Agreed--you need to use libraries written in C/C++ for audio/video. But you can certainly call them from Java, as long as they handle the streaming side of things on their own. Whether or not it's suitable for GUI work depends on what you want your GUI to look like; if platform integration is your top priority (default widget sets, color schemes, etc.) then no, it doesn't work so well. Otherwise, it's not fantastic but it's servicable (again assuming blistering performance isn't necessary).
There is a _big_ difference between clumsily optimized (or unoptimized) Java and carefully-optimized Java--more, in my experience, than the difference between clumsily optimized Java and clumsily optimized C or C++. So if you are already using Java for some reason (robustness to faults, ease of parallelism of certain kinds (w.r.t. C), library that does exactly what you need, etc.), you should figure out how to optimize it before bailing out and using a different language.
Only if you absolutely must get as much out of your hardware as physically possible should you start using C/C++, and at that point, don't expect to be using ANSI C; you should be issuing SSE4 instructions and such (basically writing targeted assembly, even if you are doing so in a way that looks like C functions) that have been cleverly crafted to do exactly what you need.
(And don't forget that while you are taking extra time to write all this low-level high-performance code, your computers _could_ have been running using the slower code, making progress towards a solution, or serving customers albeit with delays, etc..)
Did you miss the part where neither Pfizer nor anyone else had a particularly solid understanding of what HDL and LDL actually do? The problem isn't that science is failing, it's that proper science isn't being done. It's not that reductionism is failing, it's that people aren't patient enough to wait until things are understood. So, when heart disease kills tens of thousands of people per year in the U.S. alone, companies are wiling to gamble a billion dollars on a drug that will affect something that is somehow related to the process. If they and/or doctors tell themselves it's a sure thing, to cover up their actual lack of detailed knowledge while making themselves feel better about the scale of the bet, then this only indicates something about human psychology.
Maybe this provided a convenient excuse to rant against reductionism, but all the examples were in fact examples of people trying to bypass reductionism and replace educated guesses based upon insufficient information.
I did both. The car exaggerates the true mileage by about 3%. Annoying, but small enough to not change any of the overall conclusions. (Sometimes disappointing when it looked like you hit 45 mpg on a tank of gas, but it was really only 43....)
The article author claims, "To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg."
I happen to own a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid, and the _very first time_ I drove it on the freeway at moderately consistent speeds at 60-65 MPH, I got over 40 mpg. I still do that routinely.
So, either he's lying that he has "driven all of them, extensively", or he's lying about what you need to do to get that mpg rating. Probably the former--it's easy to drive a few in a not-very-MPG-friendly way, get disgusted, and then overgeneralize. Easy, but not terribly forgivable for a journalist.
This is just horrible--breaks nearly every convention in order to fix a nearly trivial bit of mathematics, while introducing significant errors in the process? Yay!
Why should months start of different days of the week? Make them all 28 days long, and you have room for a 13th month.
While we're at it, why don't we go back to the Mayan Haab' calendar. It's more accurate than Gregorian; the only problem is that it shifts a tiny bit from year to year. If you don't like your months drifting, you can fix it by extending Wayeb' by a day every time it gets more than half a day ahead.
FIOS is dramatically outperforming even its impressive advertised speeds. This means that teenagers can infringe content and be lured by online predators that much faster! Quick, parents, sue Verizon for false advertising! You are getting too much (dangerous) bandwidth!
"If we find out there is no free will, then how do you make the case against slavery if you're just a robot?"
Really easily:
Robots don't like slavery. Unhappy robots are uncooperative and try to overthrow you, and in any case don't make as much progress, think as creatively, or solve problems as well. Also, the robots feel bad for other enslaved robots, based on their empathic abilities (which is useful, because they also make the robots help each other out).
Thus, slavery is a stupid idea (inefficient, unstable, etc.). Also, you are a robot too, and you feel bad for the enslaved robots.
This is seriously confused. Think a little more about limits of observability and emulation with a Turing machine, eh? Unless you postulate a nonphysical acausal soul that is experiencing consciousness, said Turing machine emulation will be identical to reality for everything including the beings in it. So for any meaningful sense of consciousness or free will, quantum mechanics is an implementation detail, not an absolute necessity (with consciousness therefore being ascribed back to quantum mechanics).
This is an example of argument from incredulity. I do not know why otherwise respectable philosophers seem so beholden to it in the area of consciousness.
From many experiments and observations it is clear that consciousness is something that our brain does. And we have _almost no idea how the brain does what it does_. Should we be surprised, then, that we don't understand how consciousness works? This goes for the "easy" problem and "hard" problem alike. The easy problem is fiendishly difficult. In solving that, we'll probably realize that we're not framing the question coherently, that the issues we care about are equivalent to a dozen specialized sub-issues, and once we solve those we may not even bother coming back to the original issues.
Now that we know the metabolic and molecular basis of life to a reasonable degree, old disagreements about qualities of the life-force seem almost hilarously misguided. There is no particular reason to believe that consciousness will be any different, except possibly for wishing for it to be different because it seems so intimate.
For those things where clicking is unavoidable, MJT Macro Scheduler not only allows you to automate it, but to run in client/server mode, so you can have clients that take macroing commands from a central server. This Enterprise version isn't exactly cheap, but it can be a great way to get around the most aggravating repetitive tasks for which scripting doesn't work.
I read the article, and your post. The "extremely simple concept" is amazingly easy to understand but very hard to accept because it fails to account for the mindboggling effectiveness of science (cumulatively over centuries), and because it fixates on largely irrelevant features while ignoring essential ones.
The scientific thinking that works has _very little_ use for faith. Thinking in terms of degrees of certainty, caveats, probabilities, and so on is extremely useful. Of course one has to accept a few premises to be able to do anything (e.g. "reality can be understood to some extent"), but this is so far removed from the religious ideas of faith or the colloquial usage of faith that it is an observation of very little value.
And, as a layperson, the _only_ thing you have to do is adopt the simplest parts of a scientific point of view--e.g. to be able to think in terms of degrees of certainty--before the difference between science and religion becomes profound. There are plenty of venues where scientific knowledge is distilled down from the original research to a point where interested laypeople can understand if they care to (e.g. Scientific American, science column of many major newspapers, etc.). Highly disinterested people do, of course, have to take the word of scientists on faith, but that's again an observation of very little value. They have to take _everything_ on faith that they don't pay attention to: science, religion, law, mathematics, you name it.
Only the "drag a runtime library" does not also describe Scala (and possibly Clojure, though it's questionable whether static-type-annotated Lisp "looks nice"). If that were an important concern, personally I would have made scala-lite that drops all but the essential core library support, and where the compiler auto-inserts the remaining stub into the main class file (which is pretty much what you get when you use Proguard on a Scala project that doesn't use the extra Scala libraries explicitly). But if the "no library" part of the puzzle is really important, then I at least see the point. (Or if you just like Ruby-style syntax enough that anything else is not acceptable.)
The most advanced Scala notions do not map to Java, agreed. So if you don't use them, what's left is a language that fills the design goals of Mirah, as I said. If the goal of Mirah is not "Nicer syntax!" but "Language with same limitations that you love from Java!" then the designers could make that more clear.
Mirah looks to me so far like a waste of effort. It has somewhat nice syntax, granted, but if you really want to use Ruby syntax with the JVM, there already is something that does that: JRuby.
If you just want simplified syntax, Groovy is just as simple and looks more familiar to Java programmers.
If you want simplified syntax and powerful new programming tricks, Scala and Clojure do this far better. If you ignore the Scala libraries and half its features, you get everything that Mirah was designed to do.
The language designers should do a better job explaining why this is worth paying attention to.
If you had to take those pay cuts because your skills are getting out of date (still useful, but not as much as they used to be), and you're avoiding buying books or taking classes to improve your skills because you can't afford both that and a nice dinner out three days a week...well, then that'd be more like what this budget is doing.
One of the big questions in science is how neurons control behavior. It's a tough thing to answer when you can't control the neurons. (E.g. "tell me what this software program works without using it or altering the source code.")
So this is a big help in figuring out how neurons control worm behavior. Since we don't know much about how neurons control the behavior of anything, this is a big step forward!
Maybe this will bring in a new era of competitive worm-games: you control your team (or single worm) with your system, and Stirman controls the other side with his. (You just need to put them in a microfluidic device and set up your system on one side and theirs on the other....)
Actually, Stirman, not Stewart. Anyway, there is a second independently developed system that does approximately the same thing, just without Harvard's PR department behind it.
It would be collegial to mention that this other project exists, no? (Especially since their software is also available, and since you know it exists.)
Mathematics is not one of the physical sciences, so it is free to expend more effort on impressing others than on instructing them.
Same thing with computer science.
There really is a difference when you are in a field where data can give particularly clear insight into how things are; and then the major burden becomes explaining why this data is relevant to the problem (or why this theory is relevant to that data), and how it provides insight. (There is of course a little bit of "look how smart I am!" around the edges, but rarely enough to detract from the point.)
10. A new addition to world history: "Explain how Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict." Now that's not at all a loaded statement, is it?
The sentence itself is true, it was the will of the internation community that Israel would be founded, the territory belonged to the UK and the UK agreed to this. The arab world sought to defy the will of the UN and this has led to the conflict.
It's such a small slice of "truth" that I'm not sure it escapes being dishonest--you've barely scratched the surface of the complexities involved. (E.g. Jewish terrorism against Arabs before Israel was created, the transformation from the ideas of living in harmony to ardent opposition on both sides, etc. etc..)
And, UN and UK aside, you could phrase it as "explain how Jewish apartheid in Israel has led to ongoing conflict" and be just as truthful as with the above (which is to say, the literal truth of the matter, while not entirely absent, is insufficient to consider the statement honest if presented alone).
Fortunately, school tends to be horribly boring, and most students won't pay significant attention to such lessons anyway, accurate or not, so the stakes are somewhat lower than one might fear when one realizes how hard it is to present information instead of propaganda in some situations.
It's (almost) possible but so fantastically improbable save for careful maneuvering that it's not worth considering.
(You could have it on a trajectory nearly parallel to the Earth where the Earth catches it from behind very gently (relatively speaking). This is a tiny fraction of all possible approach angles and a tiny fraction of all possible approach velocities.)
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Exactly. If you can't afford two new drives from different vendors large enough to hold your data, then you cannot afford to keep your data safe.
Don't bother fiddling with RAIDs unless you have many terabytes of data. Single drives are a lot faster to get and use.
Agreed--you need to use libraries written in C/C++ for audio/video. But you can certainly call them from Java, as long as they handle the streaming side of things on their own. Whether or not it's suitable for GUI work depends on what you want your GUI to look like; if platform integration is your top priority (default widget sets, color schemes, etc.) then no, it doesn't work so well. Otherwise, it's not fantastic but it's servicable (again assuming blistering performance isn't necessary).
There is a _big_ difference between clumsily optimized (or unoptimized) Java and carefully-optimized Java--more, in my experience, than the difference between clumsily optimized Java and clumsily optimized C or C++. So if you are already using Java for some reason (robustness to faults, ease of parallelism of certain kinds (w.r.t. C), library that does exactly what you need, etc.), you should figure out how to optimize it before bailing out and using a different language.
Only if you absolutely must get as much out of your hardware as physically possible should you start using C/C++, and at that point, don't expect to be using ANSI C; you should be issuing SSE4 instructions and such (basically writing targeted assembly, even if you are doing so in a way that looks like C functions) that have been cleverly crafted to do exactly what you need.
(And don't forget that while you are taking extra time to write all this low-level high-performance code, your computers _could_ have been running using the slower code, making progress towards a solution, or serving customers albeit with delays, etc..)
Did you miss the part where neither Pfizer nor anyone else had a particularly solid understanding of what HDL and LDL actually do? The problem isn't that science is failing, it's that proper science isn't being done. It's not that reductionism is failing, it's that people aren't patient enough to wait until things are understood. So, when heart disease kills tens of thousands of people per year in the U.S. alone, companies are wiling to gamble a billion dollars on a drug that will affect something that is somehow related to the process. If they and/or doctors tell themselves it's a sure thing, to cover up their actual lack of detailed knowledge while making themselves feel better about the scale of the bet, then this only indicates something about human psychology.
Maybe this provided a convenient excuse to rant against reductionism, but all the examples were in fact examples of people trying to bypass reductionism and replace educated guesses based upon insufficient information.
I did both. The car exaggerates the true mileage by about 3%. Annoying, but small enough to not change any of the overall conclusions. (Sometimes disappointing when it looked like you hit 45 mpg on a tank of gas, but it was really only 43....)
The article author claims, "To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg."
I happen to own a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid, and the _very first time_ I drove it on the freeway at moderately consistent speeds at 60-65 MPH, I got over 40 mpg. I still do that routinely.
So, either he's lying that he has "driven all of them, extensively", or he's lying about what you need to do to get that mpg rating. Probably the former--it's easy to drive a few in a not-very-MPG-friendly way, get disgusted, and then overgeneralize. Easy, but not terribly forgivable for a journalist.
This is just horrible--breaks nearly every convention in order to fix a nearly trivial bit of mathematics, while introducing significant errors in the process? Yay!
Why should months start of different days of the week? Make them all 28 days long, and you have room for a 13th month.
While we're at it, why don't we go back to the Mayan Haab' calendar. It's more accurate than Gregorian; the only problem is that it shifts a tiny bit from year to year. If you don't like your months drifting, you can fix it by extending Wayeb' by a day every time it gets more than half a day ahead.
FIOS is dramatically outperforming even its impressive advertised speeds. This means that teenagers can infringe content and be lured by online predators that much faster! Quick, parents, sue Verizon for false advertising! You are getting too much (dangerous) bandwidth!
"If we find out there is no free will, then how do you make the case against slavery if you're just a robot?"
Really easily:
Robots don't like slavery. Unhappy robots are uncooperative and try to overthrow you, and in any case don't make as much progress, think as creatively, or solve problems as well. Also, the robots feel bad for other enslaved robots, based on their empathic abilities (which is useful, because they also make the robots help each other out).
Thus, slavery is a stupid idea (inefficient, unstable, etc.). Also, you are a robot too, and you feel bad for the enslaved robots.
Poor robots.
This is seriously confused. Think a little more about limits of observability and emulation with a Turing machine, eh? Unless you postulate a nonphysical acausal soul that is experiencing consciousness, said Turing machine emulation will be identical to reality for everything including the beings in it. So for any meaningful sense of consciousness or free will, quantum mechanics is an implementation detail, not an absolute necessity (with consciousness therefore being ascribed back to quantum mechanics).
This is an example of argument from incredulity. I do not know why otherwise respectable philosophers seem so beholden to it in the area of consciousness.
From many experiments and observations it is clear that consciousness is something that our brain does. And we have _almost no idea how the brain does what it does_. Should we be surprised, then, that we don't understand how consciousness works? This goes for the "easy" problem and "hard" problem alike. The easy problem is fiendishly difficult. In solving that, we'll probably realize that we're not framing the question coherently, that the issues we care about are equivalent to a dozen specialized sub-issues, and once we solve those we may not even bother coming back to the original issues.
Now that we know the metabolic and molecular basis of life to a reasonable degree, old disagreements about qualities of the life-force seem almost hilarously misguided. There is no particular reason to believe that consciousness will be any different, except possibly for wishing for it to be different because it seems so intimate.
For those things where clicking is unavoidable, MJT Macro Scheduler not only allows you to automate it, but to run in client/server mode, so you can have clients that take macroing commands from a central server. This Enterprise version isn't exactly cheap, but it can be a great way to get around the most aggravating repetitive tasks for which scripting doesn't work.
I read the article, and your post. The "extremely simple concept" is amazingly easy to understand but very hard to accept because it fails to account for the mindboggling effectiveness of science (cumulatively over centuries), and because it fixates on largely irrelevant features while ignoring essential ones.
The scientific thinking that works has _very little_ use for faith. Thinking in terms of degrees of certainty, caveats, probabilities, and so on is extremely useful. Of course one has to accept a few premises to be able to do anything (e.g. "reality can be understood to some extent"), but this is so far removed from the religious ideas of faith or the colloquial usage of faith that it is an observation of very little value.
And, as a layperson, the _only_ thing you have to do is adopt the simplest parts of a scientific point of view--e.g. to be able to think in terms of degrees of certainty--before the difference between science and religion becomes profound. There are plenty of venues where scientific knowledge is distilled down from the original research to a point where interested laypeople can understand if they care to (e.g. Scientific American, science column of many major newspapers, etc.). Highly disinterested people do, of course, have to take the word of scientists on faith, but that's again an observation of very little value. They have to take _everything_ on faith that they don't pay attention to: science, religion, law, mathematics, you name it.
Isn't it curious how much the physical world cares about "semantics"?
Or maybe there is something else going on that is relevant here.
Only the "drag a runtime library" does not also describe Scala (and possibly Clojure, though it's questionable whether static-type-annotated Lisp "looks nice"). If that were an important concern, personally I would have made scala-lite that drops all but the essential core library support, and where the compiler auto-inserts the remaining stub into the main class file (which is pretty much what you get when you use Proguard on a Scala project that doesn't use the extra Scala libraries explicitly). But if the "no library" part of the puzzle is really important, then I at least see the point. (Or if you just like Ruby-style syntax enough that anything else is not acceptable.)
The most advanced Scala notions do not map to Java, agreed. So if you don't use them, what's left is a language that fills the design goals of Mirah, as I said. If the goal of Mirah is not "Nicer syntax!" but "Language with same limitations that you love from Java!" then the designers could make that more clear.
Mirah looks to me so far like a waste of effort. It has somewhat nice syntax, granted, but if you really want to use Ruby syntax with the JVM, there already is something that does that: JRuby.
If you just want simplified syntax, Groovy is just as simple and looks more familiar to Java programmers.
If you want simplified syntax and powerful new programming tricks, Scala and Clojure do this far better. If you ignore the Scala libraries and half its features, you get everything that Mirah was designed to do.
The language designers should do a better job explaining why this is worth paying attention to.
If you had to take those pay cuts because your skills are getting out of date (still useful, but not as much as they used to be), and you're avoiding buying books or taking classes to improve your skills because you can't afford both that and a nice dinner out three days a week...well, then that'd be more like what this budget is doing.
One of the big questions in science is how neurons control behavior. It's a tough thing to answer when you can't control the neurons. (E.g. "tell me what this software program works without using it or altering the source code.")
So this is a big help in figuring out how neurons control worm behavior. Since we don't know much about how neurons control the behavior of anything, this is a big step forward!
If he designs the arena, it might help him make up for your 50% faster response time.
Very sporting of you!
Maybe this will bring in a new era of competitive worm-games: you control your team (or single worm) with your system, and Stirman controls the other side with his. (You just need to put them in a microfluidic device and set up your system on one side and theirs on the other....)
Actually, Stirman, not Stewart. Anyway, there is a second independently developed system that does approximately the same thing, just without Harvard's PR department behind it.
It would be collegial to mention that this other project exists, no? (Especially since their software is also available, and since you know it exists.)
Mathematics is not one of the physical sciences, so it is free to expend more effort on impressing others than on instructing them.
Same thing with computer science.
There really is a difference when you are in a field where data can give particularly clear insight into how things are; and then the major burden becomes explaining why this data is relevant to the problem (or why this theory is relevant to that data), and how it provides insight. (There is of course a little bit of "look how smart I am!" around the edges, but rarely enough to detract from the point.)
10. A new addition to world history: "Explain how Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict." Now that's not at all a loaded statement, is it?
The sentence itself is true, it was the will of the internation community that Israel would be founded, the territory belonged to the UK and the UK agreed to this. The arab world sought to defy the will of the UN and this has led to the conflict.
It's such a small slice of "truth" that I'm not sure it escapes being dishonest--you've barely scratched the surface of the complexities involved. (E.g. Jewish terrorism against Arabs before Israel was created, the transformation from the ideas of living in harmony to ardent opposition on both sides, etc. etc..)
And, UN and UK aside, you could phrase it as "explain how Jewish apartheid in Israel has led to ongoing conflict" and be just as truthful as with the above (which is to say, the literal truth of the matter, while not entirely absent, is insufficient to consider the statement honest if presented alone).
Fortunately, school tends to be horribly boring, and most students won't pay significant attention to such lessons anyway, accurate or not, so the stakes are somewhat lower than one might fear when one realizes how hard it is to present information instead of propaganda in some situations.
It's (almost) possible but so fantastically improbable save for careful maneuvering that it's not worth considering.
(You could have it on a trajectory nearly parallel to the Earth where the Earth catches it from behind very gently (relatively speaking). This is a tiny fraction of all possible approach angles and a tiny fraction of all possible approach velocities.)