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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
The very fact of a diversity czar is troubling, but par for the progressive course.
We’re just being permitted to live in it. For now.
A “diversity” czar who is obsessed with race…
And FCC official who thinks the first amendment is often exaggerated…
Oh, and as a bonus, essentially worships Chavez (after Obama, of course), a petty dictator who shuts down broadcast stations that have the temerity to oppose him, or engage in any other speech than spouting the approved state narrative…
Boy, this guy is a real winner, eh? And how far down the chain of command will Senate approval of executive branch appointments have to go in order to keep subversives like Lloyd from assuming the mantle of any governmental authority.
-Mark Lloyd
Mark Lloyd is an American; does he scare himself? It’s some kind of voodoo!
Slart, I doubt he thinks of himself as an American.
And how far down the chain of command will Senate approval of executive branch appointments have to go in order to keep subversives like Lloyd from assuming the mantle of any governmental authority?
Let’s just strip any such authority from the government. Then guys like this will have to content themselves with subverting their local economic development authority.
Fundamentally you’re right Squid. The FCC should be abolished, along with the Dept of Ed, EPA, and a few others merged back into the original entities from which they were derived.
You keep that thinking up, Bob Reed, and for all we know next you’ll claim that govt agencies are all running on fiscal fumes while making our lives miserable.
And that cannot be so.
The presses are running out of ink JHo.
As soon as the new funny money dries they better run down and get some more. There are bills to pay!
It’ll be fine, Bob. Monetary regimes always defy the trajectories of all other regimes. They just do.
Shorty right! JHo…
Everything will be Jake when the Dow hit 15000 in a few weeks, after taking a ride on the QE2. Of course, gas, food, and building materials will be unaffordable.
But who cares! as long as Uncle Sugar is mailing out checks. Besides, despite all of the monetizing, it seems that treasury yield curves are starting to look like Kansas; flat. Imagine that…
So who’ll need building materials anyway, when few will be able to afford mortgages.
Gosh, I wonder how much play this will get on ABCCBSNBCPBSNPR? What is the smallest number next to zero?
We can call it epsilon, LTC. For a computer guy like me, the value is basically something slightly greater the floating-point precision of a value that is zero.
Roughly 10^-39 for IEEE-754 floating point, or 10^-308 for double precision.
epsilon is the smallest number that is not zero. The concept is useful in some mathematics, and its computer science approximation is useful in distinguishing between computer architectures — two computers with different epsilon values will give different results in some calculations.
Is there a name for 1/epsilon, the largest number that is not infinity?
Regards,
Ric
That is a good question. The problem is that no number can ever “be” infinity, while a number can be zero. I conclude on that flimsy evidence that there is no such term.
By the way, usually I use some value for epsilon in computing when comparing the difference between two numbers to determine if they are close enough to effectively be the same. I have seen some programmers using the “=” operator when comparing two floating point numbers, and I want to smack them. It shouldn’t even be allowed by the compiler in my arrogant opinion.
/geek rant
There is also the issue of precision, and the fact that there are more floating point numbers near zero than there are at the higher value limit in a positive or negative direction. I would not try to compare two IEEE-754 floats past 7 decimal places, or two doubles past 14, since anything after that is meaningless.
Is there a name for 1/epsilon
let’s call it Øbama
I would say Obama’s ego certainly approximates 1/?
cranky-d —
Agreed, about compilers, but what I’ve always thought is that EPSILON should be a reserved word, with a command-line or load-time option for what the exact value should be. Floating point “equals” test would then compile as FABS(A – B) <= EPSILON, unless special syntax was used (there are a few places where you really do want bit-by-bit equality, but they're rare enough to be special cases).
Mainly, though, I'm old enough to remember when IEEE hadn't published the standard, and the result of a long chain calculation like a matrix inversion or a Fourier transform could be different depending on the computer nameplate. That was especially true when going back and forth among different IBM machines, where there were different word lengths and they didn't tell the high-level programmers that. One of the reasons CDC was popular for scientific computing is that its floating-point processor closely approximated what is now IEEE-754.
Regards,
Ric
I like your thinking, Ric. That sounds like a great way to handle floats. Most of the time I make up a value for epsilon that’s “good enough” and move on, but I’d rather it be chosen for me based on the hardware.
If you want to do bit by bit equality, you can handle it completely differently at the byte level. I’ve recently had to learn how to handle this stuff because I’ve been working with hardware that communicates by sending bytes back and forth, and you have to break down and re-assemble all the types such as shorts, ints, and floats.
One thing about older machines is that they often had fixed-point numbers, and you had to be careful when making calculations (well, more careful than you have to be now). I like Wilkinson’s “The Algebraic Eigenvalue Problem” for the discussion on those points. The book was so beautiful I had to buy it, though I really did not need the information in there. I think the only thing I every really looked at was the Wilkinson shift, which is used in the QR decomposition.
I should have said “sending arrays of bytes back and forth.” Right now I’m trying to reverse-engineer a few commands because we don’t have the source code for the PC side; we only have the firmware source.
Good times.
Dunno.
There may be a photo for it, though.
of all the muslim stuff, i’m willing to maybe give ’em a pass on how the invented the concept of zero
and the andulusia tiles
but epsilon?
you hater
1- might as well put a bag on a yemeni’s head- move him 15 miles into the desert/ and give him an anthology of science-fiction…
brave new world!
get ur hands offa me, u damn dirty apes
cranky-d —
**sigh** I spent years trying to be a decent programmer before I discovered that high-level languages just plain don’t make sense to me, but give me a decent assembler and off I go. I once wrote 10K lines of mixed Z80 assembler and bit-banging for an early-model floating point chip, plus about half the 2K the guy on the other end was supposed to do, plus conning the hardware designer into building something that made it easier. It ran the first time we turned it on, and bar a few typos it didn’t get changed much. It took half a year. In my spare time, I re-organized the output of the crappy DG FORTRAN compiler to just about double the execution speed of a few critical routines. Then the company ran out of money… Good times, indeed. The sort of thing that’s frustrating you is what I used to do in my spare time for entertainment, back when my brain still worked.
Regards,
Ric
epsilon-the second to last word citizen kane muttered
epsilon-james camerons moby dick
[ what do u do with a drunken sailor? early in the morning?]
[irish cop brogue-] epsilon..nothin to see here..move along/epsilon..
epsilon…may cause fits,and starts-wet packagesdry months-twirls-stampy feets,confusion.paperlip
untied shoes-dampness/uncontrollable wingspan
mad bladder45/tightening of sweatpants..
canadien desire, and general discomfort..
[plus- included- new and improved-neighbor leave]
You strange programmers. Everyone knows that epsilon represents price elasticity.
Ric, I’m glad there are guys like you out there who actually enjoy tinkering with compilers and such, because then I don’t have to. I am much more interested in coding in high-level languages, though with C# I miss having pointers to abuse as I could in C and C++.
The whole hardware thing came as a surprise to me, because I thought I had been hired to write a GUI. I’m rolling with it, though, because it’s about the best job I will ever have. I work from home and can travel and see my father whenever I want to, though of course I work when I’m at his house, too.
bh, I’m glad to see the return of ceiling cat.
If I’d only hung up my prices to dry instead of throwing them in the dryer, I’d still have price elasticity. My wife told me so, I guess.