Slashdot Mirror

I've just realised that the Wikipedia page I linked to in my previous reply was distinctly light on detail. Sorry.

There's an excellent chapter on Moonlight Maze in Thomas Rid's book Rise of the Machines (The Lost History of Cybernetics). Well worth borrowing from the library, in my opinion.

How would you respond to this: "Net neutrality advocates are dumb. No we don't want ISPs slowing down some traffic, that would be censorship and anti-competitive and wrong. But those idiots keep complaining about fast lanes. Going fast is good! Fast lanes are just fine." ?

Egalitarianism is specifically about people, so I can't call net neutrality egalitarian, but the idea is the same: equality is good and it is the opposite of promoting one group (of internet traffic) while excluding others. There's very little difference between promoting group A exclusively, and inhibiting everything that isn't in group A.

So you bring up civil rights and the civil rights movement, and there's an interesting feminist angle there. Civil rights, of course, are for everyone - not black people exclusively. But the civil rights movement, at least in the United States, was pretty much exclusively about civil rights for black people. There were a couple of women, civil rights activists, who felt disenfranchised and ultimately quit the civil rights movement for this reason. But not before writing a fairly famous memo (here) which is considered one of the founding documents of second wave feminism.

In other words, a couple of women quit an exclusionary movement for being excluded, only to inspire their own exclusionary movement. I wish I could say it was surprising that they would just perpetuate the same problem, but this is a common reaction to being mistreated.

So this is a criticism of the civil rights movement, but there's a question of whether they could have achieved what they did if their focus had been broader. And if you compare to the Black Lives Matter movement, going on right now, well... there are some positive and negative things to be said about that comparison, but this is now meandering. (I wrote two more paragraphs here before I realized that this was a dumb tangent.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "individual" agenda, but it is the agenda that is the problem. So... yes? I gave you an example above (the soup kitchen) of a way to pursue an agenda (mitigating hunger, particularly the greater hunger of group A) without excluding anyone. It's just a matter of identifying a problem and helping with that, rather than identifying a group of people and helping them.

https://archive.org/details/NI...

I would have thought there would be a rush on Walter Lippmann's "Public Opinion"

http://wwnorton.com/college/hi...

Thanks Archive .org and W.W. Norton.

Even better read this book and understand that treating bitcoin as an "investment" is basically guaranteed to make you poorer.

My point is that you can not make the "reasonable assumption" that the two halves are representative, any less than you could in my examples. Why would you be any less likely to find differences in space than you would in those? I'm not an astronomer, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that there are similar unique qualities that could only be explored from one. The article linked below shows differences seen with simple latitude changes.

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/astronomy/astro21/sandt/latitude.html

Yes, I fully understand that "this depends on what you're after". Try not to jump to conclusions about someone's understanding of science before you know anything about them. I expect that kind of thing from youngsters, but I'm betting from your low ID that you've been around the block a few times.

Suggested reading for you "The Big Short" by : http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-07223-5/
The forensic analysis of the Housing Bubble and how Wall street and Corporations contributed.

The word consilience was apparently coined by William Whewell, in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840. In this synthesis Whewell explained that, "The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction obtained from another different class. Thus Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs."

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is a 1998 book by biologist E. O. Wilson. In this book, Wilson discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might in the future unite them with the humanities. Wilson prefers and uses the term consilience to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor. ... . ... "Definition of consilience "Literally a 'jumping together' of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.""

Biologist E.O. Wilson Pens Fiction Science: FiSci on Wednesday April 14, @06:05AM mindbrane Submitted by mindbrane on Wednesday April 14, @06:05AM mindbrane writes "Wired is running a short interview with noted naturalist and biologist E.O. Wilson as he speaks to the publication of his first novel. "Anthill tells the parallel stories of Raff Cody, a southern lawyer trying to preserve the wilderness of his youth, and the epic territorial wars among the ants that inhabit that land. Wilson has argued that our behavior is governed by genetics and evolutionary imperatives. In Anthill, he turns that conviction into a narrative technique, writing about human nature with the same detachment he uses when explaining how worker ants lick the secretions of their larvae for nourishment. But Wilson's novel is also an emotional plea to safeguard wild landscapes. Wilson talked to Wired about ants, evolution, and the creative aspects of the scientific process."

"The mind is just the brain doing its job." is a quote from an American neuroscientist, S. Levy (i think). The brain is stupefyingly complex. It seems to be widely distributed in terms of nodes and massively parallel processed. For example, a well known experiment had subjects meet a potential significant other in two settings. In one setting the meeting took place in mundane surroundings. In another setting the meeting took place on a high suspension bridge. In the second instance the same potential significant other was seen as much more attractive. The conclusion was drawn that the brain layers experiences and stuff leaks from one layer to another. If your in an exciting circumstance it's likely someone you meet there will appear more interesting. Just from this one experiment and the known complexity of our brains it should be at least likely that attempts to quantify our existentialist experience is doomed, happily in my opinion. It's not unlikely that if you subscribe to such a method and submit to a data driven religious experience then, more likely in the company of others who share your methods and beliefs, you'll get a rewarding experience, but it'll be a belief driven quasi religious experience none the less.

no, i did not RTFA.

Contrary examples everywhere. Noteworthy scientists are used to being "torn down" and often it IS personal.

There's actually another neat video (from an intro psych textbook website from a couple years ago) showing the effects of TMS on Broca's area. The guy counts numbers upwards, and as they stimulate Broca's on the left side he experiences a disruptive effect (afterwards saying, "That was cool" ;). They also stimulated on the analogous region on the right side, showing that this participant had no observable effect.

As long as the person is expecting their speech to be disturbed, and they can hear/feel the exact moment that the magnet is pulsing, the effect could be purely psychosomatic. They really need to test this on someone who's not expecting these effects. It may be ethically a bit strange, but it's the only true test.

There's actually a few different types of controls which are used experimentally. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:

* use a sham coil that triggers the same sorts of clicking sound but doesn't actually stimulate anything

* more recently, a different type of sham coil has been developed which allows you to modify current directions on-the-fly, allowing you to create the sound/sensation of scalp stimulation, but causes minimal stimulation in the brain region (disclaimer: this coil was devised by people from the same lab as me)

* you can switch which side of the brain you're stimulating on, and if the subject isn't familiar with neuroanatomy they'll be none the wiser. About midway down this page there's a video of someone counting upwards, and it shows that even though there's a disruption when you stimulate Broca's area on the left side of the brain, no effect is observed when the symmetric area on the other side of the brain is stimulated.

Here's a pretty good explanation of what happened.

Basically, luxury taxes are dumb. They barely bring in any revenue, and cause too much economic damage.

For those who don't know:

The storys the poster is refering to can be found in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

(A Few Excerpts from the text)
Math Magic http://www.craigr.com/books/surely.htm
Education in Brazil (my favorite) http://www.wallaceinfo.com/feynman.asp

There is also a sequel What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Here's a textbook (a college one at that), and here's the scientific definition of a theory and a law. Have at it. Given that no amount of validation changes a theory into a law, I'd love to see how you propose that the textbook is doing so.

I just hope we don't see those of us supporting Open Source thinking we have won. This feels sort of like a "Peace in Our Time" (http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/wor kbook/ralprs36.htm) kind of moment to me.

I don't think you're getting me. "Jumping the shark" means the last important, exciting act, after which nothing important happened. Andreesen jumped the shark. Mosaic was just getting started. Andreesen is no "luminary" - he's faded to cold, dark matter since his early-1990s home run. He's now famous merely for being famous - and only people preoccupied with the Netscape spokesmodel PR think otherwise. For example, Andreesen had nothing to do with business decisions like pricing, or selling "the firm" to AOL - that was all Jim Clark, the majority owner and total force behind Netscape's entire storyline. Andreesen was along for the ride, a prop to make the whole revolution look that much more exciting, that an unknown geek could set the world on fire. Except he didn't; Jim Clark, industry veteran behind Sun and SGI, did the burning. I watched the whole story unfold, from relatively inside, starting around 1990-93. A very well told version of the story is The New New Thing.

My "negative bias" is supported by the facts. A negative bias against an obnoxious, conceited jerk is justified, and accurate - not just a strike against the holder of the bias.

BTW, "Mo zilla" was just a way to say "this is the bigger, monstrous version of Mosaic" - hence its Godzilla-style logo/mascot. It has nothing to do with killing, Oedipal or not. That's *your* projection.

Hate to screw up a good rant, but software is, by definition, a public good.

A public good is non-excludable, and non-rivalrous in consumption. That is, like a streetlight, you can't keep people from benefitting by it (non-excludable), and you don't lose any of your benefits when others benefit by it (non-rivalrous). Schooling is not a public good, since it is easily excludable: just close the door of the school room.

... that's why we have licenses.

No.

Some public goods can be made artificially excludable by law. Lighthouses are a good example of this (lighthouses in England were once private, for-profit, very lucrative businesses). Software is another example of a public good which can easily be made artificially excludable. That's ``...why we have licenses'': to artificially turn a public good (information) into a private good.

We originally began doing that because our constitution allows (but doesn't require) our congress to grant these monopolies:

``To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;'' (article 1, section 8, discussed here.)

Whether it is still a good idea for Congress to grant those monopolies to all software creators is an empirical question, and the answer may be no. If we can identify any cases in which patents or copyrights are hindering progress in the sciences and useful arts, Congress would have no authority to grant those exclusive rights in those cases.

You make it sound like there is some organization of rich folks that meets weekly in smoke filled rooms to discuss and plot the downfall of the middle class.

Diseases had already adapted to infect humans when they were introduced to the Americas.

This can't be emphasized enough.

More specifically, diseases adapt to infect humans through long-term exposure to humans. This often come through domesticated animals eg. smallpox, measles, but sometimes through wild animals which live in close proximity to humans, eg. bubonic plague or AIDS. Jared Diamond author of Guns, Germs and Steel develops these idea in this talk.

What the hell is so funny about this? Right when the bestseller list features Guns, Germs and Steel, conventional wisdom finally accepts how foreign contacts sparked the plagues that devastated first "bubonic" Europe, then "reservation" America, and every region of America is fighting losing battles against marauding "alien" species. Some people try to tell NASA and other researchers that innoculating other planets, like Mars and Europa, is even more disastrous. They go ahead and innoculate Mars, and will recklessly bring back our own infestation. Thanks for possibly the last plague of our civilization.

I like the cut of your jib, mister. Have you read Guns, Germs and Steel? I'm delighted to report that it was on the Canadian national non-fiction bestseller list for a very long time, until quite recently in fact.

The US certainly conducted its own campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and I don't think genocide is too strong a word, but... The proportion of the pre-contact population wiped out as a result of the accidental transmission of diseases of European origin is almost certainly far greater than the proportion who died as a result of intentional action on the part of settlers and their governments. Of course this doesn't excuse anything in the slightest.

This whole business is often marked by claims that are rarely based on much more than politics and population estimates.

The principles of rotary motion were known throughout both the "Old" and "New" worlds, but the development and use of the wheel was a technological outgrowth of the domestication of large herbivores such as kine, horses, water buffalo, etc.

The "New World" didn't have any large domesticable animals except for the llama which lives in regions too mountainous for wheeled vehicles.

Jared Diamond is a recent popularizer of this observation but he wasn't the only to make it. It's not that early Americans didn't "think" of the wheel: it's just that in the absence of large draft animals, they couldn't figure out how to use it in any practical way.

you should check out What Einstein Told His Cook, a interesting, informed and somewhat scientific approach to cooking in the kitchen. To quote a two line review: " Science in the kitchen. Wolke, a columnist for the Washington Post, offers explanations, humour and some pretty engaging recipes. Unlike many other books of this nature, Wolke wields a lively and light pen."

I thought Patrick O'Brian had finally gotten his due slashdotting.

Think of that less as "Ten times as accurate" and more as "One-tenth as inaccurate" meaning humans will miscategorize ten times as many messages. 99.84% accuracy = 0.16% inaccuracy, and one-tenth of that would be 99.984% accurate.

The problem is that English is not very precise, since it's just as accurate to say that 20% is ten times higher than 2%, as it is to say that 99.984% is ten times higher than 99.84%. (See also, "How to Lie with Statistics").

...by far most of the wealth in this world is created by people

This is, unfortunately, a false statement. By far most of the wealth in this world is inherited. You were born (or immigrated to - it doesn't matter) in a rich country, a western country. Others are born in a poor country.

You might argue that this is because our ancestors were so smart. I think it's for more complex historical reasons, neatly summed up in a great book, Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

The economic climate was designed to be (and lucky enough to be) the most conducive to economic growth

The wealth-generating processes date back thousands and (as is pointed out in the book) tens of thousands of years. Design of economic climate, a rather recent invention, has nothing to do with it.

The basic question is this: Why did Europeans invade America, why was it not the other way around? The answer is complex, but it basically comes down to having natural resources (such as farmland, plants that are suitable for farming, and animals suitable for farming).

Through a combination of available resources (farm animals and farmable crop) and pure neccessity, Europeans became farmers. Farming makes it possible for there to be non-food-gathering professions such as scientists.

Read the book. It will open your mind.

Purely symantics. The way I see it writing(even on slashdot) benefits from having 30 seconds of proofing applied before submission.

Is this a private grammar war, or can anybody join in?

Anyway, perhaps you meant semantics ?

Peace in our time.

Frankly, you might as well ignore Mexicans when they bring up worthless items like this- they're still trying to take back the land they lost in the war.

Troll.

But mostly valid... Yeah call us USians or some other (sounds rather insulting when you say it in the United States slang we call english) term.

"Amercians" is short for "United States of America-ians" It's a logical extraction of a mouthful that dosen't make the speaker sound like an idiot.

USians however...
US - The group of people I am part of.
(It is also used to mean "The only people that matter")
Used as a "nation" USians could litterally mean "The people of the only nation that matters". Pritty high handed even for the U.S.A. (note the piriods)

It's no wonder the rest of the world hates the United States. Outside of our really stupid diplomatic policy people refer to the citizens of the United States by a phrase that in english is a global insult.

We don't say Yusah we say You Ehss Aey. Three letters for three words.

Outside that USians, USlanders, USers, USAers and any other combonation starting with the letters US in an effort to make a word out of the initals turns into a mouthful.

Anyway people seldomly refer to themselfs based on the contenent or landmass they come from but from the nation they are part of.

Go ahead and call the citzens of the United States of American USAlanders if you like...
Hay try it in a French bar I wonder how long it'll take before they pick up the insult and slam a bottle of wine over your head (a cheap California brew not a fine French wine.. never waist the good stuff)

Spain and morroco are indeed on separate tectonic plates. However, they only move 10mm towards eachother each year, and the subduction is not happening between spain and morroco, but south of greece and farther to the east. So, my personal guess is that plate movement for this tunnel can be reasonably safely disregarded (no fault lines to mess things up).

But then, IANATG (tectonic geologist).

I don't agree with the idea that the West had better lateral thinking. I lean towards an idea put forward by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Basically, the West isn't/wasn't one culture but many. In China, if the emporer didn't like your ideas about how to use gunpowder you had nobody else to go to. However, in Europe you could shop your idea around to Italy, Portugal, or even Spain. If it was a good idea (was successful) then other countries adopted it readily, especially if it had military implications.

It isn't that the West are better thinkers, it's just that we are a diverse lot trying to kill each other. :-)

It's not politically correct to say so, but the West really is a superior culture when it comes to making practical use of theoretical discoveries.

Check out Guns, Germs & Steel which will go a pretty long way to refuting your argument.

Diamond's thesis, in a nutshell, is that there are no better societies, just better geographic locations and various wierd outcomes that derive from these lucky locations.

IMO it deserves more than a Pulitzer - it deserves to be legally mandated required reading.

Read "Guns Germs and Steel" (as Bill Gates has ;p ) to understand why this may be the case.
http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring99/gunsgerms .htm

Brian Greene wrote an excellent book, The Elegant Universe on superstring theory. It's an engaging book, and well worth the read.

You can buy it here from Amazon.

I know what anarchy means. It is the absense of authority, and it implies either disorder or death.

The broadest stages of human organization are anarchy, tribes (chiefdoms) and states. I used "tribal anarchy" as a synonym for the two non-state stages. (Chapter 14, "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" of GG&S, has an entertaining list of the forces that increase state power)

Prehaps you are using a fantasy defintion put forth by self-proclaimed "anarchists". (They are better called "libertarian socialists", which at least makes plain the impossibilities of their goal)

well, there are primative types of anarchism, but it's not the most common

Oh, do you have examples of any other form of anarchism ever occuring? And did it last very long?

Even pro-"anarchist" writers admit that no such system exists today.

If he hadn't left us so prematurely, I'm sure the recent spate of genetic determinism would have given him enough material for another edition or two of The Mismeasure of Man .

RIP, Mr. Gould. You tried.

I second the recommendation for O'Brian - I am an avid sci-fi/fantasy reader, and I have really enjoyed his books. What I find most interesting (if somewhat frightening) is that they were recommended to me by my Dad (shudder)...
Start at the beginning of the Aubrey/Maturin series with "Master and Commander". More info at The world of Patrick O'Brian I have recommended his books to several friends, and all have enjoyed reading them.

My own tastes have been wandering afield over the last decade. I still enjoy good Sciece Fiction and Fantasy, but my fiction shelves now include such marvelous reads as Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series. Think ST:TOS set in the age of sail during Britain's wars with France. See W.W. Norton's pages for a list of the books. Heartily recommended, and with 20 books in the series, as well as other books by the author, it may last you a month or three.

The idiocy of this remark amazed me. While I have no doubt that students will be having Gilgamesh and Beowulf rammed down their craw in a thousand years time I very much doubt the Heaney translation will be much remembered (except perhaps by a snarky comment in a preface to Potter!).

P.S. I highly recommend this book!

The Japanese have managed to publish 3 books focusing on whacky inventions. They, however, refuse to admit to the whackiness, hence the title "Unuseless".

I agree. When I first started reading The Elegant Universe (http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall98/universe.h tm), I'd go to bed and couldn't sleep because my brain was going a million miles an hour thinking about everything I'd just read. The first third of the book introduces you to some amazing stuff, such as some of Einstein's ideas about time travel, numerous dimensions, and basic physics.

The second two thirds are a bit more complex and I began to lose interest. It spent a lot of time talking about the Theory of Everything and how that seems to be the Holy Grail of physics these days. It also got into some extra-dimension stuff which was cool.

Overall it's definitely worth reading. Like I said, the first third is mind blowing, and the rest is interesting enough to keep reading.

The Dancing Wu Li Masters: Gary Zukav" A book about the dynamics of new physics without mathematics.
The Elegant Universe: Brian Greene" Again, another new physics book with neat pics and no mathmaticas. Specific to Superstrings mostly.
A Brief History of Time: Stephen Hawking" A good book about allmost everything between classical physics and the physics of the last few years. I.E. Relativity, quantum mechanics etc.

In 1959 Richard Feynman said that all the information accumulated in all the books in the world could theoretically fit in a cube 1/200th of an inch on a side.

You can read the transcipt of the speech from when he made that prediction.

Feynman worked on developing the atomic bomb, he won a nobel in physics and is known as much for his scientific research as for his story telling.

Mathematics for the Million (ISBN 0-393-31071-X) Even Albert Einstein had good things to say of this book.

That being said, anthropologists theorize that the reasons why the west has come to rule is bad weather and winter. In Africa, it was for a long time relatively feasible to live hand-to-mouth. They didn't have cold, cold winters where food got scarce. They didn't have overpopulation that required ever increasing levels of food output. Being too organized in terms of housing might have proven a disadvantage when there was confrontation. Lots of theories.

There's an excellent book on this subject called Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He goes through a whole series of hypotheses to debunk the popular myth that non-Europeans are biologically inferior (I know that wasn't what you were arguing).

It's more complex than just climate, for instance Diamond argues that the east-west orientation of the Eurasian landmass allowed agriculture to spread easily once it had developed in the "fertile crescent" of the middle east, whereas the north-south orientations of Africa and the Americas hindered any such migration due to significantly different climates as one moves away from or towards the equator.

Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man.

Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg)
part 1
part 2
part 3

For example, the discovery of Santa's flying reindeer would be a big step on the road to understanding the physics of his journey, akin in chemistry to discovering the transuranic series, and would have much more impact than finding yet another sign of a stressed creator. For example, the CIA would be absolutely fascinated to get a handle one someone who ``knows when you've been naughty''.

``But seriously folks,'' add to this the 250,000+ species known from fossils and it should be clear that at least every 8th-to-80th transitional form should have shown up in the fossil record we've exhumed so far (BTW, the above ref cites TL Erwin in The Tropical Forest Canopy within Biodiversity, 1988, NAP (WA DC) for a generous ceiling of 30 million species, mostly insects). If we had equal parts transitional and stable species (really, we need many times that because most attempted changes would fail according to any reasonable theory), for example, there should be an absolute scratching minimum of about 2,000 known transitional species discovered in the fossil record by now.

While we're having fun, take DM Raup's figure of 99.9% ( Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? , 1991, WW Norton NY - see this too for commentary and a ceiling of 40M species) extinct species, there should be at least 20 transitional species alive today, and using the 10-30 million species range vs 2 million known, we should have found somewhere between 1 and 4 of those by now.

Maybe one of those is Santa's reindeer? Which, BTW, are probably female...

Hmm, proving the existence of wrapped up dimensions could be a tangiable shot in the arm for superstring theory which necessitates 10 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension. If this sort of thing interests you, do read the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. It's well written and very readable considering the complexity of the subject matter. Hawking radiation is also covered, and a string twist is put on the process. The book kept me quiet for days.

Same with Hitler - the Americans were to scared, and thought he was no threat. But Britain nobly stood alone.

Oh, please. I am of British heritage and this made me laugh out loud. Recall that England's noble stand of 1940-41 was made possible by England's pathetic capitulation to Hitler just two years earlier. And Neville Chamberlain was a Rugby graduate, too.

--

Yowza. I need to turn this into a proposal for Andover, and then turn this into the greatest, cheapest national and global newspaper on the Web. And it might be feasible even without patenting it as a business model or closing off slashcode to public review. If I got involved with this, I could do more good for the world than going into public office as an educated, intelligent, honest individual. Hold on a sec while I review my life's plans...

-----
IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
-----

Sorry for not posting the link earlier. I thought this was pretty widely known, and it certainly should be. Here's a book that covers the topic pretty well. The web page even quotes the letter that an FBI agent sent to King: The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. by David J. Garrow.