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Let's say you've got a guest-access laptop or all-in-one computer in your lobby, training area or some such. Everyone knows it's a risk as a dirty machine, so they don't do anything on it that they don't need to, and they avoid giving it passwords, passing sensitive data through it, etc. Every hotel with a "business center" has these today.

So, great, people practice good computing hygiene around them, because they're assumed to be dangerous. And yet, who would think of them as an eavesdropper on local verbal conversations? If you're going to talk about sensitive things, you're going to glance around and be sure nobody who shouldn't hear can hear, but do you think about that bank of idle computers on the wall?

This is not a new problem, either; Sun Microsystems brought it up in 1993 .

Why do you think that getting regularly in space is important? Getting what into space? To do what?

www.distancetomars.com

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

I mean jet airliners are a sustainable way to cross the ocean, because there are a lot of people who want to travel on this planet. Because there's actually a destination at the other end. Space is just a deadly sucking void, just good enough to put some metal boxes full of electronics in. That's all.

Yes, the trees, grass, plants, and plankton breath in CO2 and release O2, converting CO2 to O2 and bonding the Carbon into carbohydrates.

There are more trees on the planet earth than there are stars in the milkyway galaxy.

So the real question is, how much co2 does a tree sequester? (48lbs a year)

48 pounds is the highest estimate for the biggest tree under the best circumstances. And even that CO2 is only permanently sequestered if the tree is neither burned nor allowed to rot - otherwise it just turns back into CO2.

How many trees are there? 3,000,000,000,000

Also the highest available estimate.

I guess you can do the math on that one. ;)

I could, but why should I? We can directly measure CO2 in the atmosphere, and we do. We know that CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing at slightly more than 2ppm/year at the moment, and has increased from about 280 ppm to about 400ppm over the last 150 years. We also know that this is about half of the CO2 that we emit into the atmosphere, while the other half is currently still being taken up by natural sinks (mostly the ocean), which have serious limits.

Don't be so sure. To maintain current average economic growth - our energy requirements would skyrocket so much that, even if we can eventually get all our machines at thermodynamic theoretical maximum efficiency) the total energy from the sun could not power it - how long would that take ? Less than 100 years.

Here's the detailed maths from the source:
Required pre-reading
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
And on to the economics:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Don't be so sure. To maintain current average economic growth - our energy requirements would skyrocket so much that, even if we can eventually get all our machines at thermodynamic theoretical maximum efficiency) the total energy from the sun could not power it - how long would that take ? Less than 100 years.

Here's the detailed maths from the source:
Required pre-reading
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
And on to the economics:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

The extra warming has been compared to 400,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions per day, or 2.5 x 10^14 Joules per second, or 250 TW. This is a very large number, but total solar energy intercepted by the Earth is around seven hundred times greater. World power consumption in 2013 was 18 TW. Power consumption is a term in the energy balance equation; we are eventually going to have to rein in energy use purely because of climate considerations, but not soon.

This is the kind of question that belies a complete lack of understanding about the scale of energy involved. I can't even qualify your comments on friction. However, to believe that there is any kind of hidden source of 100-125 TW located on the planet defies any kind of credulity.

It's a religious viewpoint fueled by memories of colonizing North America, conveniently overlooking dozens of engineering impossibilities, and a religious foundation of sci-fi ideologies that are very attractive to a large percentage of Asperger's programmer types. They are also very often misanthropic, depressed doomsday cultists.

You'll rarely hear about colonizing Mars from real engineers, they know it's not possible. But from programmers? They think all technology just consists of sitting on your ass and typing at a keyboard:

#include warpdrive.h
#include 3d-printer-replicator.h

They vastly oversimplify the complexity of space, reduce dangers, and invent all kinds of fantasy scenarios to justify their beliefs, aka a religion.

www.distancetomars.com
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://www.centauri-dreams.org...
http://www.economist.com/blogs...
http://www.thespacereview.com/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

It's a religious viewpoint fueled by memories of colonizing North America, conveniently overlooking dozens of engineering impossibilities, and a religious foundation of sci-fi ideologies that are very attractive to a large percentage of Asperger's programmer types. They are also very often misanthropic, depressed doomsday cultists.

You'll rarely hear about colonizing Mars from real engineers, they know it's not possible. But from programmers? They think all technology just consists of sitting on your ass and typing at a keyboard:

#include warpdrive.h
#include 3d-printer-replicator.h

They vastly oversimplify the complexity of space, reduce dangers, and invent all kinds of fantasy scenarios to justify their beliefs, aka a religion.

www.distancetomars.com
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://www.centauri-dreams.org...
http://www.economist.com/blogs...
http://www.thespacereview.com/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

Nuclear fission is fairly simple and produces enormous energy for a given input...but the variables involved make plants large, safety measures redundant (by intent) and costs high. If we can simplify things and bring costs down by better understanding the atomic process then maybe 'too cheap to meter' could actually be a thing one day.

Not that nuclear power should not be cheaper, but "too cheap to meter" will never happen and should never happen. There are negative externalities that need to be priced into the cost of producing power from any source, and eventually we are going to run up into some hard thermodynamic limits to how much energy we can produce without cooking ourselves. We're going to end up (in a few centuries) in a thermodynamic zero sum game. This may be as good as it gets for power costs, and we probably should think carefully about anything that would provide incentives for greater power use per capita.

There is nothing wrong with making nuclear power cheaper, but any power source being "too cheap to meter" would probably do more harm than good.

The increased green will mean more CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere.

Yet, CO2 concentration is showing no signs of slowing down. http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/sit...

Their algorithms are ... worrisome.

http://www.npr.org/2014/07/04/...

They can, and HAVE, manipulated their algorithms to affect 100M+ americans mood.

They can, and HAVE, manipulated their algorithms in political events. In 2012, it was just TO vote. In 2016, it very easily could be HOW to vote.

http://fowler.ucsd.edu/massive...

Now imagine if those in control of the algorithms want to lean a race one way or another. A few less articles about Hillary, a few more good articles about Trump. Say -1/+1 every week, until the election. Subtle, but a clear influence pushing neutral folks to FBs leaning.

I'm a Republican and a Trump supporter. I post updates linked to political articles I like and unfollow people who hold radical far-left beliefs. Even still, my facebook is inundated with updates on the right side-bar about "NAZI REPUBLICANS" and "EVIL TRUMP". Whatever Facebook is talking about publicly to influence the elections and politics of its users, is a moot point. They already are.

Their algorithms are ... worrisome.

http://www.npr.org/2014/07/04/...

They can, and HAVE, manipulated their algorithms to affect 100M+ americans mood.

They can, and HAVE, manipulated their algorithms in political events. In 2012, it was just TO vote. In 2016, it very easily could be HOW to vote.

http://fowler.ucsd.edu/massive...

Now imagine if those in control of the algorithms want to lean a race one way or another. A few less articles about Hillary, a few more good articles about Trump. Say -1/+1 every week, until the election. Subtle, but a clear influence pushing neutral folks to FBs leaning.

You're still not citing any actual studies.

Studies are not evidence. For example, the energy policies of Germany and Denmark have resulted in electricity prices almost double that of their neighbor, France. The carbon emission credit markets all have the serious flaw of hard caps (fixed amount of credits traded). That means that there is a swift transition from a very elastic market to a very inelastic market once the demand exceeds the caps (demand here includes speculators trying to drive up the price of credits by hoarding them).

US loan guarantees for renewable energy projects have funded a variety of pointless, but expensive projects from Solyndra's follies through to the current failure at Ivanpah. And they have an expected failure rate of 30% built in. I have better standards for multi-hundred million dollar projects.

And of course, the Kyoto treaty which demands a huge amount of belt tightening only from the developed world without resulting in a significant improvement in greenhouse gases emissions in return.

And what of your link? This is what "starting to work" means:

âoeThe new figures confirm last yearâ(TM)s surprising but welcome news: we now have seen two straight years of greenhouse gas emissions decoupling from economic growth,â said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. âoeComing just a few months after the landmark COP21 agreement in Paris, this is yet another boost to the global fight against climate change.â

Unless the "confirmation" is actually for strong El Nino conditions. I notice that there is a weak correlation between Mauna Loa Observatory measurements of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and the presence of El Nino or La Nina conditions (the former positive and the latter, negative in correlation).

Bragging that your policies are working seems to be premature, when you're using a two year record and have strong El Nino conditions in existence (existence of which was the reason I looked in the first place).

Also, the study doesn't consider growth of societies which are heavy fossil fuel users over societies which aren't. It's worth noting that despite the US's many flaws, it still remains an economic leader in terms of economic activity per person with only Norway doing better. I believe a key component of that economic growth is cheap electricity and transportation, both which the US has in considerable advantage over Europe (for example, Texas has electricity prices a quarter that of Germany).

"To help build a way to take us to the stars.'

Why does this come up so often with geeks? Especially the gamer and programmer sub-species?

http://www.distancetomars.com/

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Anyone who's given space a moment's thought will realize that absolutely *none* of those pseudo-religious, doomsday, romantic, colonialist fantasies will *ever* happen.

Sure, chucklenuts.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Stick to software, the virtual world is more your speed.

That the world will warm as atmospheric CO2 increases is basic physics. The radiative forcing from that CO2 is well constrained (given by 5.35 ln(c/c0)wm^-2). That ice melts as it warms is basic physics. That water is less reflective than ice is basic physics. That the atmosphere will hold (and is holding) more moisture as it warms is basic physics. That water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas is basic physics. The amount of warming directly attributable to the added moisture is well constrained. (see http://www-ramanathan.ucsd.edu...)

We believe that the amount feedbacks will enhance warming from CO2 is well constrained, but there could be (and already have been) surprises. For example arctic ice melt is well beyond what we had anticipated. We have underestimated that feedback.

To some extent you are being alarmist by suggesting that we don't really know, but then again, this is a grand experiment and we may need to learn to expect the unexpected.

L4 and QNX are nice, but do you have an example of their use outside of the embedded space?

L4Linux, ie. Linux running on L4 as a guest, came out before Xen and paravirtualization was even a thing. The overhead of running on L4 was demonstrably lower than Xen. So you could run L4 on a desktop using Linux as a guest. Maybe you still can, though the Linux kernel is probably quite outdated now.

Context-switching overhead has always been the argument against microkernels

It's substantially better than hypervisors which are now everywhere.

So basically, despite their fancy message passing design, to get performance they have to lump everything together into gigantic monolithic applications, albeit running in userspace. Doesn't sound like a great proof-of-principle design to me.

QNX was and is typically deployed in embedded systems where resource constraints dominate. These are domains where you'd use something like the lwIP library embedded directly in your application to get a networking stack. These certainly aren't representative of desktop or server systems, which is presumably what you're asking about.

Furthermore, there's no question that achieving high performance in a decomposed design with lots of isolation boundaries is harder, particularly if you want to achieve security or other properties, which is where researchers mostly focus, but it was solved at least 12 years ago. If a final release wants to squeeze out that extra 2-5% of throughput, you can switch a compile-time option to link everything monolithically, but that doesn't mean you should design it monolithically by default.

Microkernel "performance issues" are largely a myth. The very first microkernels in the 80s had some issues due to their design, and simple profiling identified IPC as the problem. Liedtke then invented the L3 microkernel that solved this problem, and there has never since been an informed performance complaint against microkernels. This myth persists due to that initial impression and to developers looking at the structure of this system and simply saying, "well obviously this will be much slower". Not very scientific. Past research is why microkernel papers focus on IPC; it's just science in action.

Finally, the KeyKOS operating system was a high-security microkernel design that was widely deployed in commercial timesharing systems, and even early ATMs, back in the 70s and 80s. It was proprietary and unpublished until later, and included hard disk drivers in the kernel because its core design included orthogonal persistence and the verifiable security properties depended on an audited disk driver. Other than that it was a legit microkernel and hosted an optional full POSIX guest.

Yep, this blog post sums it up pretty nicely.

There was a rash of people submitting jobs to Mechanical Turk and then not paying anyone. The person paying can rate work as unacceptable and not pay, and there's no real oversight if they just do that all the time (and Amazon doesn't police this at all, or even provide a reputation mechanism). So some academics put together a third-party site, Turkopticon, that people use to rate jobs, payers, etc., which has made it a lot easier to avoid the people on the site who won't pay. Seems like a good idea to extend it to "the real world".

However due to feed back effects like more methane and more water vapor in the atmosphere it is increasing exponentially.

The feedbacks are one of the most controversial and least verified parts of the AGW hypothesis.

Fantasies for addled-brained children.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

And what does "fusion solar" even mean?

I thought this was going to be a scientific article about how the unit called a calorie is screwed up. I was hoping for a treatise on thermodynamics and standards and some new measurement technology. So sad to find out it was just about losing weight. Is it too much to expect a news site for nerds to geek out on units of measurement, without fretting about real-world applications?

Besides, if you're looking at real-world applications, how about looking at a nerdy version of it? Weight loss is just a mass balance problem. Just inhaling and exhaling loses weight. So as long as you poop out more than you eat, you will lose weight. How you do that might or might not involve counting calories. The article I linked to has an easier solution; just skip a meal every now and then. But that doesn't sell meal plans and gym memberships, so don't expect it to catch on.

decarbonization is a convenient side effect for those who don't want a warmer world.

The only way to not have an unbearably warmer world is to reduce our energy usage. If energy usage continues to grow at it's current rate, regardless of the technology used to generate it, earth's oceans will boil away in a few hundred years: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

My problem is with adults who don't understand reality.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

I'd bet you're a programmer?

My problem is with adults who don't understand reality.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

I'd bet you're a programmer?

This wouldn't be a problem if the MMU did its job properly ..

Oil is dirty and it sucks and other things are already cheaper. There is no need for a weird imagined oil supply catastrophe in order for people to switch to cheaper, cleaner, better fuel sources. That is happening already.

Would you please enumerate the oh-so-wonderful alternatives?
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

That's basic [your choice of internet search engine] material. I will enumerate it for you as far as to say, I'm only using the mainstream, top-shelf definition of "other things" in my statement. I am only talking about energy sources that are well known, and where is consensus that they exist, and that they are not oil. If you don't know of any, then start with reputable encyclopedic sources, don't just ask some random person on the internet.

The funny part, aren't you the same guy who claims in another post to work in a research center studying alternative energy? So you're just trolling here, then?

Oil is dirty and it sucks and other things are already cheaper. There is no need for a weird imagined oil supply catastrophe in order for people to switch to cheaper, cleaner, better fuel sources. That is happening already.

Would you please enumerate the oh-so-wonderful alternatives?
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Then please compare 1900 to 1950, and 1950 to 2000.

Why do you lack the insight to see the differences?

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Do you also lack the maturity to question your beliefs?

is that most people seem unable to grasp the distances involved. Even people who should know better. It's amazing to me the amount of people sitting comfortably at their desks surrounded by everything they need and describe the most fantastic fact-free unrealistic scenarios.

http://www.distancetomars.com/

http://www.centauri-dreams.org...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

It's over, folks, the Space Age's corpse will be on display for all worshipers, and it aint' going anywhere.

That would be idiotic.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

A space program? Sure. Drink all the Tang in Low Earth Orbit you want. Bounce all the Ku band you want off satellites. Heck, it's what I do for a living.

Thinking the species must leave this rock and colonize the universe on 3D printed space elevator private startups, not so much.

Bringing up all this tiresome shit about how I only have a computer because of Apollo? Blow it out your ass.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://www.distancetomars.com/
http://www.computerhistory.org...

http://i67.tinypic.com/35c278x...

A space program? Sure. Drink all the Tang in Low Earth Orbit you want. Bounce all the Ku band you want off satellites. Heck, it's what I do for a living.

Thinking the species must leave this rock and colonize the universe on 3D printed space elevator private startups, not so much.

Bringing up all this tiresome shit about how I only have a computer because of Apollo? Blow it out your ass.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://www.distancetomars.com/
http://www.computerhistory.org...

http://i67.tinypic.com/35c278x...

A space program? Sure. Drink all the Tang in Low Earth Orbit you want. Bounce all the Ku band you want off satellites. Heck, it's what I do for a living.

Thinking the species must leave this rock and colonize the universe on 3D printed space elevator private startups, not so much.

Bringing up all this tiresome shit about how I only have a computer because of Apollo? Blow it out your ass.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://www.distancetomars.com/
http://www.computerhistory.org...

http://i67.tinypic.com/35c278x...

We call that first camp "Space Nutters" and no matter how many times I ask them for a timetable of the future I never get an answer.

It's more a question of people who got good at doing one single thing in their lives, usually programming, then projecting that on to every other field...

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Not engineers, Space Nutters. Anyone with even a single neuron capable of rational thought will see that space-based solar power is firmly a fantasy, and will always stay that way.

If we had the energy and resources to build something like that, we don't have an energy and resource problem in the first place!

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

But there is direction to evolution.

See for example https://mechanism.ucsd.edu/tea...

Ernst Mayr on Teleology

"Consider the following statement: 'The Wood Thrush migrates in the fall into warmer countries in order to escape the inclemency of the weather and the food shortages of the northern climates'. If we replace the words 'in order to' by 'and thereby', we leave the important question unanswered as to why the Wood Thrush migrates. The teleonomic form of the statement implies that the goal-directed migratory activity is governed by a program. By omitting this important message the translated sentence is greatly impoverished as far as information content is concerned, without gaining in causal strength." Mayr (1974)

For all of this, in the very best case W7X will only sustain fusion for thirty minutes (according to Wikipedia). That is an extremely long way from being practical.

Even assuming it works very well, we are an extremely long way from solving all of the problems required to build a practical working fusion reactor.

Some of the problems remaining to be solved:

• Neutron flux (part 1). Most of the energy from the deuterium-tritium reaction is in the high-energy neutron produced by the reaction. The best estimate is that the neutron flux from a 1GW fusion reactor would be one or two orders of magnitude higher than from a fission reactor. No known material can withstand that neutron flux. One other way to look at it is that in five years of operation, every atomic nucleus in whatever radiation shield you build will be hit hundreds of times over a five year period.
• Neutron flux (part 2). the deuterium-tritium reaction produces one neutron. That neutron has to (1) heat a working fluid that can be used to run a turbine, and (2) strike a lithium nucleus with enough energy to breed tritium. You need to do that with every damned neutron to have a self-sustaining system. This is made even more challenging by the fact that neutrons will be emitted isotropically from the reactor. Yes, there are materials that can act as neutron amplifiers, but no one has ever done that on a large scale and it probably won't be easy or simple.
• Lithium. You are going to need a lot of it. A 1GW reactor will probably need around 10000 tons of lithium. At $7/kg, that is seventy billion dollars worth of lithium. That is also a significant percentage of the world's annual production of lithium.
• Tritium. Once you've made the tritium from the lithium, you need to get it back into the plasma where it can do some good. I note that both tritium and lithium will easily react with each other and separating them will be tricky.
• Helium removal. Your fusion reaction will produce helium. Too much helium in the plasma will interfere with the reaction and lower the efficiency of the reactor. You need a system to get the helium out of the plasma without cooling it down. This system must operate continuously.
• Scaling. W7X has a plasma volume of around 30 cubic meters. A 1GW fusion plant would need a plasma volume on the order of 1000 cubic meters. W7X will cost around a billion dollars -- straight-up extrapolation implies a cost north of 30 billion dollars. That doesn't include all of the systems described above or a turbine to actually generate electricity. I also point out that scaling up isn't necessarily cheaper either.

I'd also note that solving each of the above problems is not going to be cheap. It is hard to imagine how a fusion plant can be made for less money than an existing fission plant, and those plants are already not competitive. Chances are it would be better and cheaper to build lots of batteries with all that lithium and a lot of wind turbines and solar panels. That would get you the same amount of energy, probably.

Sources: matter2energy, Do The Math

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

The religion of continuous progress is hitting the wall of engineering reality. We're hitting limits everywhere, and the only way to "meet" unrealistic goals is by cheating because simply put, technology eventually slows down and plateaus.

But this goes against the geek religion that just because we got better at storing information, this somehow means all technologies increase at the same pace.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Maybe it's time to change the focus of our "progress" away from the machines and towards our social models. No one needs that many cars if we accept that not everyone needs to work anymore.

A person who gets half their calories from a meat like beef increases their caloric load by biking wherever they go instead of driving; they'd be better for the environment driving a large SUV without any passengers.

So much fail here.

Let's see. A 190 lb. person riding a bicycle at 15 mph uses about 58 calories per mile.. Gasoline contains about 31,000 calories per gallon.. Suppose the large SUV gets 20 mpg. That's 1550 calories per mile, or more than 26 times as much.

See also here.

Every element in the universe was created through fusion. It just starts with hydrogen and works its way up. I think hydrogen is also the easiest to get to fuse, but I'm not sure on that one.

Every element besides hydrogen and a large amount of helium were formed through fusion reactions in stars. Here's some info on fusion and the binding energies of atomic elements.

1) http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
2) Wrong. Fusion is not dense at all, even in the Sun the power density per volume is less than a chemical fire. It's just that the Sun is quite large.
3) So what?

Bad form to self-reply, but if you want another paper (unpublished?) which analyses what's likely to get a paper accepted, there's this one which is hilarious and sadly all too true:

http://vision.ucsd.edu/sites/d...âZ

How many times can you conduct the same study of how fast fingernails grow in space before the taxpayers tire of footing the bill? We haven't learned anything on the International Space Station that we couldn't have learned way cheaper some other way Sorry to be the dreamcrusher of five year olds everywhere but out here in the real world we adults have to pay the bills and frankly I see no compelling reason to fund low earth orbit manned space flight or even trips to other planets out of the public purse. If such things become necessary or profitable then the private sector will do them quickly and more cheaply than government ever could. Although, from all that I'm acquainted with the current understanding of physics, a "destiny in space" is not a likely future outcome for humanity unless and until we make some serious breakthroughs which for all we know might be impossible anyway. However, the current manned space program or any likely replacement doesn't offer any meaningful hope of such breakthroughs. NASA, like the rest of us, needs to learn to live within its means. If that means shutting down manned space flight for now and assigning the astronauts to other duties or giving them their walking papers then so be it. Come back with your manned space flight proposals when you have a viable interstellar drive and somewhere interesting to go.

It's a good test to see if anyone can tell Russian Cosmism sci-fi religious delirium from reality, yes.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Conclusion: I wager that you're a programmer. It's always the people least qualified to comment on physics, engineering and reality that have the most absurd opinions about space...

Wow.... Why do you believe that?

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

There is no evidence that biology has anything to do with the proclivities of the genders for computer science. There is lots of evidence that many gender differences which are popularly ascribed to biology are in fact cultural, for example competitiveness.

Last time I checked, competitiveness is a behavior, not a skill. In any event, there is plenty of evidence of biological differences in the brains of men and women, and there are strong correlations between these differences and observed strengths/weaknesses of the sexes relative to one another. Do you need a citation for that, or do you know how to use a search engine?

Your anecdotes and personal preferences for what might be true just aren't as convincing as systematically gathered evidence.

What anecdotes? I don't believe I told any stories. Care to point out these supposed anecdotes to me?

And what personal preference did I relate? If you're referring to my comment on biology, I was merely stating that dismissing biological factors in these matters is foolish.

If you read my statement and concluded that I somehow prefer a biological explanation to a cultural one, you are stuck in a black and white world. There are shades of grey here, and there is no evidence that women are somehow culturally discouraged from participating in math or science these days. This is 2015, not 1955.

God forbid biology has anything to do with it.

There is no evidence that biology has anything to do with the proclivities of the genders for computer science. There is lots of evidence that many gender differences which are popularly ascribed to biology are in fact cultural, for example competitiveness.

Your anecdotes and personal preferences for what might be true just aren't as convincing as systematically gathered evidence.

Real art, in it's natural form, from humans anyway, comes from discovering new truths of the world

I disagree with that. Science might lead to discovering new truths, but I don't think art typically does that. I think art is a kind of outlet for stuff simmering inside the mind. Whether that stuff is 'true' or not is almost irrelevant. The art may lead to self-discovery, which could be a kind of truth, but it doesn't necessarily do that. It could lead to self-deception instead.

This project, as it mentions in the article, is a kind of Turing test. It's not about being 'intelligent' in the normal sense, but it could shed light on how the creative process works. I think a lot of creativity might just be an almost random juxtaposition of concepts where somehow somebody sees some utility. It seems that synesthesia might be a mechanism for such juxtaposition and maybe computers could do that also. The hard part would probably be recognizing utility. For more on what I mean about synesthesia see the Scientific American Article "Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes" from April 15, 2003 by Ramachandran. http://chip.ucsd.edu/pdf/SciAm_2003.pdf/

...
Our insights into the neurological basis of synesthesia could help
explain some of the creativity of painters, poets and novelists.
According to one study, the condition is seven times as common in creative people as in the general population.

One skill that many creative people share is a facility for using
metaphor ("It is the east, and Juliet is the sun"). It is as if their
brains are set up to make links between seemingly unrelated
domains--such as the sun and a beautiful young woman. In other words, just as synesthesia involves making arbitrary links between seemingly unrelated perceptual entities such as colors and numbers, metaphor involves making links between seemingly unrelated conceptual realms. Perhaps this is not just a coincidence...