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My brain doesn't seem to be working well (I had a few beers). I thought I'd read everything he wrote, what's that from?

It's from a speech he gave at a conference which hasn't actually been published anywhere, but was captured on tape, and Richard Dawkins quoted it in his eulogy.

The German driver thing illustrates that it might be safe for German drivers to speed on American highways. Sadly, many Americans have adopted the view that flaunting the least possible precaution demonstrates maximal independence from the nanny state. Somehow the Germans manage to maintain masculinity while wearing proper safety equipment. If America had a sane culture of safety, Palin's approval rating would be -300%

Have you ever used a chainsaw without wearing a face shield and Kevlar pants? No soup for you.

The second requirement is passing a piss test for shit-eating grin.

Robert Sapolsky on TOXO

Finally, I have to wonder what the medical response time in Utah looks like compared to any Hamburg in Germany. Half the time I bet the salt truck gets there sooner than the ambulance. Perhaps in Utah that's considered acceptable.

If there indeed is no such thing as a soul, then science should be theoretically able to create life out of bunch of atoms through chemical reactions. If that happens, it would be a strong argument against God's existence. But so far, science couldn't create even an amoeba, simplest of all beings. I guess there's a component scientists are missing

Well, if the study described in that link is true and valid, your point is not true anymore and we could then have that strong argument as you said. http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge318.html

For a bunch more positions, see "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" (edge.org's 2010 Annual Question - Pinker and Carr are both among the 172 essayists who responded).

Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)

There, I feel better now.

Here's another postscript. Edge Foundation way back in 1999 ran a question with some historical depth.

EDGE: What Is The Most Important Invention?

From my notes: Joseph Traub, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, David Shaw, David Myers, Milford H. Wolpoff, John McCarthy, Philip Brockman, Howard Rheingold, Samuel Barondes and John Rennie all put forward the scientific method or some variation on scientific progress, alongside all the usual votes for the pill, the printing press, the a-bomb, digital electronics, and hay.

Around the time of that survey, a lot of people convinced themselves that this new model for managing a company (or a software product line) made sense, because that was how the world worked now. No, actually. Even in the dotcom stampede, bad management was bad management. This will hold true of science as well.

The scientific method is way too important in the history of modern civilization to have the IPCC make lite of this tradition in order to win a political grudge match.

Too bad Wolfram used up the title "A New Kind of Science". We could have saved it for IPCC committee reports with 2,500 eminent signatures.

I say this with full conviction that the central human activity of the 21'st century will be paying the piper for high living. I still harbour a dim hope that we'll pay off these days less rashly than we entered into them. Yes, I can see it now. This will all come to pass through a non-contentious political process involving scientific walled gardens, incestuous peer review, and sanctified data hoarding.

I've said this a thousand times before: Make Wikipedia a P2P project without a single control, and build a cascading network of trust relationships on top of it (think CSS rules, but on articles instead of elements, and one CSS file per user, perhaps including those of others), and you solve all problems with then not-existing central authorities, and so also with censorship.

I agree wholeheartedly. If I understand correctly, this is very like what David Gelernter is saying with his datasphere/lifestreams concept: a fully distributed system with no centre where any node can absorb and retransmit its own view of the data universe. Twitter and 'retweets' is a sort of lame, struggling, misbegotten attempt to shamble towards this idea.

What would happen, I think, is that such a distributed Wikipedia would converge on a few 'trusted super-editors' who produced their own authorised versions - like Linux kernel forks or distributions - since the pressure to join a 'good enough' peer group would force forking to only happen where necessary. And yes, there'd probably emerge separate political factions: a Mainstream Wikipedia, a Citizendium, a Conservapedia, an Encyclopedia Dramatica, a UFOpedia, a Treknopedia, each of which has their own idea of what subjects are/are not 'noteworthy' or which sources are well-attested... but that's fine, we have that already, what we'd win in a truly distributed system is not the ability the ability to fork (which the GPL already gives us) but the ability to easily remerge which is currently a real pain.

There's no reason, for instance, why Citizendium, TVTropes, Encyclopedia Dramatica, C2, MeatballWiki, etc all couldn't share the same technical base and content and link to and import/export from each other, and just provide different editorial policies or views. And I think we'd all win hugely if we could bring that about.

My alternative vision is very close to that of David Gelernter or Ted Nelson: information should be central, there should be a 'cloud-like' thing (a datasphere or dataspace or whatever we call it) which is not the page-based Web, or the node-based Net, but a sort of floating repository of information, with the appropriate security/privacy controls. Unlike the Web, it wouldn't be a client-server infrastructure, or at least not one where those who own the servers get to set content policy, but anyone could stake out space on an equal basis.

And all physical devices should just be very thin portals over this shared self-published dataspace that set as little policy as possible: the only device policy should be the absolute minimum required by the form-factor, UI, CPU. The actual 'stuff', the content, the apps should be device-independent as much as possible, and the division between 'user' and 'developer' should be erased: anyone who shares or remixes content should automatically be a publisher/developer, able to aggregate and republish their own information feeds (like Gelernter's Lifestreams or Nelson's 'applitudes').

Apple (and even Linux - Ubuntu) are going full speed in the other direction, to me the wrong direction: back to the days of single-purpose, single-use apps strongly tied to single-purpose devices, and a strict separation between 'user' and 'developer'. I believe this is very damaging and it frustrates me deeply to see otherwise bright people buying back into this neo-feudalism.

We need a Cloud, just not the Cloud that's being pitched to us, because it's built on bad ideas which will hurt us.

Please fight this tendency to re-centralise and re-divide users from programmers. Please.

Considering this piece reads like the sleep-talking of a singularitarian

He runs in those circles:
Kurzweil Debates Gelernter at MIT
I'm shocked how many smart people have a deep intuition that computation can't underlie consciousness when we have so many formal results that the limits of computation are inscrutable (complexity theory).

Users Are Not Reactionary After All
I thought I would find a soul-mate in Gelernter, since I believe strongly in aggregating *my own* data, but in truth I don't get much out of his ideas. This is what I wrote to myself when I first read that piece:

Edge question 2010: made the absurd statement that 99.9% of the technocrats involved in creating the internet will be displaced when the system evolves to operate in a top-down mode. This is extremely insulting, because it implies the technocrats have created the system in the image of their personal limitations, and denies the possibility that we've chosen to work at this level because that's where the action is. If we'd started top down, the internet would have never made it off the ground.

Many of us were well aware that we were cutting rough stone to build a cathedral. I use a personal wiki to keep track of my ideas, and I rely heavily on being able to determine when I added a comment through the page history. The time axis can be immensely useful. Still, it doesn't strike me as a liberating force. I had an Econtalk lecture on my iPod that I ended up listening to in six minute chunks over two weeks. Time can be quite messy in its own right.

Gelernter might be brilliant on some level, but he's Ted Nelson brilliant, FWIW. I think the silver bullet is a metaphor. Gelernter thinks that metaphor is a silver bullet.

The ROB ran a long, long article just a few days ago with some insight into Canadian broadband politics.

Who do you call to clean up a mess like BCE? A man called Cope

On one side of this issue, I've got a copy of Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It". It's an excellent book. I've read big chunks of Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" and I agree with most of it. I've watched the Edge Talk with Yochai Benkler.

On the other side of this issue, I've had broadband from Shaw Cable since June 2005. The Berkman report about the broadband situation in Canada is slanted, and this irritates me immensely, because I agree with their perspective *and* their agenda, but I can't stomach the way they have distorted their data to bring Canada into line with their desired conclusion.

I've had landline phone service from Telus during this time as well, which is why they've never earned my broadband loyalty. Telus definitely plays "blame the customer" as a form of cost control. Especially since Darren Entwistle gained control. Telco landlines in Canada are under very strict regulation about availability of service. On my service there was some floating voltage associated with rainfall (not good when you live fifty miles downwind from a rain forest) which kept triggering my phone to go off-hook when no-one was calling. People would ring, the moisture goddess would signal that my phone had already been answered, the caller would hear nothing, and not even be able to reach my voice message service. There was one wet spring month when my phone was going off hook every few hours. Many waste-of-life conversations with Telus support ensued where I was roundly assured the problem was on my end. Many tickets were closed, which I violently reopened. Meanwhile there was a Telus service truck parked on the street every other day a block away from my house having the most intense romantic affair with a sidewalk service opening. Coincidence? They finally found me a line pair above the water line, and my service has been fine ever since.

My father-in-law spent twenty years flying to oversea oil fields to supervise telephony infrastructure. We have passed some extremely pleasant evenings together discussing this Telus-presumption-of-customer-stupidity-until-they've-charged-you-a-big-fee. He had a problem with his service in Alberta, I forget the details, but it was a misconfiguration on the Telus side. He called them up and explained to them *the precise misconfiguration problem*. Telus of course did nothing for weeks or months, while blaming customer premise equipment. Finally, it did turn out to be their problem, exactly as originally described. Neither of us will ever get that chunk of our life back.

What we need here is a telephony ombudsman. When Telus says we'll charge you $200 if the problem is on your end, then you say "fine, I'll hire the ombudsman". I would easily pay $100 to the ombudsman to show up and adjudicate who really owns the fault. If I'm proved right, Telus owes me $1000. If Telus is proved right, they get my $200 (so I'm now out $300). The fee is higher for Telus, because they have the infrastructure and latitude to know better (should they choose to use it, which would entail some major culture shock).

Mr Entwistle, what's the point here? You waste the time of a lot of competent technical people, now we all hate your guts. Hey, that worked great for Bill, didn't it? No, none of us ever pipe up when the CRTC runs a public consultation. Is this your idea of job security? Scorch the earth so badly no one else *wants* your job? Do you carry "good will" on your balance sheet? How about "bad will", of which there is no shortage? With guerrilla marketing, scoring with the "in" crowd is supposedly a coup. So what

I haven't read more than a few nutty people who think there are no gender differences, both people who think it's all biologically predetrmined and those who think everything is cultural. Most scientists I read fall somewhere in between.

Here's an interesting discussion between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke about gender differences, intelligence and how it relates to women in science:

THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE

Obviously there's a lot of prejudice and sexism clouding the issues, which makes it very hard to say for sure that the differences between adults are biologically programmed. When we've peeled away all the prejudice, what remains should be biological. Even so, biological differences are nothing more than slightly offset normal distributions, meaning that a fair number of women outpeform most men, and vice versa. Conservative gender roles that restrict these people are unnecessary and oppressive, especially when argued from tradition or religion.

If you think gender roles work for you, fine. But they opress a lot of people, and you parttake indirectly in that oppression by defining what's normal and what's not like this. Be a manly man if you want (doubtful since we're on Slashdot, but still), but why judge others like this when it feeds prejudice and sexism?

Fertility rates fall everywhere where women are empowered, so it's not just us. If lower fertility is the price we pay for equality, it's a small price. But there are good reasons to think that more equality can make starting a family a more promising deal, especially for women.

the usual answer is beauty, fairly common

and I know of one guy who sometimes evaluates ideas on moral criteria. (this is not old testament stuff)

On objective truth, I may be full of shit, but I cannot quite pin it down. I mistrust my reification to context-sensitive.

Since we were talking about axiomatic philosophic systems, I googled goodel Wittgenstein. Lots of stuff. Somewhat randomly, I read the following, which might be of interest to you,

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/goldstein05/goldstein05_index.html

Something was niggling at me while composing that last post. I must have imprinted on Bernie, our nine year old fart king impresario: he's always been my archetype of the human condition. I think I imprinted at too young an age, before our pre-pubescent stagecraft kicked into high gear.

Edge: A Bozo of a Baboon

Our frontal lobes are great accouterments, but really, in most of us they function with the consistency of a light bulb in Africa during a lightening storm. I've never once fallen for the suit and tie edition of human magnificence.

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god -- the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!"

Somehow I don't think he's talking about his uncle Bernie. A mite unresolved?

Funny how something niggles, decide maybe Sapolsky has something to say on the matter, and stumble over this, never having seen it before. (Fascinating for those with a bug for writing, but a tough read due to a rough, stuttering, stammering transcription.)

From How I Write

"The trouble is, the thing that's the core here, is Paul doesn't want to grow up and be you, and you know that and it hurts you." This is like, I almost burst into tears. It was like I was having these therapy sessions. And he was right. Paul had betrayed me because he didn't want to grow up and be like me. And I like immediately had to call up Paul and, like, relate this to him, and this was the case, that in fact he had no desire to ever be, like, this narrow. And, it immediately cleared up this one sentence. And this was like the only I've ever had the agonizing over, the editor keeping me from becoming an alcoholic by telling me the unresolved issue. So like that one time, and I've been scared of this guy ever since and never have dealt with him again.

Elsewhere in the Edge article, he comments that after the Bronx, the baboons were a welcome change.

The parent made a bunch of strong claims, without any data reference or argument to back them up. He contradicts the findings of EPOCA, BIOACID and the Royal Society in the UK, the NERC and various other organisations directly tasked with evaluating the situation. Moreover he claims these organisations essentially lie in order to get research money, without as much as a shred of evidence to back up his claims, and this is moderated insightful?

Sure, the appeal to authority is one route you can take; indeed people like you always do that when you want to close down any debate. I don't know if you're aware of Professor Wegman's criticism of the Peer Review process in Climate Science? If not, I think you should read it. Or perhaps you'd prefer an expert opinion on the predictive capabilities of Computer Models? I don't know about you, but I raised an eyebrow when I found out Briffa's "hockey stick" turned out to have been generated from a whole 12 tree cores, or that the recent UN report stating that 300,000 people have died already due to "Climate Change" was a complete load of bollocks? Perhaps the American Chemical Society recently in uproar over it's Chairman's uncritical endorsement of "Global Warming" doesn't make you think twice? Or what about the EPA in the US suppressing a report from one of its own scientists? Does that make you feel uneasy at all?

So, follow the money. Who's going to benefit from Cap and Trade? Who's already benefiting from Carbon Offsetting? Hmmmmmmm.

Call me a heretic, if you like. I'm in good company.

Now, what is the difference (tech-wise) between their shutter glasses and mine? Only the fact that theirs send a specific "yes I'm nvidia" signal back to the card.

I call this the "fill factor" as in landfill. I had a perfectly good Canon scanner that died when Canon decided it would never have a driver more recent than Windows 2000. Off to the landfill in near mint condition. (Or off to China in a mist of CO2 and particulate heavy metals). Generally my experiences with Canon have been good, but this one did not impress me.

I'm appalled at waste streams involving perfectly good manufactured goods that outlived its software. Stewart Brand was joking about "squanderable energy". You mean we don't already have that in the energy invested in squanderable applicances?

squand

I understand his inner mirth at the term. It's against nature to squander entropy. It's like saying "squanderable blood". Maybe from one vantage point. The sentiment is rarely universal.

I've never reconciled myself to some of the emergent stupidities associated with free market capitalism. The main argument is that most of the cures (regulation is the most cited) are worse that the disease--until we caught a bad case of trillion-dollar bail out. Taleb and Summers refer to this outcome as the "privatization of gain, socialization of loss". This was true for a long time about the medical profession (who were slow to grasp sterilization).

Ignaz Semmelweis

Semmelweis was puzzled that puerperal fever was rare amongst women giving street births. "To me, it appeared logical that patients who experienced street births would become ill at least as frequently as those who delivered in the clinic.

OK, so sometimes the cure *is* worse than the disease. But that won't last forever. Free market capitalism (and its champion of the hour, Nvidia) does such a good job of motivating economic Semmelweis's to contemplate the alternatives, if the system can't manage to eliminate it's own issues, we'll eventually reach the point of replacing the whole thing. God forbid it's any system we've tried already.

We haven't yet invented the germ theory of capitalism, so I'll have to content myself by referring to Nvidia's PhysX business decision as a cadaverous particle.

When I was a teen, I always consciously kept track where the North was. Every time I made a turn, I would adjust my imaginary compass - yeah I was some kind of freak. I would also make note of the orientation of some landmarks in every city. After a while, it became an automatism, now (over 20 yrs later) I often amaze people by pointing where the North is with very good accuracy without using a compass. It always works, but if I have been a passenger in a car (or other transport) it takes about half an hour after arriving before I know where the North is. Extra bonus: if the sun is visible, I can read the time of day from its position. I guess everybody can train it with a little bit of effort.

There are several cultures, most famously Australian Aborigines, where you can't even speak the language correctly if you don't have this skill. A quick example is from this article by Lera Borodistky:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms -- north, south, east, and west -- to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

Advocates call the law a necessary control on hate speech in an age where the Internet makes the spread of messages easier and faster. Opponents say it's censorship and has no place in a free society.

Not only are we divided on whether it should be legal, we are divided on what it should be.

Is it hate speech to call other races subhumans, but legal to note in a scientific paper that there IQ differences between races, moral evolutionary differences, or even that statistically, crime is not distributed evenly between all groups?

Half of scientists say race doesn't exist, the others keep quiet.

The bigger issue here is what we're obscuring the pursuit of truth with all sorts of social pretense. Let's look at the facts and keep emotion (true hate speech) and censorship out of the debate.

Upon reading the GP's statement I tried Googling for a graph showing percent of the world's population killed in combat throughout human history. Unfortunately, such records don't seem to exist, although I did stumble upon an interesting article. Modern intellectuals seem to be fond of feeling guilty, but this seems like something of which we should be fairly proud.

Morality is a human invention, so we have a few billion years of natural selection working against us. If you're a creationist then I suppose you could look at human history (IIRC there are only ~100 years of global peace) and decide that either we're made to be violent, or some ever-present thing makes us violent. IMHO the natural world is violent (e.g. ants, cats), and subsequently the most intelligent creatures tend to be the most sadistic (chimps have tribal wars and dolphins kill for entertainment).

Combine that with some game theory and I'm rather surprised at how peaceful we are. Perhaps modern philosophy, civilization and instant communication help, or it could be that our weapons got too effective for a reasonable person to take lightly (i.e. give a person what they think they want and they might realize that they don't want it anymore).

After a long career in the tourism and non-for-profit sector, my brother became fond of the statement "the first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers". When this happens, the contrast ratio tends to increase, leaving a dysfunctional organization ever more dysfunctional. If the best and brightest of rural America are heading into the cities, the same applies. Averaged across America as a whole, nothing has changed, but you do have a slightly smaller, more woeful bucket.

Arthur Benjamin suggests we have the wrong focus in our math education. We should be teaching statistics, not calculus.

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education

A typical person, after learning some calculus in high school, applies this skill precisely zero times in the rest of their adult life.

Statistics, however, is something we encounter on a daily basis, such as this article, with its potentially bamboozled statistical claim (did it properly account for a selective migration effect? Impossible to say from the story summary.)

People tend to have a relatively poor intuitive grasp on statistics, yet it impacts many of our daily decisions. Worse, even among those who have a reasonable grasp of statistics, few have a solid handle on robust statistics, which can be surprisingly subtle.

Bart Kosko (Edge.org is link challenged.)

Does everyone know the old joke that you can take the dumbest guy from a room of 50 pound foreheads and move him into a room of evolution deniers, and the average IQ in both rooms increases (really). This is just to point out that it matters how you draw the lines, as every corrupt politician knows instinctively. It doesn't mean that a single additional person voted in favour of the corrupt politico, yet moving the line can still result in victory.

On another front, urban migration is a fact of the modern world.

Stewart Brand on squatter cities

I have a friend who paddles at an elite level. As the club where she presently rows, the coach recently decided to split the top six athletes three each in an A and B boat. Two things happened: A) the race time averaged across the two crews improved, B) neither boat medalled. The six elite athletes were not impressed.

In Canada, we're inclined toward this kind of social experimentation. I deliberately live on the edge of a slightly seedy area of town, because I oppose further polarization (seedy by Canadian standards is no great hazard to life and limb).

In America, the balance is tipping so that one more year of life for some rich old white fart is procured at great expense, while a far cheaper intervention for an inner city black kid, who might live another twenty years with the benefit of treatment, is often neglected.

Here's an interesting question for debate: how does our widespread statistical ignorance bias social policy? If schools taught statistics instead of calculus, would the coefficient on power-law wealth distribution change one way or the other?

It would destroy the content creators overnight, and then we'd get no quality content.

Not exactly. It would destroy the content creating business. There would not be for-profit corporations spending millions of dollars to produce, market, and distribute content. However, artistic expression would survive just as it did before copyright was invented.

There is no doubt that the world would be drastically different without copyright. There would almost assuredly be less content. Probably even less 'quality' content. However, at times I think that the average American's life revolves around this content a bit too much. People are so busy entertaining themselves that we forget about the future. We live in fictional worlds. We seek immediate satisfaction. People work all day in their service jobs so that they can afford that new TV with the HD player, and a collection of HD movies. People may be content with their entertainment driven lives, but at what cost? How much of Earth's resources are being expended for our entertainment, while our understanding of the world around us increases at a snails pace?

For the 2006 Edge question, Geoffrey Miller wrote an essay titled "Runaway Consumerism Explains the Fermi Paradox" (about half-way down the page), in which he suggests that the reason we have not come across extraterrestrial intelligence is that all intelligent races reach a point where they become consumed in their own creations. They completely lose interest in the real world. "Having real friends is so much more of an effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done so by filming Star Wars."

There was a time when hearing a tale from a traveling bard was a rare treat. Those days have been replaced by ones full of fiction and fantasy. Is this a bad thing? No.. Well.. maybe... Yes? Who knows? The answer is completely subjective.

The escalating violence in society is most definitely due to media, media in all forms, not just video games.

Well, I'm glad that's been settled then. There I was thinking we might need to do some research, but all I had to do was read an anonymous comment on Slashdot.

Oh, and I'd also like a citation for "escalating violence". Modern times are the least violent in all of recorded history. No, I think it's far more likely that the escalating depiction of violence in the media (by that, I mean the news) spreads the myth that we're more violent today, because we're far more likely to hear about it.

As for:

The issue is not whether violent/sexual games are good or bad. The question is if it's appropriate for children.

I wish that was the question. In many countries, such as the UK, games and other media can be criminalised even for adults, taking the form of the film censors, laws on publication to adults, and now even criminalisation of simple possession of adult material that the Government doesn't like.

BTW I do statistical and probabilistic analysis in a hedge fund...

Oh, so according to Nassim Taleb, you're one of the guys we should be blaming for the housing crash? You know, for improperly applying financial algorithms in a situation that has inherent (and significant) statistical uncertainty?

Ok, good to know.

and it makes sense. like i said before, the answers will bell curve. idiocy is random, it does not skew in a particular manner. the idiots randomly cancel each other out, and become noise, while anyone with the real answer will stand out as a signal against the background noise. involving quantities like a population count, they simply bell curve to the right answer

Totally wrong. Moreover, provably wrong. Poll a random set of individuals on the age of Planet Earth, which is an estimated 4.55 billion years. In the US at least, the answer you are likely to get by averaging is closer to 2.5 billion years, as quite a lot of people will say 6000 years. In fact, if you decided to cheat by restricting your sampling to academics or scientists, your answer now would be different from answer obtained 100 years ago, and will probably be different to answers obtained 100 years from now. Why? Because this is no way to determine the age of the Earth.

In fact, poll people about the number of planets in the solar system. You'll probably get an answer between 8 and 9. But I guarantee you it will not be an integer value, say 8.713452, which will be a fairly strange answer for the number of planets. Moreover, any answer you get will have much less to do with the idea of a "planet" that you might think.

Again, go back to the Emperor of China's nose. Let's take the Last Emperor as an example. Suppose I went around asking people what they thought the length of his nose was? Would the average of the answers somehow converge on the length of his particular nose? Why not someone else? In fact, would they converge on the length of of the nose of anyone who was ever alive?

Now finally go back to the population of China itself. Suppose I asked around. What will people's guesses average to? Say it's 1.3 billion. Am I to take this as a good value for the population of China, which is again an integer? It's only accurate to at best within 50,000 people or 3.8% of the total. That's a pretty wide margin when it comes to such an important number. Do I hope that the answers somehow converge after yet more guesses to the correct one. Will the overestimations cancel out the underestimation? On what basis can I make this claim? The answer is, none at all.

As I said before, I think statistics should probably be taken off most curricula. They seem to induce a rather misguided faith in the primacy of the Gaussian bell curve, and have lead to it application in areas which it is totally inappropriate. Here's a small fact which is completely and totally overlooked in 99.9% of all statistics courses taught. The Gaussian Bell curve is the result of Central Limit Theorem. This theorem states that if one averages the results of sufficiently many random, uncorrelated measurements, then the results will approximate a Gaussian Bell curve.

Random. Uncorrelated. Measurements. If one of these conditions is not satisfied, then no Gaussian Bell curve will result, and the average of the results is meaningless. The answers you get when asking about the population of China, the age of the Earth, or the length of the Emperor's nose will be neither random or uncorrellated, and there will be no accuracy from averaging them. You are in what Nassim Taleb calls the fourth quadrant, and are essentially engaged in numerology. There are very real limits to statistics which everyone using them should be ware of.

its really quite a simple concept, i don't know why you can't grasp it. perhaps you don't need to brush up on your statistics, you just need to brush up on your grasp of common sense reasoning

It is not a simple concept. It is a naive and very dangerous one. I do not accept it because I have studied statistics and I know its power and its limit

Interesting enough he's also a believer im the theories of Tommy Gold which propose that there is an abundance of OIL in the earths mantle and was not produced by biological processes in ancient times. So we should all carry on our current energy policies and use OIL in the certitude that none of these activities will have a serious impact on human life on this planet. Of course if he's wrong humanity will be reduced to a pre-industrial marginalized existence.

This reminds of certain utterances by James Watson regarding the inferior intellect of the non-white races. Just because you're clever in one area don't mean you necessarily know anything in another.

'There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global'

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

Ice-free Arctic could be here in 23 years

In the past 60 years or so human activity has contributed to the deterioration of the ozone layer

incidentally Carolyn Porco is now my favourite female scientist

A good link to provide for Dr. Porco is the imaging project she runs, CICLOPS http://ciclops.org/ , since it's a wonderful site and the project under her direction has produced some stunning photographs and fantastic discoveries.

But, and I say this having spent some time with Dr. Porco, none of that has anything to do with her being female whatsoever. She is not a female scientist, she is a scientist full stop. And a damned good one at that.

It's likely that her being female has affected her career path, but that is entirely independent of the quality of her work. So why continue to promulgate irrelevant aspects? Dr. Porco is Caucasian, why didn't you say that she's your favorite Caucasian female scientist? It's irrelevant. Dr. Porco is a scientist. And, if Dr. Porco happens to be your favorite scientist, I'd endorse that wholeheartedly, as she's one of my favorites as well.

Without any kind of background in the subject (disclaimer disclaimer) I've begun to wonder if the substrate for the emergence of life on Earth may have been carbon nanotubes or graphene on clays, with various oxidising agents as the energy source. This could apply also to remote moons.

Here's a link to Taleb's views on the financial crisis:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html

It's an easy read with nice quotes like " The banking system (betting AGAINST rare events) just lost > 1 Trillion dollars (so far) on a single error, more than was ever earned in the history of banking."

and "I have nothing against economists: ... But beware: they can be plain wrong, yet frame things in a way to make you feel stupid arguing with them. So make sure you do not give any of them risk-management responsibilities."

I can't find the quote (I think it is in "The Black Swan" or "Fooled by Randomness") but I'm pretty sure that Taleb's comment on Li's Cupola is that it is a pretty piece of mathematics whose essential problem is that it never worked for what people were trying to use it for.

I'm sure if you ask anybody else, they would agree that they too are smarter then the rest of Slashdot. Why do you think we all post here?

Slashdot, the game show: I'm smarter than you, and I can prove it in five disconnected, ungrammatical sentences.

Personally, I post here because it allows me to commune with the human truth that no matter whether you have a brain or a clue or both, it doesn't help much if you don't plug it in and turn it on.

The problem with being blinded by your own brilliance is tripping over the power cord.

No, more often than not, the game show here is "I'm smarter than you and I can prove without turning my brain on in the first place". We've all discovered that the engine roars loudest with your foot on the clutch.

I'm only about half way through, and this crop isn't as good as previous years, but I did like this one:

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_7.html#fisher

I know this might be a shocking proposal, but it is possible we might someday learn what the people who post here actually get out of it.

Rarely does it involve being taken seriously for substantive contribution. The dance is something entirely different.

I think some posters here have been trapped so long in the vacuous underbelly of IT support, they actually crave being told how stupid they've been, as if being hit over the head with a clue stick is better than no clue stick at all, by the same calculus that it's better to have a hot chick spit at you than fail to note your existence.

From another perspective, there are just enough people around here (but not on every thread) firing live ammunition to make crawling under the fence on your belly an interesting sport.

I used to know an usher back when Cats played in Toronto. I think it was the kind of theater where you pass the ticket boxes into the main lobby where a giant staircase sits in the middle, 5m wide at the base, covered in red carpet, with curved brass banisters. She never ceased to be amazed at how many people came up to her and asked, "do these stairs go up?" I've seen threads here with 200 posts that never got much above that level.

On a side note, I've often wondered if the people who persist in posting the deflated "in Soviet Russia" have the same brain activation pattern of a dog urinating on a fire hydrant. Really, that meme has all the appeal of a eunuch's scrotum.

It's pretty far fetched to claim the average poster here is engaged in a meaningful battle of wits, even from the safe refuge of mock sarcasm.

If I had a child, I'd be tempted to teach him or her to respond "my father taught me to be respectful toward people who believe in biblical horse shit".

I think we're right in the middle of a flood myth revival: the flood of data, genetic data. Unlike that blogging outfit, Adam and Eve made a *lot* of off-orchard backups. with some diligence, we might yet recover much of the original.

This time, however, the bible thumpers will paddle for 40 days and 40 nights, and the flood will not recede. This time the dove will land with a genetic scroll in its beak.

Curiously, one question I've never seen asked is this: how many genes present in the human population 7000 years ago (or 70ka or 700ka) have since gone extinct within modern humanity? How would one go about determining this?

It could be the case that we have an essential modern gene that converges on an introduction (fork) into the genome X years ago, but prior to X some other gene we no longer have must have been there, or the genotype would have been lethal.

Adam wasn't much of a poet, was he? Only woman in the known universe, and he doesn't even mention her eye color.

No, wait, he did, but some zealot wiped it out.

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_8.html#zeilinger

I haven't seen a comment yet about small business fatigue.

Was the disgruntled employee a founding member? Was he a stake-holder on any other level? Had all back salaries been paid to cover any ... uh ... dry spells in the startup plan? Were they confident they would be cash flow positive entering a difficult business year? Do they really not have any back media stashed somewhere? Maybe they just looked at the recovery cost from their dated (and possibly tampered) spares, the cost to their business credibility, and decided the prudent business decision was to close the doors and move on.

Maybe the disgruntled party was throw out the door but the parties responsible for creating the dysfunctional environment hung around. They usually do. Does the closure unlock any business assets that one or more of the existing principals can roll forward into another opportunity? Is the "failed drive" story just a lot more sanitary for public consumption than the sordid story about disgruntlement and personality conflict?

There's a troll out there who is suggesting maybe the same thing about Madoff's too easy confession.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11488

Not very good and puts far too much faith in "board level oversight" and never once mentions the Enron factor: even at the top (maybe especially at the top) people refuse to question black boxes if the profit stream appears reliable. How did Enron get away with not supplying detailed balance sheet? The usual refuge of "trade secret": if we tell you how we do it, the chicken recipe will cross the road.

Isn't that the bonus of being at the top? Everyone lets you into their secret tree forts? There are a lot of empty suits out there stalking the putting greens who aren't much motivated to puncture the veil of a secret handshake. They have other agendas.

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_10.html#taleb

The problem with the Madoff analysis is that it presumes his operation was legitimate for some (long) period of time, then he's wiped out by the big melt-down LTCM style, after which he concocts this bogus pyramid excuse. How then did he really achieve these implausibly consistent results over that long period of time? Does he really have a system that works as portrayed (until it blows up) LTCM style? Is there a secret he's still trying to keep?

I'd put my own bet on the square that the fund return levels were massaged since way back, and that the empty suit oversight boards were as gullible as you'd have to imagine, despite the glass and granite whitewash of financial controls and oversight.

As far as Journalspace is concerned, if it turns out that this "backup oversight" was the only bad seed at the core of this apple, it would be a case of truth stranger than fiction.

Everything worked as advertised.

Absolutely not.

The individual quantitative analysts ("quants") built redundancy into their individual company's systems by counting on external "randomness" (approximately), insuring against possible losses emanating from their highly leveraged transactions through insurance contracts (credit default swaps).

However, All the other quantitative models were built on essentially the same set of assumptions: That their insurers had sufficient capitalization to cover the CDS contracts. The triggering event, a loss in home valuations is particular markets, started an avalanche consisting of lots of finance companies invoking the CDS contracts, all at once. That's when they found out that the insurer (AIG, for example) was just as undercapitalized as everyone else. (There's way more to this sordid tale, so this is a necessarily compressed synopsis.)

Unless one counts "we got ours, you're fucked" as implying "working as advertised", then it didn't work by any stretch of the imagination.

Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's comments on the Black Swan Event for a properly thought and documented analysis.

BTW, The Edge is a great resource for the intelligent and curious reader. I have no financial interest in these guys, but I've found their insights to be highly informative and balanced.

Everything worked as advertised.

Absolutely not.

The individual quantitative analysts ("quants") built redundancy into their individual company's systems by counting on external "randomness" (approximately), insuring against possible losses emanating from their highly leveraged transactions through insurance contracts (credit default swaps).

However, All the other quantitative models were built on essentially the same set of assumptions: That their insurers had sufficient capitalization to cover the CDS contracts. The triggering event, a loss in home valuations is particular markets, started an avalanche consisting of lots of finance companies invoking the CDS contracts, all at once. That's when they found out that the insurer (AIG, for example) was just as undercapitalized as everyone else. (There's way more to this sordid tale, so this is a necessarily compressed synopsis.)

Unless one counts "we got ours, you're fucked" as implying "working as advertised", then it didn't work by any stretch of the imagination.

Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's comments on the Black Swan Event for a properly thought and documented analysis.

BTW, The Edge is a great resource for the intelligent and curious reader. I have no financial interest in these guys, but I've found their insights to be highly informative and balanced.

Arachnophobia is the most common phobia, certainly in the western world. It's certainly not innate. Babies show no fear of spider at all. We pick arachnophobia up from our parents and from those around us, and it's easy to see why. When people around you, and almost everyone you see in contemporary media displays arachnophobia, it's hard not to be arachnophobic. Hollywood's use of spiders, and spider like creatures, as stock horror objects is actually a self perpetuating.

Classification of a behavior as innate or learned is an oversimplification. In many cases, there is a genetic predisposition to learning a specific behavior which must be nurtured to become active:

Wild-born monkeys are afraid of snakes. They're so scared of snakes that they will cower in the back of the cage screaming rather than reach across a plastic model snake to get at a peanut when they're very hungry. Captive-born monkeys are not afraid of snakes; they happily reach across the model snake to get at a peanut. So what's going on here? That means that fear of snakes must be learned. But how on earth do you learn fear of snakes? The conventional classical conditioning wouldn't work very well, would it, because either you have a bad experience with a snake to learn from, in which case you're dead, or you don't have a bad experience, in which case you don't learn that snakes are frightening. So how are you going to end up acquiring a fear of snakes? It seems an absurd thing to acquire. She argues that what's happening is that there is a program for fear of snakes, an instinct if you like, but that that instinct needs to be socially triggered--in some sense triggered by a vicarious experience, by observing another monkey having a fear of snakes. So she set up an experiment in which she videotaped the wild-born monkey reacting with fear to a snake, and she then showed this video to a captive-born monkey, which immediately acquired a fear of snakes and was not then prepared to reach across even a model snake to get a peanut. She now doctors the video, so that it has the same monkey reacting in the same way in the background, but the bottom half of the screen now instead of having a snake has a flower. Again, the captive-born monkey has never seen a flower, so after it sees a monkey reacting with extreme fear to this new thing called a flower it should just as easily learn a fear of flowers. But it doesn't. It just learns that some monkeys are crazy.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_p5.html

Interesting essay here on statistics and risk taking by Taleb Nassim who seems to been saying for the past couple of years something bad was going to happen.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html

There is a link from the article to a good essay that he's written recently to explain the current meltdown in terms of a black swan.

The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

Just two years ago he still stated that the origin of life and evolution were different things. Would you be so kind to point me to references of his conflating both to deny the existence (I'd rather say essence, but that's a Cartesian debate for another day) of God?

Radiohead set a good precident. Good for Trent,he's finally beginning to see the light. He used to be a hardliner for industry methods from all I've heard him say in the past.

          It doesn't take much thought to see that the music industry is dying like a dinosaur on a glacier. It hasn't adapted and because of the consensus of stockholders(who invest in stock in other industries that performs as per the safe usual) is needed for evolution,it will continue to reach for extinction.
          P2P isn't so much the death of the industry as it's own corruption is. The information age is merely hastening it.People and artists are tired of artists being ripped off,chewed up and spat out in the name of marketing convenience.
          Cyber-space has recursively proved what happens in meat-space; sound travels freely and longs to be free like information. You may be able to charge someone for labor done or the right to take up physical space in a venue, but music permeates not unlike the air we breath.That leaves revenues to be made from performance or product packaged for convenience.Slashdot recently featured an article on Kevin Kellys article on the necessary evolutionary changes needed for various I.P. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html
          Of course with this the middleman (music industry and its mafiaa) is obsolete. This may leave some without a convenient career but in the words of Caddyshacks Judge Smales "Well,Danny,the world needs ditchdiggers too". Obviously,I have little sympathy for an industry that has smothered more talent than it's featured and force fed the public crap(think disco era assembly line production amongst even more modern crimes)in the name of marketing convenience for maximum profit.
          Music is a living,breathing entity that manifests itself through musicians. As such it must honor the physical laws that govern us all: ADAPT OR DIE,being the relevant one in this case. It has, the music industry being a synthetic entity manifested by the ever shifting laws of commerce hasn't. Therefore it is like a parasite that music has evolved an immunity to ,and robbed of its food source is dying. Oh well.

While I am a law abiding citizen within the bounds of reason,I also see that this goes deeper than a problem with copyright law (badly broken here,originally it was 4 years and worked just fine to promote invention and progress rather than the opposite as evidenced now.)It is a broken,obsolete industry (the music ind.) whose sole function throughout has been as a middleman with it's hand out. While the need for the marketing of sheet music more than a century ago was honest and needful enough,enterprises since (recorded music,promotion,A&R) have fostered corruption,crime and lost talent to the public eye in favor of ease of marketing for themselves.
Musical artists of the world now have a level playing field to take the reins themselves without a middleman and its problems .As Kevin Kelly pointed out in his article http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html featured on ./ recently a new business model is to be embraced.
          Kind of like when Ford popularized the motor vehicle as transportation of the masses,many buggymakers, blacksmiths, horsetraders, leatherwrights and others associated with the old way had to find other employment(the world needs ditchdiggers too). This (removal of the middleman) is a righteously conducted act of revolution on the part of the world.The corrupt old industry is dead as disco and this fit of legal action on the part of the RIAA is only the body twitching not conscious of it's own demise. I'm sure our original patriots revolting for change were also called criminals by angry opposition and their butt lickers. The copyrights worldwide are out of hand,and creativity by coming generations is stifled by the greed of previous generations of giant faceless corporations whose plethora of shareholders only want money without having the responsibility of adapting to the change of the climate of progress.Dinosaurs that didn't adapt,died and are no longer with us,so is it recursively with all else.Business,government,cultures all "adapt or die".
          The music industry can be chronicled in history books as well as electric underwear , buggywhips, dodos and good riddance to them.
I'll dance on their graves to the new music played.Keep on sharing the information and let the walls come down everywhere.

How about a training video for prosecuters showing them that investigating the crimes and questionable practices of the RIAA like stealing songrights from artists,enticing underage children into contracts and wasting the judiciaries time could lead to cocaine busts , pedophile rings, prostitution,political corruption and other organized crime rings?
                Truth,folks,we just don't need the music industry for anything anymore.They're an outdated entity who's only purpose was ever as a middleman with their hand out.
We now have a level playing ground for musicians to do their own business with a much more sensible business model. Sell performance not copies.Even other methods were outlined in a recent slashdot story on Kevin Kelly and his view http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html which makes complete crystal clarified sense.
Consider this the thrashing death throes of an obsolete industry who doesn't have the sense to quit trying to breath with the laundry bag over its head.

• Immediacy
• Personalization
• Interpretation
• Authenticity
• Accessibility
• Embodiment
• Patronage
• Findability

Been a scientist myself, as I mature in my research field, I tend to agree with him. However, at the same time I still remember the advice of a senior scientific and professor: "making relevant scientific advances requires a lot of arrogance to deny the common wisdom". So I suppose there must be a balance: neither blind reluctance to consider challenges, nor blind faith on "counter examples".

"In short, [Atheism] has none of the hallmarks of a religion."

I disagree. Ever go here? Let's see...

charismatic leader? check.
book? sure, lots of em! Try "The God Delusion".
ceremonies? check.
hierarchy? Sure. There a several preeminent atheists that are followed by the rest. Atheists, being human, tend to follow people they admire. Who knew?

This flavor of atheism even has its own ministry. Care to go door-to-door and hand out these "religious" tracts? Actually, the message there is similar to that of some religious groups.

I sometimes see people make statements like "atheism is a religion like *not* collecting stamps is a hobby" and so on. It's just word games. If you define a religion as a body of people who adhere to a set of beliefs which are based on faith (and atheism is just that because you cannot *know* there is no God), then by that standard modern Atheism is a religion. One could reasonably argue that not believing in a god is not a religion, but we all know that the movement called Atheism is more than that.

This is just another spin on Creationism.

Unlike Creationism, there is both a rational explanation (an hypothesis) and a test to disprove the hypothesis.

The hypothesis goes like this: if intelligent life were to evolve in a universe, and it were to survive for any significant length of time (say, millions of years of civilization), then it will eventually create a simulation of the universe itself. This makes it entirely possible that we exist in the simulation, rather than being in the "physical" universe.

Unfortunately, there is a similar hypothesis that suggests the universe itself is real, but is nothing more than a giant quantum computer. (It is possible to calculate the entire processing power of the universe, to within an order or two of magnitude.) This suggests the universe is incapable of doing something impossible using information theory. This is the viewpoint held by very brilliant men like Ray Kurzweil and Seth Lloyd.

There is, as far as I can tell, no fundamental way to distinguish between these two possibilities. Me, I lean more towards the "computational universe" concept, rather than the simulation. The simulation would necessarily be slower than the universe itself (as the universe has only a limited amount of computational capacity), and so any significant simulation would by necessity be slower than the universe, probably by trillions of times. This makes it unlikely to be useful.

(Actually, I can see a case in which the universe is simulated in very broad terms unless there are observational entities nearby. This would rather fit with quantum mechanics. So, perhaps it wouldn't necessarily be significantly slower than the universe itself.)

The Obligations and Responsibilities of The Scientist:
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_3.html#lederman

Dr. Lederman is the Nobel laureate who was interviewed on Slashdot several years ago. If you haven't read that interview, you owe it to yourself to do so now.

Link: http://slashdot.org/interviews/00/01/14/0948201.shtml

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_12.html#buss

I seem to be changing my mind about that one on a constant basis.

Nowhere in the summary did any of the links point to the bloody index!

Isn't it still generally accepted to start at the beginning when reading, or has digg finally removed all semblance of intelligence from the general public?

Unfortunately, that's what people do.

As a species, homo sapiens is really really good at only a handful of things:

* having sex
* communicating
* building
* killing

Say what you will about individual persons, good or bad, but as a species we have systematically and deliberately killed off all possible threats and competition (mammoths, neanderthals, large predators) and have become the deadliest intelligent force on this planet. As groups of people, mankind will always resort to violence against others past a certain threshold of hunger, pain, dishonor or other provocation. That's why true pacifists can be so respected - they are so few and far between that they truly stand out on the backdrop of the rest of human society.

You can argue (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that civilization, over time, reduces the relative amount of violence in a population - see "A History of Violence" by Steven Pinker. While that may be true, the other side of civilization's influence is that the tools of violence inevitably become more sophisticated and deadly, even if the frequency of their use declines.

The other really interesting historical development in violence over the past hundred years is the vastly increased cost and destructive power of high-end weaponry. The most destructive forms of warfare used to require literal armies of people bent upon pillage and destruction. Now, governments (and really only governments, not individuals or corporations) can instead spend gigantic amounts of money and acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of immense destructive power. Or they can firebomb cities into submission, like the Allies did in WWII against Dresden and Tokyo.

That changes a lot of the balance in warfare and politics. Much as heavy cavalry and standing armies helped to transform city-states into nation-states, air forces and navies and nuclear weapons play a role in transforming nations into continental powers.

Robotics may start to swing the pendulum back in the other direction. R&D costs for robots really aren't that expensive compared to traditional Big Weapons Systems. $14m is way less than a new US Air Force fighter jet costs, let alone a typical new system deployed by the US DoD. The resulting technology stands a good chance of becoming commoditized, which means that smaller groups and individuals may be able to afford them.

Ultimately, that may not be good for World Peace, given that peace (as perceived by the people in powerful countries who tend to write history) is best maintained by a clear balance of power and not by uncertainty and threats to power.

We are in the midst of it.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

(and all technology has nefarious applications)