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One of the more interesting morbid articles I have stumbled across lately: Little Men (the subject being a pair of shrunken corpses).

Though I can ride w/o hands, I'd probably crash playing chess or simcity on my way to school. Davis has way too many bikes. =P

"Not another bike distraction!!!"

Maybe Edgar Cayce was right when he spoke of Atlantis and the use of crystals: "...Rays of various kinds were controlled, including the death ray. Fluxes of metals unknown today were used in the various types of air and water craft which were constructed by the Atlanteans. The forces used to propel these crafts were first gas and electricity, but later, forces from the sun's rays - caught and reflected by crystals."

Maybe there is some truth to what the whackos say about crystal power.

Or maybe not.

-- anthony /p>

And after all these years how do you show that Plato did it himself, rather than simply repeating something he had heard and being the first person to be recorded to do so?

A quick Google search turned up a number of pages, including this one (the first half of the page or so, through the first paragraph after the Plato quote, is relevant), summarizing research done by people far more expert in the field than me (and, I'm guessing, most anyone reading /.).

The Egyptians built quite well with just human labor rather than using domestic animals.

Large domesticable animals aren't just useful as a source of labor; at least according to Diamond's thesis (see my post above), they're one of the factors in how easily and advanced a civilization can develop. Among other things, close habitation with large animals leads to plague-style diseases in humans (no goatse.cx posts, please!), and thus to improved resistance to those diseases, which were subsequently carried over to the Americas.

Also: The Americas had quite a range of stuff - including wolly mamoths - until the inhabitants ATE them.

Exactly, and more interestingly, large animals disappeared from the Americas immediately (speaking in archaeological timespans here) after humans arrived -- i.e. there were essentially no large domesticable animals that mattered in the development of civilizations in America.

As for plants - where do you think corn comes from, just for starters? And tomatoes?

Right; I'm aware of that. What many people aren't aware of is that corn became usefully domesticable only shortly before Europeans arrived (again archaeologically speaking here); Americans had to improve it very slowly and painstakingly, as it was essentially useless as a crop (took too much energy to gather relative to the energy it took to harvest). Likewise with the tomato -- not a particularly useful staple crop, unlike the huge varieties of staple crops available in Eurasia/northern Africa.

I'm getting off-topic here, though; I'm not trying to argue that the Americas didn't have civilization, but that they were dealt a crappy hand in terms of a civilization-friendly environment. You're right, one more American civilization would be no surprise, but it's worth being skeptical of the finding, at least until further study is done, and calling it a good candidate for Atlantis is premature to an extreme.

Is that a Boston Boskonian, or a Springfield Boskonian?

No, this kind of Boskonian.

Or, more specifically, this kind.

Sun pack for Apple powerbooks

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

Sounds cool. I'm here at UC Davis; that's about 20 minutes away by car for you non-locals ;), and the only 802.11b we have is in the library. That's changing. The Mech/Aero Engr bldg is getting 802.11 and all the profs are getting laptops. It'd be even more cool if UCD/City of Davis were to install some 802.11 routers and repeaters throughout the city. That would be bad-ass. Since my SDSL is getting turned off due to the NorthPoint thing.

PS: Occam's (or Ockham's) Razor is "plurality should not be posited without necessity." Your supposed quote was a bastardization of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" by Robert Heinlein (Logic of Empire, 1941), the primary use of which has historically been either by or in defense of those engaged in some sort of malfeasance of office. My, less abusable, quote, with which I always rejoin is Bowery's Razor: "Never attribute to sheer stupidity that which can be adequately explained by unenlightened self-interest." Live by it.

I thought I was fast for catching that as I scrolled down and came to your post!.

Some days I wonder why I even bother reading Slashdot. I feel sorry for the guy who feels like he has to make a bunch of posts justifying a company. If they are on the up&up you just need one post to say that were all sux0rs and then get back to work and prove slashdot wrong.

Not that linuxgruven is doing any wrongdoing with out proof, but the thing that is alluded to here is a ponzi scheme More here and here I've had a number of relatives who have had first hand experience with these.

The people that get trapped in these are often trusting, "good" upstanding people with never any intention of doing anybody wrong. Unfortunately this veneer is all it takes for the unscrupolous to come along and take advantage and hence their wallet.

No, no, no... If you like Star Wars and technology, try E.E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" series. It was written at the height of the 1930's "space police" space opera and intentionally overwhelmed the others in scope and scale. If you think the Star Wars rebels are underdogs, you don't know Atlantis. If you think the Star Wars fleet battles are large and complex, you don't know fleet formation fighting. If you think planetary defenses are impressive, you don't know the difference between a negasphere and a planet's intrinsic velocity.

Uh, no. Evolution works on timescales of millions of years, not hundreds. More likely would be a technological solution, and it would have to be a solution that alters the environment, not one that alters biology.

...according to Nostradamus, the "end of the world" should be fairly soon.

Oh, please. According to Nostradamus, the end of the world should have been 500 year ago. Before you use Nostradamus for any kind of predictions, you ought to go see what kind of track record he's got. Hint -- it's pretty miserable. Hundreds of people try to use Nostradamus to predict things every few years, and they have uniformly flopped. Based on that track record, we probably can't expect any better today.

The year 1999 seven months
From the sky will come the great King of Terror.
To resuscitate the great king of the Mongols.
Before and after Mars reigns by good luck.

Oops. Missed another one. More reading here.


...phil

www.davis.k12.ut.us A School District in Utah
www.dcn.davis.ca.us A small non-profit ISP that includes the city in their domain name. In Davis, CA
www.city.davis.ca.us The City of Davis, CA
www.washtenaw.cc.mi.us A Community college in Michigan.

Having had an e-mail address at a similiar domain as above a lot of people get confused on it, and it can be a mess.

www.davis.k12.ut.us A School District in Utah
www.dcn.davis.ca.us A small non-profit ISP that includes the city in their domain name. In Davis, CA
www.city.davis.ca.us The City of Davis, CA
www.washtenaw.cc.mi.us A Community college in Michigan.

Having had an e-mail address at a similiar domain as above a lot of people get confused on it, and it can be a mess.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

1. The only way I can perceive civil discussions happening on sites like this is if... people were required to post under some form of recognizable ID, and... moderators with power kept the conversation on track and kicked out people who attacked ideas or posters personally or strayed off topic.

Sidestepping the undemocratic leanings of this rant, we get to ask ourselves one question. What could be more offtopic than a nontechnical, newbie hack preaching to hackers on the net's numero uno technical weblog?

2. But remember that I express opinions more frequently than anybody on Slashdot

And more verbosely. Must have skipped the pith and wit classes at that journalism school he so clearly (anti-thesis?) never went to.

3. I read all criticism, even flames. I don't believe in many aspects of the moderation system. I set my prefs to everything. To me, steering software is the anti-thesis of community. I consider it self-censorship, a Balkanization of ideas, an effort to smother a human problem with software.

You don't like it, why not hack the source, which is freely available, and remove this offending 'Ba lkanization'. Incidentally, if it wasn't for the filtering system, more people would be exposed to your low-content name-dropping, and you would no longer be able to sustain the impausible boast that you "read all criticism, even flames."

4. I read Freshmeat every day, and marvel at it, understanding hardly anything. It's one of the most interesting places to go on the Web.

If you're too thick to understand it (what's to understand?) why do you continue to read it? Who are you trying to impress?

5. For example, I believe government should have stopped Microsoft much sooner, and should definitely halt the AOL/Time-Warner merger.

Why? I'd be particularly interested to hear what legal basis you think there is for a suit against AOL/Time-Warner, as, I'm sure, would their lawyers. For someone who describes himself as "skittish about labels and parties" and "not a political person" you sure have a sweet tooth for Big Government.

6. But I have to say that my thinking about Libertarianism is a work-in-progress. Maybe the best response is to write about it a bit, and start some discussions.

Maybe if you thought about things before engaging MSWord you might be more esteemed as a writer than a pissweak cluebie.

7. I don't believe most people on Slashdot hate me.

Let's put it to a poll. It's gotta beat "What's your favourite number?" and "Who's your favourite Khan?" anyday.

8. I have been railing against Microsoftism before most of you were programming.

I started in 1981 (with the ZX81). You've been flaming Microsoft for 19 years? Clever boy. Care to post a URL?

9. ... many of you would be mortified to know how many people come onto Slashdot to laugh at the nightmare that is Threads. [Ha Ha. Thread Derision: The world's fastest growing spectator sport. I think not.] Rob's moderation systems have definitely made this better, and he thinks quite a bit about this issue.

Compare and contrast with point 3.

10. Slashdot is hiring some professional editors.

Why doesn't it hire a professional writer while it's at it, so you can be swiftly put out of our misery? All these criticisms become null and void if you'd take your talent (everyone has it: even you) outside of this essentially technical forum. CmdrTaco is too honourable and hippyish to bludgeon you to death like a baby seal. Why don't you do the right thing and resign? I see the katzdot domains are still available...

Dvorak wins by a long shot. I spent approximately a month training to get to my old qwerty speed and accuracy. Things I've noticed _personally_ since switching:

1) I haven't had that sore-typing-hands feeling since.
2) Typing on the qwerty keyboard now feels like I'm tying my fingers in knots. Typing on dvorak just "flows".
3) I've gained approximately 15 WPM since switching. My old qwerty rate was approximately 80wpm- with dvorak, I'm up to 95wpm. I've even hit around 120wpm a few times.
4) If anything, my typing is more accurate. I did not track this- however, I certainly haven't lost any accuracy.
5) Yes, I even like it more for programming.

Papers and studies and articles in nonwithstanding, the only way you will ever know if it works for you is to try it. From the web pages I've seen, an overwhelming majority have been pro-dvorak.

Finally, I remember last year reading a very convincing rebuttal to the "Fable of the Keys" article on which this Economist article is largely based. I'll post the URL as a reply here if I can find it again. I've been unsuccessful so far.

Some good links for those who want to see for themselves:

Comparison of Dvorak and Qwerty typing "demons":
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/Dvorak/demons.ht ml

Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard:
http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak /dvorak.html

Let Your Fingers Do Less Walking:
http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~s ander/mensa/dvorak1.html