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Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Sat Dec 24, 2011 12:02 pm
by PeterTurland
My favorite way out of the larger paradox, comes from something that Nietzsche wrote.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Sat Dec 24, 2011 12:15 pm
by John McKenna
That may be a suitable question to ask a man like Kim and his ilk. Such people, like ancient emperors and religious leaders, claim that they are gods or are proclaimed by others to be God. All they have ever lacked is immortality (time) and the means (material) to conquer all.

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2011 8:16 am
by Ian Stephens
[/quote]Once an inkling as to how evolution works is gained, one come across the idea that multicellular organisms have a precursor, namely unicellular organisms.

The evidence says before around 800 million years ago, life was not multicellular, it was just a one cell organism that multiplied by dividing. ie it split in half, with the the new half being the egg and the old half being the chicken. The chicken and the egg are the same thing at different times. Once you take time into consideration, the chicken and the egg are the same.[/quote]

Thanks for that Peter, I have now stepped out of the "Eternal loop" and now consider the Chicken/egg paradox to be somewhat like a sand filled egg timer that was once a single entity suspended until some type of reaction occurred that then set off the division, This "egg Timer" began to pivot to produce an egg which then produced the Chicken, so the "Chickenegg" could indeed be one entity at different stages of a cycle.

If you look at the end of your arm do you see five digits or one hand?

Do we see two Kim Jongs or one Dynasty? (keeping on thread)

Do we see billions of people or one World?

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2011 8:13 pm
by PeterTurland
Ian P Stephens wrote:Once an inkling as to how evolution works is gained, one come across the idea that multicellular organisms have a precursor, namely unicellular organisms.

The evidence says before around 800 million years ago, life was not multicellular, it was just a one cell organism that multiplied by dividing. ie it split in half, with the the new half being the egg and the old half being the chicken. The chicken and the egg are the same thing at different times. Once you take time into consideration, the chicken and the egg are the same.

Thanks for that Peter, I have now stepped out of the "Eternal loop" and now consider the Chicken/egg paradox to be somewhat like a sand filled egg timer that was once a single entity suspended until some type of reaction occurred that then set off the division, This "egg Timer" began to pivot to produce an egg which then produced the Chicken, so the "Chickenegg" could indeed be one entity at different stages of a cycle.

If you look at the end of your arm do you see five digits or one hand?

Do we see two Kim Jongs or one Dynasty? (keeping on thread)

Do we see billions of people or one World?
I first had experiences of computers, long before the Internet became part of our culture in the early 80's. My first computer was a TRS-80 it had a grand total of 4 KB of ram, can you imagine it? I taught myself to program the TRS-80 , first in BASIC then in Z80. The first program I wrote for it ran in a Tandy shop window extolling the virtues of a TRS-80, the Indian shopkeeper gave me a soldering iron for writing it :)

Then I bought a BBC micro, what a powerful piece of kit that was, if you could 'code' and yes in those days I could 'code'. I could actually think in '6502'!

I actually sold one game nationwide.

Basically there are two ways to write a computer program 'top down' and 'bottom up'.

Basically all computer programs are a giant loop of code, that connects lots of subroutines together, the giant loop calls each subroutine in turn, some routines input data, some routines process data and some routines output data, in a lot of programs, one routine checks purely for 'control alt and delete' as an input routine (AKA the Vulcan nerve pinch) this enables you to escape from the giant loop, if you have tried to do something stupid like divide by zero or find the square root of a minus number.

Top down programs, are written by writing the giant loop first, then the individual subroutines, once you have written the giant loop, the structure of the program is preordained, it is said this method of programming is tidier.

Bottom up programs are written by writing the individual routines first, then when they have been written and individually tested, joined together by one giant loop.

An operating system is just a computer program like any other computer program.

Windows is written in the main 'top down' and UNIX in the main, is written bottom up.

Writing top down OS's, enables you to become colossally rich, the sequence runs, win3.1, win95, win98, winNT , winME, winXP and win7, you know, the latest windows washes whiter.

UNIX is written from the concept of 'it if it aint broke don't try and fix it'

Some UNIX programs are over 30 years old, one example is vi, it is still used.

I find it remarkable ,how the concepts of 'top down' and 'bottom up' are applicable in many different areas other than computer programming.

People who look at life 'top down' are religious and have lots of preconceived notions as to the nature of reality.

People who look at life bottom up, perceive life as only detail and it's all just a matter of wallet and testicles.

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2011 10:23 pm
by Alex Holowczak
PeterTurland wrote:if you have tried to do something stupid like divide by zero or find the square root of a minus number.
What's so stupid about finding the square root of a minus number (said the Maths student)? :wink:

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2011 11:23 pm
by Rob Thompson
Alex Holowczak wrote:
PeterTurland wrote:if you have tried to do something stupid like divide by zero or find the square root of a minus number.
What's so stupid about finding the square root of a minus number (said the Maths student)? :wink:
Shh, you'll interrupt the rambling philosophy/personal history that seems completely irrelevant to anything very much

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 7:55 am
by PeterTurland
Alex Holowczak wrote:
PeterTurland wrote:if you have tried to do something stupid like divide by zero or find the square root of a minus number.
What's so stupid about finding the square root of a minus number (said the Maths student)? :wink:
Just grab your nearest scientific calculator, input -9 press the square root key, then the equals key, ergo you have crashed your calculator.

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 8:02 am
by PeterTurland
Rob Thompson wrote:
Shh, you'll interrupt the rambling philosophy/personal history that seems completely irrelevant to anything very much
Well maybe I did waffle a bit, but I was trying to give my answer a wee bit of context when Ian wrote
Ian P Stephens wrote:
If you look at the end of your arm do you see five digits or one hand?

Do we see two Kim Jongs or one Dynasty? (keeping on thread)

Do we see billions of people or one World?
In terms of 'top down' one hand and 'bottom up' five fingers. etc etc.

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 9:49 am
by John Clarke
PeterTurland wrote:Just grab your nearest scientific calculator, input -9 press the square root key, then the equals key, ergo you have crashed your calculator.
You mean to say it won't find the modulus of the negative number and display it, followed by an "i" to represent the square root of minus 1?? Would have thought calculators would have made that much progress at least in the last 30 years!

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 10:01 am
by Alex Holowczak
PeterTurland wrote:
Alex Holowczak wrote:
PeterTurland wrote:if you have tried to do something stupid like divide by zero or find the square root of a minus number.
What's so stupid about finding the square root of a minus number (said the Maths student)? :wink:
Just grab your nearest scientific calculator, input -9 press the square root key, then the equals key, ergo you have crashed your calculator.
Surely that depends on which calculator you use? Some calculators can deal with complex numbers these days. A friend at University had one. So did at least 1 lecturer.

Some programming languages can deal with them too. If you type sqrt(-9) into MATLAB, you'll get output as 0 + 3i. Wolfram Alpha can manage them too, and that's based on Mathematica. MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha both miss the other root, but they would only ever output one root if you're working with a real number, so such a limitation shouldn't be fatal for the programmer who knows a bit about Maths! (If there's a calculator in manufacture that shows the two complex cube roots of 1, it'll be brilliant!)

I just tried it in Java, and in this case you're right; my output is NaN. 20 seconds of Googling revealed a class I could download to add to a project should I need to work in complex numbers. So in general, based on my random sample of programming languages, I reckon most can deal with complex numbers. Your program may not want to work with them, in which case it's a human error, not a computer error. So the game will just behave wildly, rather than crash spectacularly.

I'm reminded of Donkey Kong, which has this sort of oversight. The timer gave you a time limit of 100×(10×(level+4)). So on level 22, the computer gives you 100 x 260 time. Unfortunately, the counter was 8 bits, and therefore its limit of calculation was 256. Thus, 260 became 4. So the player had 400 time units, instead of 26,000... Pac-Man had similar 8-bit issues on level 256.

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 12:59 pm
by Rob Thompson
My calculator gave me 3i. I don't see what the problem is here...

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 1:21 pm
by Alex Holowczak
Rob Thompson wrote:My calculator gave me 3i. I don't see what the problem is here...
But not -3i, the other square root of -9. :wink:

The problem is, I guess, that your programming language might have a perfectly valid answer of 3i or -3i. However, a game is - I would have thought - unlikely to actually want to go into the realm of complex numbers, because it might make forthcoming calculations based on that answer fraught with complexity. So I can understand why a programmer wants to avoid it. That didn't stop the mathematician in me making a cheeky remark, which seems to have got somewhat out-of-hand... :oops:

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 1:31 pm
by Rob Thompson
If i run x^2 + 9 = 0 through my calculator it does give me both roots, though admittedly that's a home-made program...

Re: Kim Jong Il (1942?-2011)

Posted: Sat Dec 31, 2011 12:25 am
by John McKenna
N. Korean state media issued the following - "We declare solemnly and confidently that the foolish politicians around the world, including the puppet group in S. Korea, should expect no change from us."
That answers William Hague's call on them to change their policies.
First post in thread I wrote, "... what event would it take to signal policy changes here..."
Richard Thursby replied, "It's called a general election."
We'll see.
Dimissis incruciationibus (G. Cardano)