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".. whether antimatter falls down .." Or maybe it falls up?

There does exist an hypothesis by Marcoen Cabbolet that antimatter will fall up (in an environment of matter such as on earth, antimatter would fall down in an antimatter environment according to this theory) which will be tested by those CERN experiments :

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/andp.201000063.

Wow. A single source of energy is your proof that our climate not a closed system? By that definition, yes it is unless you consider the solar system to be the 'system' we are considering, in which case it is virtually closed. External inputs are gravity, relatively infinitesimal radiation, and damned few rocks. Let's set aside Creation as an input for the sake of argument.

Solar radiation is the single greatest influence on our climate. Imagine turning off the Sun. How long before Earth becomes too cold to sustain life? Double the Sun's output, how long before Earth's surface becomes untenable for life as we now know it?

I'm no scientist, nor trained, but you don't seem to have made a valid point. n Our climatic system had bertter include the Sun, or you're playing with magic, and that was largely disproven back in the 1600s or so, wasn't it?

Wow. A single source of energy is your proof that our climate not a closed system? By that definition, yes it is unless you consider the solar system to be the 'system' we are considering, in which case it is virtually closed. External inputs are gravity, relatively infinitesimal radiation, and damned few rocks. Let's set aside Creation as an input for the sake of argument.

Solar radiation is the single greatest influence on our climate. Imagine turning off the Sun. How long before Earth becomes too cold to sustain life? Double the Sun's output, how long before Earth's surface becomes untenable for life as we now know it?

I'm no scientist, nor trained, but you don't seem to have made a valid point. n Our climatic system had bertter include the Sun, or you're playing with magic, and that was largely disproven back in the 1600s or so, wasn't it?

This sounds very much like the guessing game done as part of the talking heads experiments in 1999 at the VUB Artificial Intelligence Lab and Sony Computer Science Lab Paris by professor Luc Steels. These experiments already date from 1999.

This sounds very much like the guessing game done as part of the talking heads experiments in 1999 at the VUB Artificial Intelligence Lab and Sony Computer Science Lab Paris by professor Luc Steels. These experiments already date from 1999.

Mandriva has lost 30 million euros, unable even to win over its' home market despite the government helping push them in education. It's dead, Jim!

In the 1980s, my university had a Cray computer and a swimming pool. Some engineering students did the math: it was possible to bring the swimming pool to temperature using the cooling of the Cray. The only reason this did not happen was the two and a half kilometers between the pool and the calculation centre.

Your assumption is flat out wrong. Populations with high mortality due to disease tend to switch from K reproduction strategies to r reproduction strategies. What this means is that if you are unsure that any one of your children will live to give you grandchildren, you have more children to increase the likelihood that you will have some grandchildren. Therefore untreated diseases and epidemics paradoxically lead to an INCREASE in population in the long run rather than a decrease, as long as those diseases don't lead to actual extinction.

The two most powerful tools for switching human populations from r reproduction to K reproduction have been shown to be widespread medical care and available education/employment for women. Ironically, these two things are fought tooth and nail by those who complain about minorities "outbreeding" whites.

1. Cross-link Facebook, Slashdot, Twitter, Second Life, Google Earth
2. Create detailed 3D body model for all Slashdotters
3. Render 3D models to latex masks.
4. Render 3D models to simulated virtual environment
5. Capture, drug and equip Slashdotters with goggles
6. Replace real-world Slashdotters with robot duplicates.
7. Profit!

This is one of the first websites I discovered when I first started getting on the internet back in the early to mid 90s.

A listing of peer reviewed studies relating to suicide rates in the wake of stories on TV, newspapers, etc can be found at http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Conf/MemePap/Marsden.html

There is a pretty convincing body of evidence which suggests that the "Werther" effect is in fact real. I.e. that reading about a sympathetic character who commits suicide makes one more likely to do the same. So yes, I would say that reading does invoke the same effect.

Here is an interesting link for you: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Conf/MemePap/Marsden.html

I'm still not sure if it is better than Con Kolivas' SD scheduler in his patchset, but we'll see.

Well, the CK patchset has been formally discontinued... the reasons for which appear to be related to this (and it seems that CFS was related in many ways to SD as well).
http://artipc10.vub.ac.be/serendipity/archives/32- The-end-of-the-CK-kernel-patch-set.html

09:32 [ AdamW] sander85: there are no plans to do a deal with microsoft, and that comes from the top (fb)
  (fb is probably François Bancilhon, Mandriva's CEO).

Actually, not always. The groups that breed like cockroaches don't necessarily invest heavily or even much in their offspring. r-K selection is an aspect of natural selection described by one of two extremes. In an r scenario, high volume, high churn is the name of the game: produce as many as fast as possible and some will live to reproduce. In a K scenario, emphasis is on a longer development and is more useful in a more stable environment: produce only a few, but make sure they're really good.

These strategies apply to primates as well.

Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer prize winning author with a Ph.D. in physics and an appointment in Cognitive Science at Indiana University, talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the oncoming technological singularity at the Artificial Life X conference this year. An audio-only webcast of his talk is available.

Nice to see that it's in place at Sony but um... this has been done. See Luc Steels.
  http://arti.vub.ac.be/~steels/

Very interesting work but not new.

The enhanced AIBOs used in the experiments have defined inputs (perceptions) and defined actions (outputs). The best way to think of this is to pretend there's a "little man" (homunculus) inside your brain: he only see the inputs from your eyes and controls the output signals to your limbs. Then replace the little man with a computer program. Yes, the computer program can only do what it is programmed to do, but as "Good Old Fashioned AI" has shown, the program can also can alter itself, so there is no lack of variety in resultant behaviors. The key is to choose an appropriate set of initial behaviors for the particular environment.

You should skim some of the papers of Luc Steels, who is the primary researcher behind this work. Don't dig into the details; look for the summaries and the insights. Steels is a good writer and has gone out of his way to encourage research. Here are two sources:

• Sony's CSL Labs publications - go down to Steels' papers
• Luc Steels publications.

A favorite, How to do Experiments in Artificial Language Evolution and Why. For an example that addresses your question, scroll down to Figure 3 which shows the AIBO and a plot of what it "sees" with it's rather primitive visual system.

This type of language/vocabulary development experiments has been done before.
You should take a look at the talking heads experiment.
This page has some related publications.

I don't want to get a 700+ phonebill each month for my expenses, I would never consider my cellphone Provider as my banking service. (because they en effect become your "banking service" if you only use your cellphone)

Proton has been around for a decade in Belgium already with the same philosophy. It's very convenient, and you can almost use it everywhere and where I can't I use my Credit Card.

The theory that applies to this nicely: The Red Queen

And the entire book on it: The Red Queen : Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Some evil voice inside me says that if you increase the number
of monkeys, random code generation still won't scale,
the number of possible codes increases exponentially with
code length.

That evll voice wouldn't be named Gene Ahmdal would it?

(Yes, yes, I know. Ahmdal's law was about computer programs. But you have to admit that it applies this situation amazingly well.)

"I still like to know how you equate that Global Warming was the cause. If what you say is true then we should have the same amount or more next season, correct? What if we have only 3 to 5 next year"

Hurricanes are a thermally driven phenomenon.
My 2006 prediction for the Atlantic basin is the formation of 30(+-5) cyclones.

How do I know?? Daily observations, I'm located in South Florida, which is mostly surrounded by ocean. SF winter air temp is significantly moderated by surrounding water temp. SF air temps are averaging 7.5 to 10 degrees(F) above normal.. A significant delta(T) over last year(2005).

As for the cause of GW.
Atmospheric CO2 measurements don't lie.
Historical ice core data confirms CO2 at unprecedented levels.
CO2 is of organic nature(12C/13C isotope ratio) (mankind).
The chemical/optical, IR trapping, characteristics of CO2 is well known.
Solar energy input is well known.
Apply Occam's Razor .

"A way of management I have never managed to head my head round but it seems to happen at times."

Try this for helping you to understand: The Peter Principle
(http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PETERPR.html)

Hypothesised by L. Peter around turn of century (1890-1900, can't remember exactly) and published as a book...interesting reading. Here's a snippet:

"The original principle states that in a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their "level of incompetence"."

If that were the case, we'd better tell the permafrost that it should stay frozen. Because, if you haven't heard, it is melting right now.

And if you ask if that is bad, well, scientists estimate that fourteen percent of the worlds carbon is stored in permafrost. Fourteen percent of ALL carbon, not only of the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. And it is mostly in the form of methane, which upon release, would increase the greenhouse effect considerably. See also positive feedback loop.

I think another problem would be the "NASA effect", when good people get old and couldn't move anywhere since there was no other place to go, then started to stay around for the paycheck. Or whatever it was that happened to NASA in the Shuttle era, forward.

This would require that you prove all other possible theories are false. How long do you suppose that would take? Scientists like to use Occum's razor. ( http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/OCCAMRAZ.html ) In essence use the simplest model that it testable and fits the evidence. Evolution is testable, it fits and is almost the simplest. (ID is simpler but can not be tested.)

Something being unprovable forces it to remain a lowly theory? Yup. The step up from theory is fact.

Furthermore, ID introduces a hypothesis which is not needed to explain the evolution of life, so it falls foul of Occam's razor. I don't understand this at all. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/OCCAMRAZ.html Occam's Razor says one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything. If anything Occam's razor argues for ID. And the evolution of life can be explained as a side effect.

As I said before the two theories are not mutually exclusive.

However I did like your last comment. Incidentally I am not an atheist, but I think it's extremely defeatist to invoke the "God made it happen" argument, rather than trying to find a conventional scientific explanation. Think what we would have missed out on over the past 2000 years.
and I agree 100%.

Still that's not a reason to not consider ID as well. Why limit ourselves?

Occams or even Ockhams.

I probably missed the karma boat on this one but c'est la vie. These are NOT self-replication robots, what they are, are self re-configurable robots, and quite honestly, not that impressive, if you want to see something with blow you away check out MURATA Satoshi and his bots. They are rediculous, just watch the video (asf sorry)http://complexity.vub.ac.be/~comdig/ALife9/M urata.asf
http://unit.aist.go.jp/is/dsysd/mtran/English/inde x.html

Maybe, maybe not.

If it costs $200 to buy a documented office suite, and 1mn people do it, the cost to the economy as a whole is $200mn. Now if it costs $10mn to document and support an open source alternative, the economy as a whole has saved $190mn which it could spend on other services.

You're right the people with a computer gain, but others can gain too. Now that $10mn raised through taxes has freed up $190mn for people to spend. Even if they save half their disposable income that's still $95mn 'new' disposable income in the country. This can go on to benefit those without computers.

Now this $95mn spending isn't 'new' as the old office suite that used to be bought because the company that made this suite employed people and gave shareholders (i.e. pension and saving plans) income, their income has been cut $190mn (see paradox of thrift). So in theory how useful is this, well jumping several steps from arithmetic to growth theory, efficient use of capital (buying something cheaper on a sustainable basis) frees up money for new spending/investment and should lead to economic growth (which means higher wages, standards of living, etc).

Economic growth hasn't been especially beneficial for the average worker over the past couple of decades, (using the US as an example as the numbers are easily available and well discussed) in 1980 corporate profits made up around 7% of GDP, in 2004 they were 14% - corporates grew the amount of 'profit' they made from the economy while households didn't make much progress, some sectors of society declined. So economic growth cannot be argued as a wholly good thing - it depends on who it accrues to and whether the observer perceives that as a 'good' thing.

Personally I welcome some funding of open source, it does cost some tax money, but it introduces a notion of competition to corporates which can well be seen as monopolistic in some/many industries - i.e. without governement support of competition things wouldn't progress. There are other ways for governments to encourage support too.

THere are other arguments regarding taxation and perception of volume of tax.

Yes it is all circular arguments: that is economics, if you ever think about what happens to a dollar it goes in a circle many many times. An yes IAAE (I Am An Economist).

That was my first reaction as well.

And don't forget, God Wrote in Lisp.

Homeostasis is one of the most typical properties of highly complex open systems. It comes with the territory. We are part of the system. If we get to far out of control a feedback loop will kick in and negate our activity. The system will take care of itself. The question is will we work with the system and enjoy the error signal or work against it and suffer the consequences.

his homepage has papers on his current research.

Unless you're a communist, capitalism is good for our society.

Holy crap are you ignorant.
You need to do a little research on the concpet of "market failure".

Capitaism SUCKS at TONS of things. To believe otherwise is to be pathetically uninformed.

A great example of this is the current US health care situation. People in other civilized countries are getting better health care cheaper because they have socialized health care.
Why?... For one, because "capitalism" doesn't take into account the cost of my death to society.

For a more academic, widely accepted example of how capitalism can totally suck hairy donkey balls, read up on something called the "prisoner's dilemma".

If you're making furbies, capitalism is great but for a great many of the problems that plague society at large, it just plain sucks.

"The idea that we should always be "balanced" when it comes to arguments of political import leads to a lot of bullshit getting consideration it doesn't deserve. Global warming deniers at this point are in the same class as creationists, Holocaust-deniers, and flat-earthers"

.....oh, dearie me, and I always thought I was a balanced person. Now I am put into the same corner as (sigh) holocaust deniers.
let me recap: there is at least one person (me) thinking that at the basis of science there is at least a modicum of methods, like Occam's razor, .
Now, the raw data are before our very eyes, and I do not dispute them; but, dear Sir, I dispute their extrapolations in the future, on the grounds that all these so called models do not explain great climate changes of the past, like the maunders minimum and the other variations of temperature in historical times in which the Impact of human activity was, by today's standards, negligible.
Now, I can understand the primeval impulse of Man, in the face of things that hurt him and that he doesn't comprehend, to atone and offer sacrifices; after all, we are but a few generations removed from ancestors that made human sacrifices to appease the weather.I do not understand the same behaviour in people that follow a scientific site, in which the ability to deliver balanced reasoning and correct behaviour is defined as "Kharma".

So who is wrong, or lying: the person who says that today's model are inadequate and require further study, or the person that in the face of exogenous events says :"It is all my fault" and self mutilates, in an unselfish sacrifice to blind and deaf Gods?

As I said, further study is worthwhile. But remember, in science, it is the true scientist that tries to prove himself wrong. No opposition is required.

these guys http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ are using self adapting and darwinian technology to evolve the structure of the web, strengthening or weakening links, automatically, or even creating new links, based on usage patterns. they are comparing it to biological neural networks. they are trying to make the net actually work like a "global brain" ... their project also has the best name: Principia Cybernetica

Actually doing that is not a scientific requirement at all. Economics, for example, doesn't require that kind of analysis; it keeps "human actions" as an indivisible object of study, and build a (somewhat) successful theory in top of it.

Reductionism is not the only way to proceed on science. As Sycraft-fu points out, the only required thing is testability - the possibility to build experiments that can disprove your current theory.

I would add that strict logic reasoning is a must, and analytic separation of a fact in its composing parts is a natural way to progress. But science doesn't implies that everything must be decomposed that way, and that humans "are built from the basic building blocks and chemicals". Science is also able to adopt "holistic" (systemic) procedures. See Complex systems and systems theory for some examples.

However, even outside the balance of loans, banks create net money when they exchange reserves (non-interest bearing) for government securities (interest bearing), which is where I suppose the increase in actual cash comes from. Of course the central banks control the amount of reserve exchange and therefore the net created money. The simplest explanation for this I could find was here.

Still, it sounds like you have more education on this subject, so you can correct me if I'm wrong in this. But this is my understanding of where net currency increase comes from.

Well, picking up on your reply (above), I can see that Wiki users could employ Wikipedia to further their view of the world. By taking a whack at topics in the encyclopedia (or other Wiki site), users can communicate their thoughts. In some cases, these ideas may be quirky or the actions may be fanatical -- wacky. Hence "Wiki-wacker". Whether through saturation of key topics, artful writing, or nurturing of followers, the Wiki-wacker affects the ideas that may be passed on to others, perhaps reproducing. The user pushes a particular meme -- becoming a memist (my term) or a memetic engineer (more popular term).

Actually, "occasional wild shifts" are exactly how organisms evolve.

Not false, but not true.

Honestly, I was being a little humorous in my original message. But I wasn't completely accurate.

There are places where the "Standard Model" should break down that we might be seeing pretty soon. There's even some evidence we're seeing cracks in the Standard Model, but pretty much everyone wants to see something a bit more significant.

The problem is, we know the Standard Model cannot be correct. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics simply do not get along as both are currently formulated. The so-called "string" and "brane" theories have features that seem to make the relativity problems go away. But there are so many different possible theories, there's no current way to tell which is correct.

So why play with them?

Brian Greene points out in The Elegant Universe that a lot of the current theories appear to complement one another - they may in fact be subsets of the "ultimate" theory. There are some questions that one theory can answer better than another theory, and some calculations that simply can't be done in a third theory that a fourth theory handles almost trivially.

So the physicists play with these theories in the hopes that either a) they'll find something we can test (like "large" hidden dimensions.

And who knows? Some folks suspect that eventually they'll find that only one theory, with only one set of constants, produces a totally consistent theory and that the current universe is the only one possible. Others postulate that we'll find there's an infinite set of possible universes with the same or similar theories, but variables that are random and that our "universe" is merely one of many in the "multiverse."

In the meantime, it's great fun and keeps physicists employed.

Occam's Razor

"Occam's razor is a logical principle attributed to the mediaeval philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham). The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony. It underlies all scientific modelling and theory building. It admonishes us to choose from a set of otherwise equivalent models of a given phenomenon the simplest one. In any given model, Occam's razor helps us to "shave off" those concepts, variables or constructs that are not really needed to explain the phenomenon. By doing that, developing the model will become much easier, and there is less chance of introducing inconsistencies, ambiguities and redundancies."

Don't make things more difficult then they have to be. Black holes are the simplest explanation. Anti-matter and anti-gravity is a more complex explanation than what is possibly needed.

One of the princiapl tenets of capitalism, is that entities that supply better value will succeed, to the expense of entities that do not.

Why do so many people insist on treating capitalism as some kind of god-figure that will make everything work out if you just worship properly? This statement is true under many circumstances, but if you understand the concept of the "prisoner's dilemma" class of problem, you will recognize that there are many circumstances under which it fails. I would suggest reading The Efficient Society by Joseph Heath. I'm not sure RFID tags worry me as much as they worry some people around here, but as a society we can not afford to ignore these issues by saying "don't worry, Mammon will fix it for us".

From the post: Apparently traditional ethanol from food crops like corn used at least as much energy to create as they released when burned.

From the parent: That is, the product will produce more energy than it takes to manufacture it.

Thanks for your keen understanding of entropy and the Laws of Thermodynamics.

This is simply an indication that 95% of the population is scientifically illiterate.

Unfortunately science education is not mandatory like english and basic math are. Nor is it taught in a manner that supports curiousity and interest.

Given that we live in an increasingly technical dependent society it's scary to find pseudoscience and scientific ignorance so rapidly on the rise. For those struggling to separate science and pseudoscience, a good book putting science's role into a clearer perspective is Carl Sagan's book: "The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark." I have a few copies and lend it to people when they need it. (Note: there are other good books too this is just one that comes to mind).

The underlying skills of critical thought and a healthy dose of skepticism are the basis of good science. Even basic concepts like Occam's razor are not widely understood or accepted. People need to be made to understand that science is not just ugly formulas in physics class, but that it forms the basis for all things that define our modern high standard of living.

If less than 1% of congress men ever elected have any scientific background how do you expect them to put forth a meaningful policy on scientific education or even understand basic issues.

Rather than sitting here in self congratulatory bliss about other people ignorance, we should take our responsibility as the scientifically literate (to some degree anyway) seriously and do what we can to educate people around us. Take an active role in science outreach programs, or at the very least lobby your elected representatives.

Yes, it is a slow difficult up hill battle, but 300 years ago 95% of the population was illiterate, today most can read and write. This is mostly due to a number of dedicated individuals that convinced their government of the need for literacy.

Ignorance is bliss... Unfortunately for me its to late...

This is the same logic that resulted in the prediction that the earth's population would reach infinity around 2040. The job migration will be stopped as wages in [India] approach wages in [US]. Equality happens.

Systems = Parts + Relationships. Complex systems can have emergent properties.

You have been trained to understand both analog and digital gauges.

When you first learned to count, you had to view natural numbers (i.e. 0,1,2,3...) and collections of discrete objects in their singularity and plurality. Eventually you're mind made a mapping between digits and abstract quantities of discrete objects (i.e. 2->pairs, 12->dozen etc). The only remotely innate intuition may have been the basic set theoretic framework the entire number system is built on. Maybe.

The analog gauge is defined in terms of the digital representation. You had to learn about a 12-modulus system in order to understand how to read and interpret your analog wristwatch. You also had to develop the abstraction of a mapping between radial coordinates of a wristwatch and the digital, base 10, modulus 12 representation. Heck, even to look at a sundial and say that the day is half done requires some knowledge of fractions.

So if intuition is defined by Occam's Razor, by which I mean if intuition is based on what abstraction can be interpreted by the most canonical collection of knowledge, the digital wristwatch would in my opinion be more intuitive.

Also, from a geeky perspective, I like analog watches because of their true continuity of temporal representation. Also, IMHO, gears and pendulums (in old clocks) are just so much cooler than quartz crystals.

A product's value is whatever it was most recently traded for. A product's price is whatever the guy who's pushing it chooses it to be. That could be set based on a random number generator, it could be a number restrained by cash flow, maybe theories that one's product will lead to sales of another product from which they will profit (even if they're selling at a loss), or just a number set usingGiffen Good strategies.

However, no matter how you slice it, playing any market, including the market of life itself, is a zero sum game.