There are better ways to transmit knowledge, without enforcing censorship. Testing is really a kind of "security through obscurity".
Instead, I propose let students help each other openly, if they choose to do so. The good students will help others more, so if you still want to find them you can.
Declaring that the free and open sharing of knowledge is cheating says more about the control issues of the teachers than it does about the students.
'theories become more plausible or less plausible, and are never "true" or "false", which would imply that they are immune to any further evidence whatsoever. This state simply cannot be achieved within the Bayesian formalism.'
Really? What in the formalism prevents a prior of 1? Is Cromwell's rule enforced in some way by the math? Or is it a heuristic outside of the formalism, a guideline, easy enough to overlook? Inferences on new never-seen-before samples have to use such hacks as smoothing to prevent breaking the Bayes model. Are all those hacks included in the formalism?
Okay, but I can still choose to read only the scifi that deals explicitly with science and imaginative technology and speculations about the physical nature of the universe. That's also scifi. Claiming that scifi is only fantasy, or only about humans in different realities, is not accurate. Some of scifi may be in that category, but the best (imho) is in a more explicitly scientific genre, using the explicit language of science.
But Tolkien makes no reference to any physical or scientific model that would account for magic. Star Trek explicitly does, for transporters and other technologies.
Scotty uses a machine. The machine is assumed to work in accordance with some physical model (more advanced than our models). That's clear from the show, from the dialogs, from the way they talk about their technologies.
Gandalf is explicitly using magic. He needs no machine. He is tapping into some force that needs no physical model to work. But Star Trek posits some physics model underlying their technologies. Engineers study the physics, and produce and operate transporters, etc.
Yeah maybe "many", but not all. I can read science fiction authors like Clarke, Bova, Robinson, Bear and think about the technological contrivances imagined, which is what I prefer to do, instead of the human elements.
I think what differentiates science fiction from other types is the science. All fiction can be said to be about human responses to author-created contrivances. But science fiction's focus, apart from the human soap-opera filler, is on scientific contrivances. That's the appeal, for me at any rate. Not the human fluff.
But it's explicitly called magic in fantasy, whereas in Star Trek the show has a logical, scientific explanation for the "fantastical" items. Scotty on Star Trek is not casting spells when he beams someone up, he's using a machine. That's very different from Gandalf casting a spell.
I think you're wrong. Good science fiction is about the possibilities of technology, and how we can use it to become more knowledgeable about ourselves. Bad science fiction is about human soap operas, and isn't really science fiction but more of a romance or fantasy type genre.
No, I disagree. I read science fiction to try to break through the imagination barrier implied in a statement attributed to Eddington: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine." The most interesting science fiction deals with expanding our imaginations beyond what the present limits are. The human aspects are mere distractions, like commercials.
Have them print up a 3D printer for you, then after the purchase your only costs are material and energy, which could easily be less than even the scale costs + profit + shipping of a factory producer.
Conclusion: China's cheap labor advantage will become irrelevant. Manufacturing becomes decentralized and local, jobs decrease, leisure time increases, and (with a basic income) we are closer to utopia.
When you say "intellect-nots" and talk of shortages of "smart employees", you mean there are too many people who don't want to code intrusive ads to sell sell sell, right? Maybe you're the one who's not so smart, looking for robotic employees you're too stupid to code.
I know the feeling, so I'm taking the edx Thermodynamics MOOC to try to learn more about the subject.
Something I learned in the first week: the assumptions of Thermodynamics are astonishingly limited. According to Professor Gaitonde, the science of Thermodynamics is macroscopic (so it doesn't say anything about microscopic phenomena). The assumptions are:
1) No quantum effects
2) No relativistic effects
3) No scale effects.
So any limits derived by Thermodynamics only apply to a small range of phenomena, when you consider the universe. Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Quantum Physics, and Computer Science (since scale effects are very important) are not limited by the assumptions Thermodynamics makes. The laws of thermodynamics, based on these assumptions, don't apply as broadly as people commonly assert.
What about information entropy? The entropy is lowered when the file is zipped, then raised when the file is unzipped. According to the "rule of thumb" cited above, if a process is reversible, the entropy remains constant. Zipping is reversible, but the information entropy is not constant; it lowers and increases.
What cost does the absorption and re-emission extract from me, every time I use the lens to do the work I want it to do? What am I losing, what am I giving up to get heat of ignition from sunlight?
I had to buy the glass, and there was an energy cost in producing it. But those are one-time expenditures. Once it's made, the cost to light a fire is nothing.
Also, the first law of thermodynamics seems to be violated, as outlined above. U = Q - W. U (internal energy of the system, in this case the magnifying glass) should be negative, since Q (heat added to the system) is very small, and W (work done by the system) is relatively large. But the internal energy of the magnifying glass doesn't go down, if anything it increases slightly because of a temperature increase?
"If you were trying to imply that Q is the energy added to the system that the light is being focused upon,"
No, I'm guessing Q would be the heat added to the magnifying glass on the sun side, which is very small compared to the heat produced on the side where the light is focused; the latter heat does the work you want (lighting a fire or whatever). Since Q is small, and W is large, U should be negative. But it's not.
"The process of compressing your data costs more than decompressing it. Rule of thumb holds."
Costs more in what sense? Energy cost? Lines of code cost? Time cost? In any event, it is not something that I consider when zipping a file. Zip and unzip are treated as equivalent from the user's standpoint.
"A magnifying glass, simply put, directs the energy that hits its outside lens surface to a much smaller area, at the cost of the loss due to diffraction of light."
The point that confuses me is: the energy on the outside lens surface can't light a fire, but the energy produced by the glass can. What work was done on the outside energy? It was redirected inside the lens, but how is that work? Doesn't work in thermodynamics reduce to the lifting of a mass in a gravitational field? How is the lens doing any work, in that sense?
All models are flawed, by definition. These holy "Theories" you have such emotional attachments to simply use models. In a 100 years, they will be superseded and allow us to do things we can't think of today. Like GPS wouldn't work if we relied on Newton's theory of gravity.
Where is the waste heat, or change in internal energy, in a magnifying glass system, used to focus the sun's rays to produce a concentrated, high-temperature Airy disk?
U = Q - W
The U (internal energy) of a magnifying glass does not change appreciably during use. Q is heat added to the system; it is much less than the W, or heat produced by the focused rays, which do the work of lighting a fire.
U is small, Q is small, W is large. In theory, U should be large and negative. But it's not...
http://www.askamathematician.c... says: 'A good rule of thumb for entropy is, "if you can reverse it, then the entropy is constant".'
But a zipped file has lower (information) entropy than the same file uncompressed, and the process is reversible. So that rule of thumb doesn't hold for information entropy?
The other question I have about the "ask a mathematician" response is: it assumes the energy input to the magnifying glass system is the temperature of the sun. That is not true: the atmosphere, at least, reduces the sun's irradiance. The input to the system should be the temperature on the sun's side of the glass, which can be less than zero since you can light fires on cold or windy days when the sun is out.
Wikipedia notes that a 2011 report found the problems were all mechanical, not electrical. Barr's report seems to be a lot of "what if"s like a cosmic ray causing a bit flip.
Slashdot Mirror
Kaye. Sammy Kaye. He swung at least, which makes him a better musician than most today!
The larger issue is: can we teach without worrying about cheating?
Socrates didn't give exams or grade his students. Why do teachers teach with a closed fist, holding some knowledge back? (See Maha-parinibbana Sutta, Part 2 The Journey to Vesali, Paragraph 32.)
There are better ways to transmit knowledge, without enforcing censorship. Testing is really a kind of "security through obscurity".
Instead, I propose let students help each other openly, if they choose to do so. The good students will help others more, so if you still want to find them you can.
Declaring that the free and open sharing of knowledge is cheating says more about the control issues of the teachers than it does about the students.
'theories become more plausible or less plausible, and are never "true" or "false", which would imply that they are immune to any further evidence whatsoever. This state simply cannot be achieved within the Bayesian formalism.'
Really? What in the formalism prevents a prior of 1? Is Cromwell's rule enforced in some way by the math? Or is it a heuristic outside of the formalism, a guideline, easy enough to overlook? Inferences on new never-seen-before samples have to use such hacks as smoothing to prevent breaking the Bayes model. Are all those hacks included in the formalism?
Who's replicated the Higgs?
Yes, what kind of monsters sever the spinal cords of fellow mortals, in cold blood. They should be prosecuted for assault.
Okay, but I can still choose to read only the scifi that deals explicitly with science and imaginative technology and speculations about the physical nature of the universe. That's also scifi. Claiming that scifi is only fantasy, or only about humans in different realities, is not accurate. Some of scifi may be in that category, but the best (imho) is in a more explicitly scientific genre, using the explicit language of science.
But Tolkien makes no reference to any physical or scientific model that would account for magic. Star Trek explicitly does, for transporters and other technologies.
Scotty uses a machine. The machine is assumed to work in accordance with some physical model (more advanced than our models). That's clear from the show, from the dialogs, from the way they talk about their technologies.
Gandalf is explicitly using magic. He needs no machine. He is tapping into some force that needs no physical model to work. But Star Trek posits some physics model underlying their technologies. Engineers study the physics, and produce and operate transporters, etc.
Yeah maybe "many", but not all. I can read science fiction authors like Clarke, Bova, Robinson, Bear and think about the technological contrivances imagined, which is what I prefer to do, instead of the human elements.
I think what differentiates science fiction from other types is the science. All fiction can be said to be about human responses to author-created contrivances. But science fiction's focus, apart from the human soap-opera filler, is on scientific contrivances. That's the appeal, for me at any rate. Not the human fluff.
But it's explicitly called magic in fantasy, whereas in Star Trek the show has a logical, scientific explanation for the "fantastical" items. Scotty on Star Trek is not casting spells when he beams someone up, he's using a machine. That's very different from Gandalf casting a spell.
I'm a scifi fan. But I've never read Niven. So any definition of SF that relies on Niven isn't the definition for me.
The origins of sci fi are in imagining things that weren't as yet imagined. So Poe predicted black holes in Eureka:
"Poe also expresses a cosmological theory that anticipated black holes and the Big Crunch theory"
So, science fiction includes a lot of different things. It is not restricted to human elements as the post I was replying to asserted.
Clarke's communications satellites?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Everyone? Clarke predicted that by 2001 HAL would be doing astronavigation better than humans.
I think you're wrong. Good science fiction is about the possibilities of technology, and how we can use it to become more knowledgeable about ourselves. Bad science fiction is about human soap operas, and isn't really science fiction but more of a romance or fantasy type genre.
No, I disagree. I read science fiction to try to break through the imagination barrier implied in a statement attributed to Eddington: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine." The most interesting science fiction deals with expanding our imaginations beyond what the present limits are. The human aspects are mere distractions, like commercials.
Have them print up a 3D printer for you, then after the purchase your only costs are material and energy, which could easily be less than even the scale costs + profit + shipping of a factory producer.
Conclusion: China's cheap labor advantage will become irrelevant. Manufacturing becomes decentralized and local, jobs decrease, leisure time increases, and (with a basic income) we are closer to utopia.
When you say "intellect-nots" and talk of shortages of "smart employees", you mean there are too many people who don't want to code intrusive ads to sell sell sell, right? Maybe you're the one who's not so smart, looking for robotic employees you're too stupid to code.
I know the feeling, so I'm taking the edx Thermodynamics MOOC to try to learn more about the subject.
Something I learned in the first week: the assumptions of Thermodynamics are astonishingly limited. According to Professor Gaitonde, the science of Thermodynamics is macroscopic (so it doesn't say anything about microscopic phenomena). The assumptions are:
1) No quantum effects
2) No relativistic effects
3) No scale effects.
So any limits derived by Thermodynamics only apply to a small range of phenomena, when you consider the universe. Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Quantum Physics, and Computer Science (since scale effects are very important) are not limited by the assumptions Thermodynamics makes. The laws of thermodynamics, based on these assumptions, don't apply as broadly as people commonly assert.
What about information entropy? The entropy is lowered when the file is zipped, then raised when the file is unzipped. According to the "rule of thumb" cited above, if a process is reversible, the entropy remains constant. Zipping is reversible, but the information entropy is not constant; it lowers and increases.
What cost does the absorption and re-emission extract from me, every time I use the lens to do the work I want it to do? What am I losing, what am I giving up to get heat of ignition from sunlight?
I had to buy the glass, and there was an energy cost in producing it. But those are one-time expenditures. Once it's made, the cost to light a fire is nothing.
Also, the first law of thermodynamics seems to be violated, as outlined above. U = Q - W. U (internal energy of the system, in this case the magnifying glass) should be negative, since Q (heat added to the system) is very small, and W (work done by the system) is relatively large. But the internal energy of the magnifying glass doesn't go down, if anything it increases slightly because of a temperature increase?
"If you were trying to imply that Q is the energy added to the system that the light is being focused upon,"
No, I'm guessing Q would be the heat added to the magnifying glass on the sun side, which is very small compared to the heat produced on the side where the light is focused; the latter heat does the work you want (lighting a fire or whatever). Since Q is small, and W is large, U should be negative. But it's not.
"The process of compressing your data costs more than decompressing it. Rule of thumb holds."
Costs more in what sense? Energy cost? Lines of code cost? Time cost? In any event, it is not something that I consider when zipping a file. Zip and unzip are treated as equivalent from the user's standpoint.
"A magnifying glass, simply put, directs the energy that hits its outside lens surface to a much smaller area, at the cost of the loss due to diffraction of light."
The point that confuses me is: the energy on the outside lens surface can't light a fire, but the energy produced by the glass can. What work was done on the outside energy? It was redirected inside the lens, but how is that work? Doesn't work in thermodynamics reduce to the lifting of a mass in a gravitational field? How is the lens doing any work, in that sense?
All models are flawed, by definition. These holy "Theories" you have such emotional attachments to simply use models. In a 100 years, they will be superseded and allow us to do things we can't think of today. Like GPS wouldn't work if we relied on Newton's theory of gravity.
Where is the waste heat, or change in internal energy, in a magnifying glass system, used to focus the sun's rays to produce a concentrated, high-temperature Airy disk?
U = Q - W
The U (internal energy) of a magnifying glass does not change appreciably during use. Q is heat added to the system; it is much less than the W, or heat produced by the focused rays, which do the work of lighting a fire.
U is small, Q is small, W is large. In theory, U should be large and negative. But it's not...
http://www.askamathematician.c... says: 'A good rule of thumb for entropy is, "if you can reverse it, then the entropy is constant".'
But a zipped file has lower (information) entropy than the same file uncompressed, and the process is reversible. So that rule of thumb doesn't hold for information entropy?
The other question I have about the "ask a mathematician" response is: it assumes the energy input to the magnifying glass system is the temperature of the sun. That is not true: the atmosphere, at least, reduces the sun's irradiance. The input to the system should be the temperature on the sun's side of the glass, which can be less than zero since you can light fires on cold or windy days when the sun is out.
Wikipedia notes that a 2011 report found the problems were all mechanical, not electrical. Barr's report seems to be a lot of "what if"s like a cosmic ray causing a bit flip.