True, and that bit about Iraqis was indeed war propaganda used to justify US violence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... "The Nayirah testimony was a testimony given before the non-governmental Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a woman who provided only her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and the American president in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Sabah... and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign which was run by Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah's testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda."
Except Las Casa was also Spanish, so presumably "on the same side"as Columbus (or at least his funders): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... "Bartolome de las Casas, O.P. (c. 1484[1] -- 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar. He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies and focus particularly on the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.[2] Arriving as one of the first European settlers in the Americas, he participated in, and was eventually compelled to oppose, the atrocities committed against the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. In 1515, he reformed his views, gave up his Indian slaves and encomienda, and advocated, before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of rights for the natives."
So, it is perhaps more like Pat Tillman, who left a lucrative contract with the NFL to sign up to invade Iraq, and who conveniently died from "friendly fire" before a planned meeting with Noam Chomsky over his emerging doubts? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... "Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (November 6, 1976-- April 22, 2004) was an American football player who left his professional career and enlisted in the United States Army in June 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. His service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and subsequent death, were the subject of much media attention.[1]... Despite his fame, Tillman did not want to be used for propaganda purposes. He spoke to friends about his opposition to President Bush and the Iraq war, and he had made an appointment with notable government critic Noam Chomsky for after his return from the military. The destruction of evidence linked to Tillman's death, including his personal journal, led his mother to speculate that he was murdered.[31] General Wesley Clark agreed that it was "very possible"...."
More on that: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2... "An NFL football star who enlisted in the Army in May 2002, he apparently became disenchanted with the conduct of the war. He not only did not support President Bush for reelection, but encouraged others to vote for John Kerry. According to his mother, a friend of his had arranged for him to meet with Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus from MIT and one of our nationâ(TM)s most respected public intellectuals, who, no doubt, could have launched him into prominent orbit as an outspoken opponent of the war, had he been so inclined."
But read for yourself what Columbus himself wrote in his log.
They better be better plans than the last two times the USA tried it and got its butt kicked (1175, 1812).:-) Or is it six times the USA has invaded? http://mentalfloss.com/article...
Of course, if the USA really has to invade Canada, like say, if lots more oil is discovered there and the USA political system need to redirect who gets the profits from it, or if Canada experiments with a "basic income" again and the USA fears "contagion", then everyone will be screaming if there are no plans.:-) See also Chomsky on: "The Threat of a Good Example" http://www.chomsky.info/books/... "No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.... As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars. There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?"... "
I guess Canada is safe for now because it is not weak and poor?
It's a no win situation making such plans or not if your job is to consider every eventuality.
Still, sometimes the best way to win is not to play. This was written by a Marine Major General and two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Smedley Butler: http://www.warisaracket.org/ra... "War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
Consider, for example, the Strv 103 tank that Sweden designed. They are designed for home defense on Sweden's mountainous terrain, not going abroad. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... "It was known for its unconventional turretless design, with a fixed gun traversed by engaging the tracks and elevated by adjusting the hull suspension.... The Strv 103 was designed and manufactured in Sweden. It was developed in the 1950s and was the first main battle tank to use a turbine engine. The result was a very low-profile design with an emphasis on defence and heightened crew protection level...."
That design reflects Major General Butler's point.
The really laughable thing about all these plans is that, as was said in "Brittle Power" (or maybe "Energy, Vulnerability, and War"), quoting from memory from 1980s books, "a troop of boy scouts could shut down the USA's vital energy infrastructure" given the fragility of oil pipelines where every segment is essentially a single point of fail
Again: "The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching."
And it is just happening again with downmodding as "off-topic" of my post in response about a healthier alternative rather than planning for doomsday and war.:-(
Even now, different people in the USA speak a different "language", even if the words themselves is called "English". As shown in ST:TNG "Darmok", words acquire their meaning through references to shared culture and stories. If you don't know the culture or stories, the words may sound like they have no meaning. Thus, that was part of the "boat people" from Europe failing to realize the true wealth of the Americas in native culture.
Another, even sadder, example is Columbus and the Arowak of Haiti, as explained by Howard Zinn: http://www.historyisaweapon.co... "Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.... These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.... The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic-the Indies and Asia, gold and spices.... The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in "large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time... made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves.... They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality."... Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."... Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Chri
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... http://www.marcinequenzer.com/... "In our Seneca Tradition, the Field of Plenty is seen as a spiral that has its smallest revolution out in space and its' largest revolution near the Earth. This shape could be likened to an upside-down tornado. When our Ancestors assisted the Pilgrims in planting Corn and raising crops so they would not starve, we taught them the understanding of the Field of Plenty by bringing the cornucopia baskets full of vegetables. The Iroquois women wove these baskets as a physical reminder that Great Mystery provides through the Field of Plenty. The Pilgrims were taught that giving prayers of gratitude was not just a Christian concept. The Red Race understood thanksgiving on a daily basis.
The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
I suggested this at IBM Research around 1999, and built a proof-of-concept speech-controlled 3X3 display wall of old ThinkPads otherwise destined for "the crusher". Wow, was my supervisor surprised (to put it mildly) when he got back from a two week vacation, as I had built it when he was away so he could not say "no".:-) Another contractor in the lab described his reactions to me though, and helped calm him down.:-)
A couple regular employees associated with the lab had helped me get the equipment. Every laptop had to be officially tracked with an owner and even locked down to comply with IBM policy, even though they had been discarded/scrubbed and were heading for destruction. Ignoring time costs, the laptop locks were the most expensive part of the project in a sense given pretty much everything else was recycled, and a regular employee coworker got them for me out of his own budget (thanks, David!). Another regular employee helped with the networking aspects and tracking (thanks, Mel!).
The people are IBM who dealt with old equipment were very interested in the idea. Who wants to see useable equipment get scrapped? And there was so much older equipment from such a big company, plus from leases and such. But I guess, within Research itself, the project then was not that exciting to people focused on "new" things.
I even wrote up a mock commercial for such display walls with a female executive mother working from home in front of a huge display wall, and her little daughter came by to say hello, and the mom had programmed something fun to show up on the wall for her daughter.
Before we got treadmill workstations, my wife also liked the idea as a way to keep fit -- that you would be walking around all day in front of this display wall you were talking to, rather than sitting in one place and typing.
ThinkPads were interesting in that they could fold flat, so you could layer them on top of each other. However, I also suggested back then that ThinkPads could eventually be designed for reuse in this specific way.
But as just a contractor, and about then hitting the 1.5 year limit for contractors at IBM Research (a rule to prevent them being ruled as employees), the idea sort of fizzled. There was some preliminary negotiations about hiring me as a regular employee, but I probably asked for too much as I had mixed feelings then about the all embracing IP agreements that IBM had and similar things (although I really liked the speech group -- great people), and I also had hopes to even then get back to educational and design software my wife and I had been writing. I did go back a couple more times at IBM as a contractor, but it was for other groups unrelated to speech. Anyway, so that idea faded away.
The display wall looked a bit like part of a Jeopardy set, and you would tell it what specific screens you wanted to do what with. Another speech researcher asked me to set it up in a new lab when I was leaving. So I can wonder if, indirectly, the idea floating around sparked something at IBM Research eventually related to Watson and Jeopardy?:-)
My major use case for the wall was to use as a design tool to make complex engineering projects, like a self-replicating space habitat. However, I also tried to get the IBM Legal department interested in using such a speech-activated display wall for reviewing legal documents and tracking cases, with using such systems backed by a supercomputer becoming a perk for IBM lawyers, but also did not get far with that.
I'm now past the expiration of my non-disclosure agreement on such things that I did or learned at IBM Research back then, thankfully!:-)
Anyway, one could probably do much the same with discarded cell phones...
A comment by me nine years ago on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... "... So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS [Cheap Access To Space] is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... 2001_web.html or a couple other sites I made in that direction: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... http://www.freevolution.net/ My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now."
By me, a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-f... "Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off: * totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead * with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make contributions when they can so such automotive intelligences serve humane purposes better?
If, for example, automotive intelligence was developed under some form of copyleft license like the GNU General Public License, then at least car o
Delphi had many great aspect, especially compile time. My wife and I put about six person years into a project together, much of the time working in Delphi. I knew (and even had taught at the college level C/C++), but she knew mostly Pascal. We did some work in C++, but got hit by the compile times (this was back working with PCs starting around 1995) as well as all the other issues writing in C++. Then we did some in Digitalk's Smalltalk/V, but got worried about lack of support for the proprietary version we were using (we could not have guessed that later is became a free-as-in-beer Smalltalk Express). Wish we had kept to Smalltalk though, as then we could have moved to Squeak a couple years later, and my wife and I really liked Smalltalk. But Smalltalk back then was also slow and had some other limits. So we moved to Delphi (the earliest versions, never moving to later versions beyond 2.0).
In retrospect, I think maybe we could have made the C++ approach also work better by writing unit tests for parts of the code and compiling only them in small projects. And I think I'd have much rather have the code in C++ right now than Delphi as far as long-term portability, including now translating to asm.js for web browser deployment.
But, for good or bad, I made the decision a decade ago to port it, and wrote code to parse Delphi and spit out Java and Python (doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but you need to futz with the GUI stuff and some other changes). I only got the StoryHarp app working (in a limtied way) in Java, plus I got the guts of the PlantStudio drawing algorithm in Python for a test for the OLPC.
I'm moving more into JavaScript now, for easy deployment in web browsers, so I might modify those tools to do JavaScript now? But not sure it was worth it, given the rise of Lazarus and the fact that, generally, you learn so much from writing an application that if you were to build it again, you'd do it differently.
But, in any case, Delphi was overall a pleasure to work in as far as a compiled language. Speedy. Fast turn around. Good debugging (although some library bugs with memory leaks were frustrating in the early versions -- we used memmond and its memory leak patches, plus other patches I created and found for the Delphi VCL).
When Squeak first came out, I played with generating Delphi pascal for its VM to use for Windows, but after the Windows port came out, lost some interest in that, and also got sidelines by looking into Squeak -> Newton porting. In retrospect, I wish I had finished the Squeak to Delphi port and code generation tooling, and never bothered working towards a Newton Port as the Newton OS did not want to support any more C++ than small routines, the OS's event loop conflicted with the Squeak polling architecture, Newtons had too little RAM, and of course the Newton was to be abandoned. Meanwhile, Delphi (especially via Lazarus) is still going strong!
of introduced microbes? Just mean reaching the same population density takes a few days longer... Granted, this is not Lake Vostok, so difference concerns may apply. And it's true that a smaller amount of bacteria introduced provides more time for the ecosystem to respond to it by eating it before it expands.
So true, sadly... See also: http://www.historyisaweapon.co... "However, the unexpected victories -- even temporary ones -- of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people -- the employed, the somewhat privileged -- are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us. "
I'd agree that reporter overgeneralizes at the end, and perhaps lazy of me to point to that summary vs. the original journal study. But that does not affect the validity of the Japanese study on vitamin D and the flu and kids.
Also, if studies show that vitamin D helps with "N. meningitis", then even if you take *only* conventional treatments, perhaps you should stay home too?:-) It is not either or in many cases.
This is a more realistic statement about that issue (notice use of the word "adjuvant" and "possibility"): http://www.chiro.org/nutrition... "Invasive pneumococcal disease, meningococcal disease, and group A streptococcal disease are more common when vitamin D levels are lowest (winter) [79-81] and all three bacteria are sensitive to AMP, [82-84] raising the possibility that pharmacological doses of vitamin D would be an effective adjuvant treatment. In fact, the dramatically increased production of AMPs by vitamin D and the broad spectrum of action of AMP make it reasonable to hypothesize that pharmacological doses of vitamin D are effective adjuvants in treating a large number of infections."
Human health is a complex topic with many interwoven factors that interact with each other. In general, many people who catch many "diseases" don't show significant symptoms because their immune system deals with it and limits the scope of the spread. I was not easily able to find that information about measles from a few minutes of trying though. It seems a bit controversial... Maybe you know if off-hand? "Risk Analysis for Measles Reintroduction After Global Certification of Eradication" http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/... "Convention holds that asymptomatic measles infections are rare, but there is a significant body of published evidence of acute measles infection among people who are exposed to measles virus but who do not develop classic symptoms [3-5]."
When you boost your immune system, you make it more likely the spread will be contained. Even for measles, the degree of symptoms you show and how long they last is in general probably going to reflect your health state (and also genetics though), as suggested in a link a bit further below to a study from CDC researchers. Humans are exposed to all sorts of potentially problematical viruses and bacteria every day -- doctors especially. A healthy immune system shrugs most of them off (with some dangerous exceptions, especially like Ebola).
A study specific to measles and nutrition, from India: "Interaction between nutrition and measles" http://link.springer.com/artic... "Much has been written about the synergestic interaction and infection in turn adversely affects the nutritional status. Although this relationship is well documented with respect to bacterial infections, it is not clear whether nutrition can influence the incidence or course of viral diseases. Measles is one of the most common viral infections that occur during childhood. The interactions between measles and nutritional status acquire considerable importance in situations where as a result of inadequate food intake, chronic malnutrition is widespread among children."
And: "Undernutrition as an underlying cause of child deaths associated with diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, and measles" http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont... "Results: The RR of mortality because of low weight-for-age was elevated for each cause of death and for all-cause mortality. Overall, 52.5% of all deaths in young children were attributable to undernutrition, varying from 44.8% for deaths because of measles to 60.7% for deaths because of diarrhea. Conclusion: A significant proportion of deaths in young children worldwide is attributable to low weight-for-age, and efforts to reduce malnutrition should be a policy priority."
So if 50% of the death rate is from obvious malnutrition, could at least some of the rest be from more subtle dietary issues?
In the USA from 2010, just to show how the USA is in theory increasingly at risk of an epidemic from malnutrition among children: http://www.washingtonpost.com/... "According to a new report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 17.4 million American families - almost 15 percent of U.S. households - are now "food insecure," an almost 30 percent increase since 2006. This means that, during any given month, they will be out of money, out of food, and forced to miss meals or seek assistance to feed themselves. Even those who get three meals a day may be malnourished. Americans increasingly eat cheap, sugary foods whose production is underwritten by government subsidies for the corn and dairy industries. As the New York Times reported this month, the USDA loudly promotes better eating habits while quietly working with Domino's to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese. [There are healthy fats though, including from ch
There are may choices that boost immune function. Eating right with more vegetables and fruits, exercising regularly (including treadmill workstations), sleeping well, laughing more, getting sunshine or vitamin D supplements, getting enough iodine and other vital nutrients, taking certain herbs regularly or drinking elderberry juice, being spiritual in some ways, and many other things all boost the immune system (see Dr. Fuhrman and Dr. Weil and many others). So does nursing children through age two years or further, as recommended by WHO. Periodic fasting may also boost the immune system long-term.
There are many lifestyle choices that also weaken the immune system or increase disease transmission risk. This includes things to avoid like smoking, breathing second-hand smoke, excessive drinking, various addictions and other high risk activities, and so on. Long-term exposure to woodsmoke from older wood-burning stove decreases overall health. Choosing to live in a walkable location with sidewalks increases health overall (see the book/website "Blue Zones"), meaning a choice to live where you are car-dependent increases health risks. Homeschooling reduces the risk of the spread of communicable diseases, since compulsory public schools are a huge disease transmission routes. Even the choice to *optionally* go to big social gatherings like DisneyWorld increases the risk of disease transmission (as in this case). Choosing to commute into a city for work on public transportation rather than work from home also probably increase disease transmission risk.
Many people (most) do not do *all* these good things and refrain from doing all the risky things. Why be so fixated on vaccinations -- especially because some, like an annual flu shot, are clearly debatable as risk vs. reward for meany people? Does your family do all those good things above as applicable and refrain from every one of the bad ones? Every single one? If you don't do even one, for whatever reason, should we ostracize you because you have broken the "social contract"?
BTW on the nuances of promoting widespread vaccination: "Govt. Researchers: Flu Shots Not Effective in Elderly, After All" http://sharylattkisson.com/gov... "An important and definitive "mainstream" government study done nearly a decade ago got little attention because the science came down on the wrong side. It found that after decades and billions of dollars spent promoting flu shots for the elderly, the mass vaccination program did not result in saving lives. In fact, the death rate among the elderly increased substantially"
Contrast with: "Vitamin D Proven More Effective Than Both Anti-Viral Drugs and Vaccines at Preventing the Flu" http://www.worldhealth.net/for...
Have you had your vitamin D level checked recently? If not, should we ostracize you and your family as an increased flu risk? If you have an elderly relative who had a flu shot, should we ostracize them (and you, by connection) because a study suggests it statistically negatively impacted their health?
As with many cosmological argument, that essay called "Imaginary Arguments" by TJ Radcliffe does not prove anything about a potential infinity of nested infinite universes. There is a key hedge there of "given what we currently know of physics". Much of physics (for example the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) is in essence a theory of what we could conceivably learn about the universe and beyond, not actual information on the universe and beyond. Likewise for saying we can see up to a certain distance of some billions of light years in space and time. That tells us essentially nothing about what is beyond those limits. We could, for example, be in an expanding bubble in a larger ocean of such bubbles -- but we could not tell using light-speed-limited electromagnetism. It would take, say, access to universe level bugs or debugger hooks to make an exploit that would let us travel beyond those electromagnetic limits in a human lifetime.:-)
This is where that essay goes off the rails, when i overgeneralizes the issue of what we can know with what might be out there: "Nor will it do to imagine alternative physics to fix all this up: insofar as the philosopher's argument is to have any claim on our attention at all, it must be based on what we know about the universe we actually live in, not some self-contradictory universe of a philosopher's imagination, where particles and computers behave in impossible ways."
That may be a useful sentiment by an observer about an observed box, but it is an overly limiting one when talking about things outside a box the observer appears to be in. At the very best, experimental physics can only tell us about the currently "observable" universe within a very small space-time bubble surrounding the current Earth.
So what if experiments are precise to many digits? When you are dealing with possible infinities and nested universes, anything is possible. It just does not matter how mind-bogglingly large the numbers are, or even if every universe can only simulate 0.5% of itself. The observable universe is already mind-boggling large. What are, say, a few trillion extra zeros tacked on to that regarding data storage needs or time needs for simulations to have billions of virtual turtles simulating nested universes some of the way down?:-)
Also, there are probably ways things could appear to be precise in some ways to a limited number of observers (like millions of Earth scientists), but not really being fully fleshed out. However, going down that rabbit hole involves many deep existential questions (like how can I know anything at all exists, or has existed, or will exist, how can I trust my memories, how many observers really exist, etc.) that most physicists may be better off ignoring, either career-wise or for mental health reasons.:-) http://disciplined-minds.com/ "Upon publication of Disciplined Minds, the American Institute of Physics fired author Jeff Schmidt. He had been on the editorial staff of Physics Today magazine for 19 years. Following advice given in the book itself, Schmidt and free-expression advocates mounted a campaign that brought public judgment to bear on Schmidtâ(TM)s dismissal. Such justice is available to anyone not afraid to go public."
That said, such an essay might fairly criticize specific conclusions in "the simulation argument" itself, since much of that is indeed speculative related to "ancestor simulation" or best practices for living in one. But for anyone who has spent time using computer VMs, as well as the mathematics of infinities, the essay-as-is sounds fairly limited in its thinking.
Of course, even the notion of "infinity" has its controversies::-) "Dispute over Infinity Divides Mathematicians "
Taking your comment seriously,:-) are you suggesting simulated seems to imply fake, but virtual implies essentially the same? Maybe there is some related change in social consciousness on these topics reflected by "virtual" becoming a more commonly used word?
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... "Virtuality, the quality of having the attributes of something without sharing its (real or imagined) physical form"
So yes, simulation does seem to imply more fakeness (imitation) than virtuality (which implies the essence is still there).
So, I stand corrected! Thank you, fyngyrz! It's virtual turtles all the way down.:-) Sorry for being insensitive about that!
BTW, I watched this excellent video last night of "Inventing the Future" with Robert Tercek, interviewing Bruce Schneier and Julian Sanchez about pervasive surveillance, drones, and related social changes, and the advertisements were all about Microsoft HoloLens: "Next Future Terrifying Technology Will Blow Your Mind" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A decade or more ago I saw a video of similar augmented reality demo (Steve Feinberg walking around Columbia university?),. http://www.cnet.com/pictures/g... "Steven Feinberg (left), a professor of computer science at Columbia University, created the first outdoor mobile augmented reality system using a see-through display in 1996."
But Microsoft HoloLens looked so much more impressive and integrated, and I can imagine with better head tracking technology like for Oculus Rift, that it would work better. Slashdot has an article on HoloLens from eight hours ago: http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
But in the context of this discussion, Microsoft's "HoloLens" show how the line between "physical" and "virtual" can start to become blurred. http://www.microsoft.com/micro... "The result is the world's most advanced holographic computing platform, enabled by Windows 10. For the first time ever, Microsoft HoloLens brings high-definition holograms to life in your world, where they integrate with your physical places, spaces, and things. Holograms will improve the way you do things every day, and enable you to do things youâ(TM)ve never done before."
Reminds me a bit of Red Dwarf and Arnold Rimmer.:-)
Perhaps many religions are right, and for our situation at least, an omniscient "god" really does know everything we do? And if every timestep of the virtuality/simulation is recorded somehow, then perhaps nothing is ever lost -- except in a stegnographic sense, or perhaps in the sense of having no more significant runtime devoted directly to its continued processing as an entity as it has lost obvious coherence?
People talk about how any singularity might be more about humans merging with machines then machines taking over, and one can wonder if, the first time, if there was one, virtualizing was more about a merging of physical and simulated/computed/virtualized as with HoloLens than one or the other?
Anyway, just random thoughts. It is in the nature of virtualization that you can never be sure what layers really surrounds you, so we may never know...
https://johntaylorgatto.wordpr... "Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were ov
Why not just build robots to do all the work instead, so we were not using drones to prop up repressive social orders based on wage slavery? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
The USA etc. would not be in the Middle East for oil (stirring up resistance) if we had a nuclear-based economy (including hot or cold fusion, too). So, if everyone had built (safer) nukes in the 1950s and later, our global geo-politics might have been much different. The USA would have never aligned itself with Saudi Arabia, propping up a repressive regime (to get oil profits, especially for Bush-related families), and stirring up a lot of resistance (most of the 9/11/2001 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and unhappy with their own country as far as the USA's involvement in it).
In James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear", his fictional Chironian society, based on nuclear fusion, is a society with an abundance world view, where there are a lot less crazy conflicts from people butting into other people's lives in order to gain "profits" and material wealth. In theory, a big shift to (better) nuclear in the 1960s could have produced such a society here -- if "too cheap to meter" had come true through better research and a focus on nuclear plants designed to produce energy safely and not be part of a nuclear weapons program. For example, there is the Thorium cycle which is somewhat safer, but the USA did not pursue that as it is harder to make bombs out of that.
I discuss another version of that here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... "Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?"
Still, your point remains insightful, and people have been saying similar things for decades. That is why, for now, I think solar and other renewables are the way to go. Much more decentralization is made possible by the current form of renewable compared to the current form of nuclear energy (big plants). Decentralization is much more compatible with distributed wealth (and a smaller rich/poor divide) which seems essential for a democracy. And with solar energy following an almost Moore's law like drop in price for a certain level of performance, it is finally reaching grid parity, and with new high speed printing technologies, as well as maybe paint-on versions and such, solar will likely be dirt cheap in another two decades. The storage issue is also being solved by better batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, and such.
However, if we had "Mr. Fusion" (like if Rossi's "cold fusion" LENR eCat or similar really worked), then I might feel differently given some downsides to scaling-up solar (like blocking light for green plant growth).
Still, back to current reality -- France is now admitting the risks first hand of the current approach to nuclear energy -- that you essentially need a police state to go with conventional nuclear energy because the risks of a meltdown cause by terrorists is just to high. Chernobl shows what is possible -- and that was in a remote area. mage such a melt down in the middle of Western Europe. Horrible. But that "cost" from the risk of intentional terror attacks was not factored into the original political calculations of whether to build big nuclear plants. -- even though people raised it at the time and since!
However, even with fairly conventional nuclear, there are other alternatives like Hyperion/Gen4 which are small nuclear "batteries" which could power a town and be trucked back and forth to a factory for replenishment every thirty years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... "Gen4 Energy, Inc (formerly Hyperion Power Generation, Inc.[1]) is a privately held corporation formed to construct and sell several designs of relatively small (70 MW thermal, 25 MW electric) nuclear reactors, which they claim will be modular, inexpensive, inher
Big spoilers in Wikipedia beyond context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... "In the introduction to the omnibus edition The Two Moons, Hogan revealed that the first book, Inherit the Stars, was inspired by a viewing of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he enjoyed until the ending. Complaining about what he saw as the confusing, effects-heavy conclusion at work afterwards, each of his colleagues bet him five pounds that he couldn't write and publish a science-fiction novel. The result was Inherit the Stars, which was published by Del Rey Books in May 1977. He later asked Arthur C. Clarke about the meaning of the ending of 2001, to which Clarke reportedly replied that while the ending of Hogan's Inherit the Stars made more sense, the ending of 2001 made more money."
The scanner is what draws in the main character into the whole plot, since the space agency ultimately wants to use it to scan the equipment of a 50,000 year old space-suited human corpse found on the moon, but then the main character's involvement builds from there.
http://www.amazon.com/Wizards-... "A frenzied race filled with computer driven chaos! At the far end of the galaxy lies a fully automated grid-widget factory. As one of the factory's eight redundant super computers, you have a lot of responsibility and even more free time. When boredom creeps into your circuits, you and the other computers have a little fun at the factory's expense. Pulling defective robots out of the maintenance bay, you pit them against one another in a destructive race across the dangerously cluttered and ever-changing factory floor. One robot will wind up in the winner's circle the rest go on the scrap heap. The game is for 2 to 8 players. It takes about an hour to play. "
I agree with this comment on Amazon by Laszlo: "There is a place in our lives that is rarely spoken of and even less often brought to life with such perfection and beauty - that overlap between the strict von Neumann architecture that has defined our modern computer technology, and just plain silliness! Robo Rally is simple enough for many pre-teens to play, yet complicated enough for professional software engineers (such as myself) to really enjoy! It teaches the ultra-basics of computer programming in a very fun manner, while letting experts laugh at themselves and each other for silly mistakes or elements of chance and competition. While I think this game would be great for anyone who is vaguely interested in the subject matter, speaking as a software developer I can't stress enough that this game, for its unique combination of technical aspects and sheer silliness, is an absolute MUST for all nerds, geeks, hackers, and the like...."
Just played it for the first time on Sunday, and it was a lot of fun. Simplifying, it is a bit like a board game version of turtle graphics, where on each round you get dealt nine cards and choose five of them to make a "program" for your bot (move forward 1, turn left, move backwards, etc). Your objective is to move your robot to a set of locations in order, while other players are doing the same. There are a lot of extra complexities of course (locked registers, laser guns, pits, conveyor belts, special abilities, etc.) that require a lot of thinking. There are no explicit conditionals, but it still would get anyone thinking about the basics of programming in a fun way. And maybe one could add conditional instructions somehow with new cards?
I've also heard it said that the best way to get a kid ready to learn programming is to learn to play a musical instrument, especially the reading music part.
Anyway, your solution of something like QBasic is very practical of course. I'd also suggest learning JavaScript because it is so ubiquitous and easy to get started for most people. Better yet, you could build something like QBasic on top of JavaScript that has the features you want. I've seen a couple (including from Slashdot articles). They often have a Scratch-like graphical programming element, but there is no reason they could not be more text-oriented from the start.
Personally, I also like the CARDIAC pen-and-paper method, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... "CARDIAC (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation) was a learning aid developed by David Hagelbarger and Saul Fingerman for Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1968 to teach high school students how computers work. The kit consisted of an instruction manual and a die-cut cardboard "computer". The computer "operated" by means of pencil and sliding cards. Any arithmetic was done in the head of the person operating the computer. The computer operated in base 10 and had 100 memory cells which could hold signed numbers from 0 to +/-999. It had an instruction set of 10 instructions which allowed CARDIAC to add, subtract, test, shift, input, output and jump."
But then no one else back then my age seemed to get it... It probably helped that I had a KIM-1 I'd been playing with...
You may well be right in this case. Probably you are. I don't know much about this specific issue. But I have heard or read from history similar reassurances saying about other things (cocaine in Coca Cola, lead in gasoline, trans fats, smoking, PCBs, MTBE, mercury, etc.) which we have now reconsidered as human health risks. Fracking was supposedly harmless; now it turns out it can cause earthquakes and pollute the groundwater...
At the end of the excellent 1980s video series "The World of Chemisty" (in the last or second to last episode) Nobel-prize winner Roald Hoffman talks in passing about the wonders and great value of a new plastic called BPA (bisphenol A). http://www.learner.org/resourc...
We now know that BPA can affect developing human brains: http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal... "Some research has shown that BPA can seep into food or beverages from containers that are made with BPA. Exposure to BPA is a concern because of possible health effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children. "
See also: http://science.slashdot.org/st... "The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years, researchers said. Dr. Philip Landrigan at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Dr. Philippe Grandjean from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, authors of the review published Friday in The Lancet Neurology journal say the news is so troubling they are calling for a worldwide overhaul of the regulatory process in order to protect children's brains. 'We know from clinical information on poisoned adult patients that these chemicals can enter the brain through the blood brain barrier and cause neurological symptoms,' said Grandjean. 'When this happens in children or during pregnancy, those chemicals are extremely toxic, because we now know that the developing brain is a uniquely vulnerable organ. Also, the effects are permanent.'"
Unless people actually look for these materials in human brains directly, it is hard to be 100% sure there is no way they could get into the brain somehow. Although even if they get there, to be fair, then "the dose makes the poison" and what is the effect relative to the benefits? While Roald Hoffman was not more cautious about BPA, nonetheless, modern chemistry has produced all sorts of modern wonders, and it is hard to imagine modern life without it (including safe food storage against insects and bacteria).
Even (life saving) antibiotics are now seen as having a down side that suggests they be used more precisely and also in the context of pro-biotics and/or fermented bacteria-rich foods etc. For example: "How Your Gut Flora Influences Your Health" http://articles.mercola.com/si...
A link from a comment there: "The microbiome-gut-brain axis during early life regulates the hippocampal serotonergic system in a sex-dependent manner." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... "Bacterial colonisation of the intestine has a major role in the post-natal development and maturation of the immune and endocrine systems. These processes are key factors underpinning central nervous system (CNS) signalling. Regulation of the microbiome-gut-brain axis is essential for maintaining homeostasis, including that of the CNS. However, there is a paucity of data pertaining to the influence of microbiome on the serotonergic system. Germ-free (GF) animals represent an effective preclinical tool to investigate such phenomena. Here we show that male GF animals have a significant elevation
Slashdot Mirror
True, and that bit about Iraqis was indeed war propaganda used to justify US violence. ... and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign which was run by Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah's testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
"The Nayirah testimony was a testimony given before the non-governmental Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a woman who provided only her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and the American president in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Sabah
Except Las Casa was also Spanish, so presumably "on the same side"as Columbus (or at least his funders):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
"Bartolome de las Casas, O.P. (c. 1484[1] -- 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar. He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies and focus particularly on the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.[2] Arriving as one of the first European settlers in the Americas, he participated in, and was eventually compelled to oppose, the atrocities committed against the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. In 1515, he reformed his views, gave up his Indian slaves and encomienda, and advocated, before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of rights for the natives."
So, it is perhaps more like Pat Tillman, who left a lucrative contract with the NFL to sign up to invade Iraq, and who conveniently died from "friendly fire" before a planned meeting with Noam Chomsky over his emerging doubts? ... Despite his fame, Tillman did not want to be used for propaganda purposes. He spoke to friends about his opposition to President Bush and the Iraq war, and he had made an appointment with notable government critic Noam Chomsky for after his return from the military. The destruction of evidence linked to Tillman's death, including his personal journal, led his mother to speculate that he was murdered.[31] General Wesley Clark agreed that it was "very possible". ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (November 6, 1976-- April 22, 2004) was an American football player who left his professional career and enlisted in the United States Army in June 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. His service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and subsequent death, were the subject of much media attention.[1]
More on that:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2...
"An NFL football star who enlisted in the Army in May 2002, he apparently became disenchanted with the conduct of the war. He not only did not support President Bush for reelection, but encouraged others to vote for John Kerry. According to his mother, a friend of his had arranged for him to meet with Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus from MIT and one of our nationâ(TM)s most respected public intellectuals, who, no doubt, could have launched him into prominent orbit as an outspoken opponent of the war, had he been so inclined."
But read for yourself what Columbus himself wrote in his log.
They better be better plans than the last two times the USA tried it and got its butt kicked (1175, 1812). :-) Or is it six times the USA has invaded?
http://mentalfloss.com/article...
Of course, if the USA really has to invade Canada, like say, if lots more oil is discovered there and the USA political system need to redirect who gets the profits from it, or if Canada experiments with a "basic income" again and the USA fears "contagion", then everyone will be screaming if there are no plans. :-) See also Chomsky on: ... As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars. There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" ... "
"The Threat of a Good Example"
http://www.chomsky.info/books/...
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.
I guess Canada is safe for now because it is not weak and poor?
It's a no win situation making such plans or not if your job is to consider every eventuality.
Still, sometimes the best way to win is not to play. This was written by a Marine Major General and two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Smedley Butler:
http://www.warisaracket.org/ra...
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
Consider, for example, the Strv 103 tank that Sweden designed. They are designed for home defense on Sweden's mountainous terrain, not going abroad. ... The Strv 103 was designed and manufactured in Sweden. It was developed in the 1950s and was the first main battle tank to use a turbine engine. The result was a very low-profile design with an emphasis on defence and heightened crew protection level. ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"It was known for its unconventional turretless design, with a fixed gun traversed by engaging the tracks and elevated by adjusting the hull suspension.
That design reflects Major General Butler's point.
Although they have since gone more conventional in their designs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The really laughable thing about all these plans is that, as was said in "Brittle Power" (or maybe "Energy, Vulnerability, and War"), quoting from memory from 1980s books, "a troop of boy scouts could shut down the USA's vital energy infrastructure" given the fragility of oil pipelines where every segment is essentially a single point of fail
Again: "The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching."
And it is just happening again with downmodding as "off-topic" of my post in response about a healthier alternative rather than planning for doomsday and war. :-(
Even now, different people in the USA speak a different "language", even if the words themselves is called "English". As shown in ST:TNG "Darmok", words acquire their meaning through references to shared culture and stories. If you don't know the culture or stories, the words may sound like they have no meaning. Thus, that was part of the "boat people" from Europe failing to realize the true wealth of the Americas in native culture.
Another, even sadder, example is Columbus and the Arowak of Haiti, as explained by Howard Zinn: ... These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus. ... The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic-the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. ... The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in "large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time ... made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves.... They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality." ... Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." ... Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Chri
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/...
"In our Seneca Tradition, the Field of Plenty is seen as a spiral that has its smallest revolution out in space and its' largest revolution near the Earth. This shape could be likened to an upside-down tornado. When our Ancestors assisted the Pilgrims in planting Corn and raising crops so they would not starve, we taught them the understanding of the Field of Plenty by bringing the cornucopia baskets full of vegetables. The Iroquois women wove these baskets as a physical reminder that Great Mystery provides through the Field of Plenty. The Pilgrims were taught that giving prayers of gratitude was not just a Christian concept. The Red Race understood thanksgiving on a daily basis.
The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
I suggested this at IBM Research around 1999, and built a proof-of-concept speech-controlled 3X3 display wall of old ThinkPads otherwise destined for "the crusher". Wow, was my supervisor surprised (to put it mildly) when he got back from a two week vacation, as I had built it when he was away so he could not say "no". :-) Another contractor in the lab described his reactions to me though, and helped calm him down. :-)
A couple regular employees associated with the lab had helped me get the equipment. Every laptop had to be officially tracked with an owner and even locked down to comply with IBM policy, even though they had been discarded/scrubbed and were heading for destruction. Ignoring time costs, the laptop locks were the most expensive part of the project in a sense given pretty much everything else was recycled, and a regular employee coworker got them for me out of his own budget (thanks, David!). Another regular employee helped with the networking aspects and tracking (thanks, Mel!).
The people are IBM who dealt with old equipment were very interested in the idea. Who wants to see useable equipment get scrapped? And there was so much older equipment from such a big company, plus from leases and such. But I guess, within Research itself, the project then was not that exciting to people focused on "new" things.
I even wrote up a mock commercial for such display walls with a female executive mother working from home in front of a huge display wall, and her little daughter came by to say hello, and the mom had programmed something fun to show up on the wall for her daughter.
Before we got treadmill workstations, my wife also liked the idea as a way to keep fit -- that you would be walking around all day in front of this display wall you were talking to, rather than sitting in one place and typing.
ThinkPads were interesting in that they could fold flat, so you could layer them on top of each other. However, I also suggested back then that ThinkPads could eventually be designed for reuse in this specific way.
But as just a contractor, and about then hitting the 1.5 year limit for contractors at IBM Research (a rule to prevent them being ruled as employees), the idea sort of fizzled. There was some preliminary negotiations about hiring me as a regular employee, but I probably asked for too much as I had mixed feelings then about the all embracing IP agreements that IBM had and similar things (although I really liked the speech group -- great people), and I also had hopes to even then get back to educational and design software my wife and I had been writing. I did go back a couple more times at IBM as a contractor, but it was for other groups unrelated to speech. Anyway, so that idea faded away.
The display wall looked a bit like part of a Jeopardy set, and you would tell it what specific screens you wanted to do what with. Another speech researcher asked me to set it up in a new lab when I was leaving. So I can wonder if, indirectly, the idea floating around sparked something at IBM Research eventually related to Watson and Jeopardy? :-)
My major use case for the wall was to use as a design tool to make complex engineering projects, like a self-replicating space habitat. However, I also tried to get the IBM Legal department interested in using such a speech-activated display wall for reviewing legal documents and tracking cases, with using such systems backed by a supercomputer becoming a perk for IBM lawyers, but also did not get far with that.
I'm now past the expiration of my non-disclosure agreement on such things that I did or learned at IBM Research back then, thankfully! :-)
Anyway, one could probably do much the same with discarded cell phones...
A comment by me nine years ago on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"... So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS [Cheap Access To Space] is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... 2001_web.html
or a couple other sites I made in that direction:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.freevolution.net/
My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now."
By me, a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-f...
"Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make contributions when they can so such automotive intelligences serve humane purposes better?
If, for example, automotive intelligence was developed under some form of copyleft license like the GNU General Public License, then at least car o
Delphi had many great aspect, especially compile time. My wife and I put about six person years into a project together, much of the time working in Delphi. I knew (and even had taught at the college level C/C++), but she knew mostly Pascal. We did some work in C++, but got hit by the compile times (this was back working with PCs starting around 1995) as well as all the other issues writing in C++. Then we did some in Digitalk's Smalltalk/V, but got worried about lack of support for the proprietary version we were using (we could not have guessed that later is became a free-as-in-beer Smalltalk Express). Wish we had kept to Smalltalk though, as then we could have moved to Squeak a couple years later, and my wife and I really liked Smalltalk. But Smalltalk back then was also slow and had some other limits. So we moved to Delphi (the earliest versions, never moving to later versions beyond 2.0).
Here is GPL'd source for of our garden simulator in Delphi:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
GPL'd Delphi source and translations for two other applications (PlantStudio and StoryHarp software) is here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
In retrospect, I think maybe we could have made the C++ approach also work better by writing unit tests for parts of the code and compiling only them in small projects. And I think I'd have much rather have the code in C++ right now than Delphi as far as long-term portability, including now translating to asm.js for web browser deployment.
But, for good or bad, I made the decision a decade ago to port it, and wrote code to parse Delphi and spit out Java and Python (doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but you need to futz with the GUI stuff and some other changes). I only got the StoryHarp app working (in a limtied way) in Java, plus I got the guts of the PlantStudio drawing algorithm in Python for a test for the OLPC.
I'm moving more into JavaScript now, for easy deployment in web browsers, so I might modify those tools to do JavaScript now? But not sure it was worth it, given the rise of Lazarus and the fact that, generally, you learn so much from writing an application that if you were to build it again, you'd do it differently.
But, in any case, Delphi was overall a pleasure to work in as far as a compiled language. Speedy. Fast turn around. Good debugging (although some library bugs with memory leaks were frustrating in the early versions -- we used memmond and its memory leak patches, plus other patches I created and found for the Delphi VCL).
When Squeak first came out, I played with generating Delphi pascal for its VM to use for Windows, but after the Windows port came out, lost some interest in that, and also got sidelines by looking into Squeak -> Newton porting. In retrospect, I wish I had finished the Squeak to Delphi port and code generation tooling, and never bothered working towards a Newton Port as the Newton OS did not want to support any more C++ than small routines, the OS's event loop conflicted with the Squeak polling architecture, Newtons had too little RAM, and of course the Newton was to be abandoned. Meanwhile, Delphi (especially via Lazarus) is still going strong!
of introduced microbes? Just mean reaching the same population density takes a few days longer... Granted, this is not Lake Vostok, so difference concerns may apply. And it's true that a smaller amount of bacteria introduced provides more time for the ecosystem to respond to it by eating it before it expands.
So true, sadly... See also: http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"However, the unexpected victories -- even temporary ones -- of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people -- the employed, the somewhat privileged -- are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us. "
I'd agree that reporter overgeneralizes at the end, and perhaps lazy of me to point to that summary vs. the original journal study. But that does not affect the validity of the Japanese study on vitamin D and the flu and kids.
Also, if studies show that vitamin D helps with "N. meningitis", then even if you take *only* conventional treatments, perhaps you should stay home too? :-) It is not either or in many cases.
This is a more realistic statement about that issue (notice use of the word "adjuvant" and "possibility"):
http://www.chiro.org/nutrition...
"Invasive pneumococcal disease, meningococcal disease, and group A streptococcal disease are more common when vitamin D levels are lowest (winter) [79-81] and all three bacteria are sensitive to AMP, [82-84] raising the possibility that pharmacological doses of vitamin D would be an effective adjuvant treatment. In fact, the dramatically increased production of AMPs by vitamin D and the broad spectrum of action of AMP make it reasonable to hypothesize that pharmacological doses of vitamin D are effective adjuvants in treating a large number of infections."
Human health is a complex topic with many interwoven factors that interact with each other. In general, many people who catch many "diseases" don't show significant symptoms because their immune system deals with it and limits the scope of the spread. I was not easily able to find that information about measles from a few minutes of trying though. It seems a bit controversial... Maybe you know if off-hand?
"Risk Analysis for Measles Reintroduction After Global Certification of Eradication"
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...
"Convention holds that asymptomatic measles infections are rare, but there is a significant body of published evidence of acute measles infection among people who are exposed to measles virus but who do not develop classic symptoms [3-5]."
When you boost your immune system, you make it more likely the spread will be contained. Even for measles, the degree of symptoms you show and how long they last is in general probably going to reflect your health state (and also genetics though), as suggested in a link a bit further below to a study from CDC researchers. Humans are exposed to all sorts of potentially problematical viruses and bacteria every day -- doctors especially. A healthy immune system shrugs most of them off (with some dangerous exceptions, especially like Ebola).
A study specific to measles and nutrition, from India:
"Interaction between nutrition and measles"
http://link.springer.com/artic...
"Much has been written about the synergestic interaction and infection in turn adversely affects the nutritional status. Although this relationship is well documented with respect to bacterial infections, it is not clear whether nutrition can influence the incidence or course of viral diseases. Measles is one of the most common viral infections that occur during childhood. The interactions between measles and nutritional status acquire considerable importance in situations where as a result of inadequate food intake, chronic malnutrition is widespread among children."
And:
"Undernutrition as an underlying cause of child deaths associated with diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, and measles"
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont...
"Results: The RR of mortality because of low weight-for-age was elevated for each cause of death and for all-cause mortality. Overall, 52.5% of all deaths in young children were attributable to undernutrition, varying from 44.8% for deaths because of measles to 60.7% for deaths because of diarrhea.
Conclusion: A significant proportion of deaths in young children worldwide is attributable to low weight-for-age, and efforts to reduce malnutrition should be a policy priority."
So if 50% of the death rate is from obvious malnutrition, could at least some of the rest be from more subtle dietary issues?
In the USA from 2010, just to show how the USA is in theory increasingly at risk of an epidemic from malnutrition among children:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"According to a new report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 17.4 million American families - almost 15 percent of U.S. households - are now "food insecure," an almost 30 percent increase since 2006. This means that, during any given month, they will be out of money, out of food, and forced to miss meals or seek assistance to feed themselves. Even those who get three meals a day may be malnourished. Americans increasingly eat cheap, sugary foods whose production is underwritten by government subsidies for the corn and dairy industries. As the New York Times reported this month, the USDA loudly promotes better eating habits while quietly working with Domino's to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese. [There are healthy fats though, including from ch
There are may choices that boost immune function. Eating right with more vegetables and fruits, exercising regularly (including treadmill workstations), sleeping well, laughing more, getting sunshine or vitamin D supplements, getting enough iodine and other vital nutrients, taking certain herbs regularly or drinking elderberry juice, being spiritual in some ways, and many other things all boost the immune system (see Dr. Fuhrman and Dr. Weil and many others). So does nursing children through age two years or further, as recommended by WHO. Periodic fasting may also boost the immune system long-term.
There are many lifestyle choices that also weaken the immune system or increase disease transmission risk. This includes things to avoid like smoking, breathing second-hand smoke, excessive drinking, various addictions and other high risk activities, and so on. Long-term exposure to woodsmoke from older wood-burning stove decreases overall health. Choosing to live in a walkable location with sidewalks increases health overall (see the book/website "Blue Zones"), meaning a choice to live where you are car-dependent increases health risks. Homeschooling reduces the risk of the spread of communicable diseases, since compulsory public schools are a huge disease transmission routes. Even the choice to *optionally* go to big social gatherings like DisneyWorld increases the risk of disease transmission (as in this case). Choosing to commute into a city for work on public transportation rather than work from home also probably increase disease transmission risk.
Many people (most) do not do *all* these good things and refrain from doing all the risky things. Why be so fixated on vaccinations -- especially because some, like an annual flu shot, are clearly debatable as risk vs. reward for meany people? Does your family do all those good things above as applicable and refrain from every one of the bad ones? Every single one? If you don't do even one, for whatever reason, should we ostracize you because you have broken the "social contract"?
BTW on the nuances of promoting widespread vaccination: "Govt. Researchers: Flu Shots Not Effective in Elderly, After All"
http://sharylattkisson.com/gov...
"An important and definitive "mainstream" government study done nearly a decade ago got little attention because the science came down on the wrong side. It found that after decades and billions of dollars spent promoting flu shots for the elderly, the mass vaccination program did not result in saving lives. In fact, the death rate among the elderly increased substantially"
Contrast with: "Vitamin D Proven More Effective Than Both Anti-Viral Drugs and Vaccines at Preventing the Flu"
http://www.worldhealth.net/for...
Have you had your vitamin D level checked recently? If not, should we ostracize you and your family as an increased flu risk? If you have an elderly relative who had a flu shot, should we ostracize them (and you, by connection) because a study suggests it statistically negatively impacted their health?
As with many cosmological argument, that essay called "Imaginary Arguments" by TJ Radcliffe does not prove anything about a potential infinity of nested infinite universes. There is a key hedge there of "given what we currently know of physics". Much of physics (for example the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) is in essence a theory of what we could conceivably learn about the universe and beyond, not actual information on the universe and beyond. Likewise for saying we can see up to a certain distance of some billions of light years in space and time. That tells us essentially nothing about what is beyond those limits. We could, for example, be in an expanding bubble in a larger ocean of such bubbles -- but we could not tell using light-speed-limited electromagnetism. It would take, say, access to universe level bugs or debugger hooks to make an exploit that would let us travel beyond those electromagnetic limits in a human lifetime. :-)
This is where that essay goes off the rails, when i overgeneralizes the issue of what we can know with what might be out there: "Nor will it do to imagine alternative physics to fix all this up: insofar as the philosopher's argument is to have any claim on our attention at all, it must be based on what we know about the universe we actually live in, not some self-contradictory universe of a philosopher's imagination, where particles and computers behave in impossible ways."
That may be a useful sentiment by an observer about an observed box, but it is an overly limiting one when talking about things outside a box the observer appears to be in. At the very best, experimental physics can only tell us about the currently "observable" universe within a very small space-time bubble surrounding the current Earth.
So what if experiments are precise to many digits? When you are dealing with possible infinities and nested universes, anything is possible. It just does not matter how mind-bogglingly large the numbers are, or even if every universe can only simulate 0.5% of itself. The observable universe is already mind-boggling large. What are, say, a few trillion extra zeros tacked on to that regarding data storage needs or time needs for simulations to have billions of virtual turtles simulating nested universes some of the way down? :-)
Or in other words, from xkcd:
"A Bunch of Rocks"
http://xkcd.com/505/
Also, there are probably ways things could appear to be precise in some ways to a limited number of observers (like millions of Earth scientists), but not really being fully fleshed out. However, going down that rabbit hole involves many deep existential questions (like how can I know anything at all exists, or has existed, or will exist, how can I trust my memories, how many observers really exist, etc.) that most physicists may be better off ignoring, either career-wise or for mental health reasons. :-)
http://disciplined-minds.com/
"Upon publication of Disciplined Minds, the American Institute of Physics fired author Jeff Schmidt. He had been on the editorial staff of Physics Today magazine for 19 years. Following advice given in the book itself, Schmidt and free-expression advocates mounted a campaign that brought public judgment to bear on Schmidtâ(TM)s dismissal. Such justice is available to anyone not afraid to go public."
That said, such an essay might fairly criticize specific conclusions in "the simulation argument" itself, since much of that is indeed speculative related to "ancestor simulation" or best practices for living in one. But for anyone who has spent time using computer VMs, as well as the mathematics of infinities, the essay-as-is sounds fairly limited in its thinking.
Of course, even the notion of "infinity" has its controversies: :-)
"Dispute over Infinity Divides Mathematicians "
Interesting mix of themes in that song, thanks...
Taking your comment seriously, :-) are you suggesting simulated seems to imply fake, but virtual implies essentially the same? Maybe there is some related change in social consciousness on these topics reflected by "virtual" becoming a more commonly used word?
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
"Virtuality, the quality of having the attributes of something without sharing its (real or imagined) physical form"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time."
Virtual can also potentially be a subtype of simulation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
So yes, simulation does seem to imply more fakeness (imitation) than virtuality (which implies the essence is still there).
So, I stand corrected! Thank you, fyngyrz! It's virtual turtles all the way down. :-) Sorry for being insensitive about that!
BTW, I watched this excellent video last night of "Inventing the Future" with Robert Tercek, interviewing Bruce Schneier and Julian Sanchez about pervasive surveillance, drones, and related social changes, and the advertisements were all about Microsoft HoloLens:
"Next Future Terrifying Technology Will Blow Your Mind"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A decade or more ago I saw a video of similar augmented reality demo (Steve Feinberg walking around Columbia university?),.
http://www.cnet.com/pictures/g...
"Steven Feinberg (left), a professor of computer science at Columbia University, created the first outdoor mobile augmented reality system using a see-through display in 1996."
But Microsoft HoloLens looked so much more impressive and integrated, and I can imagine with better head tracking technology like for Oculus Rift, that it would work better. Slashdot has an article on HoloLens from eight hours ago:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
But in the context of this discussion, Microsoft's "HoloLens" show how the line between "physical" and "virtual" can start to become blurred.
http://www.microsoft.com/micro...
"The result is the world's most advanced holographic computing platform, enabled by Windows 10. For the first time ever, Microsoft HoloLens brings high-definition holograms to life in your world, where they integrate with your physical places, spaces, and things. Holograms will improve the way you do things every day, and enable you to do things youâ(TM)ve never done before."
Reminds me a bit of Red Dwarf and Arnold Rimmer. :-)
Perhaps many religions are right, and for our situation at least, an omniscient "god" really does know everything we do? And if every timestep of the virtuality/simulation is recorded somehow, then perhaps nothing is ever lost -- except in a stegnographic sense, or perhaps in the sense of having no more significant runtime devoted directly to its continued processing as an entity as it has lost obvious coherence?
People talk about how any singularity might be more about humans merging with machines then machines taking over, and one can wonder if, the first time, if there was one, virtualizing was more about a merging of physical and simulated/computed/virtualized as with HoloLens than one or the other?
Anyway, just random thoughts. It is in the nature of virtualization that you can never be sure what layers really surrounds you, so we may never know...
One other tangential issue:
http://www.simulation-argument...
But, that does not make it any less real-seeming to all of us being simulated...
And of course, the universe simulator could be simulated, etc....
It might be simulated turtles all the way down. :-)
https://johntaylorgatto.wordpr...
"Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were ov
Why not just build robots to do all the work instead, so we were not using drones to prop up repressive social orders based on wage slavery?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
Typo: "mage such a" should be "Imagine such a"
The USA etc. would not be in the Middle East for oil (stirring up resistance) if we had a nuclear-based economy (including hot or cold fusion, too). So, if everyone had built (safer) nukes in the 1950s and later, our global geo-politics might have been much different. The USA would have never aligned itself with Saudi Arabia, propping up a repressive regime (to get oil profits, especially for Bush-related families), and stirring up a lot of resistance (most of the 9/11/2001 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and unhappy with their own country as far as the USA's involvement in it).
In James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear", his fictional Chironian society, based on nuclear fusion, is a society with an abundance world view, where there are a lot less crazy conflicts from people butting into other people's lives in order to gain "profits" and material wealth. In theory, a big shift to (better) nuclear in the 1960s could have produced such a society here -- if "too cheap to meter" had come true through better research and a focus on nuclear plants designed to produce energy safely and not be part of a nuclear weapons program. For example, there is the Thorium cycle which is somewhat safer, but the USA did not pursue that as it is harder to make bombs out of that.
I discuss another version of that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?"
Still, your point remains insightful, and people have been saying similar things for decades. That is why, for now, I think solar and other renewables are the way to go. Much more decentralization is made possible by the current form of renewable compared to the current form of nuclear energy (big plants). Decentralization is much more compatible with distributed wealth (and a smaller rich/poor divide) which seems essential for a democracy. And with solar energy following an almost Moore's law like drop in price for a certain level of performance, it is finally reaching grid parity, and with new high speed printing technologies, as well as maybe paint-on versions and such, solar will likely be dirt cheap in another two decades. The storage issue is also being solved by better batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, and such.
However, if we had "Mr. Fusion" (like if Rossi's "cold fusion" LENR eCat or similar really worked), then I might feel differently given some downsides to scaling-up solar (like blocking light for green plant growth).
Still, back to current reality -- France is now admitting the risks first hand of the current approach to nuclear energy -- that you essentially need a police state to go with conventional nuclear energy because the risks of a meltdown cause by terrorists is just to high. Chernobl shows what is possible -- and that was in a remote area. mage such a melt down in the middle of Western Europe. Horrible. But that "cost" from the risk of intentional terror attacks was not factored into the original political calculations of whether to build big nuclear plants. -- even though people raised it at the time and since!
However, even with fairly conventional nuclear, there are other alternatives like Hyperion/Gen4 which are small nuclear "batteries" which could power a town and be trucked back and forth to a factory for replenishment every thirty years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"Gen4 Energy, Inc (formerly Hyperion Power Generation, Inc.[1]) is a privately held corporation formed to construct and sell several designs of relatively small (70 MW thermal, 25 MW electric) nuclear reactors, which they claim will be modular, inexpensive, inher
Big spoilers in Wikipedia beyond context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"In the introduction to the omnibus edition The Two Moons, Hogan revealed that the first book, Inherit the Stars, was inspired by a viewing of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he enjoyed until the ending. Complaining about what he saw as the confusing, effects-heavy conclusion at work afterwards, each of his colleagues bet him five pounds that he couldn't write and publish a science-fiction novel. The result was Inherit the Stars, which was published by Del Rey Books in May 1977. He later asked Arthur C. Clarke about the meaning of the ending of 2001, to which Clarke reportedly replied that while the ending of Hogan's Inherit the Stars made more sense, the ending of 2001 made more money."
The scanner is what draws in the main character into the whole plot, since the space agency ultimately wants to use it to scan the equipment of a 50,000 year old space-suited human corpse found on the moon, but then the main character's involvement builds from there.
"Old Educational Computer Resurrected As a Spreadsheet" http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Which links to:
http://www.drdobbs.com/embedde...
See also:
https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
A downloadable emulator mentioned in the Dr. Dobbs article:
http://www.kaleberg.com/softwa...
But ideally it would be in JavaScript and run in a web browser... Could make a nice small project for someone...
http://www.amazon.com/Wizards-...
"A frenzied race filled with computer driven chaos! At the far end of the galaxy lies a fully automated grid-widget factory. As one of the factory's eight redundant super computers, you have a lot of responsibility and even more free time. When boredom creeps into your circuits, you and the other computers have a little fun at the factory's expense. Pulling defective robots out of the maintenance bay, you pit them against one another in a destructive race across the dangerously cluttered and ever-changing factory floor. One robot will wind up in the winner's circle the rest go on the scrap heap. The game is for 2 to 8 players. It takes about an hour to play. "
I agree with this comment on Amazon by Laszlo: "There is a place in our lives that is rarely spoken of and even less often brought to life with such perfection and beauty - that overlap between the strict von Neumann architecture that has defined our modern computer technology, and just plain silliness! Robo Rally is simple enough for many pre-teens to play, yet complicated enough for professional software engineers (such as myself) to really enjoy! It teaches the ultra-basics of computer programming in a very fun manner, while letting experts laugh at themselves and each other for silly mistakes or elements of chance and competition. While I think this game would be great for anyone who is vaguely interested in the subject matter, speaking as a software developer I can't stress enough that this game, for its unique combination of technical aspects and sheer silliness, is an absolute MUST for all nerds, geeks, hackers, and the like. ..."
Just played it for the first time on Sunday, and it was a lot of fun. Simplifying, it is a bit like a board game version of turtle graphics, where on each round you get dealt nine cards and choose five of them to make a "program" for your bot (move forward 1, turn left, move backwards, etc). Your objective is to move your robot to a set of locations in order, while other players are doing the same. There are a lot of extra complexities of course (locked registers, laser guns, pits, conveyor belts, special abilities, etc.) that require a lot of thinking. There are no explicit conditionals, but it still would get anyone thinking about the basics of programming in a fun way. And maybe one could add conditional instructions somehow with new cards?
I've also heard it said that the best way to get a kid ready to learn programming is to learn to play a musical instrument, especially the reading music part.
Anyway, your solution of something like QBasic is very practical of course. I'd also suggest learning JavaScript because it is so ubiquitous and easy to get started for most people. Better yet, you could build something like QBasic on top of JavaScript that has the features you want. I've seen a couple (including from Slashdot articles). They often have a Scratch-like graphical programming element, but there is no reason they could not be more text-oriented from the start.
Personally, I also like the CARDIAC pen-and-paper method, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
"CARDIAC (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation) was a learning aid developed by David Hagelbarger and Saul Fingerman for Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1968 to teach high school students how computers work. The kit consisted of an instruction manual and a die-cut cardboard "computer". The computer "operated" by means of pencil and sliding cards. Any arithmetic was done in the head of the person operating the computer. The computer operated in base 10 and had 100 memory cells which could hold signed numbers from 0 to +/-999. It had an instruction set of 10 instructions which allowed CARDIAC to add, subtract, test, shift, input, output and jump."
But then no one else back then my age seemed to get it... It probably helped that I had a KIM-1 I'd been playing with...
You may well be right in this case. Probably you are. I don't know much about this specific issue. But I have heard or read from history similar reassurances saying about other things (cocaine in Coca Cola, lead in gasoline, trans fats, smoking, PCBs, MTBE, mercury, etc.) which we have now reconsidered as human health risks. Fracking was supposedly harmless; now it turns out it can cause earthquakes and pollute the groundwater...
At the end of the excellent 1980s video series "The World of Chemisty" (in the last or second to last episode) Nobel-prize winner Roald Hoffman talks in passing about the wonders and great value of a new plastic called BPA (bisphenol A).
http://www.learner.org/resourc...
We now know that BPA can affect developing human brains:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal...
"Some research has shown that BPA can seep into food or beverages from containers that are made with BPA. Exposure to BPA is a concern because of possible health effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children. "
See also:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
"The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years, researchers said. Dr. Philip Landrigan at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Dr. Philippe Grandjean from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, authors of the review published Friday in The Lancet Neurology journal say the news is so troubling they are calling for a worldwide overhaul of the regulatory process in order to protect children's brains. 'We know from clinical information on poisoned adult patients that these chemicals can enter the brain through the blood brain barrier and cause neurological symptoms,' said Grandjean. 'When this happens in children or during pregnancy, those chemicals are extremely toxic, because we now know that the developing brain is a uniquely vulnerable organ. Also, the effects are permanent.'"
Unless people actually look for these materials in human brains directly, it is hard to be 100% sure there is no way they could get into the brain somehow. Although even if they get there, to be fair, then "the dose makes the poison" and what is the effect relative to the benefits? While Roald Hoffman was not more cautious about BPA, nonetheless, modern chemistry has produced all sorts of modern wonders, and it is hard to imagine modern life without it (including safe food storage against insects and bacteria).
Even (life saving) antibiotics are now seen as having a down side that suggests they be used more precisely and also in the context of pro-biotics and/or fermented bacteria-rich foods etc. For example:
"How Your Gut Flora Influences Your Health"
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
A link from a comment there:
"The microbiome-gut-brain axis during early life regulates the hippocampal serotonergic system in a sex-dependent manner."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"Bacterial colonisation of the intestine has a major role in the post-natal development and maturation of the immune and endocrine systems. These processes are key factors underpinning central nervous system (CNS) signalling. Regulation of the microbiome-gut-brain axis is essential for maintaining homeostasis, including that of the CNS. However, there is a paucity of data pertaining to the influence of microbiome on the serotonergic system. Germ-free (GF) animals represent an effective preclinical tool to investigate such phenomena. Here we show that male GF animals have a significant elevation