Yes, this is why it is important to get the body cooled quickly for cryonics to have any chance, and that's why when someone who has signed up for cryonics is dying, they generally get a team ready to go so as soon as the person dies they can immediately begin prepping the body (cooling it down first, perfusing with anti-freeze compounds and then reducing the temperature further to liquid nitrogen temps).
Luckily, they don't freeze you, but rather pump you with anti-freeze compounds first. minimizing ice crystal growth. They haven't been trying direct freezing since the 1980s.
sadly, it's gotten to the point where you could assume if there's no bloody toilet paper it's due to a spy agency.
I can't tell if you are trying to reference when this actually happened in the Cold War or not, but figured either way I should include a link for people who didn't know that toilet paper theft was really a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tamarisk.
And it wouldn't surprise me if someone said something similar about the humans who first moved out of Africa. And it applies as well to those who went on voyages of exploration, or those scientists who selflessly used their own bodies for medical tests (a category often underappreciated and discussed Lawrence Altman's excellent book "Who Goes First"). We progress by taking risks and we should be grateful for those willing to do so.
Discrete log has been believed to almost certainly not be NP-complete since well before this. We have much better than exponential time algorithms for discrete log so it would contradict the exponential time hypothesis for it to be NP complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_time_hypothesis . Second, discrete log is closely related to factoring which llives in NP intersect co-NP. Since factoring lives in that intersection, if factoring is NP complete then then the polynomial hierarchy would collapse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_hierarchy which is largely believed to not be the case.
They are discrete logs over different groups. Joux's work and related stuff being referred to is for (Z/nZ)*, that is the discrete log over the group of units under in the integers modulo n. That problem is of course, closely connected to prime factorization. In contrast, ECC uses the discrete log over elliptic curve groups, which are also abelian groups but as of yet do not have any similar sort of breakthrough. In fact, this isn't a new situation. Discrete log has been harder over elliptic curves than over (Z/nZ)* since the mid 1990s. It is however worth noting one potential vulnerability that both share: any form of discrete log is efficiently solveable on quantum computer. So if one is thinking in the really long-term then ECC doesn't look much better.
So, that shouldn't matter for purposes of the hypothesis in question. If a smaller percentage of people have guns, that means it is less likely that a criminal will encounter any given person who has a gun. So even if that's the case it doesn't make the percentage issue just as bad for the hypothesis that guns deter crime.
They detected 28 electron neutrino interactions, where they would have expected 5 such events without the oscillation in question. This helps underscore how incredibly hard is it to get neutrinos to show up with anything: even when one is manufacturing millions of them, one is lucky to get a tiny set to then show up in your detector. This is connected to how most neutrino detectors are basically large vats of water or some other liquid, because the most we can generally hope for is that if we put enough mass in the way, some neutrinos will by sheer chance run into things.
This is also relevant to what we expect for stellar neutrino observation. Understanding neutrino oscillation gets us a better idea of what sort of neutrino ratios to expect (as a function of energy levels) in other circumstances. Right now, we can observe a lot of natural neutrinos from the sun. But the only neutrinos we've observed from an identified extra solar location, the 1987A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A, which was a very close supernova (so close it could be seen with the naked eye). In fact, in that case, the neutrinos arrived before we saw the light. That's not at all connected to the erroneous claim from a few years ago that neutrinos were going faster than light speed. What is happening here is that most of the light in a supernova is formed in the core, and the core of a star is very dense. So it takes a long time for the light to reach the surface of the star. But from the standpoint of neutrinos even very dense star isn't that much of an issue so they can get to the surface much faster. It is possible that this sort of work will give us better understanding both such neutrinos and what to expect when we do observe them from other close supernova.
Neutrinos are still a major area where there's a lot we don't understand, and this research is going to possibly have major implications for our understanding of these elusive particles.
But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."
This is clearly much more than an endorsement of binary. This is clearly a moral condemnation of any error correcting code that works any way other than just repeating each bit some constant number of times. Hamming codes must be of the devil.
I think you missed the point. The malaria parasite is unambiguously a bad thing. It doesn't do much in the general ecosystem, simply preying on people. Wiping out malaria will be a net benefit. Labeling doing so the act of a "power-mad super villain" if anything serves to illustrate my point even more. You've been so subject to literature portraying every attempt at improving quality of life that you have to imagine some fantastical bad result of something simply because it pattern matches to what super villain would do. Of course, it also helps when one is living in a country without malaria. It is much easier for someone who doesn't have a problem to worry about upsetting the natural order when it isn't their children dying. I have to wonder if you would have had the same attitude about small pox before we eradicated it.
Yeah, so it does seem strongly like you are disputing definitions http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/. Words don't have absolute Platonic meanings. But even if we grant that and that and say that, it doesn't change the initial point. All those Outer Limits episodes I mentioned clearly fall into the cateory of exploring the impact of technology on humanity. The impact in all of them "awful terrible stuff because scientists are arrogant". So I fail to see your point.
Are you trying to argue that there's a specific subgenre of scif that is the only "real Science Fiction"? Because that sounds pretty close to a No True Scotsman situation.
The problem is that science fiction and other forms of literature, including comic books often have a heavy anti-science, reactionary attitude. Look at the most egregious examples- things like the rebooted Outer Limits where almost every episode was of the form "scientists makes new discovery, something goes drastically wrong in a marginally related way which shows how bad humanity's hubris is." And it connects to another issue: supervillains are active, while superheros are generally passive. The Joker goes to poison Gotham, and Batman stops him, and look at how many villains are geniuses, Brainiac, Lex Luthor, Doc Oc are but three of the more well-known ones, while the heroes are often superstrong people who punch really hard (remind me again why nerds actually like this genre)? And when there is a genius on the side of "good" it is someone like Richard Reed who despite brilliance has done nothing at all to better the lives of the everyday person.
Let's look at another example. Suppose there were a billionaire who made his money making crappy products and pushing those products on people. Suppose that man decided to then dedicate his life to wiping out a series of specific species completely from their native environments. Sounds like a supervillain, right? Well, that man is Bill Gates, and the species in question are the four species of malaria.
Bottom line, if one wants to actually help the world, don't think like a superhero. Think like a supervillain.
Does anyone actually care about these other planets besides the folks who are trying to get more grant money from the tax paying middle class?
Yes, and there are a lot of reasons for this. Before I get to them, let me quickly note that the entire US budget on all research as a percent of GDP is generally around 3% http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guitotal.shtml, and space research fraction of that. The NASA budget is slightly less than a half of 1% of the federal budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA, and only a small fraction of that is devoted to planet searching. The cost of Kepler for its entire life is around 600 million dollars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft), which spread out over the course of its lifetime through the whole US population is about 25 cents a year per a person.
Now, let's examine why we care. The zeroth reason we care because its freaking awesome. Let me tell you how awesome this. In the early 1990s, one of the best computer games ever made was Masters of Orion II. In that game, in order to find out what planets were around other stars, you had to send probes to them. Now, we can see extrasolar planets from the comfort of Earth orbit. That's how far our technology has gone: that we can do this when it was considered implausible even for science fiction. Now, what other reasons are there? First, basic research is important. We don't know in advance how helpful any form of scientific research will be. But for much of the basic research, since there's always a massive set of steps between basic research and applied things, it isn't in the interest of any private enterprise to do such research. Basic research is what economists call a public good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good, and those need to be funded by the government in order for them to happen. Second, there's a concern about the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter, a variant answer to Fermi's famous question. It is possible that there's something which wipes civilizations out just as they are getting advanced. If so, we need to figure that out before we trigger it, whatever it is. That means that there's a long term, but definitely practical goal in trying to find other planets and seeing what they are like.
There really isn't anything that interesting. Most of the interest in Fermat's Last Theorem extended from its history, and to a large extent mathematicians cared much more about what Wiles proved that implied FLT. In this context, this looks like an extremely difficult Diophantine equation, and unlike some such equations this one has little obvious impact on other areas.
There's nothing like that in the system in question though in anything discussed publicly as far as I can tell. although your basic point is a sound one. Note that if you had a very large system, like say your university system but done in a hundred schools then you'd expect to see still a few people in the 45-49 range. But you are correct, there could be some issue like that, but if so, no one has identified it yet. But you are correct that this sort of thing can happen, and your point makes me update in the direction of large-scale tampering looking less likely.
The main issue why I'm still slightly inclined to think that this might not be due to cheating is motivation: the central body has no motivation to cheat except in specific cases of bribery, so one would expect cheating issues to occur not completely universally in the data set. This does suggest that possibly some weird distribution work is here, because the result is too extreme. Actually, thinking about it more, the argument made in the article that the extremely low scores should have been hit is also weak, since it is possible that some questions were just gimmes or that testing made so that no one got below a certain score (like how the SAT functions). Moreover, his claim that if one has a wide distribution in the upper range then one needs to get all the low scores doesn't really follow, if one has a lot of questions in the 5-10 point range, and the 5 and 6 point questions are tough questions, then that sort of thing could be quite natural. But even in that context, it still seems from the total set of anomalies like something weird is going on.
You should read the original http://deedy.quora.com/Hacking-into-the-Indian-Education-System. The missing scores are in extremely suspicious positions. For example, there are no scores of 32,33 and 34, and the minimum pass grade if 35. That looks pretty close to a bump to get people to pass. This doesn't look like someone not understanding the grading system. It looks like manipulation. Frankly, speaking as someone who does a fair bit of grading, yes one can get weird distributions from legitimate adjustments, but they don't look like this.
For many, Vance is most remembered for "Vancian" casting in Dungeons and Dragons where spellcasters prepare their spells in advance and then cast the spells, causing them to leave their minds. Gary Gygax, one of the two major founders of D&D, liked Dying Earth and so incorporated the idea into the game. The casting idea does show up in the Dying Earth, but in a very different way, where spells are big and rare, and having a spell in one's mind takes up a lot of space. In contrast, in most versions of Dungeon's and Dragons a wizard could have many spells memorized at the same time. To some extent, Vancian casting has been a cause of controversy, with some people blaming it for being partially responsible for the overpowerd nature of spellcasters in some editions, especially 3.0 and 3.5. Yet, many who rejected 4th edition did so because 4th dropped the Vancian casting.
Vance is also remembered in D&D in a different way- the legendary lich-wizard "Vecna" was named that as an anagram of Vance. Jack Vance had a lot of influence on a lot of different aspects of scifi and fantasy culture.
If we had eyes like nearly all squids, we would be color blind. Does Dawkins think that is superior?
This is deeply confused. No one is arguing that the squid has better eyes for all purposes. The point is a very specific set of issues the human eye has that the squid eye does not.
you've got irritating irregularities in taught evolutionary science which just refuse to die (eg. Lucy) and pesky irregularities in the fossil record which contradict common/popular evolutionary dogma, and are thus ignored or explained away...
And what pray tell is wrong with Lucy? Incidentally, I'm not sure what you mean by explained away, but I'm hoping that it isn't just "scientists noticed this thing and explained it".
Not quite, since Scott is perfectly ok with then trying to interpret what one is getting. The issue isn't philosophical here as much as it is pedagogical in terms of what order one presents thinks in.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is why it is important to get the body cooled quickly for cryonics to have any chance, and that's why when someone who has signed up for cryonics is dying, they generally get a team ready to go so as soon as the person dies they can immediately begin prepping the body (cooling it down first, perfusing with anti-freeze compounds and then reducing the temperature further to liquid nitrogen temps).
Luckily, they don't freeze you, but rather pump you with anti-freeze compounds first. minimizing ice crystal growth. They haven't been trying direct freezing since the 1980s.
sadly, it's gotten to the point where you could assume if there's no bloody toilet paper it's due to a spy agency.
I can't tell if you are trying to reference when this actually happened in the Cold War or not, but figured either way I should include a link for people who didn't know that toilet paper theft was really a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tamarisk.
And it wouldn't surprise me if someone said something similar about the humans who first moved out of Africa. And it applies as well to those who went on voyages of exploration, or those scientists who selflessly used their own bodies for medical tests (a category often underappreciated and discussed Lawrence Altman's excellent book "Who Goes First"). We progress by taking risks and we should be grateful for those willing to do so.
Discrete log has been believed to almost certainly not be NP-complete since well before this. We have much better than exponential time algorithms for discrete log so it would contradict the exponential time hypothesis for it to be NP complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_time_hypothesis . Second, discrete log is closely related to factoring which llives in NP intersect co-NP. Since factoring lives in that intersection, if factoring is NP complete then then the polynomial hierarchy would collapse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_hierarchy which is largely believed to not be the case.
They are discrete logs over different groups. Joux's work and related stuff being referred to is for (Z/nZ)*, that is the discrete log over the group of units under in the integers modulo n. That problem is of course, closely connected to prime factorization. In contrast, ECC uses the discrete log over elliptic curve groups, which are also abelian groups but as of yet do not have any similar sort of breakthrough. In fact, this isn't a new situation. Discrete log has been harder over elliptic curves than over (Z/nZ)* since the mid 1990s. It is however worth noting one potential vulnerability that both share: any form of discrete log is efficiently solveable on quantum computer. So if one is thinking in the really long-term then ECC doesn't look much better.
So, that shouldn't matter for purposes of the hypothesis in question. If a smaller percentage of people have guns, that means it is less likely that a criminal will encounter any given person who has a gun. So even if that's the case it doesn't make the percentage issue just as bad for the hypothesis that guns deter crime.
They detected 28 electron neutrino interactions, where they would have expected 5 such events without the oscillation in question. This helps underscore how incredibly hard is it to get neutrinos to show up with anything: even when one is manufacturing millions of them, one is lucky to get a tiny set to then show up in your detector. This is connected to how most neutrino detectors are basically large vats of water or some other liquid, because the most we can generally hope for is that if we put enough mass in the way, some neutrinos will by sheer chance run into things.
This is also relevant to what we expect for stellar neutrino observation. Understanding neutrino oscillation gets us a better idea of what sort of neutrino ratios to expect (as a function of energy levels) in other circumstances. Right now, we can observe a lot of natural neutrinos from the sun. But the only neutrinos we've observed from an identified extra solar location, the 1987A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A, which was a very close supernova (so close it could be seen with the naked eye). In fact, in that case, the neutrinos arrived before we saw the light. That's not at all connected to the erroneous claim from a few years ago that neutrinos were going faster than light speed. What is happening here is that most of the light in a supernova is formed in the core, and the core of a star is very dense. So it takes a long time for the light to reach the surface of the star. But from the standpoint of neutrinos even very dense star isn't that much of an issue so they can get to the surface much faster. It is possible that this sort of work will give us better understanding both such neutrinos and what to expect when we do observe them from other close supernova.
Neutrinos are still a major area where there's a lot we don't understand, and this research is going to possibly have major implications for our understanding of these elusive particles.
But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."
This is clearly much more than an endorsement of binary. This is clearly a moral condemnation of any error correcting code that works any way other than just repeating each bit some constant number of times. Hamming codes must be of the devil.
I think you missed the point. The malaria parasite is unambiguously a bad thing. It doesn't do much in the general ecosystem, simply preying on people. Wiping out malaria will be a net benefit. Labeling doing so the act of a "power-mad super villain" if anything serves to illustrate my point even more. You've been so subject to literature portraying every attempt at improving quality of life that you have to imagine some fantastical bad result of something simply because it pattern matches to what super villain would do. Of course, it also helps when one is living in a country without malaria. It is much easier for someone who doesn't have a problem to worry about upsetting the natural order when it isn't their children dying. I have to wonder if you would have had the same attitude about small pox before we eradicated it.
Yes, it is a problem that they so frequently take this knee-jerk, anti-technology attitude.
Yeah, so it does seem strongly like you are disputing definitions http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/. Words don't have absolute Platonic meanings. But even if we grant that and that and say that, it doesn't change the initial point. All those Outer Limits episodes I mentioned clearly fall into the cateory of exploring the impact of technology on humanity. The impact in all of them "awful terrible stuff because scientists are arrogant". So I fail to see your point.
Are you trying to argue that there's a specific subgenre of scif that is the only "real Science Fiction"? Because that sounds pretty close to a No True Scotsman situation.
The problem is that science fiction and other forms of literature, including comic books often have a heavy anti-science, reactionary attitude. Look at the most egregious examples- things like the rebooted Outer Limits where almost every episode was of the form "scientists makes new discovery, something goes drastically wrong in a marginally related way which shows how bad humanity's hubris is." And it connects to another issue: supervillains are active, while superheros are generally passive. The Joker goes to poison Gotham, and Batman stops him, and look at how many villains are geniuses, Brainiac, Lex Luthor, Doc Oc are but three of the more well-known ones, while the heroes are often superstrong people who punch really hard (remind me again why nerds actually like this genre)? And when there is a genius on the side of "good" it is someone like Richard Reed who despite brilliance has done nothing at all to better the lives of the everyday person.
Let's look at another example. Suppose there were a billionaire who made his money making crappy products and pushing those products on people. Suppose that man decided to then dedicate his life to wiping out a series of specific species completely from their native environments. Sounds like a supervillain, right? Well, that man is Bill Gates, and the species in question are the four species of malaria.
Bottom line, if one wants to actually help the world, don't think like a superhero. Think like a supervillain.
Does anyone actually care about these other planets besides the folks who are trying to get more grant money from the tax paying middle class?
Yes, and there are a lot of reasons for this. Before I get to them, let me quickly note that the entire US budget on all research as a percent of GDP is generally around 3% http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guitotal.shtml, and space research fraction of that. The NASA budget is slightly less than a half of 1% of the federal budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA, and only a small fraction of that is devoted to planet searching. The cost of Kepler for its entire life is around 600 million dollars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft), which spread out over the course of its lifetime through the whole US population is about 25 cents a year per a person.
Now, let's examine why we care. The zeroth reason we care because its freaking awesome. Let me tell you how awesome this. In the early 1990s, one of the best computer games ever made was Masters of Orion II. In that game, in order to find out what planets were around other stars, you had to send probes to them. Now, we can see extrasolar planets from the comfort of Earth orbit. That's how far our technology has gone: that we can do this when it was considered implausible even for science fiction. Now, what other reasons are there? First, basic research is important. We don't know in advance how helpful any form of scientific research will be. But for much of the basic research, since there's always a massive set of steps between basic research and applied things, it isn't in the interest of any private enterprise to do such research. Basic research is what economists call a public good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good, and those need to be funded by the government in order for them to happen. Second, there's a concern about the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter, a variant answer to Fermi's famous question. It is possible that there's something which wipes civilizations out just as they are getting advanced. If so, we need to figure that out before we trigger it, whatever it is. That means that there's a long term, but definitely practical goal in trying to find other planets and seeing what they are like.
See http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/jerrold-nadler-does-not-thinks-nsa-can-listen-us-phone-calls/66278/. It looks likely that this was primarily a miscommunication and not what was actually going on.
There's been other similar prior work. For example, there's evidence that gamers can quickly allocate their attention in an efficient fashion. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680769/ and that gamers have faster reaction times for a large variety of tasks http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/18/6/321.short.
Wow. I mean, I know in principle that can happen, but that it actually happens in practice is pretty appalling.
There really isn't anything that interesting. Most of the interest in Fermat's Last Theorem extended from its history, and to a large extent mathematicians cared much more about what Wiles proved that implied FLT. In this context, this looks like an extremely difficult Diophantine equation, and unlike some such equations this one has little obvious impact on other areas.
There's nothing like that in the system in question though in anything discussed publicly as far as I can tell. although your basic point is a sound one. Note that if you had a very large system, like say your university system but done in a hundred schools then you'd expect to see still a few people in the 45-49 range. But you are correct, there could be some issue like that, but if so, no one has identified it yet. But you are correct that this sort of thing can happen, and your point makes me update in the direction of large-scale tampering looking less likely.
The main issue why I'm still slightly inclined to think that this might not be due to cheating is motivation: the central body has no motivation to cheat except in specific cases of bribery, so one would expect cheating issues to occur not completely universally in the data set. This does suggest that possibly some weird distribution work is here, because the result is too extreme. Actually, thinking about it more, the argument made in the article that the extremely low scores should have been hit is also weak, since it is possible that some questions were just gimmes or that testing made so that no one got below a certain score (like how the SAT functions). Moreover, his claim that if one has a wide distribution in the upper range then one needs to get all the low scores doesn't really follow, if one has a lot of questions in the 5-10 point range, and the 5 and 6 point questions are tough questions, then that sort of thing could be quite natural. But even in that context, it still seems from the total set of anomalies like something weird is going on.
You should read the original http://deedy.quora.com/Hacking-into-the-Indian-Education-System. The missing scores are in extremely suspicious positions. For example, there are no scores of 32,33 and 34, and the minimum pass grade if 35. That looks pretty close to a bump to get people to pass. This doesn't look like someone not understanding the grading system. It looks like manipulation. Frankly, speaking as someone who does a fair bit of grading, yes one can get weird distributions from legitimate adjustments, but they don't look like this.
For many, Vance is most remembered for "Vancian" casting in Dungeons and Dragons where spellcasters prepare their spells in advance and then cast the spells, causing them to leave their minds. Gary Gygax, one of the two major founders of D&D, liked Dying Earth and so incorporated the idea into the game. The casting idea does show up in the Dying Earth, but in a very different way, where spells are big and rare, and having a spell in one's mind takes up a lot of space. In contrast, in most versions of Dungeon's and Dragons a wizard could have many spells memorized at the same time. To some extent, Vancian casting has been a cause of controversy, with some people blaming it for being partially responsible for the overpowerd nature of spellcasters in some editions, especially 3.0 and 3.5. Yet, many who rejected 4th edition did so because 4th dropped the Vancian casting.
Vance is also remembered in D&D in a different way- the legendary lich-wizard "Vecna" was named that as an anagram of Vance. Jack Vance had a lot of influence on a lot of different aspects of scifi and fantasy culture.
If we had eyes like nearly all squids, we would be color blind. Does Dawkins think that is superior?
This is deeply confused. No one is arguing that the squid has better eyes for all purposes. The point is a very specific set of issues the human eye has that the squid eye does not.
you've got irritating irregularities in taught evolutionary science which just refuse to die (eg. Lucy) and pesky irregularities in the fossil record which contradict common/popular evolutionary dogma, and are thus ignored or explained away...
And what pray tell is wrong with Lucy? Incidentally, I'm not sure what you mean by explained away, but I'm hoping that it isn't just "scientists noticed this thing and explained it".
Not quite, since Scott is perfectly ok with then trying to interpret what one is getting. The issue isn't philosophical here as much as it is pedagogical in terms of what order one presents thinks in.