle it remains in the pdf format and whilst all the formatting and any pictures remain pristine it can be quite hard to read without zooming in; and once zoomed in you realise that the original pdf line breaks still apply and you can end up shuttling back and forth. However, and its a doozy of a however, if you email the pdf to your own kindle email address madeupname@kindle.com with subject line convert , they download it to your kindle in a new format where the texts flows to fit (although some formatting might be lost - equations get screwed). If you have a 3G enabled kindle make sure to use your free kindle address (madeupname.free@kindle.com) otherwise they will download it over 3g network and charge you for the privilege.

Most of the articles I read are from legal journals and the conversion is great (I still load up a copy of the unconverted to follow references which can get confusing) - the times I have converted scientific papers have been less successful

Has the 3rd gen got a confirmed release date yet?