That's why "the theory of evolution" refers to Big-E evolution and is quite accurate in claiming that it is, indeed, only a theory. Science will not ever be able to convert Big-E evolution into a fact, since there is no method of proving how something DID happen, only ways to show how it COULD HAVE happened.
While otherwise erudite, I wanted to make a clarification. One way science evolves (grin) a theory toward fact is in prediction. That is the theory which seems to explain all the facts explains some things which are not yet fact. Once those facts are seen, that is very strong implication that the parts of the theory which explain new facts in terms of old facts are themselves "fact":) The simple anecdote is General (I think) Relativity predicted: "the apparent position of stars should change when near the sun, so we should be able to detect that during an eclipse" and then it was detected during an eclipse and Einstein became very famous.
I don't know if the theory of evolution makes any testable prediction apart from the little-e variety such as those you mentioned that continue to happen as predicted. One that would be nice to see is an actual prediction of what we should be evolving to in a few millenniums (sorry don't know latin)... like "We will become like the gray aliens". Or some kind of prediction like that. Then, in a few thousand years at least people like me wouldn't have this nagging feeling that something is missing.
Same with string theory. Long live Quantum Loop Gravity!
Ha! Can you imagine. Every winter you get your flu shot and also "here, read this while you wait, please. Its a standard inoculation against meme-viruses this season."... we could have a Center for Stupid Idea Control... or just have World Health take on a whole new sub-meaning.
Unfortunately that might require everybody agreeing that Ayn Rand is not healthy for consumption.:)
Does anyone know if there's a general difference in MTBF? I would love if my normal hard drives could avoid burning out in 51 years, but it seems like I get around 10 years. It seems like with less moving parts, there would be less parts to fail...
Scientists believe knowledge comes from evidence and the logical conclusions derivable from that evidence.
Religious people believe knowledge comes from "faith" (aka "it is written"), which is the polar opposite of evidence.
Opposites may not be as correct as orthogonal. Its like a plane... er... it *can be* like a plane in the mind of a moderate. Something can be believed true by faith and supported by evidence... or believed false by faith and supported by lack of evidence...
And even more fun, believed true by faith but still contradicted by evidence, as in:
... a state of mind called "cognitive dissonance"
I've always figured this is the powerful part of human-level intelligence that has made AI so unbelievably hard. The ability of the human mind to hold two contradictory things completely true in your head and not crash out on a syntax error... but I could be wrong:)
That's what I always liked about the term trolling... that is trailing a line off the end of a speeding boat to entice the fish. I can just imagine someone sitting there with a beer kicked back and watching the line of bait they just put into the water. Meanwhile the fish are swimming for all their worth to catch that line.
Makes you almost feel bad for the fish when you've been one yourself:)
Reminds me of The Diamond Age. Opens up a world of opportunity and may someday save society from itself. Or gives access to lots and lots of spam and pr0n.
By ignoring the undeniable truth that global warming is due to human behavior, we are toying with balances we can't possibly understand, and now may even be releasing ancient microbes into the environment whose dangers we don't yet know!
Somehow I don't find myself fearing a microbe which has had 8 million years less evolution than the ones I kick out left and right currently...
Even if the Earth has been doing this on its own, we are unnaturally accelerating it; therefore, the potential release of these microbes must be bad!
Its pretty cool from the algorithmic standpoint. Its like the natural process has a built in branch'n'bound to inject old results if the current are too specialized. As far as accelerating it, isn't it better to run algorithms faster?:)
It seems to me there's even analytical support for the evidence. Fat people probably eat at fat places like greasy fast food places. So if you're hanging out with them, you are probably there as well. Skinny people probably don't. Or if they do they push it away earlier... meaning if you're hanging out with a group of skinny people, to stay fat you have to either keep eating while everyone else is done or take it away with you. That sort of influence seems highly likely to cause shifts. Although one counter point, my wife is much thinner than I am and usually shoves her left-overs in my direction. Jack sprat indeed.
You say "a few hours worth of work" as though that has anything to do with determining the value of art.
Michelangelo was commissioned to do one Sistine Chapel... I don't really know how much he got paid for it, but I'm sure it wasn't bad. However, there was an insane amount of work that would have gone into making a copy of that. Not to mention that the copy most likely wouldn't have been as good if it were done by an apprentice.
The point being... the *cheap and easy* copying goes both ways. Right now the marketing people are making a killing off the artists' works because they can commission the artist for a few hours work and then distribute like made but get paid the same amount for each of these cheap copies. It doesn't really make sense. Why is it that nobody seems to worry so much about photos of the Sistene Chapel showing up on the internet (well besides that the copyright on the work has expired:)... why is it that paint artists don't mind so much advertising their gallery through electronic images of exactly the same stuff... because the experience can be different.
It is true that the artist should be paid a great deal for the value of his work... unfortunately there are some new Michelangelos who are getting a few thousand from each painting when they do a gallery... but somehow they don't compare even a little to either Hollywood or the Music industry... so what really *is* the value of Britney Spears' work?
I'm pretty sure the claim is mistaken mythology. What I've read is that he did poorly in school because he spent so much time studying physics on his own. But he did always do well on physics and math... he just appeared lazy to his teachers assigning him uninteresting work. So basically he was the bored genius stereotype, not a hope to the mathematically disinclined.
On the other hand, it is known he went to get some help in formulating the tensor equations for the general theory of relativity (I don't remember all the details only that he had the physical picture not the mathematical one something like that... but I'm not really sure that story is entirely true either because there's a specific notation called Einstein's notation for tensors... so obviously he knows tensor math... but maybe he developed it cause he really is lazy... it drops some of the extra notation for doing inner product because that notation says something that is usually obvious from the equation... anyway).
Its not really that its not uncommon to go find an expert and collaborate in the world of science... except that Einstein stands out particularly on *not* collaborating during his miracle year. Except again for the rumors about Mileva.
You know I think you could consider adventure games in that original search and puzzle form the B-game cult following.
Except its more like the gameplay is what gets it. Its not funny, but its cult. Longest Journey and Syberia were traditional adventures that people really dug and have a following, but its not like an A-game's following. Some of the hardcore strategy war games that are designed to be long and boring and detailed... its like their designed to be bad, except there's people that love it.
Heh... that and Balance of Power strikes me as a B-game as well. I've heard it was built so that you always lose... I always lost but I was only 10 and couldn't really figure it out so... who knows.
Taking that seriously... it seems like the better test for AI compression isn't how well it can reconstruct the original text but whether or not a human reading the decompressed text thinks it says the same thing. The human reading the text might not recognize that "Clear skys" and "Good weather" are really different unless reading really carefully...
In my undergrad I did some work with jpeg wavelet compression using the QUEST algorithm which is supposed to measure the minimum detectable change a human can see (using two-alternative forced choice)... anyway the interesting result that came out was that wavelets could get about 20% better compression without noticeably changing the image over traditional jpeg. This is despite the RMS compared with the original image being about the same as jpeg. This sorta implies that lossy wavelet compression deletes the stuff that the human eye wouldn't notice anyway. Its also been shown that wavelet compression can "fix" artifacts coming out of jpeg compression.
Of course my bias comes from a result my professor showed me of building a steerable-twistable pyramid of wavelets for image recognition that used about 100 points and seemed to correspond nicely with the arrangement of the cortical hypercolumns in a monkey's V1 cortex... also implying that maybe the reason wavelets work so well when using human detection is that they do the same sort of thing the brain is doing... of course this is all just interesting supposition:)
Well its not just that compression is knowledge representation... its intrinsically linked to learning... which implies inference and planning... although IMO its easier to see it with lossy compression
this is hard to do without a picture, but imagine you had a cluster of points which you knew was a noisy measurement of a line. Well you may have a million points but once you "know" that you need a line then all you need are two values the slope and intercept. You've turned 1 million values into 2 (please forgive the imprecision.) Now that you know its a line you can do inference, "The next point will land here" and planning "Because I know where the next point will land I will react to it before it happens..."
This is where it relates to information theory, you might have a random jumble of points but the mutual information of the "Line" prior and the data posterior is very low. That is if you "know" that its a linear model then its very easy to represent.
I keep saying "know" because its very unlikely you will know that its a line. And the line is so specialized (high bias) that its unlikely for any given data that the its actually a line generating it. But you could imagine if you knew the perfect representation behind the data maybe its not a line maybe its a set of lines each with a different slope (peicewise linear)... anyway in text compression some use the idea of lines of text much like the peicewise linear representation. But assuming you knew the perfect representation... the perfect model for generating the text then it would take very few parameters to generate the whole of text. One could say the model is DNA and the parameters are the particular DNA variables that make up a particular human. Solving for those parameters could allow you to infer all the text that human would ever say... with some error:)
Robert Pirsig is that you?! Would you sign my motorcycle?:)
Re:Emphasis on the light, please.
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 1
But the biggest factor is energy consumption. Is it cheaper to spend the energy to move crops from 100% natural light into the city or is it cheaper to spend the energy on artificial light and grow the crops inside the city?
I'm normally a sort of socialist, but if this didn't sound like the perfect use for the invisible hand... There are countless ways in which the energy question could be answered in the whole distribution line (like would this locate close to the same place as where the farming equipment is manufactured? could you put the actual market on the first floor of the building?)
Presumably if several businesses started with different variations on the idea, the cheapest (note the increased quality of delivering downstairs instead of across country) one would win. Yay. Then we take that and put a socialized government program behind that! Broohahah.:)
That reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me (I'm going to get the text wrong because I don't know Latin):
The famous phrase attributed to Caesar of "I came. I saw. I conquered." was according to him supposed to sound like "VINNIE VEENIE VICHIE," but according to some new research he'd heard about, it may have actually sounded like "winnie, weenie, wichie"
So, I understand why its bad to save money in the bank. The interest rate of many banks is 1-2% while inflation is 3%. What I don't understand is two things.
One, its possibly to save money in other banks that give a higher than inflation interest rate without having a lot of money to put in those banks. So why not?
Two, how would it be different with a different inflation policy. Why if the inflation were to drop to zero wouldn't banks necessarily also drop to zero? I understand that would be better just be the fact of being equal, but if we assume even a little inflation is required say 1% for easy numbers then why wouldn't banks be at.5%?
Do you believe 0 inflation is possible? Or do you believe that it can be lowered and that somehow bank rates can be maintained as they are now?
Slashdot Mirror
That's why "the theory of evolution" refers to Big-E evolution and is quite accurate in claiming that it is, indeed, only a theory. Science will not ever be able to convert Big-E evolution into a fact, since there is no method of proving how something DID happen, only ways to show how it COULD HAVE happened.
While otherwise erudite, I wanted to make a clarification. One way science evolves (grin) a theory toward fact is in prediction. That is the theory which seems to explain all the facts explains some things which are not yet fact. Once those facts are seen, that is very strong implication that the parts of the theory which explain new facts in terms of old facts are themselves "fact" :) The simple anecdote is General (I think) Relativity predicted: "the apparent position of stars should change when near the sun, so we should be able to detect that during an eclipse" and then it was detected during an eclipse and Einstein became very famous.
I don't know if the theory of evolution makes any testable prediction apart from the little-e variety such as those you mentioned that continue to happen as predicted. One that would be nice to see is an actual prediction of what we should be evolving to in a few millenniums (sorry don't know latin)... like "We will become like the gray aliens". Or some kind of prediction like that. Then, in a few thousand years at least people like me wouldn't have this nagging feeling that something is missing.
Same with string theory. Long live Quantum Loop Gravity!
Unfortunately that might require everybody agreeing that Ayn Rand is not healthy for consumption. :)
I don't see the name "adolf" or "user 21054" anywhere in his post. Difference of facts, indeed.
Does anyone know if there's a general difference in MTBF? I would love if my normal hard drives could avoid burning out in 51 years, but it seems like I get around 10 years. It seems like with less moving parts, there would be less parts to fail...
Speaking of Monkeyball, playing that with the wiimote is perfection.
Religious people believe knowledge comes from "faith" (aka "it is written"), which is the polar opposite of evidence.
Opposites may not be as correct as orthogonal. Its like a plane... er... it *can be* like a plane in the mind of a moderate. Something can be believed true by faith and supported by evidence... or believed false by faith and supported by lack of evidence...
And even more fun, believed true by faith but still contradicted by evidence, as in:
... a state of mind called "cognitive dissonance"I've always figured this is the powerful part of human-level intelligence that has made AI so unbelievably hard. The ability of the human mind to hold two contradictory things completely true in your head and not crash out on a syntax error... but I could be wrong :)
Makes you almost feel bad for the fish when you've been one yourself :)
But they taste so goooood.
Reminds me of The Diamond Age. Opens up a world of opportunity and may someday save society from itself. Or gives access to lots and lots of spam and pr0n.
Interestingly for the price of one or two cruise missiles you could run a few of these $30mil competitions and *lower* your taxes.
Don't they both have a training regimen that involves beating you with a stick?... Coincidence? I think not.
By ignoring the undeniable truth that global warming is due to human behavior, we are toying with balances we can't possibly understand, and now may even be releasing ancient microbes into the environment whose dangers we don't yet know!
Somehow I don't find myself fearing a microbe which has had 8 million years less evolution than the ones I kick out left and right currently...
Even if the Earth has been doing this on its own, we are unnaturally accelerating it; therefore, the potential release of these microbes must be bad!
Its pretty cool from the algorithmic standpoint. Its like the natural process has a built in branch'n'bound to inject old results if the current are too specialized. As far as accelerating it, isn't it better to run algorithms faster? :)
One could imagine that a "psychological exercise" is still a strategy game, but with much wider priors in the statistics.
It seems to me there's even analytical support for the evidence. Fat people probably eat at fat places like greasy fast food places. So if you're hanging out with them, you are probably there as well. Skinny people probably don't. Or if they do they push it away earlier... meaning if you're hanging out with a group of skinny people, to stay fat you have to either keep eating while everyone else is done or take it away with you. That sort of influence seems highly likely to cause shifts. Although one counter point, my wife is much thinner than I am and usually shoves her left-overs in my direction. Jack sprat indeed.
Michelangelo was commissioned to do one Sistine Chapel... I don't really know how much he got paid for it, but I'm sure it wasn't bad. However, there was an insane amount of work that would have gone into making a copy of that. Not to mention that the copy most likely wouldn't have been as good if it were done by an apprentice.
The point being ... the *cheap and easy* copying goes both ways. Right now the marketing people are making a killing off the artists' works because they can commission the artist for a few hours work and then distribute like made but get paid the same amount for each of these cheap copies. It doesn't really make sense. Why is it that nobody seems to worry so much about photos of the Sistene Chapel showing up on the internet (well besides that the copyright on the work has expired :) ... why is it that paint artists don't mind so much advertising their gallery through electronic images of exactly the same stuff... because the experience can be different.
It is true that the artist should be paid a great deal for the value of his work... unfortunately there are some new Michelangelos who are getting a few thousand from each painting when they do a gallery... but somehow they don't compare even a little to either Hollywood or the Music industry... so what really *is* the value of Britney Spears' work?
On the other hand, it is known he went to get some help in formulating the tensor equations for the general theory of relativity (I don't remember all the details only that he had the physical picture not the mathematical one something like that... but I'm not really sure that story is entirely true either because there's a specific notation called Einstein's notation for tensors... so obviously he knows tensor math ... but maybe he developed it cause he really is lazy... it drops some of the extra notation for doing inner product because that notation says something that is usually obvious from the equation... anyway).
Its not really that its not uncommon to go find an expert and collaborate in the world of science... except that Einstein stands out particularly on *not* collaborating during his miracle year. Except again for the rumors about Mileva.
Except its more like the gameplay is what gets it. Its not funny, but its cult. Longest Journey and Syberia were traditional adventures that people really dug and have a following, but its not like an A-game's following. Some of the hardcore strategy war games that are designed to be long and boring and detailed... its like their designed to be bad, except there's people that love it.
Heh ... that and Balance of Power strikes me as a B-game as well. I've heard it was built so that you always lose... I always lost but I was only 10 and couldn't really figure it out so ... who knows.
Taking that seriously ... it seems like the better test for AI compression isn't how well it can reconstruct the original text but whether or not a human reading the decompressed text thinks it says the same thing. The human reading the text might not recognize that "Clear skys" and "Good weather" are really different unless reading really carefully...
In my undergrad I did some work with jpeg wavelet compression using the QUEST algorithm which is supposed to measure the minimum detectable change a human can see (using two-alternative forced choice) ... anyway the interesting result that came out was that wavelets could get about 20% better compression without noticeably changing the image over traditional jpeg. This is despite the RMS compared with the original image being about the same as jpeg. This sorta implies that lossy wavelet compression deletes the stuff that the human eye wouldn't notice anyway. Its also been shown that wavelet compression can "fix" artifacts coming out of jpeg compression.
Of course my bias comes from a result my professor showed me of building a steerable-twistable pyramid of wavelets for image recognition that used about 100 points and seemed to correspond nicely with the arrangement of the cortical hypercolumns in a monkey's V1 cortex... also implying that maybe the reason wavelets work so well when using human detection is that they do the same sort of thing the brain is doing... of course this is all just interesting supposition :)
this is hard to do without a picture, but imagine you had a cluster of points which you knew was a noisy measurement of a line. Well you may have a million points but once you "know" that you need a line then all you need are two values the slope and intercept. You've turned 1 million values into 2 (please forgive the imprecision.) Now that you know its a line you can do inference, "The next point will land here" and planning "Because I know where the next point will land I will react to it before it happens..."
This is where it relates to information theory, you might have a random jumble of points but the mutual information of the "Line" prior and the data posterior is very low. That is if you "know" that its a linear model then its very easy to represent.
I keep saying "know" because its very unlikely you will know that its a line. And the line is so specialized (high bias) that its unlikely for any given data that the its actually a line generating it. But you could imagine if you knew the perfect representation behind the data maybe its not a line maybe its a set of lines each with a different slope (peicewise linear)... anyway in text compression some use the idea of lines of text much like the peicewise linear representation. But assuming you knew the perfect representation... the perfect model for generating the text then it would take very few parameters to generate the whole of text. One could say the model is DNA and the parameters are the particular DNA variables that make up a particular human. Solving for those parameters could allow you to infer all the text that human would ever say... with some error :)
Robert Pirsig is that you?! Would you sign my motorcycle? :)
I'm normally a sort of socialist, but if this didn't sound like the perfect use for the invisible hand... There are countless ways in which the energy question could be answered in the whole distribution line (like would this locate close to the same place as where the farming equipment is manufactured? could you put the actual market on the first floor of the building?)
Presumably if several businesses started with different variations on the idea, the cheapest (note the increased quality of delivering downstairs instead of across country) one would win. Yay. Then we take that and put a socialized government program behind that! Broohahah. :)
Actually you just did. I gave you a John Cleesian accent in my head. That made it funny... to me.
The famous phrase attributed to Caesar of "I came. I saw. I conquered." was according to him supposed to sound like "VINNIE VEENIE VICHIE," but according to some new research he'd heard about, it may have actually sounded like "winnie, weenie, wichie"
Apparently that severely ruined it for him.
So, I understand why its bad to save money in the bank. The interest rate of many banks is 1-2% while inflation is 3%. What I don't understand is two things.
One, its possibly to save money in other banks that give a higher than inflation interest rate without having a lot of money to put in those banks. So why not?
Two, how would it be different with a different inflation policy. Why if the inflation were to drop to zero wouldn't banks necessarily also drop to zero? I understand that would be better just be the fact of being equal, but if we assume even a little inflation is required say 1% for easy numbers then why wouldn't banks be at .5%?
Do you believe 0 inflation is possible? Or do you believe that it can be lowered and that somehow bank rates can be maintained as they are now?
So what?