Haha, that quote is exactly what was going through my mind as I read this abstract, too.
The comment below by Reaper9889 is correct and thus highlights the fact that one could argue that the black hole goes to another universe but still kills whatever passes through. Nevertheless, this shows the silliness of the whole idea suggested now by Hawking. Any information that might be transferred to another universe would be essentially garbled beyond all recognition such that it would have only a nominal connection to this universe. A person goes in, and out in another universe comes some shadowy noise (of Hawking radiation?) that can never again be reassembled into a living person. On the other side, could we be sure that whatever "information" is really ever arriving from another universe? In fact, it is just as easy to conclude that whatever "arrives" is just random, meaningless noise with no basis in any universe whatsoever. Ockham's Razor would make such a multiverse assumption seem extremely improbable.
Perhaps the biggest problem, however, is that normal people read this kind of "news" and think that black holes are portals that might bring living people to other universes. Thankfully we don't have to worry about people throwing themselves into black holes any time soon, but people do turn this kind of gibberish into metanarratives of meaning--similar to how Bender is comforted by the thought that maybe she could still be alive in another universe. The thought of infinite other universes helps us to forget the pain and evils of this one. Example: "Maybe our little human civilization will be meaningful after all because some small little information about it will be able to reach another universe in some way and some other intelligent race will know that we once existed and that we were intelligent, after all." (Richard Dawkins says something similar to this in one of his books, but premised not on multiple universes but on the endless expanse of space.) "We maybe," I reply, "But maybe when that garbled, scratchy, noise that used to be information comes through to the other civilization, just maybe they won't give a damn. How meaningful will that be?"
Plus, by the very laws of capitalism it's almost certain that people will continually up their mining operations in order to account for dwindling returns. They will want to make sure that as fewer bitcoins are handed out, they themselves do not feel that decrease. So even though this growth might be offset somewhat by the decline of smaller mining operations, it is likely that larger operations will grow exponentially. (Disclaimer: I base this prediction upon human nature, not upon a strong understanding of bitcoin mining.)
That's fascinating, thanks. I still wonder, however, how precisely the desire for amber was translated into a large-scale battle. Trade goods would easily generate war if there were two particularly large tribes that were united enough under centralized (or central-ish) leadership in order to come to war with one another. However, if the society was decentralized and diffused into small tribes--which, in my very limited knowledge of the region and times seems possible--then it is more difficult to generate a large scale battle even over a precious commodity. In terms of Carl von Clausewitz, it is difficult to generate and maintain enough hostile intent that transcends the petty boundaries of the different peoples fighting on the same side. In fact, I would bet that for the purposes of uniting multiple distinct peoples for a common campaign, a symbolic trophy would actually be much more potent than a physical commodity (hence the role of Helen, who became more than a mere person for the Greeks). Thus, for example, a religious conflict (e.g. over sacred land, sacred materials) or a conflict over cultural identity would be much more effective, especially when coupled with basic economic factors that appeal to human greed.
However, there are so many variables and it seems like some of the speculations of TFA could be open for debate. So for example if it were not one battle but several over a long period, or if they over-estimated the number of combatants, then it becomes much easier to explain.
... it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age.
I'm guessing that you are merely comparing these events rather than suggesting that this find represents these events, since TFA suggests that this battle occurred 3200 years ago, while the events you mention occurred within the last 1000-1700 years.
The oddity, of course, is that such a major cultural-ethnic event has not left other significant evidence. Moreover, it should be recognized that a large-scale battle generally requires a large-scale political organization--if not a centralized government, then the possibility of a coalition among several clans such as in the Trojan War--and this is not as easy as one might think within a basically local, dispersed, tribal society. Homer attributes the Trojan War to the symbolic significance of Helen; one might wonder what could have been meaningful enough to these people to generate such massive warfare.
Many Englishmen seriously have a history of thinking that all world history points squarely to them. I remember coming across a goofy occult religious website once that claimed that the English were the "lost tribes" of Israel (i.e. the northerners who were deported by Assyria in the Exile but never returned) and that because of that they were destined to inherit the kingship of the world.
Yeah, as a professor I use macros a lot for common tasks in writing papers and for managing my gradebook. The main problem with macros is that they are so stupidly designed and VBA is such a stupid, inconsistent, and insecure language. Macros are already disabled by default until you enable them via a popup, but there is no distinction between harmless operations and dangerous ones that could compromise a user's system. I think Visual Basic needs to be replaced with another language, and macro security needs to be redesigned from the ground up. But Microsoft never does anything so sensible.
You're very right about the usefulness of trams and trains. And I certainly can't argue with the motion sickness issue. In fact, I have found that I am much more prone to feeling sick when a less experienced person is driving the bus (like when they are training a new employee). Although the difference is not easily noticeable, it seems that my eyes or other senses perceive it on a very low level. I start to feel nauseous even before I notice that the bus driver is a trainee.
I actually ride the bus every single day I come into work and this is so ridiculous it has to be a joke.
1. Bus drivers already typically start driving while you are still putting in your money. You have to grab on so you don't go flying.
2. Bus drivers already drive as boldly and crazily as they can get away with, and they typically do get away with a lot because their vehicle is bigger than most others around. Hence when they cut people off, people tend to just let them.
3. Having to open doors at railroad crossings is weird, but it barely takes half a second out of our trip.
4. Having the bus drive on the shoulder would be so stupid as to lead to murder; at some point someone will be on the shoulder and will get run over. Why not just use HOV lanes or reserved bus lanes? That makes a lot more sense.
5. The #1 factor affecting bus speed is not how careful the drivers are, but how many stops they have to make on a single route. The reason my bus is so effective is because it is an express bus that has relatively few stops and uses the highway in-between. To improve bus usage there will simply have to be many more express routes, better advertizing, and a significant cultural changes.
6. The reason there need to be cultural changes is because in the United States our first instinct (for most of us) is to drive, not even to look for a bus route. Most people simply assume that the bus is not workable until proven otherwise. Our basic affluence and the convenience of driving one's own car make it so that riding a bus seems like an odd, special occasion, especially for commuters who go a longer distance to work. In order to effect a cultural change it will take advertizing, spreading information, and willingness to contribute more tax money to public transportation so that new routes can be built up before enough riders can be easily recruited to make them self-sustaining.
Without reading TFA, I have to point out that if Tyson tweeted that the rapper was "five centuries regressed in your reasoning" in order to indicate that five centuries ago people all thought that the earth was flat, then Tyson's statement is ironically also uninformed. There's a common myth that Columbus "discovered" that the earth was round. In fact people had believed that the earth was round for centuries before Columbus, but nobody had ever demonstrated this fact to mainland Europe by means of sailing. I'm not talking about the ancient Greeks, either. Even Dante (13th c.) believed that the earth was round, but he thought that the other side was just filled with empty water--apart from Purgatory, which was on an island there. I believe I've even seen references to the earth being round in Christian writings from the first millennium AD. The past is not so simple as people often paint it. It's not as though people were all stupid before until the glorious age of Enlightenment. Hence the kind of fallacy that causes someone to deny the roundness of the earth today is of an entirely different character and magnitude compared to the innocent ignorance of those who imagined the earth as flat in the past.
Good point--when I spoke about bad movies, I assumed (from my own viewpoint) that what makes a good movie is something more than its commercial viability. But the truth is that many movies that many of us will call "bad" are good from the only viewpoint that typically matters: economics.
Even the typical argument that a good movie is one that will be remembered years later is open to question, even though some common sense correlation can be seen that at face value would corroborate this argument. I'm sure that 100 years from now some movies that I call "bad" will still be remembered for this or that reason. Or, what may even be worse, these "bad" movies will have a lasting influence on the way in which other movies are designed for years to come, precisely because the criterion of judgment is usually not some higher art but simply the box office impact.
While I still maintain that there has to be some better way to judge a movie, I have to admit that a universal criterion of judgment is elusive. This is especially the case because, once we shove all idealism aside, it becomes impossible to yearn nostalgically for some past golden era where films were "good" and filled with rich plots and deep meaning rather than over-the-top effects. Nostalgia in this sense always yearns for a past that never was present. In fact, I believe that even in the day of Greek dramas there were popular dramas that substituted the special effects of the day in lieu of good writing.
Good link. He makes a lot of good arguments, especially at the end where he points out that good movies are forgiven for bad effects, which means that what makes a movie good or bad is not really so much the effects but the storytelling. However, there is one important link between the effects and the storytelling today that can be overlooked in this argument. The problem today with effects is not the failure of the artists but often the failure of directors, writers, producers, etc., who specifically insert superfluous effects in order to rely on them in lieu of a decent story. Hence bad or superfluous effects can be an indicator of a bad film, but they themselves do not of themselves make a movie bad. They are mere symptoms of a deeper problem.
(If the reader lost attention during this comment, I guess it was because no superfluous 3D CG objects flew at the camera or exploded in an over-the-top way that adds nothing to the meaning of what I'm saying...)
The viability of the "-er" comparative ending in English varies from place to place; in Canada, for example, more "-er" words are acceptable than here in the United States (e.g. "funnier" I believe works in Canada). This is never merely a matter of what is technically correct, however, because our aesthetic aversion to this or that form is already determined beforehand by common practice, such that I feel that "cleverer" is awkward simply because it is not proper in the USA. If I had grown up in Canada, my very aesthetic sense would likely be different.
... the primary backlash was not so directed at the town as much as that one had many different people in the town saying really stupid things.
"Many" different people? It's not altogether clear, but from the article it looks like something in the range of 2-3 different people saying stupid things. Now I know that that seems like a lot for a town with only 800 people, but I think we still have little right to judge the entire town based on a handful of morons. The problem is that when people read stories like this, they do not simply conclude that 2-3 people in that town are stupid. Rather, we jump to conclusions about the town and make sweeping statements about rural hicks and ignorant, backwards-minded people (whom we likely will assume belong to the opposite side of the political spectrum as ourselves: if I am a Democrat, these idiots must be Republicans). This is a problem with both the way in which stories are written and the way in which we tend to read them, as we only care about figuring out whom we can look down upon. Getting the full story tends to stand in the way of our self-righteous judgments.
One thing that I found particularly interesting about this, however, is found in this line from the current article:
Lane, the Woodland councilman, said the town has received profanity-laced voice mails and enraged emails from people around the country.
So when we read an article about people saying or doing something that we consider stupid, what is our response? Hopefully most of us just make fun of the place on Slashdot, but it seems that far too many of us turn to making phone calls and emails and filling them with profanities. "They don't like solar power? Those mother#$%^# sons of #%#%#$!" I am not sure how we seem to think that these kinds of messages actually help to educate any of those ignorant solar-power hating villagers, but I wonder whether more than 2-3 people resorted to this kind of political "free speech."
Interestingly, such profanity-laden responses seem to transcend political boundaries and be the one true unifier of Americans on both left and right. Whether the issue appeals to Republicans or Democrats, and whether the people involved accept one ideology or the other, they will still be generously and profusely cursed by their fellow Americans. "One nation, under God, with liberty, and profanity for all..."
In fact, in TFA it sounds like the photos were not necessarily aligned by the photographers, but the person who did the averaging also aligned them beforehand. So yeah, nothing too astounding here. However, it does perhaps give us a blurry but explicit idea of a basic imprint of "faceness" that we implicitly look for when determining whether an object seems to us to have a face. This could be interesting. Maybe. Not really.
Yep. In fact, self-destruction is more likely than us spreading out beyond Mars. Of course we might travel beyond Mars, but at this point I think that we have enough scientific reason to think that colonizing beyond Mars is so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. There are a host of reasons, but to name a few: (1) faster-than-light travel is theoretically impossible (and only possible in mere speculations), (2) near-FTL travel is a mere dream, (3) the human body can hardly take long-term space travel as it is, (4) we allow ourselves to be guided more by politics and profit than by any "higher" goals, so we will never unite our resources on such a project unless it promises major returns in these areas, etc.
We can (and probably should) always fantasize about new technologies, etc., but there are real limits to our abilities and we do run up against them. Of course through genetic engineering, etc., we could fashion a new kind of human that might be better equipped for the challenges of interstellar colonization, but given the potential limitations of life (we can only dream and watch Star Trek to imagine a biological being that is really adapted for the conditions of space), it is at least unlikely enough that we will colonize farther than Mars that I think the word "never" is not far-fetched.
It's true; in fact, the real beneficiaries of the U.S. frontier gold rushes were the merchants who sold supplies for mining rather than the miners themselves. With this in mind, however, it seems that any intrusions from other powers will be in accord with a principle of commercial viability. Whether or not someone steals another's asteroid claim will depend upon the potential costs and profits of benefiting in another way. Thus what might contribute to some likelihood of respecting other's rights is not some innate goodness of human activity, but rather the potential to profit off of such a respect. Other countries might indeed benefit from asteroid mining much like the merchants of the past did. They might even be able to develop technologies for their own mining more easily because they will benefit from the mistakes of the first pioneers. But this principle of commercial viability could just as well lead to a non-recognition of supposed rights and outright violation of claims.
So in effect, the real weakness of fingerprints is not their non-hashability, but the fact that they are inherently linked with the user/owner. In the same way if you found a key in a hotel parking lot it would do you no good, but if that key had "Room 143" written on it, then its security is broken. Your fingerprint is harder to disassociate with yourself than a key or password. Someone pointed out above that you cannot tell someone that you forgot your fingerprint. Likewise, someone could always steal your fingerprint from objects you touch and have a reasonable certainty that that indeed is your fingerprint.
But this means that fingerprints suffer intrinsically from the same defect that incidentally affects guessable passwords. Most people create passwords that are in some way symbolically associated with their own identity (birthdates, names, etc.). Thus, in a sense, fingerprints are beneficial in certain low-security situations not only because they are more convenient, but also because the kinds of passwords or PINs that they generally replace suffer from the same weakness as fingerprints anyway.
It's all squiggles on the screen that I have to learn to interpret in the correct context.
This is true. All letters are symbols, and all symbols require a context in order to interpret. Somebody above pointed out that > is universally understood in mathematics, and thus its universality seems to make it preferable to GT, which is based on English. But this can be misleading. In the long run, > is just as arbitrary as GT, and although the symbol is widely used in mathematics, that is no guarantee that it will retain a clear meaning forever. A context will always be necessary, and although mathematics provides a kind of easily-accessible and widely-dispersed context, the specific system of mathematics that we utilize today is still a culturally-developed system of symbolization, and hence it is neither truly universal nor immortal.
At the same time, even the mathematical context may not adequately guarantee that the meaning of > is understood. In fact, it is questionable whether the strictly mathematical meaning of > is strictly at play in computer programming. The Perl gt operator already shows that the sphere of the meaning of "greater than" within programming can be wider than that which belongs to ordinary mathematics. In other words, the symbol > is borrowed from the context of mathematics, but this originary context is not the only context that determines the usage of this symbol within programming. It is always possible for this symbol to carry additional meanings not strictly intended by mathematical logic.
The strength of C++, for example, is that you can define your own operators and how they operate upon particular data structures, such that > can mean anything you want it to mean. Of course it would be silly to use > to mean "less than," but one might use it to mean "greater than" in a way that is only analogous to the scalar numerical calculation; hence for example one could conceive of a "greater than" with regard to GPS coordinates that does not measure which coordinates are greater in sheer magnitude, but rather determines which are farther north.
In short, no symbol is guaranteed in its meaning by an external relationship to another, distinct usage of the same symbol. It does not matter whether the symbol comes from written or spoken language, academic usage or common dialect, science or superstition; all symbols are determined in their meaning by context.
I can understand why one might dislike this distinction between string and numeric operators in Perl, but I personally like it a lot.
Perl is an odd hybrid. On the one hand, it for the most part does not distinguish between different scalar data types syntactically (no strict declarations as in C++). This makes it a more casual language that is good for quick scripting within a limited environment (similar to JavaScript), but of course it could lead to confusion later on if a programmer reassigns variables to different data types on the fly. On the other hand, Perl solves potential confusions by using distinct operators for string and numeric operations. This means that (A) it is clear what is being done at any given point, and (B) it simplifies converting between numeric and string data types for on-the-fly operations. This is why Perl is amazing: you can do so much in a single, miniscule line of code, and yet everything you do is very clear and straight-forward in the syntax, however brief it is. Perl is thus capable to some extent of emulating one's flow of consciousness rather than requiring a strict, logical process according to clearly-defined data types. After all, my brain only seems to distinguish between string and numeric data types when I operate upon them (e.g. when I think about the number 2, I can freely flow between adding 3 to it and writing the number out as a word).
Remember to use gold plated connectors to get the best visual fidelity.
I've been getting 8K resolution for years just by jamming my Denon Link Cable directly into my eye socket to interface with the optic nerve. It only hurt the first few times.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, that quote is exactly what was going through my mind as I read this abstract, too.
The comment below by Reaper9889 is correct and thus highlights the fact that one could argue that the black hole goes to another universe but still kills whatever passes through. Nevertheless, this shows the silliness of the whole idea suggested now by Hawking. Any information that might be transferred to another universe would be essentially garbled beyond all recognition such that it would have only a nominal connection to this universe. A person goes in, and out in another universe comes some shadowy noise (of Hawking radiation?) that can never again be reassembled into a living person. On the other side, could we be sure that whatever "information" is really ever arriving from another universe? In fact, it is just as easy to conclude that whatever "arrives" is just random, meaningless noise with no basis in any universe whatsoever. Ockham's Razor would make such a multiverse assumption seem extremely improbable.
Perhaps the biggest problem, however, is that normal people read this kind of "news" and think that black holes are portals that might bring living people to other universes. Thankfully we don't have to worry about people throwing themselves into black holes any time soon, but people do turn this kind of gibberish into metanarratives of meaning--similar to how Bender is comforted by the thought that maybe she could still be alive in another universe. The thought of infinite other universes helps us to forget the pain and evils of this one. Example: "Maybe our little human civilization will be meaningful after all because some small little information about it will be able to reach another universe in some way and some other intelligent race will know that we once existed and that we were intelligent, after all." (Richard Dawkins says something similar to this in one of his books, but premised not on multiple universes but on the endless expanse of space.) "We maybe," I reply, "But maybe when that garbled, scratchy, noise that used to be information comes through to the other civilization, just maybe they won't give a damn. How meaningful will that be?"
Plus, by the very laws of capitalism it's almost certain that people will continually up their mining operations in order to account for dwindling returns. They will want to make sure that as fewer bitcoins are handed out, they themselves do not feel that decrease. So even though this growth might be offset somewhat by the decline of smaller mining operations, it is likely that larger operations will grow exponentially. (Disclaimer: I base this prediction upon human nature, not upon a strong understanding of bitcoin mining.)
That's fascinating, thanks. I still wonder, however, how precisely the desire for amber was translated into a large-scale battle. Trade goods would easily generate war if there were two particularly large tribes that were united enough under centralized (or central-ish) leadership in order to come to war with one another. However, if the society was decentralized and diffused into small tribes--which, in my very limited knowledge of the region and times seems possible--then it is more difficult to generate a large scale battle even over a precious commodity. In terms of Carl von Clausewitz, it is difficult to generate and maintain enough hostile intent that transcends the petty boundaries of the different peoples fighting on the same side. In fact, I would bet that for the purposes of uniting multiple distinct peoples for a common campaign, a symbolic trophy would actually be much more potent than a physical commodity (hence the role of Helen, who became more than a mere person for the Greeks). Thus, for example, a religious conflict (e.g. over sacred land, sacred materials) or a conflict over cultural identity would be much more effective, especially when coupled with basic economic factors that appeal to human greed.
However, there are so many variables and it seems like some of the speculations of TFA could be open for debate. So for example if it were not one battle but several over a long period, or if they over-estimated the number of combatants, then it becomes much easier to explain.
... it could have been part of some major trans-European migration like the one that brought down the Roman empire. Secondly it could have been a large scale raid like the armies that raided Britain and France during the peak of the Viking age.
I'm guessing that you are merely comparing these events rather than suggesting that this find represents these events, since TFA suggests that this battle occurred 3200 years ago, while the events you mention occurred within the last 1000-1700 years.
The oddity, of course, is that such a major cultural-ethnic event has not left other significant evidence. Moreover, it should be recognized that a large-scale battle generally requires a large-scale political organization--if not a centralized government, then the possibility of a coalition among several clans such as in the Trojan War--and this is not as easy as one might think within a basically local, dispersed, tribal society. Homer attributes the Trojan War to the symbolic significance of Helen; one might wonder what could have been meaningful enough to these people to generate such massive warfare.
Many Englishmen seriously have a history of thinking that all world history points squarely to them. I remember coming across a goofy occult religious website once that claimed that the English were the "lost tribes" of Israel (i.e. the northerners who were deported by Assyria in the Exile but never returned) and that because of that they were destined to inherit the kingship of the world.
Yeah, as a professor I use macros a lot for common tasks in writing papers and for managing my gradebook. The main problem with macros is that they are so stupidly designed and VBA is such a stupid, inconsistent, and insecure language. Macros are already disabled by default until you enable them via a popup, but there is no distinction between harmless operations and dangerous ones that could compromise a user's system. I think Visual Basic needs to be replaced with another language, and macro security needs to be redesigned from the ground up. But Microsoft never does anything so sensible.
Very good points. Right on.
You're very right about the usefulness of trams and trains. And I certainly can't argue with the motion sickness issue. In fact, I have found that I am much more prone to feeling sick when a less experienced person is driving the bus (like when they are training a new employee). Although the difference is not easily noticeable, it seems that my eyes or other senses perceive it on a very low level. I start to feel nauseous even before I notice that the bus driver is a trainee.
Without reading TFA, I have to point out that if Tyson tweeted that the rapper was "five centuries regressed in your reasoning" in order to indicate that five centuries ago people all thought that the earth was flat, then Tyson's statement is ironically also uninformed. There's a common myth that Columbus "discovered" that the earth was round. In fact people had believed that the earth was round for centuries before Columbus, but nobody had ever demonstrated this fact to mainland Europe by means of sailing. I'm not talking about the ancient Greeks, either. Even Dante (13th c.) believed that the earth was round, but he thought that the other side was just filled with empty water--apart from Purgatory, which was on an island there. I believe I've even seen references to the earth being round in Christian writings from the first millennium AD. The past is not so simple as people often paint it. It's not as though people were all stupid before until the glorious age of Enlightenment. Hence the kind of fallacy that causes someone to deny the roundness of the earth today is of an entirely different character and magnitude compared to the innocent ignorance of those who imagined the earth as flat in the past.
Good point--when I spoke about bad movies, I assumed (from my own viewpoint) that what makes a good movie is something more than its commercial viability. But the truth is that many movies that many of us will call "bad" are good from the only viewpoint that typically matters: economics.
Even the typical argument that a good movie is one that will be remembered years later is open to question, even though some common sense correlation can be seen that at face value would corroborate this argument. I'm sure that 100 years from now some movies that I call "bad" will still be remembered for this or that reason. Or, what may even be worse, these "bad" movies will have a lasting influence on the way in which other movies are designed for years to come, precisely because the criterion of judgment is usually not some higher art but simply the box office impact.
While I still maintain that there has to be some better way to judge a movie, I have to admit that a universal criterion of judgment is elusive. This is especially the case because, once we shove all idealism aside, it becomes impossible to yearn nostalgically for some past golden era where films were "good" and filled with rich plots and deep meaning rather than over-the-top effects. Nostalgia in this sense always yearns for a past that never was present. In fact, I believe that even in the day of Greek dramas there were popular dramas that substituted the special effects of the day in lieu of good writing.
Good link. He makes a lot of good arguments, especially at the end where he points out that good movies are forgiven for bad effects, which means that what makes a movie good or bad is not really so much the effects but the storytelling. However, there is one important link between the effects and the storytelling today that can be overlooked in this argument. The problem today with effects is not the failure of the artists but often the failure of directors, writers, producers, etc., who specifically insert superfluous effects in order to rely on them in lieu of a decent story. Hence bad or superfluous effects can be an indicator of a bad film, but they themselves do not of themselves make a movie bad. They are mere symptoms of a deeper problem.
(If the reader lost attention during this comment, I guess it was because no superfluous 3D CG objects flew at the camera or exploded in an over-the-top way that adds nothing to the meaning of what I'm saying...)
It's perfect for Death Stars, since they always build them with access tunnels that go right to the core.
The viability of the "-er" comparative ending in English varies from place to place; in Canada, for example, more "-er" words are acceptable than here in the United States (e.g. "funnier" I believe works in Canada). This is never merely a matter of what is technically correct, however, because our aesthetic aversion to this or that form is already determined beforehand by common practice, such that I feel that "cleverer" is awkward simply because it is not proper in the USA. If I had grown up in Canada, my very aesthetic sense would likely be different.
... the primary backlash was not so directed at the town as much as that one had many different people in the town saying really stupid things.
"Many" different people? It's not altogether clear, but from the article it looks like something in the range of 2-3 different people saying stupid things. Now I know that that seems like a lot for a town with only 800 people, but I think we still have little right to judge the entire town based on a handful of morons. The problem is that when people read stories like this, they do not simply conclude that 2-3 people in that town are stupid. Rather, we jump to conclusions about the town and make sweeping statements about rural hicks and ignorant, backwards-minded people (whom we likely will assume belong to the opposite side of the political spectrum as ourselves: if I am a Democrat, these idiots must be Republicans). This is a problem with both the way in which stories are written and the way in which we tend to read them, as we only care about figuring out whom we can look down upon. Getting the full story tends to stand in the way of our self-righteous judgments.
One thing that I found particularly interesting about this, however, is found in this line from the current article:
Lane, the Woodland councilman, said the town has received profanity-laced voice mails and enraged emails from people around the country.
So when we read an article about people saying or doing something that we consider stupid, what is our response? Hopefully most of us just make fun of the place on Slashdot, but it seems that far too many of us turn to making phone calls and emails and filling them with profanities. "They don't like solar power? Those mother#$%^# sons of #%#%#$!" I am not sure how we seem to think that these kinds of messages actually help to educate any of those ignorant solar-power hating villagers, but I wonder whether more than 2-3 people resorted to this kind of political "free speech."
Interestingly, such profanity-laden responses seem to transcend political boundaries and be the one true unifier of Americans on both left and right. Whether the issue appeals to Republicans or Democrats, and whether the people involved accept one ideology or the other, they will still be generously and profusely cursed by their fellow Americans. "One nation, under God, with liberty, and profanity for all..."
If corporations are not altruistic, and people make up corporations, what makes you think that people are altruistic?
Funny, it seems that the more "critical mass" of capital that the super-wealthy gain, the fewer people it actually helps to buy Ferraris.
In fact, in TFA it sounds like the photos were not necessarily aligned by the photographers, but the person who did the averaging also aligned them beforehand. So yeah, nothing too astounding here. However, it does perhaps give us a blurry but explicit idea of a basic imprint of "faceness" that we implicitly look for when determining whether an object seems to us to have a face. This could be interesting. Maybe. Not really.
Including self-destruction
Yep. In fact, self-destruction is more likely than us spreading out beyond Mars. Of course we might travel beyond Mars, but at this point I think that we have enough scientific reason to think that colonizing beyond Mars is so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. There are a host of reasons, but to name a few: (1) faster-than-light travel is theoretically impossible (and only possible in mere speculations), (2) near-FTL travel is a mere dream, (3) the human body can hardly take long-term space travel as it is, (4) we allow ourselves to be guided more by politics and profit than by any "higher" goals, so we will never unite our resources on such a project unless it promises major returns in these areas, etc.
We can (and probably should) always fantasize about new technologies, etc., but there are real limits to our abilities and we do run up against them. Of course through genetic engineering, etc., we could fashion a new kind of human that might be better equipped for the challenges of interstellar colonization, but given the potential limitations of life (we can only dream and watch Star Trek to imagine a biological being that is really adapted for the conditions of space), it is at least unlikely enough that we will colonize farther than Mars that I think the word "never" is not far-fetched.
It's true; in fact, the real beneficiaries of the U.S. frontier gold rushes were the merchants who sold supplies for mining rather than the miners themselves. With this in mind, however, it seems that any intrusions from other powers will be in accord with a principle of commercial viability. Whether or not someone steals another's asteroid claim will depend upon the potential costs and profits of benefiting in another way. Thus what might contribute to some likelihood of respecting other's rights is not some innate goodness of human activity, but rather the potential to profit off of such a respect. Other countries might indeed benefit from asteroid mining much like the merchants of the past did. They might even be able to develop technologies for their own mining more easily because they will benefit from the mistakes of the first pioneers. But this principle of commercial viability could just as well lead to a non-recognition of supposed rights and outright violation of claims.
So in effect, the real weakness of fingerprints is not their non-hashability, but the fact that they are inherently linked with the user/owner. In the same way if you found a key in a hotel parking lot it would do you no good, but if that key had "Room 143" written on it, then its security is broken. Your fingerprint is harder to disassociate with yourself than a key or password. Someone pointed out above that you cannot tell someone that you forgot your fingerprint. Likewise, someone could always steal your fingerprint from objects you touch and have a reasonable certainty that that indeed is your fingerprint.
But this means that fingerprints suffer intrinsically from the same defect that incidentally affects guessable passwords. Most people create passwords that are in some way symbolically associated with their own identity (birthdates, names, etc.). Thus, in a sense, fingerprints are beneficial in certain low-security situations not only because they are more convenient, but also because the kinds of passwords or PINs that they generally replace suffer from the same weakness as fingerprints anyway.
It's all squiggles on the screen that I have to learn to interpret in the correct context.
This is true. All letters are symbols, and all symbols require a context in order to interpret. Somebody above pointed out that > is universally understood in mathematics, and thus its universality seems to make it preferable to GT, which is based on English. But this can be misleading. In the long run, > is just as arbitrary as GT, and although the symbol is widely used in mathematics, that is no guarantee that it will retain a clear meaning forever. A context will always be necessary, and although mathematics provides a kind of easily-accessible and widely-dispersed context, the specific system of mathematics that we utilize today is still a culturally-developed system of symbolization, and hence it is neither truly universal nor immortal.
At the same time, even the mathematical context may not adequately guarantee that the meaning of > is understood. In fact, it is questionable whether the strictly mathematical meaning of > is strictly at play in computer programming. The Perl gt operator already shows that the sphere of the meaning of "greater than" within programming can be wider than that which belongs to ordinary mathematics. In other words, the symbol > is borrowed from the context of mathematics, but this originary context is not the only context that determines the usage of this symbol within programming. It is always possible for this symbol to carry additional meanings not strictly intended by mathematical logic.
The strength of C++, for example, is that you can define your own operators and how they operate upon particular data structures, such that > can mean anything you want it to mean. Of course it would be silly to use > to mean "less than," but one might use it to mean "greater than" in a way that is only analogous to the scalar numerical calculation; hence for example one could conceive of a "greater than" with regard to GPS coordinates that does not measure which coordinates are greater in sheer magnitude, but rather determines which are farther north.
In short, no symbol is guaranteed in its meaning by an external relationship to another, distinct usage of the same symbol. It does not matter whether the symbol comes from written or spoken language, academic usage or common dialect, science or superstition; all symbols are determined in their meaning by context.
I can understand why one might dislike this distinction between string and numeric operators in Perl, but I personally like it a lot.
Perl is an odd hybrid. On the one hand, it for the most part does not distinguish between different scalar data types syntactically (no strict declarations as in C++). This makes it a more casual language that is good for quick scripting within a limited environment (similar to JavaScript), but of course it could lead to confusion later on if a programmer reassigns variables to different data types on the fly. On the other hand, Perl solves potential confusions by using distinct operators for string and numeric operations. This means that (A) it is clear what is being done at any given point, and (B) it simplifies converting between numeric and string data types for on-the-fly operations. This is why Perl is amazing: you can do so much in a single, miniscule line of code, and yet everything you do is very clear and straight-forward in the syntax, however brief it is. Perl is thus capable to some extent of emulating one's flow of consciousness rather than requiring a strict, logical process according to clearly-defined data types. After all, my brain only seems to distinguish between string and numeric data types when I operate upon them (e.g. when I think about the number 2, I can freely flow between adding 3 to it and writing the number out as a word).
Remember to use gold plated connectors to get the best visual fidelity.
I've been getting 8K resolution for years just by jamming my Denon Link Cable directly into my eye socket to interface with the optic nerve. It only hurt the first few times.
If we just shut down all the porn sites on the Internet, I'm sure we'd get back a good 98% of those IP addresses...