Since I had a look at a couple of them, I suppose I might as well provide reviews.
"Introduction to Proofs and the Mathematical Vernacular" -- this is actually pretty good, and I kinda wish I'd had a copy of it at the start of my university mathematical education, if only to teach me what the hell a "Lemma" was, exactly. It's also fun to read.
"21st Century Physics Flexbook" -- very odd. Admittedly intended as a K-12 textbook rather than a university-level textbook, but not much of a way to learn physics even for the kids. Virtually no mathematics whatsoever, let alone calculus. A random grab-bag of topics from "gravitation" (with an attempt to explain relativity which would be more confusing than enlightening) to "nanoscience" and "biomedical imaging". Basic mechanics finally comes in at the end as an afterthought. Not recommended to anyone.
I have a moderate hatred for most entry-level physics textbooks, which manage to pad about 100 pages' worth of information into a thousand-page tome full of glossy photographs in order to justify the $100+ price tag. So if there are any good free texts that would be great.
The first four are good general advice. The fifth and sixth are good ideas some of the time, the seventh is a bit platitudinous but possibly good advice some of the time, and the eighth is more like "a guide to writing like Kurt Vonnegut".
How about "it looks like a mess" or "it looks like every shareware image editor since the days of Windows 95" or "it looks like you crammed as many controls as you could fit on screen using a cross-platform windowing toolkit"?
I can't say any of that, it's rude - but it's what I'm thinking.
Look at the right hand side - count the scrollbars, the dropdowns, the counters. What's that hideous layer control thing that's like a treeview/gridview with nested scrollbars sized to suggest it should be huge, crammed into a tiny little space? Grim.
Do note that all that UI is crammed into a 978×722 pixel window; I would imagine it works far better on a decently sized 1280x1024 or larger screen. I bet you'd be pretty hard-pressed to get Photoshop or such to work well in that small of a space too...
Yes, its 100px wider, but still, imho Photoshop makes a lot better use of precious screen space. Compare the buttons under layer palettes. GIMP has 32px icons, while Photoshop has over 10px smaller ones. Or the slider, in Photoshop under "Navigator" and in GIMP in the Layers palette. Actually just compare Layers palettes in each. GIMP uses lots of superfluous labels and huge font size compared to Photoshop In my screenshot Photoshop also has 2 more palettes on screen.
Photoshops UI is also quite flexible, allowing to move and resize palettes freely, dock and undock, and group palettes to tab-groups. And layouts can be saved and then selected with just few mouse clicks. This allows it to scale across monitor size and count relatively easily.
edit: Sorry for inflammatory Photoshop vs. GIMP post
Photoshop (at least CS3, anyway) won't even install on a computer with a resolution less than 1024x768. Found that out when I tried to put it on my eee.
Sadly this is perhaps a measure of how desperate us GIMP users are. I'm just happy that GIMP is all going to be in one window. Its amazing that they finally decided to leave the old standard interface.
But relief and anticipation aside I have to agree with you that as far as aesthetics and design it is rather mediocre.
At the very least it is a start. Now that the maintainers are allowing the single-window mode to be created the onward march of open-source progress will keep improving it. It may not approach the elegance that Apple's designers deliver but we can sure as hell beat Adobe.
Edit: Did all of my downvote arrows disappear? I don't want to downvote anyone in particular here but that seems odd.
That's great, but I wonder how heavy the nuclear reactor would need to be that provides the 2 MW to power this thing. Is this something we could practically loft into orbit with present-day rockets? (Ignoring the not-entirely-unreasonable-in-this-particular-case environmental objections to flying nuclear reactors through our atmosphere on failure-prone chemical rockets...)
I suppose, on the upside, that once you had this thing in space it could stay there -- a nuclear reactor plus plasma rocket which could just shuffle back and forth between Earth orbit and Mars/Jupiter/wherever, refuelling at every Earth stop.
I can do it with any music, from crazy hip hop to smooth jazz ;) I get massive energy from the music and sometimes my coworkers catch me singing while i code lol !
It obviously can't do very much to a truck, but I wonder what it would do to a human. Nothing very good, obviously, but how long would you need to keep it focused on someone before they dropped down, brain cooked? (I can't help but notice that the beam is approximately head-sized).
I wonder if a reflective helmet would be a decent countermeasure (or, dare I say it, a tinfoil hat?)
Is there some kind of competition I don't know about to mention the words "straw man" in as many threads as possible? It seems to pop up in just about every thread, along with the words "correlation does not equal causation".
Both logical weaknesses are common among arguments, and people here have a penchant for pointing them out.
I'd rather they point it out than let poor arguments pass for lack of language to describe it. Maybe we need new synonyms. Says something about the state of logical strength of many popular articles, doesn't it?
When I see disingenuous, I assume that you're saying someone is pretending X, despite the fact that they know that X is false. That is, I more-or-less assume malice.
When I see straw man, it often seems to be the case that the author didn't know any better. That is, I assume ignorance until proven otherwise.
Those sorts of questions always bothered me in IQ tests too. I was also always bothered by questions like:
"What comes next in this sequence? 1,4,9,16,25,"
Sure, the answer might be 36, but then again maybe we're looking at some subtler sequence of numbers than that. Maybe it's "the number of bald men who walked past my house every hour since 5am". Maybe the next number is 345 due to the annual Patrick Stewart Lookalike Parade. Who knows?
You're probably taking it too seriously then. There's a certain subtext, the catching on to of which might be part of the test, that it's a rational and discernible pattern, and that if the answer is not 36 then the question is broken.
Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity, it's just that there's a certain part of my brain which takes delight in pointing out all the potential flaws in everything I read. It's much harder to concentrate on the test when half my brain is busy visualizing what four hundred Captain Picards would look like marching down my street.
I am no fan of IQ tests myself, but I think in most tests they are looking for the most simple and logical answers - and they are trying to create tests that have very little ambiguity. In your sequence it's more logical and simple that the answer is 36, than it is how many bald men walked by your house today.
I don't know if IQ tests tell anything about a person's real intelligence, but I think that most intelligent people can become very good at solving these tests.
There's a very good movie "The Oxford Murders", where the math professor talks about that. Every sequence has many answers, the trick is to find how to build the sequence you want and when you achieve thar, your answer is as correct as the "right answer".
No dice. Kolmogorov complexity is critically dependent on the encoding scheme you use for the complexity measure, and given the nature of the problems in question that's going to really not work. If your encoding scheme favors polynomials but makes expression squares a royal pain, you're going to get a radically different K-complexity number than you will if your encoding goes the other way around. And coming up with both such encodings is trivial.
This is why proofs using K-complexity (forgive me, I often misspell it) always use it in a way that doesn't involve actually assigning numbers to the K-complexity; while it has certain desirable properties, there is no unique K-complexity value for a given language.
Aaaaand it's exactly this reason I also loathe those questions. It is much less "do this mathematical thing" than "read the puzzle-maker's mind", and quite frequently there is simply literally not enough information in the sequence to read the puzzle-makers mind. With an uncountably infinite number of functions to choose from and a finite set of inputs to choose among them, it's a complete joke of a test. On the other hand, with suitable constraints given in advance it could prove quite useful. (... but that would remove the thrill of lording the answer over people, methinks, which I think is a distressingly large part of such problem's appeal....)
> you're going to get a radically different K-complexity number than you will if your encoding goes the other way around.
in the limit, all schemes are roughly equivalent. (they are equivalent up to constants.)
> given the nature of the problems in question that's going to really not work
ok. so attempting to compute the kolmogorov complexity for iq test problems is a bad idea. it isnt actually a computable function. its existence shows there is a mathematically rigorous way to talk about the most plausible way to extend an integer sequence. more than anything, this is a counter to the argument that "an uncountably infinite number of functions to choose from and a finite set of inputs to choose among them" makes the test entirely subjective.
> there is no unique K-complexity value for a given language.
for any given language, there is, unless i dont understand what youre saying.
> your encoding scheme favors polynomials but makes expression squares a royal pain
i know its wrong, but i cant help pointing out that that doesnt actually make any sense at all
"Introduction to Proofs and the Mathematical Vernacular" -- this is actually pretty good, and I kinda wish I'd had a copy of it at the start of my university mathematical education, if only to teach me what the hell a "Lemma" was, exactly. It's also fun to read.
"21st Century Physics Flexbook" -- very odd. Admittedly intended as a K-12 textbook rather than a university-level textbook, but not much of a way to learn physics even for the kids. Virtually no mathematics whatsoever, let alone calculus. A random grab-bag of topics from "gravitation" (with an attempt to explain relativity which would be more confusing than enlightening) to "nanoscience" and "biomedical imaging". Basic mechanics finally comes in at the end as an afterthought. Not recommended to anyone.