Friday, April 07, 2006
sanctified
When The Saints Go Marching In - Louis Armstrong version
We are traveling in the footsteps
Of those who've gone before
But we'll all be reunited (but if we stand reunited)
On a new and sunlit shore (then a new world is in store)
Oh when the saints go marching in
When the saints go marching in
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
And when the sun refuse (begins) to shine
And when the sun refuse (begins) to shine
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When the moon turns red with blood
When the moon turns red with blood
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
On that hallelujah day
On that hallelujah day
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
Oh when the trumpet sounds the call
Oh when the trumpet sounds the call
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
Some say this world of trouble
Is the only one we need
But I'm waiting for that morning
When the new world is revealed
When the revelation (revolution) comes
When the revelation (revolution) comes
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When the rich go out and work
When the rich go out and work
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When the air is pure and clean
When the air is pure and clean
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When we all have food to eat
When we all have food to eat
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When our leaders learn to cry
When our leaders learn to cry
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
We are traveling in the footsteps
Of those who've gone before
But we'll all be reunited (but if we stand reunited)
On a new and sunlit shore (then a new world is in store)
Oh when the saints go marching in
When the saints go marching in
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
And when the sun refuse (begins) to shine
And when the sun refuse (begins) to shine
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When the moon turns red with blood
When the moon turns red with blood
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
On that hallelujah day
On that hallelujah day
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
Oh when the trumpet sounds the call
Oh when the trumpet sounds the call
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
Some say this world of trouble
Is the only one we need
But I'm waiting for that morning
When the new world is revealed
When the revelation (revolution) comes
When the revelation (revolution) comes
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When the rich go out and work
When the rich go out and work
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When the air is pure and clean
When the air is pure and clean
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When we all have food to eat
When we all have food to eat
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
When our leaders learn to cry
When our leaders learn to cry
Oh lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
found on dkos
I have a wonderful machine... (8+ / 0-)
Recommended by:
mtobis, sj, RFK Lives, roses, Mike Erwin, Alexander G Rubio, metacin, qrswave
It does nothing, but it looks good doing it. Cool, huh?
What the NYT article is saying in effect is that the purpose of an economy is to grow on paper, regardless of whether it actually produces anything of value for actual humans.
That would be a Terri Schiavo Economy: It's braindead but it's still breathing, so it must be alive, right?
First of all, start with the fact that infinite growth is simply not possible on a finite planet: an infinity cannot be a subset of an integer, period. There is no way around this one, and we are finding out now (peak oil, climate change, potable water shortages) what happens when we run into the limits of finitude.
Second, the idea that production for human use is "merely political" and somehow irrelevant to the economics, is absurd. An economy is a tool, and a tool is only as good as what you build with it. A market is a mechanism for distributing goods among humans, not an isolated system like a piece of clockwork under a bell jar.
Any fool can design a theoretical system that performs well as long as it is never called upon to do anything useful.
Here's the question you can keep on asking, which reveals the absurdity (not to mention the moral bankruptcy) of the arguement put forward in the NYT article: What is an economy for? What is the purpose of having an economy in the first place? That is, why have an economy, rather than having something else, perhaps a poodle or a bad cold? Why do we even want to have an economy, instead of having a day off or having good sex? The obvious answer is, to produce and distribute goods and services to humans, not to go ticking away like meaningless clockwork under its bell jar for the amusement of its makers. And once you go there, the whole premise of the NYT article falls flat on its face.
Recommended by:
mtobis, sj, RFK Lives, roses, Mike Erwin, Alexander G Rubio, metacin, qrswave
It does nothing, but it looks good doing it. Cool, huh?
What the NYT article is saying in effect is that the purpose of an economy is to grow on paper, regardless of whether it actually produces anything of value for actual humans.
That would be a Terri Schiavo Economy: It's braindead but it's still breathing, so it must be alive, right?
First of all, start with the fact that infinite growth is simply not possible on a finite planet: an infinity cannot be a subset of an integer, period. There is no way around this one, and we are finding out now (peak oil, climate change, potable water shortages) what happens when we run into the limits of finitude.
Second, the idea that production for human use is "merely political" and somehow irrelevant to the economics, is absurd. An economy is a tool, and a tool is only as good as what you build with it. A market is a mechanism for distributing goods among humans, not an isolated system like a piece of clockwork under a bell jar.
Any fool can design a theoretical system that performs well as long as it is never called upon to do anything useful.
Here's the question you can keep on asking, which reveals the absurdity (not to mention the moral bankruptcy) of the arguement put forward in the NYT article: What is an economy for? What is the purpose of having an economy in the first place? That is, why have an economy, rather than having something else, perhaps a poodle or a bad cold? Why do we even want to have an economy, instead of having a day off or having good sex? The obvious answer is, to produce and distribute goods and services to humans, not to go ticking away like meaningless clockwork under its bell jar for the amusement of its makers. And once you go there, the whole premise of the NYT article falls flat on its face.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Entitled to your own opinion, but...
[Posted to Slashdot today]
While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, nobody is entitled to their own facts. (I need an atribution for that; it isn't original.)
Muddling the population's grasp of the facts is not hard, as there is too much going on for us all to be an expert on everything. It nevertheless is cheating. There is much organized cheating going on, intended to confuse the population. The effects of this cheating are visible in any online conversation where science impinges on policy, and slashdot is hardly immune.
Whether or not human activity is substantially changing climate, for instance, is not a speculative matter. Its truth or falsehood is established science. Nevertheless there is organized activity to convince you of the plausibility of impossible propositions.
Splitting the difference is not as reasonable as it might appear, as the side which is lying is totally unconstrained by facts.
Any debate on whether humanity is substantially changing climate constitutes a failure of the society to use the information it has, of the scientific community to convey it, and of the special interests to restrain vicious antisocial activity on the part of some of its key members.
I do not specify which side is lying on this matter. It won't be hard for you to track down my opinion, but that's beside the point I'm making here. The point is that we are debating facts and not values or policies, which means that democracy is not functioning effectively.
This is occurring in the context of a number of similar failures to come to grips with reality in the absurd noise that passes for public discourse in America, and the irresponsible power games that pass for politics. Climate change probably isn't the most harmful case, yet, though it's competitive...
While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, nobody is entitled to their own facts. (I need an atribution for that; it isn't original.)
Muddling the population's grasp of the facts is not hard, as there is too much going on for us all to be an expert on everything. It nevertheless is cheating. There is much organized cheating going on, intended to confuse the population. The effects of this cheating are visible in any online conversation where science impinges on policy, and slashdot is hardly immune.
Whether or not human activity is substantially changing climate, for instance, is not a speculative matter. Its truth or falsehood is established science. Nevertheless there is organized activity to convince you of the plausibility of impossible propositions.
Splitting the difference is not as reasonable as it might appear, as the side which is lying is totally unconstrained by facts.
Any debate on whether humanity is substantially changing climate constitutes a failure of the society to use the information it has, of the scientific community to convey it, and of the special interests to restrain vicious antisocial activity on the part of some of its key members.
I do not specify which side is lying on this matter. It won't be hard for you to track down my opinion, but that's beside the point I'm making here. The point is that we are debating facts and not values or policies, which means that democracy is not functioning effectively.
This is occurring in the context of a number of similar failures to come to grips with reality in the absurd noise that passes for public discourse in America, and the irresponsible power games that pass for politics. Climate change probably isn't the most harmful case, yet, though it's competitive...
Friday, December 02, 2005
Jack
This is the tag that flipped the flag that clobberred the makefile and caused it to break while it set the mode to load the node that made the stack get overflowed so it set the caching that caused the thrashing that crashed the node that loaded the code that lay in the job that Jack hacked.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Kuhnian revolution
From sci.environment:
If this were usenet 1995 I could probably start an interesting and non-polarized digression by musing about when the last actual instance of a Kuhnian paradigm shift occurred.
The rise of physical climatology and its uneasy relationship to the established field of observational/statistical climatology actually has something in common with a Kuhninan shift.
Certainly Bill Gray is the very model of the old guard in that regard, and Reid Bryson also is a good exemplar. But really that story is more about the rise of a wholly new discipline, and the capacity of some but not all parts of a related discipline to adapt to it. I think it would make a nice history of science project to examine this. I'd venture that the critical moments in the transition were around 1980 and that many of the crucial players are around to interview.
But it's a marginal case; not really a revolution so much as coming to terms with an invasion.
dboh suggests that discovery of a new forcing may be discovered which would amount to a revolution in climatology. It might rock the boat, but it's hard to imagine it amounting to a paradigm shift. Snowball earth rocked the boat, but it didn't change the paradigm.
What profound new discoveries in the past 50 years really changed the way of thinking of *any* quantitative science?
If this were usenet 1995 I could probably start an interesting and non-polarized digression by musing about when the last actual instance of a Kuhnian paradigm shift occurred.
The rise of physical climatology and its uneasy relationship to the established field of observational/statistical climatology actually has something in common with a Kuhninan shift.
Certainly Bill Gray is the very model of the old guard in that regard, and Reid Bryson also is a good exemplar. But really that story is more about the rise of a wholly new discipline, and the capacity of some but not all parts of a related discipline to adapt to it. I think it would make a nice history of science project to examine this. I'd venture that the critical moments in the transition were around 1980 and that many of the crucial players are around to interview.
But it's a marginal case; not really a revolution so much as coming to terms with an invasion.
dboh suggests that discovery of a new forcing may be discovered which would amount to a revolution in climatology. It might rock the boat, but it's hard to imagine it amounting to a paradigm shift. Snowball earth rocked the boat, but it didn't change the paradigm.
What profound new discoveries in the past 50 years really changed the way of thinking of *any* quantitative science?
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
New Month's Day
A new month is always a good time to turn over a new leaf. Today I announced PyNSol:
PyNSol is yet another PDE description language, implemented entirely as extensions to Python. Among its design goals are
===
To express FD and FV models tersely and in a cognitively accessible manner
To facilitate experiments in time differencing schemes and coupling
To inherit as much as possible from the interactive python environment
To facilitate high performance integration of physics modules (especially column physics)
To facilitate code-introspection tools such as testing, performance prediction, automatic parallelization, and automatic differentiation.
===
So far it's much less than all that, but it does manage to turn this little Python object into a model, and execute it:
PyNSol
a Language Oriented Programming approach to finite differences
PyNSol is yet another PDE description language, implemented entirely as extensions to Python. Among its design goals are
===
To express FD and FV models tersely and in a cognitively accessible manner
To facilitate experiments in time differencing schemes and coupling
To inherit as much as possible from the interactive python environment
To facilitate high performance integration of physics modules (especially column physics)
To facilitate code-introspection tools such as testing, performance prediction, automatic parallelization, and automatic differentiation.
===
So far it's much less than all that, but it does manage to turn this little Python object into a model, and execute it:
shallow = {
"u_t": "- csq * p_x",
"v_t": "- csq * p_y",
"p_t": "- u_x - v_y"
}
Monday, January 31, 2005
programming as black art
Why settle for snake oil?
This is the sort of thing that makes me want to take up carpentry. Or languages with latent typing.
Compiled with: % mpif77 -L/usr/lib64/ -132 -o gfftest gfftest.F -lm
(MPI is MVAPICH 0.9.4, compiler is Intel Fortran for EMT64, version 8.1.)
This hangs between the two print statements. Execution is successful if you do one of the
following:
1) Remove "include 'mpif.h'" from the source code
2) Remove -lm from the link flags
Rob says, "I know the -lm is not needed but for some reason I had it on the Linux FOAM compile for a while"
Jace says, "What's the -L/usr/lib64 doing? Isn't that a 32bit compile?"
Rob says, "He has the opteron's set to 64-bit mode"
Jace [to Rob]: Does mpif77 know that?
Rob shrugs
Jace [to Rob]: You shouldn't need that. You're possibly picking up some 64bit real/integer (ie: double precision) libraries in addition to the 64bit pointer stuff. I think that flag is dubious.
Rob says, "the -L flag?"
Jace [to Rob]: Yeah. A 64bit compile would use some flag to tell the compiler *AND* the linker, not just the linker.
===
uh-huh. This is supposed to mean more to me than it does to you, but alas, it doesn't,
This is the sort of thing that makes me want to take up carpentry. Or languages with latent typing.
program gfftest
include 'mpif.h'
real t,es
t=1.5
print *,"Before **: t=",t
es = 10.0**t
print *,"After **: t=",t,"es=",es
end
Compiled with: % mpif77 -L/usr/lib64/ -132 -o gfftest gfftest.F -lm
(MPI is MVAPICH 0.9.4, compiler is Intel Fortran for EMT64, version 8.1.)
This hangs between the two print statements. Execution is successful if you do one of the
following:
1) Remove "include 'mpif.h'" from the source code
2) Remove -lm from the link flags
Rob says, "I know the -lm is not needed but for some reason I had it on the Linux FOAM compile for a while"
Jace says, "What's the -L/usr/lib64 doing? Isn't that a 32bit compile?"
Rob says, "He has the opteron's set to 64-bit mode"
Jace [to Rob]: Does mpif77 know that?
Rob shrugs
Jace [to Rob]: You shouldn't need that. You're possibly picking up some 64bit real/integer (ie: double precision) libraries in addition to the 64bit pointer stuff. I think that flag is dubious.
Rob says, "the -L flag?"
Jace [to Rob]: Yeah. A 64bit compile would use some flag to tell the compiler *AND* the linker, not just the linker.
===
uh-huh. This is supposed to mean more to me than it does to you, but alas, it doesn't,
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