You're the one talking like you socialize with a large enough group of people to warrant taking a sample of what some of them sometimes say and extrapolating it to the extent of "number one causes of".
I'm tired of this "manishs" person not having a better grasp of English, but also authoring 90% of the/. links I follow here from Twitter. The embarrassments are mounting for whoever it is -- if they CAN be embarrassed. I dunno. Some of the articles posted seem possessed of a political slant suggesting a personality of really odd affect.
When I heard that the iPhone was "missing" the headphone jack, my first thought was "good call".
Here you have this insanely popular electronic device that people have with them at all times, and what's the number one complaint about it? No, no,/. friends, no, it's not planned obsolescence. It's "this thing dies if it so much as looks at water."
Well if you're going to try to take care of that problem one thing you might go for right away is getting rid of that crazy big hole in the top that by its very nature of design is all about exposed metal contacts.
I guess you could get all crazy in your head about DRM and shit but as someone else points out, at the end of the day however the sound is delivered it must end up being converted into a signal that can be used by standard speakers or headphones.
The only way around that is if Apple plans on making it so you have only two options: * play the sound directly through the iPhone's built-in speaker * send the sound via some Apple-proprietary encrypted cousin of bluetooth to one of Apple's own special speaker systems that if they get large enough to entertain a party probably cost many thousands of dollars
If that's the direction they're going to go I'd like to imagine it's going to be a complete failure because people don't have the money or wherewithal to spend on special speakers from Apple (the computer company, not the music company).
But then again you only have to know a handful of Apple users to understand that they would do exactly that, and would be glad to go broke doing it.
People who live without fear don't worry what other people think about them.
That's what "social justice warriors", the American liberal left, and the like don't begin to comprehend or understand: that they are only speaking on behalf of severely damaged and malicious members of society; meanwhile, plenty of minorities have gone on to become very successful, non-racist members of a society that they don't see as racist; plenty of gay people have gone on to become very successful, homosexual members of a society that they don't see as homophobic; plenty of people who don't fit whatever norm you hold true -- the details of which you think is more important than the details of the lives of everybody you claim to support -- and those people don't miss a minute of sleep because of it, aren't suffering one shred of anxiety over any perceivable discrimination, aren't held down by any over-arching power, and don't sweat the differences between men and women and black and white and you name it, because those people are "over it".
"Woke" is great. "Woke" is some shit, alright? Go ahead, be "woke" all you want. I'm glad you ain't sleepin', because there's some real world shit out there that unless you're "woke", you won't get.
But go ahead and tell me "woke" is all there is to life when you know damn well you can't always remember your own phone number or how to cook toast right when you just woke up.
"Woke" is great and all but unless you're *COMPLETE*, there's no satisfaction for you. "Woke", you're still just trying to piece together some dream you just think you had. Unless you're one steely mother fucker, if you just "woke" you aren't up for very much meet and greet, try and true, or any else that matter.
So all these "SJW" sorts and the rest of liberal politics are just barking up the tree of reactionary sorts who come down to their level. The people who engage in this don't even deserve to be sorted as "left" and "right" -- they're just reactionary consumers, plain and simple. Their politics are consumer products and they can't act because they're too busy reacting.
Now, given this perspective (which you basically have to agree with or look like a fucking tool, admit it,) what was that you said to/about me, again? "Tool"? "Sanctimonius"?
If Freud wasn't post-modern history's most absurdist spermbank I'd borrow from his porn mag and throw a little pin-up of "PROJECTIONIST!" your way, because obvious you sound more than a little bit jealous. Of what, I have no clue. You never know what people declare vals in, these days!
Personally, I feel that if your genitals are this enormous gateway straight into to your soul and that you're always, always and forever vulnerable about your own sexuality to such as extent that it needs to be hidden by default, then the problem's not with society the problem's with you.
Your argument requires that the audience is capable of comprehending rate-of-change (first differential) of whatever it is that they're paying attention to (resource consumption in this case.)
This is the problem with most scientific, economic, and political issues in the "first world": barely anybody can comprehend much more than translation along a single dimension -- measurement along one line.
The "smart people" tend to be those who can analyze two influences together at once in a simply two-dimensional relationship, at best as one function of two independent variables.
And we have to acknowledge that those people aren't really all that fucking smart. I used to take the "power" of that level of intelligence for granted -- back in high school when I was simply average at algebra. Since becoming average (and sometimes above-average) at several levels of calculus, linear programming, and differential equations (basically since completing my minor in mathematics) I no longer take that power for granted. I instead renegotiate my view of the world to see that most people are fucking ignoramuses (ignoramii?) who simply can't comprehend something as vitally important to understanding a system as change-of-rate-of-change.
Third derivatives? Beyond hope. The jerks will never, ever understand jerk.
So you can always just take whatever explaina-thon you're about to attempt, privately reduce it to differential terms for your own quiet analysis, and if any second or third order derivatives appear in the 'splainin' then you best just give up because the vast majority -- far more, far beyond (below?) merely 'the average' -- can barely get a grip on first derivatives, and especially cannot do so if there is more than one independent variable to the function.
Look, whenever you're going to come up with a projection you have to start with some data set and some function, right? Usually you use a data set to guess or regress some function and you tweak things until you get a very good match for your data.
Caveat: some mathematicians don't stop until their function hits every data point at least once, and their resulting "fit" is some outrageous degree of polynominal; some other mathematicians are content with a partial least squares fit; others spend decades looking for exactly what the root causes of the data set are and come up with differential equations to explain all the phenomenon that contributed.
The point is, though, that no matter what you do, you still have to eventually prove your theory using some data set. And when we're talking about climate, the data set isn't all that very old -- especially considering some of the limits on integral factors of climate are things like the life cycle of the sun and the thermal properties of the planet as a largish rock and not an ecosystem.
Whatever function you decide to use to predict and extrapolate data, you end up either cherry picking some set of data or using the entire set of data -- and you go ahead and name me any one entity or agency on Earth that has ready access to the entire set of data, where "the entire set of data" means literally everything worth knowing since civilization began. Especially when we find out all the time that ancient architects were capable of engineering things based on accuracies in astronomy, physics, and weather many thousands of years before any modern (Western, Eastern, or otherwise) civilizations even began toddlerhood, you have to agree that even climate data that is 12,000 years old is possibly relevant. (And yes, there is some. And the age of some more recently obtained data may be a multiple of that once Archaeology is done shitting itself over how old some recent discoveries actually are.)
My point is, you're NEVER going to get an exact climate science, and the privilege of assuming -- within an acceptable margin of error and from the basis of an acceptable level of sophisticated *and experienced* knowledge -- that one's climate predictions are exact has very likely many, many centuries of data-collecting to go before any given functions can really be "proven" to be "exact" (for the same above use of the word, "exact") and therefore has many centuries to go before that assumption deserves any kind of argumentative leverage of any scientific value.
Climate science is, in other words, in about as advanced and useful a state right now as dermatology. (Go ahead, spend roughly two decades studying them both in your free time and get back to me with your own, learned, albeit amateur opinion as I'm sure that mine needs a good shearing.)
All anybody -- including the entities and agencies mentioned in the article -- can do (or have done) right now is to: come up with a goal for their experiment; try hard (but not too hard) not to also come up with a competent yet foregone bias for their conclusions; go out and get WHATEVER TWO OR MORE DATA POINTS they so desire; extrapolate within a margin of error agreed upon by all the high-minded folks performing the experiment; tweak the function until there is a harmonious alignment between the extrapolations, the cherry-picked data set, and the competent yet foregone conclusion; consider the goal met and the experiment a success; run out and tell the world (and don't forget to give every stranger a free kitten.)
I have to disagree on your "number of pages" position. Some mathematical proofs can go on for pages, especially if they use techniques in discrete mathematics.
I think "number of concepts" might be a better gauge to unreliability. If a paper's well-written, that should closely correlate to "number of subheadings", right?
And *I'd* say guilt, guilt all around. Since when is it sociable or any other effective human virtue to ruin people from behind a screen?
I've been using computer communications since the early 1980's and this trend will not go away: people get online, they feel the power of either distance or anonymity, and they abuse it. Most users will abuse distance or anonymity at least once in their online life, to say things that they wouldn't say IRL or F2F, or to cast calumny on someone and ruin their life with lies and undue social scorn.
Well in the 1980's we had what, maybe a dozen new modem users in a given town, in a year. Outside of business and academic circles, you could expect very few new "faces" on local access BBS's. With the internet, it's more matched to the rate of population growth. So while you could study and isolate this abusive phenomenon fairly easily in the 1980's, from the 90's onward it just becomes the new normalcy.
So SJW's are nothing more than the flamer crowd from the BBS scene, ruining message bases with arguments that nobody is looking for. As flamers, they're the most likely ones to pull crazy feats of logical fallacy and outright lies in order to vent whatever angst is driving them.
Now stir in a nice whipped cap of the weird pseudo-Taoist Reality Bites/Friends type people (Wired readers) who believe that the internet is "empowering" and that information has some kind of mystic energy, inject this putrid newage mixture into the veinous growth of the internet and you've got your modern SJW (social junkie waif).
The other big difference from the 1980's is video. Video used to be expensive and very time consuming to put onto your computer, let alone to transmit to another computer. These days we can thank Youtube for making everyone believe their opinion is utterly fucking important just by virtue of the inflated egos and self-opinions of everybody else *around them*, all because pop culture says that if you have an image then you're important -- and now everybody's dog and baby has an image, shit even peoples' dead birds in their driveways have an image, now.
It would be funny if Zuckerberg was wandering around with his "End Of Data" sign hanging from his neck, and all people would do in response is to walk past him with their thumbs-up sticking out. Or just say yell "LIKE!" at him. Or hand him pictures of their cats/babies/dogs/concerts/bathrooms.
> > 1. He only posts in his personal field of interests. > > Being "interested" is, unfortunately, no guarantee of being correct. Crackpots are all interested, that doesn't make them right.
I'd call him more of an egg-head than a crackpot. Did you read his paper? And his pet theories are just that: his pet theories.
> > 2. He has no personal benefit, except for his own knowledge gain.. > > Translation: nobody is actually paying him for this work. Translation of translation: he's not actually a professional in the field.
I'd argue that the guy does have some kind of personal benefit, especially since it's all an effort on behalf of him to show that his personal interests are the most important personal interests.
> once you get rich, people start telling you how smart you are. And stop telling you when you're acting like an idiot.
Or acting juvenile, in Myrhvold's case. I mean, he starts off with a very sound criticism of the NEO search competition in general, and makes some really good general criticisms about the state of the science. To call the NEO search misled wouldn't be too harsh, but he at least keeps his criticisms from getting that hot.
He perfectly fits the stereotypical rich academic who lets his money convince him he's right in his thoughts and actions. Like I said in another comment; he's the kind of person I'd expect to break things other people value because he feels rich enough to make up for it.
As abusive as the patent office of their own system, personally I find it hard to have qualms with people who abuse the patent office in turn.
Any ways, Myhrvold seems kind of egg-headed to me. See you got your academics, and then you got your jaded academics who spring off into being intellectual-tower types. And if they spend enough time in their intellectual tower, recursively they become egg-heads in their own little world.
Myrhvold strikes me as somebody who picks his pet theories and in the case of NEO search picked his pet project, and pushes other people to see those as the best possible ways of thinking ever.
I have some qualms with his kind-of sort-of juvenile dinosaurs and asteroids obsession: I have my own pet theories about comet fragment impacts that have nothing to do with asteroids at all but instead a very large comet that we haven't located or observed yet in modern history (but which appears to have been recorded in ancient history) that appears to come near Earth every so many thousands of years, dropping fragments on us. What good does it do us to look for slow, tumbling rocks if there's a fast, large comet that would spell civilization's doom by the time we even detect it?
See, if you pick your pet theory, you can mash someone else's. If you read Myhrvold's paper you can see him cherry picking projects, and cherry picking functions and data sets in order to make a case. But it's very clearly political in his eyes. He makes a strong argument that the myriad NEO search projects should all be working from a public accessible standard of simulation, and bewails that there is no such current standard to work from. I wholeheartedly agree: my first question was why the hell didn't this competition start with a collaborative effort to create a platform that everyone can agree on and the public can use?
But then he goes on to (very hypocritically IMHO) use inaccurate data to test the accuracy of other projects. He should have spent his time petitioning to get this standardized platform created, accepted, and foisted on the startled money-grubbers competing in the NEO search. Instead he hedged his bet and hell I dunno what he thinks he's doing, maybe he figures he can stall for time.
The guy might be smart and everything but I think he's kind of a juvenile egg-head. Not as eccentric as other people here are saying, but I have to give credit to people who question his reliability based on how much money he has. Sometimes money makes people feel superior to other people and causes them to self-inspect less than they maybe should. And I think Myhrvold might be suffering from that kind of "affluenza": reading his comment regarding people coming looking for money from him and his "millionaire friends", I can't help but feel like this is the guy who'd get drunk and break my car windows with a bat because he feels rich enough to make up for it later.
Why not wonder why Myhrvold wasted all of his and our time with all of this, instead of creating the larger data set to back the more accurate standardized system of functions that all of these projects should be working from?
If you read his paper it becomes pretty apparent that this is a piss fight. And in fact the entire NEO search competition now looks really shitty in my eyes. I can't believe they're all out there waving their dicks in the wind, hoping to catch some loose money. What a failure.
I didn't realize you were mostly focused on criticizing Fortune's lack of sound method in journalism. That is disheartening; but I don't read Fortune, any way.
I thought maybe you were shilling for Xiaomi. After all, if they have a public stock available, you might be invested in them and hope to counteract any negative publicity. That's sort of how it looked.
China may not have "started out on misinformation campaigns", but ever since WW2 the U.S. has reported that the Chinese are ahead of us in signal intelligence and counter information. And if anything's obvious to the public, it's that China is a major player on the world's disinformation and propaganda stage.
We're talking about a Chinese knock-off company that is doing ludicrously well. So from my personal point of view, we're already talking about large numbers of people who basically do business completely outside of ethics. Everybody who buys stock in this company or who buys their products are doing some form of harm IMHO. Quibbling over the politics of harming their image is not at all interesting to me -- hurt away! I don't like their very existence.
That's kind of an interesting take on it. I wasn't sure what his motivation was; it read to me like Myhrvold was trying to say there aren't as many asteroids in the regions in question as NASA was trying to claim.
Is that what you picked up from his rant? That he's trying to say NASA is underestimating the size of the objects?
(Deciding to read TFA & his actual paper, now, to see what's going on...)
[...]
Well, it looks kind of odd to me. In the article, he says he was approached by B612 but stresses that he did not give them any money. He says "they came looking for me and my millionaire friends". Okay, so is it safe to assume there's a possibility that Myhrvold has taken a personal interest in B612's proposed model and is out to shoot down their competition?
In his paper, he mentions Sentinel (B612's project) in a terse paragraph but just before that he mentions LSST in a sort of verbose fashion. Then he goes on to write even less about Sentinel, and there he mentions B612's search for private funding. So maybe Sentinel isn't his pet project -- maybe B612 pissed him off during fund-raising (or maybe for soliciting funds from him at all.) Which would make sense if he'd already familiarized himself so much with LSST and had already adopted it as his pet project.
He cites the National Research Council as having determined that "LSST offered the most cost-effective and lowest risk approach". He seems concerned that LSST won't be finished on time, and therefore now I'm guessing that he hopes he can prove the other projects wrong so that LSST's long shot has a better chance.
(Sorry, writing this as I read his paper)
A few paragraphs later, he complains that simulation code used by the various projects isn't available for public scrutiny. I have to side with him on that much. If it's publicly funded, maybe at some point there should be a fundamental basis of experimentation that's also publicly available. It's sort of disheartening to read that each individual project is working from potentially grossly different simulation models. Hasn't some academic body somewhere already come up with the best model for these projects to use? Shouldn't that have been the first goal of the NEO search community?
He also mentions that each project can also add code simulating the results that competing projects might come up with. That's interesting, too. It sounds like the entire thing is very highly political. How many teams are publishing simulation results that downplay the accuracy of other teams? That doesn't seem very academically sound, at all.
He then goes on to say what I just concluded (that it's not very academic) and says exactly what I was also thinking:
"Ideally, the community would produce an open model that can simulate the NEO search performance of IR and visible-light telescopes, whether based on the ground or in space, with consistent assumptions and consistent input distributions of NEOs."
My sentiments, exactly, and I'm still just going paragraph by paragraph, here.
Later on in "Asteroids In Reflected Light", he selects his favorite functions, does some integration, and then iterates that theoretically derived functions that might be in use haven't been applied to a sufficiently large set of data. He says plainly that he prefers to use an older standardized model that is no longer the de-facto standard because the newer standards also suffer from lack of experimental data.
So, wait a minute. He has all this time, why isn't he simply trying to get more telescopes to focus on supplying the experimental data needed to make the newer standard (H, G1, G2) more immediately useful?
Well, he's just going on applying the assumption that the data from a known less accurate standard can be relied on within some margin of error to show whether newer models are accurate or not.
It seems a logical assumption that the margin of error that should be applied to the older model is a wide open variable. We're talking about tumbling rocks
What you say is true, but I'd just like to point out that Tom Cruise didn't arrive at this position by his own genius. Rather it's basically the premise of the book Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.
Now, whether LRH's syntax for mental studies laid out in Dianetics is worthwhile is hard to say. If everybody came up with their own unique language to describe mental aberration, it'd be pretty hard for academics to agree. But then again Tom Cruise didn't come up with that, either.
I don't think parent was suggesting Myhrvold used Excel to perform his more involved calculus. Excel is very popular for use as a data ledger among researchers, for some reason. It seems like parent was asking to see Myhrvold's Excel spreadsheet where he would have the values of his various results stored; basically just like asking to see Myhrvold's experimental data.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, my first thought was "this is a great way to attempt to catch some potentially very malicious people".
but then i thought, "it would be great if this code got into the hands of the security crowd".
Maybe I didn't stress enough how very little exposure to water is needed to break the Apple mobile/pocket products.
But whatevs, the discussion is dead now.
Who's moving goalposts?
You're the one talking like you socialize with a large enough group of people to warrant taking a sample of what some of them sometimes say and extrapolating it to the extent of "number one causes of".
I'm tired of this "manishs" person not having a better grasp of English, but also authoring 90% of the /. links I follow here from Twitter. The embarrassments are mounting for whoever it is -- if they CAN be embarrassed. I dunno. Some of the articles posted seem possessed of a political slant suggesting a personality of really odd affect.
Heh. Maybe you just haven't done enough phone repair. The entire world of tech doesn't fit inside a review blog, you know.
http://www.alphr.com/apple-iph...
When I heard that the iPhone was "missing" the headphone jack, my first thought was "good call".
Here you have this insanely popular electronic device that people have with them at all times, and what's the number one complaint about it? No, no, /. friends, no, it's not planned obsolescence. It's "this thing dies if it so much as looks at water."
Well if you're going to try to take care of that problem one thing you might go for right away is getting rid of that crazy big hole in the top that by its very nature of design is all about exposed metal contacts.
I guess you could get all crazy in your head about DRM and shit but as someone else points out, at the end of the day however the sound is delivered it must end up being converted into a signal that can be used by standard speakers or headphones.
The only way around that is if Apple plans on making it so you have only two options:
* play the sound directly through the iPhone's built-in speaker
* send the sound via some Apple-proprietary encrypted cousin of bluetooth to one of Apple's own special speaker systems that if they get large enough to entertain a party probably cost many thousands of dollars
If that's the direction they're going to go I'd like to imagine it's going to be a complete failure because people don't have the money or wherewithal to spend on special speakers from Apple (the computer company, not the music company).
But then again you only have to know a handful of Apple users to understand that they would do exactly that, and would be glad to go broke doing it.
[cue: old man *shaking fist at sky*; (screaming:) "god damn dildo spies!".]
[error: at 12; return 3.]
People who live without fear don't worry what other people think about them.
That's what "social justice warriors", the American liberal left, and the like don't begin to comprehend or understand: that they are only speaking on behalf of severely damaged and malicious members of society; meanwhile, plenty of minorities have gone on to become very successful, non-racist members of a society that they don't see as racist; plenty of gay people have gone on to become very successful, homosexual members of a society that they don't see as homophobic; plenty of people who don't fit whatever norm you hold true -- the details of which you think is more important than the details of the lives of everybody you claim to support -- and those people don't miss a minute of sleep because of it, aren't suffering one shred of anxiety over any perceivable discrimination, aren't held down by any over-arching power, and don't sweat the differences between men and women and black and white and you name it, because those people are "over it".
"Woke" is great. "Woke" is some shit, alright? Go ahead, be "woke" all you want. I'm glad you ain't sleepin', because there's some real world shit out there that unless you're "woke", you won't get.
But go ahead and tell me "woke" is all there is to life when you know damn well you can't always remember your own phone number or how to cook toast right when you just woke up.
"Woke" is great and all but unless you're *COMPLETE*, there's no satisfaction for you. "Woke", you're still just trying to piece together some dream you just think you had. Unless you're one steely mother fucker, if you just "woke" you aren't up for very much meet and greet, try and true, or any else that matter.
So all these "SJW" sorts and the rest of liberal politics are just barking up the tree of reactionary sorts who come down to their level. The people who engage in this don't even deserve to be sorted as "left" and "right" -- they're just reactionary consumers, plain and simple. Their politics are consumer products and they can't act because they're too busy reacting.
Now, given this perspective (which you basically have to agree with or look like a fucking tool, admit it,) what was that you said to/about me, again? "Tool"? "Sanctimonius"?
If Freud wasn't post-modern history's most absurdist spermbank I'd borrow from his porn mag and throw a little pin-up of "PROJECTIONIST!" your way, because obvious you sound more than a little bit jealous. Of what, I have no clue. You never know what people declare vals in, these days!
Personally, I feel that if your genitals are this enormous gateway straight into to your soul and that you're always, always and forever vulnerable about your own sexuality to such as extent that it needs to be hidden by default, then the problem's not with society the problem's with you.
Your argument requires that the audience is capable of comprehending rate-of-change (first differential) of whatever it is that they're paying attention to (resource consumption in this case.)
This is the problem with most scientific, economic, and political issues in the "first world": barely anybody can comprehend much more than translation along a single dimension -- measurement along one line.
The "smart people" tend to be those who can analyze two influences together at once in a simply two-dimensional relationship, at best as one function of two independent variables.
And we have to acknowledge that those people aren't really all that fucking smart. I used to take the "power" of that level of intelligence for granted -- back in high school when I was simply average at algebra. Since becoming average (and sometimes above-average) at several levels of calculus, linear programming, and differential equations (basically since completing my minor in mathematics) I no longer take that power for granted. I instead renegotiate my view of the world to see that most people are fucking ignoramuses (ignoramii?) who simply can't comprehend something as vitally important to understanding a system as change-of-rate-of-change.
Third derivatives? Beyond hope. The jerks will never, ever understand jerk.
So you can always just take whatever explaina-thon you're about to attempt, privately reduce it to differential terms for your own quiet analysis, and if any second or third order derivatives appear in the 'splainin' then you best just give up because the vast majority -- far more, far beyond (below?) merely 'the average' -- can barely get a grip on first derivatives, and especially cannot do so if there is more than one independent variable to the function.
Look, whenever you're going to come up with a projection you have to start with some data set and some function, right? Usually you use a data set to guess or regress some function and you tweak things until you get a very good match for your data.
Caveat: some mathematicians don't stop until their function hits every data point at least once, and their resulting "fit" is some outrageous degree of polynominal; some other mathematicians are content with a partial least squares fit; others spend decades looking for exactly what the root causes of the data set are and come up with differential equations to explain all the phenomenon that contributed.
The point is, though, that no matter what you do, you still have to eventually prove your theory using some data set. And when we're talking about climate, the data set isn't all that very old -- especially considering some of the limits on integral factors of climate are things like the life cycle of the sun and the thermal properties of the planet as a largish rock and not an ecosystem.
Whatever function you decide to use to predict and extrapolate data, you end up either cherry picking some set of data or using the entire set of data -- and you go ahead and name me any one entity or agency on Earth that has ready access to the entire set of data, where "the entire set of data" means literally everything worth knowing since civilization began. Especially when we find out all the time that ancient architects were capable of engineering things based on accuracies in astronomy, physics, and weather many thousands of years before any modern (Western, Eastern, or otherwise) civilizations even began toddlerhood, you have to agree that even climate data that is 12,000 years old is possibly relevant. (And yes, there is some. And the age of some more recently obtained data may be a multiple of that once Archaeology is done shitting itself over how old some recent discoveries actually are.)
My point is, you're NEVER going to get an exact climate science, and the privilege of assuming -- within an acceptable margin of error and from the basis of an acceptable level of sophisticated *and experienced* knowledge -- that one's climate predictions are exact has very likely many, many centuries of data-collecting to go before any given functions can really be "proven" to be "exact" (for the same above use of the word, "exact") and therefore has many centuries to go before that assumption deserves any kind of argumentative leverage of any scientific value.
Climate science is, in other words, in about as advanced and useful a state right now as dermatology. (Go ahead, spend roughly two decades studying them both in your free time and get back to me with your own, learned, albeit amateur opinion as I'm sure that mine needs a good shearing.)
All anybody -- including the entities and agencies mentioned in the article -- can do (or have done) right now is to: come up with a goal for their experiment; try hard (but not too hard) not to also come up with a competent yet foregone bias for their conclusions; go out and get WHATEVER TWO OR MORE DATA POINTS they so desire; extrapolate within a margin of error agreed upon by all the high-minded folks performing the experiment; tweak the function until there is a harmonious alignment between the extrapolations, the cherry-picked data set, and the competent yet foregone conclusion; consider the goal met and the experiment a success; run out and tell the world (and don't forget to give every stranger a free kitten.)
You almost seem to be mixing these two statements up , or assuming that they are mutually homogeneous.
*forehead slap*
why the FUCK do you think they called it a bounty, any way?! man, what were they THINKING.
I have to disagree on your "number of pages" position. Some mathematical proofs can go on for pages, especially if they use techniques in discrete mathematics.
I think "number of concepts" might be a better gauge to unreliability. If a paper's well-written, that should closely correlate to "number of subheadings", right?
And *I'd* say guilt, guilt all around. Since when is it sociable or any other effective human virtue to ruin people from behind a screen?
I've been using computer communications since the early 1980's and this trend will not go away: people get online, they feel the power of either distance or anonymity, and they abuse it. Most users will abuse distance or anonymity at least once in their online life, to say things that they wouldn't say IRL or F2F, or to cast calumny on someone and ruin their life with lies and undue social scorn.
Well in the 1980's we had what, maybe a dozen new modem users in a given town, in a year. Outside of business and academic circles, you could expect very few new "faces" on local access BBS's. With the internet, it's more matched to the rate of population growth. So while you could study and isolate this abusive phenomenon fairly easily in the 1980's, from the 90's onward it just becomes the new normalcy.
So SJW's are nothing more than the flamer crowd from the BBS scene, ruining message bases with arguments that nobody is looking for. As flamers, they're the most likely ones to pull crazy feats of logical fallacy and outright lies in order to vent whatever angst is driving them.
Now stir in a nice whipped cap of the weird pseudo-Taoist Reality Bites/Friends type people (Wired readers) who believe that the internet is "empowering" and that information has some kind of mystic energy, inject this putrid newage mixture into the veinous growth of the internet and you've got your modern SJW (social junkie waif).
The other big difference from the 1980's is video. Video used to be expensive and very time consuming to put onto your computer, let alone to transmit to another computer. These days we can thank Youtube for making everyone believe their opinion is utterly fucking important just by virtue of the inflated egos and self-opinions of everybody else *around them*, all because pop culture says that if you have an image then you're important -- and now everybody's dog and baby has an image, shit even peoples' dead birds in their driveways have an image, now.
It would be funny if Zuckerberg was wandering around with his "End Of Data" sign hanging from his neck, and all people would do in response is to walk past him with their thumbs-up sticking out. Or just say yell "LIKE!" at him. Or hand him pictures of their cats/babies/dogs/concerts/bathrooms.
> > 1. He only posts in his personal field of interests.
>
> Being "interested" is, unfortunately, no guarantee of being correct. Crackpots are all interested, that doesn't make them right.
I'd call him more of an egg-head than a crackpot. Did you read his paper? And his pet theories are just that: his pet theories.
> > 2. He has no personal benefit, except for his own knowledge gain..
>
> Translation: nobody is actually paying him for this work. Translation of translation: he's not actually a professional in the field.
I'd argue that the guy does have some kind of personal benefit, especially since it's all an effort on behalf of him to show that his personal interests are the most important personal interests.
> once you get rich, people start telling you how smart you are. And stop telling you when you're acting like an idiot.
Or acting juvenile, in Myrhvold's case. I mean, he starts off with a very sound criticism of the NEO search competition in general, and makes some really good general criticisms about the state of the science. To call the NEO search misled wouldn't be too harsh, but he at least keeps his criticisms from getting that hot.
IMHO:
egghead: check.
juvenile: check.
rich: check.
He perfectly fits the stereotypical rich academic who lets his money convince him he's right in his thoughts and actions. Like I said in another comment; he's the kind of person I'd expect to break things other people value because he feels rich enough to make up for it.
As abusive as the patent office of their own system, personally I find it hard to have qualms with people who abuse the patent office in turn.
Any ways, Myhrvold seems kind of egg-headed to me. See you got your academics, and then you got your jaded academics who spring off into being intellectual-tower types. And if they spend enough time in their intellectual tower, recursively they become egg-heads in their own little world.
Myrhvold strikes me as somebody who picks his pet theories and in the case of NEO search picked his pet project, and pushes other people to see those as the best possible ways of thinking ever.
I have some qualms with his kind-of sort-of juvenile dinosaurs and asteroids obsession: I have my own pet theories about comet fragment impacts that have nothing to do with asteroids at all but instead a very large comet that we haven't located or observed yet in modern history (but which appears to have been recorded in ancient history) that appears to come near Earth every so many thousands of years, dropping fragments on us. What good does it do us to look for slow, tumbling rocks if there's a fast, large comet that would spell civilization's doom by the time we even detect it?
See, if you pick your pet theory, you can mash someone else's. If you read Myhrvold's paper you can see him cherry picking projects, and cherry picking functions and data sets in order to make a case. But it's very clearly political in his eyes. He makes a strong argument that the myriad NEO search projects should all be working from a public accessible standard of simulation, and bewails that there is no such current standard to work from. I wholeheartedly agree: my first question was why the hell didn't this competition start with a collaborative effort to create a platform that everyone can agree on and the public can use?
But then he goes on to (very hypocritically IMHO) use inaccurate data to test the accuracy of other projects. He should have spent his time petitioning to get this standardized platform created, accepted, and foisted on the startled money-grubbers competing in the NEO search. Instead he hedged his bet and hell I dunno what he thinks he's doing, maybe he figures he can stall for time.
The guy might be smart and everything but I think he's kind of a juvenile egg-head. Not as eccentric as other people here are saying, but I have to give credit to people who question his reliability based on how much money he has. Sometimes money makes people feel superior to other people and causes them to self-inspect less than they maybe should. And I think Myhrvold might be suffering from that kind of "affluenza": reading his comment regarding people coming looking for money from him and his "millionaire friends", I can't help but feel like this is the guy who'd get drunk and break my car windows with a bat because he feels rich enough to make up for it later.
Why not wonder why Myhrvold wasted all of his and our time with all of this, instead of creating the larger data set to back the more accurate standardized system of functions that all of these projects should be working from?
If you read his paper it becomes pretty apparent that this is a piss fight. And in fact the entire NEO search competition now looks really shitty in my eyes. I can't believe they're all out there waving their dicks in the wind, hoping to catch some loose money. What a failure.
No, no, just no.
I read the article, and I read Myhrvold's paper, and NONE of this is scientific. It's all very, very plainly about politics.
You can see me go through the process of coming to this conclusion down below, but just "no".
I didn't realize you were mostly focused on criticizing Fortune's lack of sound method in journalism. That is disheartening; but I don't read Fortune, any way.
I thought maybe you were shilling for Xiaomi. After all, if they have a public stock available, you might be invested in them and hope to counteract any negative publicity. That's sort of how it looked.
China may not have "started out on misinformation campaigns", but ever since WW2 the U.S. has reported that the Chinese are ahead of us in signal intelligence and counter information. And if anything's obvious to the public, it's that China is a major player on the world's disinformation and propaganda stage.
We're talking about a Chinese knock-off company that is doing ludicrously well. So from my personal point of view, we're already talking about large numbers of people who basically do business completely outside of ethics. Everybody who buys stock in this company or who buys their products are doing some form of harm IMHO. Quibbling over the politics of harming their image is not at all interesting to me -- hurt away! I don't like their very existence.
That's kind of an interesting take on it. I wasn't sure what his motivation was; it read to me like Myhrvold was trying to say there aren't as many asteroids in the regions in question as NASA was trying to claim.
Is that what you picked up from his rant? That he's trying to say NASA is underestimating the size of the objects?
(Deciding to read TFA & his actual paper, now, to see what's going on...)
[...]
Well, it looks kind of odd to me. In the article, he says he was approached by B612 but stresses that he did not give them any money. He says "they came looking for me and my millionaire friends". Okay, so is it safe to assume there's a possibility that Myhrvold has taken a personal interest in B612's proposed model and is out to shoot down their competition?
In his paper, he mentions Sentinel (B612's project) in a terse paragraph but just before that he mentions LSST in a sort of verbose fashion. Then he goes on to write even less about Sentinel, and there he mentions B612's search for private funding. So maybe Sentinel isn't his pet project -- maybe B612 pissed him off during fund-raising (or maybe for soliciting funds from him at all.) Which would make sense if he'd already familiarized himself so much with LSST and had already adopted it as his pet project.
He cites the National Research Council as having determined that "LSST offered the most cost-effective and lowest risk approach". He seems concerned that LSST won't be finished on time, and therefore now I'm guessing that he hopes he can prove the other projects wrong so that LSST's long shot has a better chance.
(Sorry, writing this as I read his paper)
A few paragraphs later, he complains that simulation code used by the various projects isn't available for public scrutiny. I have to side with him on that much. If it's publicly funded, maybe at some point there should be a fundamental basis of experimentation that's also publicly available. It's sort of disheartening to read that each individual project is working from potentially grossly different simulation models. Hasn't some academic body somewhere already come up with the best model for these projects to use? Shouldn't that have been the first goal of the NEO search community?
He also mentions that each project can also add code simulating the results that competing projects might come up with. That's interesting, too. It sounds like the entire thing is very highly political. How many teams are publishing simulation results that downplay the accuracy of other teams? That doesn't seem very academically sound, at all.
He then goes on to say what I just concluded (that it's not very academic) and says exactly what I was also thinking:
"Ideally, the community would produce an open model that can simulate the NEO search performance of IR and visible-light telescopes, whether based on the ground or in space, with consistent assumptions and consistent input distributions of NEOs."
My sentiments, exactly, and I'm still just going paragraph by paragraph, here.
Later on in "Asteroids In Reflected Light", he selects his favorite functions, does some integration, and then iterates that theoretically derived functions that might be in use haven't been applied to a sufficiently large set of data. He says plainly that he prefers to use an older standardized model that is no longer the de-facto standard because the newer standards also suffer from lack of experimental data.
So, wait a minute. He has all this time, why isn't he simply trying to get more telescopes to focus on supplying the experimental data needed to make the newer standard (H, G1, G2) more immediately useful?
Well, he's just going on applying the assumption that the data from a known less accurate standard can be relied on within some margin of error to show whether newer models are accurate or not.
It seems a logical assumption that the margin of error that should be applied to the older model is a wide open variable. We're talking about tumbling rocks
What you say is true, but I'd just like to point out that Tom Cruise didn't arrive at this position by his own genius. Rather it's basically the premise of the book Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.
Now, whether LRH's syntax for mental studies laid out in Dianetics is worthwhile is hard to say. If everybody came up with their own unique language to describe mental aberration, it'd be pretty hard for academics to agree. But then again Tom Cruise didn't come up with that, either.
I don't think parent was suggesting Myhrvold used Excel to perform his more involved calculus. Excel is very popular for use as a data ledger among researchers, for some reason. It seems like parent was asking to see Myhrvold's Excel spreadsheet where he would have the values of his various results stored; basically just like asking to see Myhrvold's experimental data.
Really? "Bounty" is usually used synonymously with "plenty".
Is a single pfennig somehow plentiful to you? For most people it's kind of the smallest denomination.