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I spent a summer once working for a professor who has spent his life trying to develop an AI for Go!

In particular I was compressing read-only hash tables of end states. He was basing his approach on the work of someone who had developed AI for checkers but I think it's obvious that Go is a little bit bigger problem.

(To be specific: http://lie.math.brocku.ca/twolf/home/publications.html#3)

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Karl Marx famously wrote in his Communist Manifesto in 1888:

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged

Whenever we have in mind the discussion of a new movement in education, it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social view.

the modern education is supposed to make kids fit better into society, so how come they are bigger misfits then any generation before them?

I read the article in NY Times, but not closely.
The article is only partly about the nature of string theory.
The main point to me is this: A small group of physicists is using their academic and political power to prevent opposing views from being investigated. This isn't new, most disciplines have this problem and always will. It's corporate culture.

As for whether it's good science, right or wrong they are trying to figure out how the world works the best way they can and that's science.
Here's a good read that's only slightly related:
http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_scienc e.html

>> Evolution/Creationism: I haven't heard of a valid "experiment" to test this either way.
this one is like staying there is a valid alternative to thermo dynamics and all the laws are wrong. It doesn't stand up. This is a purely political debate amoung one ideology and the very validity of science. There have been thousands of experiements verying and reforming aspects of evolution, all implications have been supported, the falsifying . Creationism is not science but theology. There is no contriversy about this within science only within a certain religious group.

I happen to believe in this evolution hypothesis and that creationism isn't good science, but to be perfectly honest (and that is what science is all about, right), it's only a very basic limited theory on lower-lifeforms that is _probably_ applicable to humans. To be a good theory it would (in addition to being consistent with past observations) have to predict something that could be validated/demonstrated or refuted. I don't think there's any controversy in the scientific community about if it is true or not, but it still isn't validated.

I think the mistake that people make (on both sides), is that they feel there is absolute truth out there and, by golly I know it and you'd better believe me. There's no shame in admitting we don't know everything for sure and pointing out the limitations of our own theory for other to validate and change. For those that have not, reading Feynman's Cargo Cult Science is a really interesting read.

As for thermodynamics, you could call quantum dynamics a valid "theory" and that thermo "laws" are only approximate and breakdown when you have things like bose-einstein condensates and superconductivity, but I'm guessing that probably wouldn't stand up under analysis when we figure out that grand unifying theory.

The blurb was poorly worded, so I went and read the story. And it didn't make much sense either. Intelligent Design is just Creationism dressed up in scientific clothing. Lots of pseudoscience proponets try to dress up their ideas under the guise of science. As the late great Richard Feynman so aptly called it Cargo Cult Science. They talk the talk, but when they attempt to walk the walk, they can't.

For years Johannes Kepler tried to make his observations fit his theory that the planetory orbits corresponded to the five perfect solids. He took the courageous step to reject his pet theory because it was wrong and came up with his three laws of planetary motion. They fit his observations better and made actual predictions. It was, it is testable.

The fundamentalists are trying to make their observations fit their 'theory'. Except they have no observations and a theory that is mere window dressing. The problem is most Christians forgot God was a metaphor and are trying to interpret their flavors of the Bible as absolute fact and history. You can still be a devout Christian and understand evolution and accept it happened (I'm not a Christian). By rejecting Creationism they don't have to reject their entire faith. That is to say they don't have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

• Japanese schools closing because there aren't enough kids?
• ...or environmentalists taking the strategy of mythologizing "Mother Earth?"

30. (Paragraph 184) A further advantage of nature as a counter-ideal to technology is that, in many people, nature inspires the kind of reverence that is associated with religion, so that nature could perhaps be idealized on a religious basis. It is true that in many societies religion has served as a support and justification for the established order, but it is also true that religion has often provided a basis for rebellion. Thus it may be useful to introduce a religious element into the rebellion against technology, the more so because Western society today has no strong religious foundation.

Let's get back to buffer overflows, which olivianewtonjohn or whatever your name is totally glossed over. "You know (after toying around with said web app on your home machine) that certain large chunks of hex in a field will result in a submission that essentially writes your binary to their $HOME directory"

That's the "buffer overflow" part - the rest has already been pulled to pieces, but we're supposed to be talking about buffer overflows, here.

What Olivia is referring to, is that an application (in this eg, a webserver) has a coding flaw, in that it accepts unvalidated input, and treats that input in such a way as to see an "end" to the valid input, but keep processing the rest of it. Today, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow has a reasonable explanation. A quick google offers http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~cspress/HelloWorld/1999 /04-apr/attack_class.html as a less randomly-editable explanation (but that's a different rant).

Readers can spend a few minutes on Google for an accurate description of buffer overflows (in their programming language of choice - some are worse than others (the C family is probably the worst)), and we can all save ourselves the time of reading this thread.

However, many credible scientists have found evidence of creation in their work, however they are lambasted by their peers if they talk about these ideas because it does not fit into scientific method.

Yeah, right. I knew what wrote would fall on deaf ears. I wrote it for the benefit of other readers. You just repeated yourself. And I'll repeat myself. You still don't understand science or the methods of science. You have chosen to believe what you want and cherry picked your reasons to support it. There can never be enough evidence to persuade you on the theory and fact of evolution. Should I continue to waste my time and effort in this debate? Why not? If any scientist can explain the difference between scientists and pseudoscientists who use the trappings of science, it is Richard Feynman. He cuts through the bullshit. Try his wonderful essay Cargo Cult Science. Whoever brainwashed you did a pretty good job.

Or perhaps this isn't a biological trait in humans at all. The human children subjects that this study used have spent years flicking light switches, using remote controls for television sets, avoiding hot irons and spinning fans, and otherwise obeying all sorts of random magical rules imposed by adults. Maybe long before this experiment, they learned not to trust their knowledge of physics and just to do what they're shown/told. Just one more physchological study that doesn't actually show what it claims (link is to Feynman's "Cargo-Cult-Science").

We say, sure, BUT we have complete creation and control of the methodology, it will be reviewed and vetted by the community (end users and independent analysts) and must strictly follow scientific principles... All of our studies are written as if they will be released publicly BUT it is up to the sponsor if the study is publicly released.

While I understand the reasoning, I don't think this should be represented as following scientific principles. In one of his most famous speeches, Cargo Cult Science, Richard Feynman specifically called out this type of research as being problematic:

"One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results."

"I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice."

IMHO the open source community is just as bad on average, if not worse. You better believe they have an agenda and they often aren't held under the same level of scrutiny as corporations, who have to face up to investors, competitors, governments, and "lottery ticket" lawsuits (especially Microsoft these days). The solution? We need fewer one-sided publishing of studies. We also need more studies overall, as they naturally conflict and are situationally dependent, but together would paint a better picture of the state of the world.

Of course finding funding for unbiased studies that will be published regardless of outcome is probably hard to come by.

Here to get you started, here is a article I send Linux friends, since this was written by a Linux fan - it is several years old though.

http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~cspress/HelloWorld/1999 /04-apr/security.html

Secondly, just put in: nt kernel client server

Into almost any search engine, Google is what I tested it on. You can also substitute client-server to help weed out some of the articles just talking about client server computing models and not the NT kernel and OS architecture itself.

Basically, NT has a client/server kernel and is a client/server OS architecture as well. It is not monolithic and serve multiple layers at the kernel level, but does so in a way that performance is not lost at the rate of other layered kernel designs like you would find in Linux.

It is just a different kernel concept that the people building NT came up with to give the best of both worlds, almost monolithic kernel speeds, and without the layered overhead. Cutler and his team were no fools, and if people remember came from the VMS and Unix world, not a Microsoft world.

Take Care...

I consider myself that articles like this should not be taken so serious (yes, I have RTFA), they do not contribute to clarify the role of science but instead throw sh*t on it. Science is built from theories, which are supported by experimental facts.
I recommend you read "Cargo cult science" by Richard Feynman (http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_scien ce.html)

the congressman is parroting criticisms from a certain Canadian gadfly who has been proven on several occasions not to be well educated on matters of physical climatology.

The Canadian however is well educated on the subject of statistical analysis. The debate centers on the statistical validity of MHB 98 paper. Even if you don't know a damn thing about climate, you can still check the correctness of the math.

Opponents of the scientific consensus, being political rather than scientific, decided this was an opportunity.

Science is not a democracy. Many of the sciences that rely heavily on advance statistical tools can easily fall victim to Cargo Cult Science.

Although the letter seems to be out of line on a few issues, any close examination in the area of climate science will reveal its messiness. Mann could have blown all this away if only he revealed his source code so others can audit the work.

Wow.

...just.... wow.

Computer security experts consider a "trusted" computer to be the worst case scenario - it's a computer that you have no control over, so you are forced to "trust" that whoever *does* control it is really instructing it to do what they say it's doing.

Trust in **REAL** **SCIENCE** is almost exactly the same ideal. That scientists should be considered trustworthy or untrustworthy is entirely beside the point because science is concerned with what **NATURE** is doing, not the scientists. If their description of the phenomenon is *really* the correct one (or at least, close to correct), then some other independent person should be able to see that same result as well. Otherwise, there was something going on in researcher #1's lab that had nothing to do with the phenomenon in question. The whole idea behind duplicating experiments is to confirm that we got it right, that we really are describing what nature is actually doing.

Science isn't like marketing or business or history or law or sociology or literature or music or psychology -- you get ZERO points for *impressing* your audience with what you did and how you did it. Relativity isn't great because of Einstein, Einstein is great because he figured how to describe nature using relativity.

Oh, and here's some light reading from Feynman in case you are still confused about why this is important.

Maybe it's because, in Feynman's words, science is skepticism.

I was shocked to find Feynman quoted on their site; it's damned near insulting. Feyman actually went to Princeton and like Einstein, Sagan, Hawking, and the other great scientists of our time understood the importance of doubting and doublechecking results until you're absolutely sure you're seeing what you think you're seeing.

Have a read of Cargo Cult Science for some Epistemology 101 buddy.

They use these junk findings to convince the public of things, though.

Any findings that have not stood up to peer review should be discredited as such. That's the whole point of the article: that journalists are giving undue attention to bad science.

Indeed.

[Falsified] results won't be repeatable in independent experimentation. That's also where science works.

That's true, but it takes more digging to discover that later experiments do not support earlier conclusions. That's way beyond what journalists are doing today.

I had to do some research to find out about this, but it is a little different. Millikan turned out to be right.

Not really. Millikan asked an important question and created a great experiment to find it. But his numeric value for e/m_e was too low. Possibly because he cherry-picked the data, possibly because his value for the viscosity of air was off, etc. For whatever reason, his answer was off. What you don't hear about as often is how subsequent experiments slowly diverged from his:

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

That's from Cargo Cult Science by Feynman. (Who is known in a few scientific circles himself. ;)

Obviously you are overly pessimistic about the development possiblities within 50 years.

Yes, I am highly pessimistic. The only areas where AI is making significant progress is where it derives from classical process control and signal processing. And this in itself is more a result of ever increasing processing power and improved component quality than any breakthroughs that originated in the field of AI.

The assumption seems to be that if we just keep improving sensor resolution, filtering algorithms, and actuator accuracy, the difference in degree will somehow become a difference in kind, but there is really no theory which explains how this will happen or why. It's just blind faith, really. People who question the prevailing dogma are ridiculed as suckers who cannot escape their antropomorphic bias, or tree-hugging idealists who refuse to accept materialism.

Meanwhile the knowledge management and reasoning people have been stuck since the eighties solving closed-world Towers of Hanoi type problems, and the A-Life/emergent behavior types continue to present their painfully stupid carpet-cleaners as revolutionary breakthroughs.

I expect that we will become pretty good at mimicking certain human behaviors in the near future (10 to 30 years). The question is whether at that point we will have created intelligence or something more akin to a cargo cult.

I believe that the modern view on axioms is largely due to Poincare. Have a look at his book Science and hypothesis

If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.

No we wouldn't. Nobody is going to throw money at trying to do in practice something which doesn't work in theory. There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.

Paper and pencils don't cost much. Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible, and you can bet they'll get money.

The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.

Do you have a source for that? Besides which, that isn't relevant. There is a huge difference between showing something is possible and showing that it is not impossible.

Feynman himself also made a lot of good statements about pseudoscience. Perhaps you should read them? Unlike you, I provide a reference.

For the even more misinformed:
Einstein's special relativity was actually Jules Henri Poincare's special relativity and Einstein General relativity was actually David Hilbert's general relativity.

In 1998, Poincare attacks the distinction Lorentz and Larmor make between "local time" and "universal time": "Nous n'avons pas l'intuition directe de l'égalité de deux intervalles de temps. Les personnes qui croient posséder cette intuition sont dupes d'une illusion... Le temps doit être défini de telle facon que les équations de la méquanique soient aussi simples que possible. En d'autres termes, il n'y a pas une manière de mesurer le temps qui soit plus vrai qu'une autre; celle qui est généralement adoptée est seulement plus commode. ...Il a commencé par admettre que la lumière a une vitesse constante, et en particulier que sa vitesse est la même dans toutes les directions. C'est là un postulat sans lequel aucune mesure de cette vitesse ne pourrait être tentée. Ce postulat ne pourra jamais être vérifié directment par l'expérience; il pourrait être contredit par elle, si les résultats des diverses mesures n'étaient pas concordants. Nous devons nous estimer hereux que cette contradiction n'ait pas lieu et que les petites discordances qui peuvent se produire puissent s'expliquer facilement. ...c'est que je veux retenir, c'est qu'il nous fournit une règle nouvelle pour la recherche de la simultanéité... Il est difficile de séparer le problème qualitatif de la simultanéité du problème quantitatif de la mesure du temps; soit qu'on se serve d'un chronomètre, soit qu'on ait à tenir compte d'une vitesse de transmission, comme celle de la lumière, car on ne saurait mesurer une pareille vitesse sans mesurer un temps. ...La simultanéité de deux événements, ou l'ordre de leur succession, l'égalité de deux durées, doivent être définies de telle sorte que l'énoncé des lois naturelles soit aussi simple que possible. En d'autres termes, toutes ces règles, toutes ces définitions ne sont que le fruit d'un opportunisme incoscient." (H. Poincaré, La mesure du temps, in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1898), pp. 1-13)

In 1902, Poincare writes there is no absolute time and no absolute space: "1 Il n'y a pas d'espace absolu et nous ne concevons que des mouvements relatifs... 2 Il n'y a pas de temps absolu; dire que deux durées sont égales, c'est une assertion qui n'a par elle-même aucun sense et qui n'en peut acquérir un que par convention... 3 Non seulement nous n'avons pas l'intuition directe de l'égalité de deux durées, mais nous n'avons même pas celle de la simultanéité de deux événements qui se produisent sur des théâtres différents; c'est ce que j'ai expliqué dans un article intitulé la Mesure du temps; 4 Enfin notre géometrie euclidienne n'est elle-même qu'un sorte de convention de langage; nous porrions énoncer les faits mécaniques en les rapportant à un espace non euclidien qui serait un repère moins commode, mais tout aussi légitime que notre espace ordinaire; l'énoncé deviendrait ainsi beaucoup plus compliqué; mais il resterait possible. Ainsi l'espace absolu, le temps absolu, la géométrie même ne sont pas des conditions qui s'imposent à la mécanique; toutes ces choses ne preéexistent pas plus à la mécanique que la langue francaise ne préexiste logiquement aux vérités que l'on exprime en francais."(H. Poincaré, La science et l'hypothèse, 1902, ch. VI, pp. 111-112 - English translation) We know, by the way, th

You advocate a government (or governments) dictating to a publicly held company how they should write their software?

Well, actually governments are already dictating to motor companies how they should design and manufacture their cars (by enforcing safety and emission standards). In a similar manner they also dictate to electronic companies how they should design and manufacture their appliances (once again, by enforcing standards), and the list of the things they are dictating to construction companies is endless. So... what is so strange, actually, in government-enforced standards in computing? I think it is inevitable, sooner or later. The old joke "what if Microsoft build cars" has a grain of truth in it. Unlike cars, there are no mandatory crash tests for software. And it shows.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen. For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient our cars are.

Yes, I agree that today's internal combustion engines are ineffienct. However, this is a classic apples-to-oranges comparision gone bad. The prehistoric plant matter in question went through a whole heck of a lot in its journey to becoming crude oil. As another poster already pointed out, a non-trivial part of that transformation was loss of most of the water in the plants, and hence much of their volume. That means his figures for the weight are already suspect.

It would be much more proper to first examine the plants-to-petrol transformation process, and comment on how efficient that process is first, then the petrol-to-MPG process.

This is simply more cargo cult science, and we can and should do better, IMO.

The English translation of Poincare's "Science & Hypothesis" can be found here.

I may be naive, or cargo culting, but have you considered Bluetooth devices? For at least part of the problem, bluetooth seems to have been designed exactly to meet these needs: my impression is that Bluetooth keyboards & mice could take care of at least that portion of the devices you're trying to attach, provided that the connection distance isn't too far (the ranges needed are never stated in the original posting).

As for display, sound card & CD drive, I'm not sure what the best approach is. As another poster noted, the best way to find out would be to test your ideas to see if they'll work. I'm not sure what sound card you're considering; the only external one I'm personally aware of is the Griffin iMic, but the sample of it that I saw only had a 2 foot long USB cable. I have no idea if it would work with an extended cable, or if there's a faster Firewire version; I also don't know if the iMic only works with Macs (the original poster also doesn't give any platform constraints that may exist). I wouldn't be surprised if there are, or will be, Bluetooth devices (or Bluetooth optical drives, or at least housings for optical/hard drives), but again I'm not aware of details, if they exist.

As for VGA, I've set up a PC to connect to a display that was about 100 feet away, using a chain of server room VGA cables. The picture was awful, but servicable -- lots of ghosting & blurriness, but large screen features were clearly recognizable. While this was amusing as a prank on the person who's desktop was showing up down the hall, if you actually want your display that far away you might want to find a more professional solution :-)

The big constraint for all the things you want to attach is range: I'd always had the impression that USB wasn't reliable over distances greater than 10 feet or so, and again it isn't known how far these studios are going to be from the computers. Right on the other side of a wall? A dozen feet away? A hundred? The longer it is, the more work this is going to take.

Taking a different approach, this could possibly be an appropriate application for some kind of "small", self-contained devices, like PDAs or tablet PCs, using some kind of wireless networking (bluetooth or 802.11b/g). That takes care of your input & display issues, but may or may not meet the sound card constraint. I know that PDAs run quiet & cool; I assume that tablet PCs run louder & hotter, but hopefully they aren't as noisy or hot as a normal desktop or laptop. In any case, it's an option to consider.

Veering off in yet another bizarre direction, this could be an appropriate application for a beefy server & a bunch of VT100 terminals. They're quiet & cool, but they force you to use character based interfaces, and you'll *have* to use some kind of separate sound card (which you seem to be planning on anyway).

But again, this is an "interesting" problem, which is to say that the right solution might be sensitive to constraints that haven't really been spelled out (range, budget, hardware & software constraints, etc), and barring more information along those lines it's possible to come up with all kinds of creative, and possibly not very helpful, suggestions :-)

The bulk of this code comes right out of the readme file for the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple module. The main changes I made were to add the LWP call to download the source file, and I tweaked the line to split up the columns (as later replies went over & fixed).

CPAN should get the credit for this -- I'm mainly cargo culting :-)

Hi Everyone:

I'll probably try to get around to replying to many of your posts directly (will, the really useful ones at least :) ), but I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for their input thus far, and reply to some of the recurring ideas and themes.

The jSyncManager has, in fact, been around for quite a while. I started working on it back in 1997. It eventually became my thesis project. Shortly after graduating from Brock University, I joined up with IBM, working at their Toronto Software Lab.

At this time, the project was closed source (a bit of a mistake on my part). As with many big software firms, I had to sing the restrictive "IBM owns everything you develop" employment contract, which made continued work on the jSyncManager difficult (this was at a time when IBM was still formulating its rules for employees participating in Open Source projects).

As an in-between solution, I entered into an agreement with my local legal department to offer the jSyncManager through IBM in a co-copyrighted manner, where I retained the copyright to everything as it existed prior to joining IBM. Due to some problems IBM had with the name, it was changed to IBM ManplatoSync for Java. My original agreement was that the project was to be released as Open Source under the IBM Public License -- but while I kept working on the project (in my own time mind you, and for no money), the IBM lawyers kept passing the buck, and permission to actually release the project source to the public was never granted.

After leaving IBM early last year, I decided to dig up the pre-IBM source, fix it up somewhat, and make the jSyncManager Open Source myself.

In the time I've been working on the project, we've had several mentions in the press (Chapter 11 of O'Reilly's "Java Cookbook" mentions the jSyncManager in passing, the May 2000 issue of Java Pro reviewed us against Palm's own CDK for Java (very favourably I might add :) ), and we got a mention in "Assistants", an Australian publication for Chartered Accountants), and I've spoke about the jSyncManager at a few conferences (Wrox Wireless 2001 in Amsterdam, WarpStock 2001 in Toronto, and CASCON 2001 (sponsored by IBM and the National Research council of Canada), also in Toronto). Unfortunately, all of these happened before I released the jSyncManager as Open Source. Things since have been pretty dry (even though IMO we have a much better product now!).

So, we're in a good position to attract attention and funding -- we're a mature project that is rock-solid (we do have to work on our initial setup a bit, as getting end-users to grab all of the necessary third-party libraries we rely upon is curruntly an issue, but it's something we'll work on by creating installer versions that include the necessary libraries once we get closer to our next GA release), and has been received favourably in several communities.

(I do want to note that when I wrote up my story submission, I was quite aware of the potential marketing implications of getting such a story on Slashdot, as some readers here have observed. This wasn't really my intention, which is why I'm trying to ask generic questions to see what ideas every has -- I'm hoping other projects can benifit from this discussion as well. Getting our website /.'ed is an unintended side benifit :) ).

Something I've learned in the six years I've been developing the jSyncManager is that while I'm an excellent coder (well, at least I think so ;) ), and a good project administrator, and while I don't mind blowing my own horn somewhat, I know that I am _not_ a sales/m

I just read Feynman's speech (referenced in someone else's comment.) Feynman has some experience with psychology experiments there that closely match your own.

The court stated that scientific evidence is admissible only if the principle upon which it is based is " `sufficiently established to have general acceptance in the field to which it belongs.' "

This is just more of the system protecting the sytem. The late, great Dr. Richard Feynman said it best, and said it almost 30 years ago in a speach he gave at Caltech.

This is the reason why those kooks annoy me so much; it's not that they beleive in a complicated, contrived scenario so much as they use the lack of proof for their delusion as proof of correctness. Making them, by definition, immune to logic or facts.

Exactly! I found Feynman's thoughts on this sort of thing, psuedoscience, etc particularly interesting (read: agreeable to me, cause I agree with them 100 % :) ). In particular Cargo Cult Science is a good read for anybody who hasn't already.

I agree. Let's get priorities straight.
This kind of thinking strikes me as some kind of reverse cargo cult.
That is, the fallacy that if we give a society the implements of technology, then said society will act like a modernized society, improving conditions, because conditions are better in industrialized, modern societies than non-modern societies.

Yet fooling the press and the anti-scientific does not fact make. Those who dispute global warming are like Flat Earth types and creationists, rallying around fallacy and refusing to consider facts they find inconvenient. It's all Cargo Cult Science.

Some /. readers are probably adept enough at math to review the raw data and decide for themselves: solar irradiance data has been tracked and known for many years and is built into climate models that show, unequivocally, the consequences of human induced climate change. Even Bush finally admitted it.

Will the earth survive such changes? Of course it will. Will the human race survive? Probably. Will the long term cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels exceed the short term cost of switching to low carbon-load alternatives? Almost certainly.

But when evaluating the arguments of anti-environmentalists, which seem so utterly out of sync with even basic science, one must remember that, like their spiritual mentor James Watt, those that believe that Armageddon is around the corner will do nothing to protect the rights of future generations.

Read the Journal's website, folks -- it's a psych journal, not a mol-bio/physics/hard-science journal. Most of the posts here are getting this wrong.

This is in fact the reason why this journal is such a great idea. As a social science, the field of psychology has a much greater problem than fields like physics with dubious positive experiments getting overhyped -- the media will hype the one study that says the Internet turns kids into axe murders, but it doesn't mention the 99 other studies that found no relation.

Feynmann, in fact, wrote an article called 'Cargo-Cult Science', in which he attacked the discipline of psychology for not repeating experiments to check old results. Yes, he would 100% approve of this new journal.

When prepping for the divisional sale, corporate redlined ALL training. PHBs now have the attitude that development can send out a quick e-mail on all the new stuff. Between the layoffs and job hunters anyone calling in for help is pretty well doomed. The medical keeps me around for the family, but as third tier guy, I remember solving problems and not forwarding calls.

It's the age of cargo cult computing . If A happens type A-Response. If B happens type B-Response. . . If you're not on the script pass the buck and whine.

He may have been morally dispicable, but Theodore Kazinsky had a lot to say on the matter of globalization (or, more generally, the negative effects of industrialized society). Although the Manifesto was published in several major newspapers, not too many people really paid attention to what he was trying to say.

I guess that's understandable, given that he was into blowing people up. Draw the parallel to the terrorists. The mass media is mostly dousing any legitmacy they may have in their criticism of the USA (mostly unvocalized criticism, but look at their target). Which is unfortunate, because we could learn a lot from our enemies.

The corporations that now drive our industrial/technological society and gain the most from it are the key to understanding the fringe's criticism and hatred of the US. Rather than simply dismissing Kazinsky as a Luddite, consider that he and other dissenting voices may actually be trying to tell us something genuinely important.

This isn't a troll. Read the Manifesto, and momentarly set aside the fact that Ted was a bomber (although, appearantly not insane). Well you are at it, set aside your attachment to your confortable lifestyle and try to look at the bigger picture.

And if you really want to have some fun, take this Al Gore vs. the Unibomber Quiz.

Good luck.

He may have been morally dispicable, but Theodore Kazinsky had a lot to say on the matter of globalization (or, more generally, the negative effects of industrialized society). Although the Manifesto was published in several major newspapers, not too many people really paid attention to what he was trying to say.

I guess that's understandable, given that he was into blowing people up. Draw the parallel to the terrorists. The mass media is mostly dousing any legitmacy they may have in their criticism of the USA (mostly unvocalized criticism, but look at their target). Which is unfortunate, because we could learn a lot from our enemies.

The corporations that now drive our industrial/technological society and gain the most from it are the key to understanding the fringe's criticism and hatred of the US. Rather than simply dismissing Kazinsky as a Luddite, consider that he and other dissenting voices may actually be trying to tell us something genuinely important.

This isn't a troll. Read the Manifesto, and momentarly set aside the fact that Ted was a bomber (although, appearantly not insane). Well you are at it, set aside your attachment to your confortable lifestyle and try to look at the bigger picture.

And if you really want to have some fun, take this Al Gore vs. the Unibomber Quiz.

Good luck.

See here for commentary on Nostradamus that happens to use this exact quatrain as an example of a prophecy that's vague enough that a huge number of possible events could seem to fit it. Of the four specifics ("City of God", "two brothers", "fortress endures", "great leader will succumb") only two are actually even close ("City of God" for New York, or maybe Washington or maybe both - seems like a very poor fit; no leaders have succumbed).

This prophecy would apply just as well (in fact, better) to something like political/ecclesiastical family infighting in Renaissance Rome: City of God (seat of the Church), two brothers (family conflict, and remember that the Popehood was often controlled by the powerful political families), fortress endures (easy enough to come up with interpretations like "the glory of the Church endures"), great leader will succumb (the struggle causes the fall of one of the rulers).

Ok, allow me to stamp this out before it goes much furter. This quote is from this page: http://www.ed.brocku.ca/~nmarshal/nostradamus.htm

As I posted in a similar thread on the earlier story, this is not from Nostradamus, but rather an attempt by the author of the site (who does NOT claim to be psychic) to show how, given a vague "prediction", that something in the future will fit it. Seems to have backfired, tho.

But, I suppose that some people would rather believe it is from Nostadamus, and feel 'eerie' about it, rather than facing the truth, and seeing that it is just a coincidence.

Find out about Turing Machines
here
Find out about the Turing Test
here

They may not be the best resources on the matter,
but they seem to be OK, and will link to other places...

As you will see, the Turing Test and the Turing Machine are only related by the fact that the same clever geezer thought them up, and they have something to do with computing.