I caught the humor, but I mean "provoke" not in the figurative sense of "hmm... that was thought provoking", but in the sense of "this other person that I'm interacting with is knowingly going directly against my interests, for their own gain". By "challenge our assumptions and expectations", I'm not talking about electrons doing their crazy probabilistic tunneling thing, I'm talking about how our plans get dashed by any of a hundred day-to-day obstacles that stand in between us and what we thought would be ours.
So I think your idea that you have to feel bad to do yourself good is very very twisted and in itself dangerous. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that something feeling good does not make it therapeutic. Something promoting positive change is therapeutic; this often is an uncomfortable process, because stasis is usually more comfortable than growth.
Sometimes what's bad feels good. Sometimes, what's good for you also feels good. That's the ticket.
That's more plausible, but the monkeys weren't selecting at random- they were systematically rejecting the blue ones in favor of the green. That would be unlikely if the monkeys couldn't tell the difference.
I haven't worked in the vision lab for a few months (and I did only work with humans), so maybe I'm getting rusty:) but I thought that it would be easy for even a dichromat to distinguish between red and blue? I mean, what single cone, if disabled, would produce a difficulty in distinguishing red from blue?
Did you mean maybe that these monkeys diverged from humans' evolutionary branch before the red and green cones differentiated from the older, yellow cone? If that were the case, they still should have no trouble distinguishing red from blue.
I don't understand why it's so hard for people to understand that violent fantasies -- not actions, but fantasies -- are therapeutic and cathartic. Here's why- because violent fantasies aren't therapeutic and cathartic.
There is a difference between things that feel good and things that are good for you. Catharsis feels good. Freud told us that catharsis was good for us. Freud also was full of shit.
Here's the deal. Our lives are full of circumstances that provoke us or challenge our assumptions and expectations. If you let things continue to do that, you will have anger. There are many ways to deal with this:
1. Accept the limitations of the situation. Find other ways to get what you want. 2. Use the anger to get energy to overcome the challenges in ways that respect others. 3. Use the anger to get energy to overcome your sense of empathy and ignore the rights of others. 4. Ignore your desire to do something about the challenges. Get depressed.
Violent fantasies do not reduce anger. "Venting" does not reduce anger. They both just increase it. You don't realize that they increase anger when you do it, because anger without a solution feels bad, and dominance and/or validation from others feels good. The good feeling you get after violent fantasies or from venting is not the antithesis of the original anger you felt, though- it's a reward for your anger. This can be good, if you were doing strategy 4 and, because of your increased anger, are ready to go to strategies 1 or 2. But if that's not the transition in strategies that's going to take place, then there's no benefit.
Side note: where did people get the idea that "therapeutic" meant "feels nice"? Improving one's health (mental or physical) very often involves sacrifice and changing habitual ways of thinking and acting. Things that feel nice like "therapeutic" shampoo or "therapeutic" massages or "therapeutic" whatever do nothing by themselves to promote growth or change.
They each have their advantages and disadvantages. According to the great computer language shootout, Java is faster by an order of magnitude, but is more verbose and usually consumes about twice as much memory. The ultimate decision depends (at least) on your application's needs and the capabilities of the environments you're targeting.
Initialize a new stack. Pop cars from the first stack and push them onto the second stack until you find the car you want. Then, pop cars from the second stack and push them onto the first stack. This has the advantage of maintaining the original order of the stack.
I am not actually an advocate of the position you replied to. I like the idea of consistency, but my post was just one example of a consistent way to do things. That said, defining what the FDA should regulate wouldn't be that hard. Of course people would, in this hypothetical world, be able to get chocolate up to a particular dosage OTC;)
Why aren't all drugs given a consistent set of regulations under the FDA? If someone needs to get morphine, they get a prescription. If someone gets morphine without a prescription, they're being naughty. If someone needs to get marijuana, they get a prescription. If someone gets marijuana without a prescription, they're being naughty. If someone needs to get cigarettes, they get a prescription. If someone gets cigarettes without a prescription, they're being naughty.
It's not an app(lication)- it's an API (applications programming interface). It makes it so that social sites can present to third-party developers a common interface for development. OpenSocial itself is not a competitor to Facebook. It is even a logical possibility that Facebook adopt the OpenSocial API; this talk of OpenSocial "versus" Facebook is merely due to the historical accident that Facebook has not adopted it yet, and many Facebook competitors have.
Faster and more powerful != More Intelligent. Sorry to nitpick, but yes, it does. Intelligence as a function of speed, power, and strategies remains monotonically increasing with speed and monotonically increasing with power, up to the bounds of the complexity of the problem domain (cf Go and Tic-Tac-Toe). It just so happens that there will be diminishing returns on existing strategies, and finding new strategies will at some point be more cost-effective than making things faster or more powerful.
To put it simply, in order to expect a human-like intelligence in 20 years requires two things we do not yet have: An understanding of human intelligence, and a hardware architecture that is able to implement it. For some definitions of "human-like", sure. But a single architecture capable of creativity in many domains, quick reaction to unforeseen circumstances, and pragmatic reasoning and problem solving doesn't have to do it the same way we do it. As I type this, I realize that people will always expect more; if a machine were to do everything I just listed, then they'd want the machine to have empathy, be able to pick up cultures through immersion, pick up accents, and appreciate humor, etc... These things vary in how central they are to the diffuse definition of "intelligence", but as long as it serves to differentiate humans from computers, raising such objections will make people more comfortable.
The only environmental significance I can think of that the moon has is that its gravity may help to stabilize the Earth's axis (and therefore, its climate). (This was discussed in Asimov's "Left Hand of the Electron"). For the foreseeable future, the moon will be capable of performing that role.
Re:Let's hope it's cancelled after 15 eps
on
Joss Whedon Back on TV
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Angel started awesome as well, but then went down the toilet. If you could bring yourself to watch the show after season four (which could be painful at times- Connor was very much Angel's Dawn), you would have been treated to some of the best that Joss has to offer. The last season of Angel was almost as good as the only season of Firefly. Wesley's arc throughout the whole series, and especially its culmination in the last season, was an excellent demonstration of what Joss can do if you give him enough time. I can only imagine what comparable achievements he could have reached if he had been given the opportunity with Firefly.
He's not claiming that the mean is different from what would be expected if the numbers were uniformly distributed. He's claiming that the numbers themselves are not uniformly distributed.
To test whether the numbers actually fall into a discrete uniform distribution, he should've run a chi-square test for goodness-of-fit predicting all outcomes having equal frequency.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't CCTV mean "closed-circuit television"? As in, the camera is connected with a solid conductor to the display? If that's the case, then wouldn't a system that transmitted video over the air (at least, without displaying it locally first) be something other than CCTV?
What if "your problem" is really several problems? Are modern operating systems able to put different applications on different cores? (Serious question- I don't know) If they were, then multiple cores would certainly help me; at work, I'm never just running one application, and it's typical for me to run four.
Wait- if an entity is not mentioned in at least two sources, can someone explain how an article about that entity can possibly cite sources for its claims?
Consider that if there's only one source for the article, then the Wikipedia article does not add new information (as per "No original research"). If the Wikipedia article doesn't add new information, then Google can be used to find the original source and the reader loses nothing if the Wikipedia article is deleted.
1. Actively supporting third-party hardware 2. Being indifferent to third-party hardware 3. Actively interfering with attempts to run on third-party hardware
Please excuse my ignorance in these matters, because I genuinely don't know. Is Apple doing #2, or #3? It's plausible that, as people claim, #1 interferes with Apple's desire to guarantee quality. But #2 and #3 should be essentially equivalent in terms of the quality that Apple can deliver for its customers, and hobbyists would be a lot happier with #2.
It's well-known in linguistics and philosophy that "You don't get semantics from syntax." That's right- we get semantics from interpretation.
So why don't we give PR puff pieces like this the same warm reception we give to the latest announcement of a perpetual motion machine? Because the right syntax can give to a computer very helpful clues towards productive interpretations. Data- which is just "syntax"- helps to drive computers to more effectively interpret other, related data all the freaking time. That's not what kills the semantic web idea.
What kills the semantic web idea is that all the millions of individual producers of data don't have any immediate incentive to mark their own data up for the benefit of others.
I'm imagining something like BrainPal from the Old Man's War series (I'm not finished with the series, so no spoilers!). I mean, the question did explicitly state that it would be safe. If the chip were just in my occipital and posterior temporal lobes, then it could stimulate my senses of vision and hearing without having any ability to control my actions.
I think we've all got to recognize that the psychology department is where people go if they're not geeky enough to go into engineering or compsci Where does our interest in a particular subject come from? It comes from (at least) two things:
1. Knowledge of the subject helps the knower improve their balance of reward/punishment (we are not as often interested in things that make no difference to whether we receive reward or punishment) 2. The subject is nontrivial (we are not as often interested in very simple things, because we don't need to devote attention to them in order to accrue their benefits)
Brains and computers both are complex decision-making machines whose workings really matter. It should come as no surprise that there are people like me that studied both at university. How does that fit with the idea that psychology is just for those that couldn't cut it in a more technical subject?
To greatly reduce any doubt that this is happening, people should determine the availability of extremely unlikely domain names, like a random string of 24 characters.
If several of those are snatched up after a whois lookup, it's clearly not because anyone else actually bought the domain name because they wanted to use it.
It's an empirical reality that many suicides actually are the result of depressed people getting treatment finally having enough energy to kill themselves.
We don't know whether that's tied to optimism specifically. It's a plausible stretch to think that optimism could be a limiting factor on energy, but that's certainly not the only interpretation.
Slashdot Mirror
I caught the humor, but I mean "provoke" not in the figurative sense of "hmm... that was thought provoking", but in the sense of "this other person that I'm interacting with is knowingly going directly against my interests, for their own gain". By "challenge our assumptions and expectations", I'm not talking about electrons doing their crazy probabilistic tunneling thing, I'm talking about how our plans get dashed by any of a hundred day-to-day obstacles that stand in between us and what we thought would be ours.
That's more plausible, but the monkeys weren't selecting at random- they were systematically rejecting the blue ones in favor of the green. That would be unlikely if the monkeys couldn't tell the difference.
I haven't worked in the vision lab for a few months (and I did only work with humans), so maybe I'm getting rusty :) but I thought that it would be easy for even a dichromat to distinguish between red and blue? I mean, what single cone, if disabled, would produce a difficulty in distinguishing red from blue?
Did you mean maybe that these monkeys diverged from humans' evolutionary branch before the red and green cones differentiated from the older, yellow cone? If that were the case, they still should have no trouble distinguishing red from blue.
There is a difference between things that feel good and things that are good for you. Catharsis feels good. Freud told us that catharsis was good for us. Freud also was full of shit.
Here's the deal. Our lives are full of circumstances that provoke us or challenge our assumptions and expectations. If you let things continue to do that, you will have anger. There are many ways to deal with this:
1. Accept the limitations of the situation. Find other ways to get what you want.
2. Use the anger to get energy to overcome the challenges in ways that respect others.
3. Use the anger to get energy to overcome your sense of empathy and ignore the rights of others.
4. Ignore your desire to do something about the challenges. Get depressed.
Violent fantasies do not reduce anger. "Venting" does not reduce anger. They both just increase it. You don't realize that they increase anger when you do it, because anger without a solution feels bad, and dominance and/or validation from others feels good. The good feeling you get after violent fantasies or from venting is not the antithesis of the original anger you felt, though- it's a reward for your anger. This can be good, if you were doing strategy 4 and, because of your increased anger, are ready to go to strategies 1 or 2. But if that's not the transition in strategies that's going to take place, then there's no benefit.
Side note: where did people get the idea that "therapeutic" meant "feels nice"? Improving one's health (mental or physical) very often involves sacrifice and changing habitual ways of thinking and acting. Things that feel nice like "therapeutic" shampoo or "therapeutic" massages or "therapeutic" whatever do nothing by themselves to promote growth or change.
They each have their advantages and disadvantages. According to the great computer language shootout, Java is faster by an order of magnitude, but is more verbose and usually consumes about twice as much memory. The ultimate decision depends (at least) on your application's needs and the capabilities of the environments you're targeting.
Initialize a new stack. Pop cars from the first stack and push them onto the second stack until you find the car you want. Then, pop cars from the second stack and push them onto the first stack. This has the advantage of maintaining the original order of the stack.
I am not actually an advocate of the position you replied to. I like the idea of consistency, but my post was just one example of a consistent way to do things. That said, defining what the FDA should regulate wouldn't be that hard. Of course people would, in this hypothetical world, be able to get chocolate up to a particular dosage OTC ;)
Why aren't all drugs given a consistent set of regulations under the FDA? If someone needs to get morphine, they get a prescription. If someone gets morphine without a prescription, they're being naughty. If someone needs to get marijuana, they get a prescription. If someone gets marijuana without a prescription, they're being naughty. If someone needs to get cigarettes, they get a prescription. If someone gets cigarettes without a prescription, they're being naughty.
It's not an app(lication)- it's an API (applications programming interface). It makes it so that social sites can present to third-party developers a common interface for development. OpenSocial itself is not a competitor to Facebook. It is even a logical possibility that Facebook adopt the OpenSocial API; this talk of OpenSocial "versus" Facebook is merely due to the historical accident that Facebook has not adopted it yet, and many Facebook competitors have.
The only environmental significance I can think of that the moon has is that its gravity may help to stabilize the Earth's axis (and therefore, its climate). (This was discussed in Asimov's "Left Hand of the Electron"). For the foreseeable future, the moon will be capable of performing that role.
To everyone that replied about how dumb the parent's question was:
Electromagnetic radiation is a variation in the magnetic and electric fields. See superposition, and note that EM radiation is made up of bosons.
The question was not a dumb one.
He's not claiming that the mean is different from what would be expected if the numbers were uniformly distributed. He's claiming that the numbers themselves are not uniformly distributed.
To test whether the numbers actually fall into a discrete uniform distribution, he should've run a chi-square test for goodness-of-fit predicting all outcomes having equal frequency.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't CCTV mean "closed-circuit television"? As in, the camera is connected with a solid conductor to the display? If that's the case, then wouldn't a system that transmitted video over the air (at least, without displaying it locally first) be something other than CCTV?
What if "your problem" is really several problems? Are modern operating systems able to put different applications on different cores? (Serious question- I don't know) If they were, then multiple cores would certainly help me; at work, I'm never just running one application, and it's typical for me to run four.
Wait- if an entity is not mentioned in at least two sources, can someone explain how an article about that entity can possibly cite sources for its claims?
Consider that if there's only one source for the article, then the Wikipedia article does not add new information (as per "No original research"). If the Wikipedia article doesn't add new information, then Google can be used to find the original source and the reader loses nothing if the Wikipedia article is deleted.
There's a difference between these alternatives:
1. Actively supporting third-party hardware
2. Being indifferent to third-party hardware
3. Actively interfering with attempts to run on third-party hardware
Please excuse my ignorance in these matters, because I genuinely don't know. Is Apple doing #2, or #3? It's plausible that, as people claim, #1 interferes with Apple's desire to guarantee quality. But #2 and #3 should be essentially equivalent in terms of the quality that Apple can deliver for its customers, and hobbyists would be a lot happier with #2.
What kills the semantic web idea is that all the millions of individual producers of data don't have any immediate incentive to mark their own data up for the benefit of others.
Even then, if we somehow put in measures to detect ornithology pages, my cock pheasant pornography site could be misclassified, too.
I'm imagining something like BrainPal from the Old Man's War series (I'm not finished with the series, so no spoilers!). I mean, the question did explicitly state that it would be safe. If the chip were just in my occipital and posterior temporal lobes, then it could stimulate my senses of vision and hearing without having any ability to control my actions.
Sign me up.
1. Knowledge of the subject helps the knower improve their balance of reward/punishment (we are not as often interested in things that make no difference to whether we receive reward or punishment)
2. The subject is nontrivial (we are not as often interested in very simple things, because we don't need to devote attention to them in order to accrue their benefits)
Brains and computers both are complex decision-making machines whose workings really matter. It should come as no surprise that there are people like me that studied both at university. How does that fit with the idea that psychology is just for those that couldn't cut it in a more technical subject?
To greatly reduce any doubt that this is happening, people should determine the availability of extremely unlikely domain names, like a random string of 24 characters.
tksmowlapoxnvbwlqanmiutklweh.com
laskjdfghlfkajgneruykvjniour.com
qwieurylkajbaiurylkjasndfgpu.com
If several of those are snatched up after a whois lookup, it's clearly not because anyone else actually bought the domain name because they wanted to use it.
It's an empirical reality that many suicides actually are the result of depressed people getting treatment finally having enough energy to kill themselves.
We don't know whether that's tied to optimism specifically. It's a plausible stretch to think that optimism could be a limiting factor on energy, but that's certainly not the only interpretation.