Contradictions with the previous films
on
X-Men: First Class
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· Score: 1
There were some minor contradictions with the previous films. For example, in X-3 there's a flashback to Xavier and Magneto going to find Jean Grey and Xavier is already in a wheelchair. Also, the previous films didn't have any references to the apparently major Mystique/Xavier backstory they added in for this movie. Taco is incidentally very correct about how funny having the young Xavier hit on girls was- that was hilarious. Although, at least once he claimed that something was a mutation which probably wasn't; someone had two eyes of different colors. This was much more likely due to some form of mosacisim than a mutation. However, given how much X-Men abuses genetics this is comparatively minor.
The real issue isn't these elements which are unstable and not that interesting. The real question is whether the island of stability exists and how close we are to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability If current theories are correct then there may be a section of elements with atomic numbers near 120 that are much more stable. They might even be stable enough to be used for practical purposes if we can synthesize them on a large scale. Depending on the exact model, they might have half-lives as short as a few seconds (which for elements in this range is comparatively large but not large enough to use for any practical purposes) or it might be as much as 100,000 years (there are more optimistic estimates but they seem extremely unlikely). For comparison, tritium has a half-life of about 12 years and is used in a lot of practical applications. So, if the island exists and we find good ways to synthesize these elements, then we might get some very interesting chemistry.
If I'm reading TFA correctly, this material is mass we already knew had to be around but didn't know where it had gone to. According to TFA, the student in question, Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, the mass in question is essentially conventional mass that is in so called "filaments" between galaxies.
Please tell me the real, fundamental reason (ethics aside) it wouldn't be just as valid a scientific endeavor to forge ahead all at once without trying to understand every step and the implications of every signal. "we don't understand this yet" is not a reason to say we have a long way to go. All it would take is understanding of how to keep these cells alive and connecting, a large number of rat embryos, a clean room, and a scientist who doesn't care about his reputation to make a large working brain-in-a-lab and I think we have all of that.
We don't know enough to even try this. You can't just stick a lot of brain cells together like that. They would need blood vessels to supply them with oxygen, and would need glial cells to provide physical support, and if you had a random mishmash of brain cells, it is unlikely to do anything.
We're getting closer and closer to really understanding how the brain works. Being able to actually make small networks in the lab is a pretty big deal. When we really start understanding this we'll be able to start doing the really cool stuff, like genetically modifying people to increase intelligence and adding direct computer interfaces. At the same time, this research shows that we have a long way to go before we get to that point, in that there's a lot happening with these cells that was unexpected and adds to the long list of things about the brain and neurons that we don't understand.
Spirit succeeded well beyond the initial planned for mission that was only supposed to last 90 days. This is a real triumph of engineering. The headline shouldn't be about failure but about how this lasted 20 times as long as it was intended. Oh, and of course there's the obligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/695/ . And if you don't tear up a little bit on reading that then you don't have a heart.
I would first search the exoplanets pointed to by the most interesting crop circles from the global crop circles database [cropcircleresearch.com] why do the hard work when the aliens have done it for us, just draw a line from the centre of the Earth, through the crop circle to the appropriate starsystem
So the aliens are coming down to Earth from hundreds of light years away, and leaving hints in crop circles about what planets they are coming from instead of just saying hi? And they happen to use a calling card that is easily duplicated by low level technology? And the aliens happened to start in a handful of Western countries and then spread their message around the globe?
I was talking to my barber a few days ago. Nice chap by the name of Occam. He had some interesting things to say about this sort of claim.
In the second half of the 19th century the US took rail transit very seriously. The standardization of the gauge isn't the only example of this. The US also spent a large amount of effort building the transcontinental railroad. A major reason for the success of the United States in the 20th century was the massive investment in infrastructure in the end of the 19th. Unfortunately, the US hasn't done much in the way of large scale infrastructural improvement since the building of the highway system in the 1950s. Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan (the maximum speed of the Acela is less than the average speed for some of the Japanese trains). I'm deeply worried about what the next few years are going to be like.
It isn't my area specifically so I may not be the best person to give advice, but Scott Aaronson's blog - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ seems to be a good way of keeping up on a lot of these issues.
Do you like to have your files, HTTPS sessions, etc encrypted? Yes? You want it to be hard to crack that encryption? Yes? Then you care that P != NP.
Although note that encryption being hard is generally a much stronger claim than P != NP. All known encryption systems that rely on complexity conjectures need stronger claims than P!=NP. Thus for example many rely on the difficulty of factoring integers into primes. It is possible (although it seems unlikely) that P != NP but factoring is still in P. The reason to care about P ?= NP in an encryption context is that if P = NP then encryption definitely doesn't work. But the other direction isn't necessarily the case.
So, what's happened since then? We're still a long way from resolving P ?= NP. There's been a lot of success showing some techniques won't work. The fact that P^A != NP^A for some oracle A and P^B = NP^B for some other oracle B shows that a lot of possible paths simply won't work. Thus for example, there can't be any clever but essentially straightforward reduction of NP problems to P because then we would have P^A=NP^A for all oracles. Similar remarks apply to the so-called natural proof barrier.
There's been more success with related problems. In the last few years, the apparent size of P has grown. Thus, Agrawal et. al. showed that primality testing is in P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_algorithm and there's been a lot of success with taking randomized algorithms that lie in BPP and producing non-randomized versions that are in P. This had lead many to suspect that in fact P=BPP. Most recently there's been some very good work with circuit bounds. Ryan Williams has done very recent technical work showing that NEXP and ACC are not equal. This work seems to get around the natural proof barriers. There's also been some work relating complexity questions to algebraic geometry and the permanent of a matrix. ( No, that's not a typo- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent ). So there's a lot of interesting work going on, but it seems that we're pretty far from actually resolving whether P != NP. I suspect that we'll prove the weaker result that P != PSPACE before we resolve the stronger claim that P != NP.
Part of what you said is sort of correct. None of your ancestors was an amoeba. Whether one of your ancestors was an ape or just a common ancestor between humans and apes is uninteresting semantics. You had ancestors that would look like something any of us would see and say "that's an ape!" . But let's focus on the amoeba claim. Amoebas are not simple primitive organisms. Indeed, they share some similarities with complex life forms such as the presence of a cell nucleus. Amoebas are highly adopted for their niches. This means that no ancestor you had ever resembled an amoeba. You did have single-celled ancestors but that's not the same claim. Let me tentatively suggest that if you think that amoeba is a generic term for single-celled organism then you really don't have nearly enough knowledge to discuss evolution, and thinking you know enough to reject it against the scientific consensus is probably an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect. So take a few biology classes. Local colleges will often allow people to take classes they have. Start with an intro bio class, then take a genetics class and an evolutionary biology class. At that point, if you still reject evolution you'll at least understand what you are rejecting.
At this point, funding is more important than brainstorming. The Allen Array which does much of the basic SETI work is going to be essentially inoperative for about a year due to a severe shortage of funds. See http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/04/25/seti/index.html?hpt=C1. Right now, the main thing that is needed is cash not more ideas. So go over to SETI.org and donate.
Israel has never publically confirmed a nuclear test - but the Vela Incident has always assumed to be a combined South Africa/Israel test.
That's inaccurate. The Vela incident(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident for those too lazy to go over to Wikipedia) was pair of flashes of light detected in 1979 in the Indian Ocean that was consistent with a nuclear test. But, and this is a big but, no other aspects of a nuclear test were present. No radioactive material was found, no characteristic seismic events occurred, and the flashes were only seen by a single satellite. It could have easily been a malfunction or a meteorite or a series of lightning bolts. It is only once one assumes that it really was a nuclear test that Israel and South Africa become likely responsible. However, after the fall of the South African government, there's been a lot of disclosure of their NBC weapons and while there was a disturbing amount of all three, it seems that there nuclear program was not advanced enough as of that time to have engaged in the test. So, the joint test is extremely unlikely. It is still possible for it to have been just an Israeli test but this runs into its own problems including it requiring Israel to have run a quiet, complicated naval operation very far from their normal areas of operation.
There are serious problems with the NPT, and Israel probably has nuclear weapons, and Israel's activity in that regard is one motivating factor for Iran, but that doesn't make the Vela incident good evidence for any of that. Moreover, Israel's possession of nuclear weapons is not a good reason for Iran to ignore its treaty obligations.
**A massive disaster occurs on earth, forcing humanity to flee.**
"Oh wait...we forgot we took apart our space only space ships."
Darwin would be proud.
The shuttles can't do anything beyond going to low Earth orbit and only can carry a handful of people. If that sort of situation occurs humanity is toast even if we had a fleet of shuttles orders of magnitude larger.
Ok. Going off of the description http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/4/3/5/0/2/p435027_index.html TFA and the summary are somewhat inaccurate. He wasn't calculating the speed of different methods. Rather, he took two well known methods of approximating a square root, both of which when starting with a rational number give you a sequence of rational numbers which converge to the square root, and he gave a close to complete description of when the two sequences share infinitely many terms. This doesn't have any obvious algorithm application but it is very nice number theory.
Two questions that hopefully more technically knowledgeable people can comment on. First, this system uses nanotubes- as I understand it, there's no good way of making high-quality naontubes in large batches. Is that still accurate? Second, for most devices isn't the CPU consuming a lot more energy than the memory? If that is the case, won't more efficient memory have only a small impact on overall power consumption?
Degree of controversy has nothing to do with notability. Having a lot of people outside Wikipedia come and claim something shouldn't be deleted happens all the time for things that aren't at all notable (one common class of examples are bands that have nothing more than a myspace page and try to get lots of their friends to go and shout rude things at the Wikipedians.) The ability to send large numbers of people to scream at Wikipedia is not a good argument for notability. Old Man Murray turned out to be notable, in that their were sufficient reliable sources. That is the primary notability criterion and so it was kept. There's no good reason for level of internet drama to measure whether or not something should have an article. There are serious problems on Wikipedia with deletion of good content. The Old Man Murray discussions are not an example of those problems.
Sure, to use the Slashdot example, the article for Slashdot includes multiple newspaper articles talking just about Slashdot, two journal articles about Slashdot, an article from Linux Magazine, and a lot of other stuff. Your other examples fall into a similar category (There are multiple whole length books about Wikipedia for example.) Unfortunately, while there are sources for Old Man Murray, they are generally passing mentions that aren't enough to build an article. I
A deletion nomination is the last resort. However, deletion discussions last at least 7 days (this one lasted from Feb 22 to March 2) during which the article is tagged with a big note saying that deletion is occurring. Many people commented in the deletion discussion. They didn't find any substantial sourcing, just a few passing mentions. Schumin isn't at fault here. The sources simply were not found. If you find additional sources (and I hope you do) then the article can be recreated. Blaming Schumin isn't productive and won't get anywhere. Look for sources, not excuses.
Steiner trees are an example of a class of problems where perfect solutions are difficult to compute but near-optimal solutions are simple. I suspect that the ants are using some set of heuristics that would provide close to optimal solutions. The more interesting thing really is how the ants are able to do this in a completely decentralized fashion having essentially only local knowledge. However, this is not the first example of that sort of thing: ants produce very complicated systems of tunnels using only localized rules. When you've got millions of years of evolution, you develop efficient solutions.
Thanks for the blog link. That looks very interesting. As to the ease of the question, I don't think the major issues had to do with "inspired". I would have identified the key issues as parsing that they were looking for an author, and then associating Walachia with Transylvania and then Dracula.
I tuned in for the end. One thing I'm very curious about is how Watson decided how much to wager for the daily doubles and Final Jeopardy. I haven't seen much discussion of these, but it seemed from the numbers it was giving that it had some set of heuristics to decide how much to wager based on how much money it had, the amount of of money the other contestants had, and possibly (not sure about this) its confidence in the category type. The Final Jeopardy category was 19th century novels, which seems to be the sort of thing Watson excels at (it doesn't do as well in the categories involving wordplay and puns although it seems to still do much better than most humans). However, one thing that came up was the disappointingly easy nature of the Final Jeopardy question. I and another person watching got the question as soon as the answer was put up. It seemed from the behavior of Jennings realized that Watson had won given the easy nature of the question.
Overall, I was impressed with Watson's performance. I suspect that if they had given it a slightly more human sounding voice-sympathizer it would have come across as a much bigger deal. (Also does anyone know if Watson was deliberately made to look like HAL except in soothing colors rather than scary red? I have trouble not seeing that as deliberate.)
Yes, when I read the headline my first thought was "The Israelis can't possibly be so stupid as to do that. That's almost tantamount to admitting to an act of war. And doing it now will just make the faltering Iranian government look more like a valid object of sympathy." And then I read TFA. Yeah.
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There were some minor contradictions with the previous films. For example, in X-3 there's a flashback to Xavier and Magneto going to find Jean Grey and Xavier is already in a wheelchair. Also, the previous films didn't have any references to the apparently major Mystique/Xavier backstory they added in for this movie. Taco is incidentally very correct about how funny having the young Xavier hit on girls was- that was hilarious. Although, at least once he claimed that something was a mutation which probably wasn't; someone had two eyes of different colors. This was much more likely due to some form of mosacisim than a mutation. However, given how much X-Men abuses genetics this is comparatively minor.
The real issue isn't these elements which are unstable and not that interesting. The real question is whether the island of stability exists and how close we are to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability If current theories are correct then there may be a section of elements with atomic numbers near 120 that are much more stable. They might even be stable enough to be used for practical purposes if we can synthesize them on a large scale. Depending on the exact model, they might have half-lives as short as a few seconds (which for elements in this range is comparatively large but not large enough to use for any practical purposes) or it might be as much as 100,000 years (there are more optimistic estimates but they seem extremely unlikely). For comparison, tritium has a half-life of about 12 years and is used in a lot of practical applications. So, if the island exists and we find good ways to synthesize these elements, then we might get some very interesting chemistry.
If I'm reading TFA correctly, this material is mass we already knew had to be around but didn't know where it had gone to. According to TFA, the student in question, Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, the mass in question is essentially conventional mass that is in so called "filaments" between galaxies.
Please tell me the real, fundamental reason (ethics aside) it wouldn't be just as valid a scientific endeavor to forge ahead all at once without trying to understand every step and the implications of every signal. "we don't understand this yet" is not a reason to say we have a long way to go. All it would take is understanding of how to keep these cells alive and connecting, a large number of rat embryos, a clean room, and a scientist who doesn't care about his reputation to make a large working brain-in-a-lab and I think we have all of that.
We don't know enough to even try this. You can't just stick a lot of brain cells together like that. They would need blood vessels to supply them with oxygen, and would need glial cells to provide physical support, and if you had a random mishmash of brain cells, it is unlikely to do anything.
We're getting closer and closer to really understanding how the brain works. Being able to actually make small networks in the lab is a pretty big deal. When we really start understanding this we'll be able to start doing the really cool stuff, like genetically modifying people to increase intelligence and adding direct computer interfaces. At the same time, this research shows that we have a long way to go before we get to that point, in that there's a lot happening with these cells that was unexpected and adds to the long list of things about the brain and neurons that we don't understand.
Spirit succeeded well beyond the initial planned for mission that was only supposed to last 90 days. This is a real triumph of engineering. The headline shouldn't be about failure but about how this lasted 20 times as long as it was intended. Oh, and of course there's the obligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/695/ . And if you don't tear up a little bit on reading that then you don't have a heart.
I would first search the exoplanets pointed to by the most interesting crop circles from the global crop circles database [cropcircleresearch.com] why do the hard work when the aliens have done it for us, just draw a line from the centre of the Earth, through the crop circle to the appropriate starsystem
So the aliens are coming down to Earth from hundreds of light years away, and leaving hints in crop circles about what planets they are coming from instead of just saying hi? And they happen to use a calling card that is easily duplicated by low level technology? And the aliens happened to start in a handful of Western countries and then spread their message around the globe?
I was talking to my barber a few days ago. Nice chap by the name of Occam. He had some interesting things to say about this sort of claim.
That's like spiders suddenly becoming social animals.
Spiders can be social. See for example http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14094404 about groups of spiders working together to build massive webs.See also http://www.pnas.org/content/105/31/10843.full for a take on some of the relevant science.
In the second half of the 19th century the US took rail transit very seriously. The standardization of the gauge isn't the only example of this. The US also spent a large amount of effort building the transcontinental railroad. A major reason for the success of the United States in the 20th century was the massive investment in infrastructure in the end of the 19th. Unfortunately, the US hasn't done much in the way of large scale infrastructural improvement since the building of the highway system in the 1950s. Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan (the maximum speed of the Acela is less than the average speed for some of the Japanese trains). I'm deeply worried about what the next few years are going to be like.
It isn't my area specifically so I may not be the best person to give advice, but Scott Aaronson's blog - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ seems to be a good way of keeping up on a lot of these issues.
Do you like to have your files, HTTPS sessions, etc encrypted? Yes? You want it to be hard to crack that encryption? Yes? Then you care that P != NP.
Although note that encryption being hard is generally a much stronger claim than P != NP. All known encryption systems that rely on complexity conjectures need stronger claims than P!=NP. Thus for example many rely on the difficulty of factoring integers into primes. It is possible (although it seems unlikely) that P != NP but factoring is still in P. The reason to care about P ?= NP in an encryption context is that if P = NP then encryption definitely doesn't work. But the other direction isn't necessarily the case.
So, what's happened since then? We're still a long way from resolving P ?= NP. There's been a lot of success showing some techniques won't work. The fact that P^A != NP^A for some oracle A and P^B = NP^B for some other oracle B shows that a lot of possible paths simply won't work. Thus for example, there can't be any clever but essentially straightforward reduction of NP problems to P because then we would have P^A=NP^A for all oracles. Similar remarks apply to the so-called natural proof barrier.
There's been more success with related problems. In the last few years, the apparent size of P has grown. Thus, Agrawal et. al. showed that primality testing is in P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_algorithm and there's been a lot of success with taking randomized algorithms that lie in BPP and producing non-randomized versions that are in P. This had lead many to suspect that in fact P=BPP. Most recently there's been some very good work with circuit bounds. Ryan Williams has done very recent technical work showing that NEXP and ACC are not equal. This work seems to get around the natural proof barriers. There's also been some work relating complexity questions to algebraic geometry and the permanent of a matrix. ( No, that's not a typo- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent ). So there's a lot of interesting work going on, but it seems that we're pretty far from actually resolving whether P != NP. I suspect that we'll prove the weaker result that P != PSPACE before we resolve the stronger claim that P != NP.
Part of what you said is sort of correct. None of your ancestors was an amoeba. Whether one of your ancestors was an ape or just a common ancestor between humans and apes is uninteresting semantics. You had ancestors that would look like something any of us would see and say "that's an ape!" . But let's focus on the amoeba claim. Amoebas are not simple primitive organisms. Indeed, they share some similarities with complex life forms such as the presence of a cell nucleus. Amoebas are highly adopted for their niches. This means that no ancestor you had ever resembled an amoeba. You did have single-celled ancestors but that's not the same claim. Let me tentatively suggest that if you think that amoeba is a generic term for single-celled organism then you really don't have nearly enough knowledge to discuss evolution, and thinking you know enough to reject it against the scientific consensus is probably an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect. So take a few biology classes. Local colleges will often allow people to take classes they have. Start with an intro bio class, then take a genetics class and an evolutionary biology class. At that point, if you still reject evolution you'll at least understand what you are rejecting.
At this point, funding is more important than brainstorming. The Allen Array which does much of the basic SETI work is going to be essentially inoperative for about a year due to a severe shortage of funds. See http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/04/25/seti/index.html?hpt=C1. Right now, the main thing that is needed is cash not more ideas. So go over to SETI.org and donate.
Israel has never publically confirmed a nuclear test - but the Vela Incident has always assumed to be a combined South Africa/Israel test.
That's inaccurate. The Vela incident(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident for those too lazy to go over to Wikipedia) was pair of flashes of light detected in 1979 in the Indian Ocean that was consistent with a nuclear test. But, and this is a big but, no other aspects of a nuclear test were present. No radioactive material was found, no characteristic seismic events occurred, and the flashes were only seen by a single satellite. It could have easily been a malfunction or a meteorite or a series of lightning bolts. It is only once one assumes that it really was a nuclear test that Israel and South Africa become likely responsible. However, after the fall of the South African government, there's been a lot of disclosure of their NBC weapons and while there was a disturbing amount of all three, it seems that there nuclear program was not advanced enough as of that time to have engaged in the test. So, the joint test is extremely unlikely. It is still possible for it to have been just an Israeli test but this runs into its own problems including it requiring Israel to have run a quiet, complicated naval operation very far from their normal areas of operation.
There are serious problems with the NPT, and Israel probably has nuclear weapons, and Israel's activity in that regard is one motivating factor for Iran, but that doesn't make the Vela incident good evidence for any of that. Moreover, Israel's possession of nuclear weapons is not a good reason for Iran to ignore its treaty obligations.
**A massive disaster occurs on earth, forcing humanity to flee.** "Oh wait...we forgot we took apart our space only space ships." Darwin would be proud.
The shuttles can't do anything beyond going to low Earth orbit and only can carry a handful of people. If that sort of situation occurs humanity is toast even if we had a fleet of shuttles orders of magnitude larger.
Ok. Going off of the description http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/4/3/5/0/2/p435027_index.html TFA and the summary are somewhat inaccurate. He wasn't calculating the speed of different methods. Rather, he took two well known methods of approximating a square root, both of which when starting with a rational number give you a sequence of rational numbers which converge to the square root, and he gave a close to complete description of when the two sequences share infinitely many terms. This doesn't have any obvious algorithm application but it is very nice number theory.
Two questions that hopefully more technically knowledgeable people can comment on. First, this system uses nanotubes- as I understand it, there's no good way of making high-quality naontubes in large batches. Is that still accurate? Second, for most devices isn't the CPU consuming a lot more energy than the memory? If that is the case, won't more efficient memory have only a small impact on overall power consumption?
Degree of controversy has nothing to do with notability. Having a lot of people outside Wikipedia come and claim something shouldn't be deleted happens all the time for things that aren't at all notable (one common class of examples are bands that have nothing more than a myspace page and try to get lots of their friends to go and shout rude things at the Wikipedians.) The ability to send large numbers of people to scream at Wikipedia is not a good argument for notability. Old Man Murray turned out to be notable, in that their were sufficient reliable sources. That is the primary notability criterion and so it was kept. There's no good reason for level of internet drama to measure whether or not something should have an article. There are serious problems on Wikipedia with deletion of good content. The Old Man Murray discussions are not an example of those problems.
Sure, to use the Slashdot example, the article for Slashdot includes multiple newspaper articles talking just about Slashdot, two journal articles about Slashdot, an article from Linux Magazine, and a lot of other stuff. Your other examples fall into a similar category (There are multiple whole length books about Wikipedia for example.) Unfortunately, while there are sources for Old Man Murray, they are generally passing mentions that aren't enough to build an article. I
A deletion nomination is the last resort. However, deletion discussions last at least 7 days (this one lasted from Feb 22 to March 2) during which the article is tagged with a big note saying that deletion is occurring. Many people commented in the deletion discussion. They didn't find any substantial sourcing, just a few passing mentions. Schumin isn't at fault here. The sources simply were not found. If you find additional sources (and I hope you do) then the article can be recreated. Blaming Schumin isn't productive and won't get anywhere. Look for sources, not excuses.
Steiner trees are an example of a class of problems where perfect solutions are difficult to compute but near-optimal solutions are simple. I suspect that the ants are using some set of heuristics that would provide close to optimal solutions. The more interesting thing really is how the ants are able to do this in a completely decentralized fashion having essentially only local knowledge. However, this is not the first example of that sort of thing: ants produce very complicated systems of tunnels using only localized rules. When you've got millions of years of evolution, you develop efficient solutions.
Thanks for the blog link. That looks very interesting. As to the ease of the question, I don't think the major issues had to do with "inspired". I would have identified the key issues as parsing that they were looking for an author, and then associating Walachia with Transylvania and then Dracula.
I tuned in for the end. One thing I'm very curious about is how Watson decided how much to wager for the daily doubles and Final Jeopardy. I haven't seen much discussion of these, but it seemed from the numbers it was giving that it had some set of heuristics to decide how much to wager based on how much money it had, the amount of of money the other contestants had, and possibly (not sure about this) its confidence in the category type. The Final Jeopardy category was 19th century novels, which seems to be the sort of thing Watson excels at (it doesn't do as well in the categories involving wordplay and puns although it seems to still do much better than most humans). However, one thing that came up was the disappointingly easy nature of the Final Jeopardy question. I and another person watching got the question as soon as the answer was put up. It seemed from the behavior of Jennings realized that Watson had won given the easy nature of the question.
Overall, I was impressed with Watson's performance. I suspect that if they had given it a slightly more human sounding voice-sympathizer it would have come across as a much bigger deal. (Also does anyone know if Watson was deliberately made to look like HAL except in soothing colors rather than scary red? I have trouble not seeing that as deliberate.)
Yes, when I read the headline my first thought was "The Israelis can't possibly be so stupid as to do that. That's almost tantamount to admitting to an act of war. And doing it now will just make the faltering Iranian government look more like a valid object of sympathy." And then I read TFA. Yeah.