The optimization in the story is to compile parts of code written in Javascript. So when using this optimization, the Javascript is only partly interpreted, and if the compiled part is the part that takes up most of the runtime, then the Javascript could conceivably be something like the speed of natively compiled C.
SENS aims to repair the effects of again rather than just slowing their accumulation. So fixing old people to become as healthy as young ones is exactly what SENS is all about.
There are a few people who live a bit longer than average, but not that much, and these people suffer the mental effects of senescence that SENS aims to eradicate. With no subjects having ever lived several hundred years in good health, I don't see how good science could be done to predict the psychological effects of that. It may make sense to ask for speculation, such as "What do you think the psychological effects of extreme longevity will be?"
The SENS project is currently working on extending the life of mice, because it is less of a challenge due to e.g. the shorter lives of mice and the possibility of experiments that would be unethical on humans.
It is a hope of the project that once mice longevity is extended considerably, more people will buy into the possibility that human life extension is also possible within their lifetime. After all, if it can be done for mice, why should it be impossible to do for humans? It is then hoped that this would spur a Manhatten project of human life extension, which is a prerequisite of achieving significant extensions within the kind of optimistic time frames given.
For this reason, it may make more sense to ask if there has been any success yet in any mammals. I believe calorie restriction, that one of the other responders also mentioned, is the only known successful technique.
The reason IQ tests normally are all about abstract reasoning is that that gives the most reliable assessment of IQ with the least number of questions. There is no reason an IQ test needs to look like that, it just happens to be the most reliable and time-efficient way to measure IQ.
In a way, any test at all is an IQ test, in that it is nearly impossible to devise any kind of mental test that does not measure IQ to some degree. String a lot of these kinds of semi-IQ tests together in the right way, and you can end up with a reliable IQ test that contains only questions that look nothing like traditional IQ test questions do. The only reason that it is not usually done this way is just that then you need many, many questions, which is a waste of time when only a small number of abstract thinking questions can do the job just as well.
Re:but this goes for any stream of information
on
The Geometry of Music
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It is often true that if you have some parametrized way for describing data, then you generally want as few parameters as possible. You definitely want fewer parameters than data points, so going to more parameters or dimensions is not an achievement, as you point out.
The article is light on mathematical details, but it seems that the achievement is that this space of points has been characterized in a useful way. The story is not that now it can be done with even more dimensions (which as you point out would be trivial). Rather, the story is that now this space of points has been characterized at all, and this description just so happened to require several or many dimensions.
Since this paper is the first ever on musical theory to be published in Science, which is a highly prestigious peer-reviewed journal, we can assume that the paper is saying something interesting within its field. Specifically, we can assume that this is not just a question of fitting some standard statistical model to some data points.
> In the UK, we're used to getting our phones for free. > What is happening is that you are paying for the phone by taking out a loan, and then that loan gets repaid over 18 or 12 months in the form of fees that are higher than they are at other companies where you do not get a phone. This may be a good deal, and it should be evaluated the same as any other kind of loan. It is certainly not free!
Well, there is the issue of conspicuous consumption - i.e. carrying around an iPhone shows that you have 600$ to spend on a phone, which sends a signal that you have a lot of money, or you would not be wasting it like that. Now that the iPhone is significantly less expensive, it has lost some of the signal value it used to have, so the people who bought it for the signal are not happy.
I would agree, though, that one should not expect any kind of expensive electronics to hold its value for very long.
> However, I recently lost a substantial amount of weight > while consuming substantially more calories than before. > [...] > I'm guessing I now take in half again more calories, but > I weigh ten or twelve pounds less > Then your expenditure of energy has increased by more than 50%, and you say this has been achieved without any additional exercise. It seems much more likely that you are or were not measuring your caloric intake correctly.
> Imprisoning a cop for delibrate failure to catch a criminal is a must. > Giving the criminal the officer's bonus for not being caught is irony. > This will be a double-slap against the officer and the force. > How about this: put the criminal in jail, fire the cop and hire a third party to be the new cop?
> When people argue politics with me, my first question is: > "In the last election, did you vote?". If the answer is no, > then I refuse to discuss politics, after telling them > "I don't care what you think, your opinion doesn't matter!". > You sound like just the kind of guy everyone would love to have discussions with! The life of the party, Slashdot-style! Rock on!
> Further, I think most of the "low-hanging-fruit" of scientific > learning was done between 1945 and 1980. > It seems to me that the low-hanging fruit will *always* seem to have been already done. Each year, scientists make the "easy" experiments and pursue the "easy" ideas that have the most impact - why wouldn't they? That leaves only the harder things for next year, and so on. Also, things often seem much easier to do after they have been done than before.
I'm not sure I like the idea of requiring registration to get copyright protection, but even so, it could be made so that there would be no fees for registration, and that you could register in 5 seconds over the net. There could be a page saying "send in your work along with your name".
There could be an issue with fake claims of copyright ownership, though, but I guess we already have that possibility.
> I would suggest that being unaware of the state of a piece of data > on your file system is more or less the exact opposite of fault > tolerance and redundancy. > Not if that data has been deleted. Actually, I would think that redundancy and fault tolerance is a large part of the *reason* that deleting things can be harder than it would seem at first sight. It is, of course, true that if Google really cared to delete data, they would be able to implement that functionality.
> Either way what I expect from AC, but when you're ready to have something > worthy of my time, please feel free to sign up and get a better way to > respond to people that doesn't hurt your credibility. > Somehow, I don't think this Anonymous Coward guy is too worried about his credibility...:)
> In fact, I believe that Microsoft is doing this patent stuff because > they want to ease into distributing GNU Linux themselves, and they > want to be the market leading GNU Linux distro. > That's absurd! It would be like Apple starting to use Intel CPUs - and I think we all know how likely *that* is to happen!
This is not a problem if the known word is a hard image that has been solved by humans in previous captchas. This scheme works as long as the system has a small pool of known images to start the process off.
A universe governed by immutable laws need not be deterministic - we can simply imagine laws that include randomness within them. In fact, we do not need to imagine, but can simply look at current physics - quantum mechanics does postulate a universe governed by immutable laws, and those laws include randomness.
Slashdot Mirror
The optimization in the story is to compile parts of code written in Javascript. So when using this optimization, the Javascript is only partly interpreted, and if the compiled part is the part that takes up most of the runtime, then the Javascript could conceivably be something like the speed of natively compiled C.
SENS aims to repair the effects of again rather than just slowing their accumulation. So fixing old people to become as healthy as young ones is exactly what SENS is all about.
The essence of the question is OK, though suggesting that he might not even have considered it is just insulting.
There are a few people who live a bit longer than average, but not that much, and these people suffer the mental effects of senescence that SENS aims to eradicate. With no subjects having ever lived several hundred years in good health, I don't see how good science could be done to predict the psychological effects of that. It may make sense to ask for speculation, such as "What do you think the psychological effects of extreme longevity will be?"
The SENS project is currently working on extending the life of mice, because it is less of a challenge due to e.g. the shorter lives of mice and the possibility of experiments that would be unethical on humans.
It is a hope of the project that once mice longevity is extended considerably, more people will buy into the possibility that human life extension is also possible within their lifetime. After all, if it can be done for mice, why should it be impossible to do for humans? It is then hoped that this would spur a Manhatten project of human life extension, which is a prerequisite of achieving significant extensions within the kind of optimistic time frames given.
For this reason, it may make more sense to ask if there has been any success yet in any mammals. I believe calorie restriction, that one of the other responders also mentioned, is the only known successful technique.
The reason IQ tests normally are all about abstract reasoning is that that gives the most reliable assessment of IQ with the least number of questions. There is no reason an IQ test needs to look like that, it just happens to be the most reliable and time-efficient way to measure IQ.
In a way, any test at all is an IQ test, in that it is nearly impossible to devise any kind of mental test that does not measure IQ to some degree. String a lot of these kinds of semi-IQ tests together in the right way, and you can end up with a reliable IQ test that contains only questions that look nothing like traditional IQ test questions do. The only reason that it is not usually done this way is just that then you need many, many questions, which is a waste of time when only a small number of abstract thinking questions can do the job just as well.
It is often true that if you have some parametrized way for describing data, then you generally want as few parameters as possible. You definitely want fewer parameters than data points, so going to more parameters or dimensions is not an achievement, as you point out.
The article is light on mathematical details, but it seems that the achievement is that this space of points has been characterized in a useful way. The story is not that now it can be done with even more dimensions (which as you point out would be trivial). Rather, the story is that now this space of points has been characterized at all, and this description just so happened to require several or many dimensions.
Since this paper is the first ever on musical theory to be published in Science, which is a highly prestigious peer-reviewed journal, we can assume that the paper is saying something interesting within its field. Specifically, we can assume that this is not just a question of fitting some standard statistical model to some data points.
> In the UK, we're used to getting our phones for free.
>
What is happening is that you are paying for the phone by taking out a loan, and then that loan gets repaid over 18 or 12 months in the form of fees that are higher than they are at other companies where you do not get a phone. This may be a good deal, and it should be evaluated the same as any other kind of loan. It is certainly not free!
Well, there is the issue of conspicuous consumption - i.e. carrying around an iPhone shows that you have 600$ to spend on a phone, which sends a signal that you have a lot of money, or you would not be wasting it like that. Now that the iPhone is significantly less expensive, it has lost some of the signal value it used to have, so the people who bought it for the signal are not happy.
I would agree, though, that one should not expect any kind of expensive electronics to hold its value for very long.
I suspect the OP was referring to SENS (http://www.sens.org/), which already includes a plan for dealing with telomere shortening.
> However, I recently lost a substantial amount of weight
> while consuming substantially more calories than before.
> [...]
> I'm guessing I now take in half again more calories, but
> I weigh ten or twelve pounds less
>
Then your expenditure of energy has increased by more than 50%, and you say this has been achieved without any additional exercise. It seems much more likely that you are or were not measuring your caloric intake correctly.
I don't follow - I don't think anyone are arguing that an omnipotent being might not be able to create cells like the ones on earth today.
Somehow I think that if a B787 crashes there will be many more pressing issues than a slightly higher risk of cancer due to carbon powder.
> Imprisoning a cop for delibrate failure to catch a criminal is a must.
> Giving the criminal the officer's bonus for not being caught is irony.
> This will be a double-slap against the officer and the force.
>
How about this: put the criminal in jail, fire the cop and hire a third party to be the new cop?
Yes.
> Since democrats have betrayed our trust by failing to pull out our troops, we should respond by electing a Republican president once again.
By this logic, you should imprison a cop in place of the criminal he failed to catch, while giving the criminal the police officer's bonus.
> When people argue politics with me, my first question is:
> "In the last election, did you vote?". If the answer is no,
> then I refuse to discuss politics, after telling them
> "I don't care what you think, your opinion doesn't matter!".
>
You sound like just the kind of guy everyone would love to have discussions with! The life of the party, Slashdot-style! Rock on!
> Further, I think most of the "low-hanging-fruit" of scientific
> learning was done between 1945 and 1980.
>
It seems to me that the low-hanging fruit will *always* seem to have been already done. Each year, scientists make the "easy" experiments and pursue the "easy" ideas that have the most impact - why wouldn't they? That leaves only the harder things for next year, and so on. Also, things often seem much easier to do after they have been done than before.
This is a test to see my new sig.
I'm not sure I like the idea of requiring registration to get copyright protection, but even so, it could be made so that there would be no fees for registration, and that you could register in 5 seconds over the net. There could be a page saying "send in your work along with your name".
There could be an issue with fake claims of copyright ownership, though, but I guess we already have that possibility.
> I would suggest that being unaware of the state of a piece of data
> on your file system is more or less the exact opposite of fault
> tolerance and redundancy.
>
Not if that data has been deleted. Actually, I would think that redundancy and fault tolerance is a large part of the *reason* that deleting things can be harder than it would seem at first sight. It is, of course, true that if Google really cared to delete data, they would be able to implement that functionality.
> Either way what I expect from AC, but when you're ready to have something :)
> worthy of my time, please feel free to sign up and get a better way to
> respond to people that doesn't hurt your credibility.
>
Somehow, I don't think this Anonymous Coward guy is too worried about his credibility...
> In fact, I believe that Microsoft is doing this patent stuff because
> they want to ease into distributing GNU Linux themselves, and they
> want to be the market leading GNU Linux distro.
>
That's absurd! It would be like Apple starting to use Intel CPUs - and I think we all know how likely *that* is to happen!
Hey, wait a minute...
This is not a problem if the known word is a hard image that has been solved by humans in previous captchas. This scheme works as long as the system has a small pool of known images to start the process off.
A universe governed by immutable laws need not be deterministic - we can simply imagine laws that include randomness within them. In fact, we do not need to imagine, but can simply look at current physics - quantum mechanics does postulate a universe governed by immutable laws, and those laws include randomness.