Didn't they tally up the numbers in 1650. So it's at LEAST 6360 years old now.
Usher published his calculation the late 1648. Note that he gives the initial date of creation as 4004 BC, Sunday October 23rd. That makes the current year 6014. However, he's not the first person to make such a calculation. The traditional Jewish calendar which has been used for about 1500 years at minimum, puts the current year as 5771 since creation. Some Christian denominations with literalist leanings have gotten other numbers as well. In general, a literal reading of the Bible gets you an age somewhere between 5400 and 7000 or so but the exact time span is complicated. For example, the book of Judges has irregularities and vague parts so working out how much time it is supposed to be is difficult (most likely Judges is a compilation of different stories from each of the tribes in the pre-monarchical period that then became ascribed to leaders of the united tribes. Some of the stories in Judges explicitly have leaders who only control a handful of the Twelve tribes). There are other issues. For example, the sections in Kings and Chronicles have different chronologies, giving different lengths of reign for some kings. Also, working out the chronology from the end of the First Kingdom to the middle of the Second Kingdom is frat with difficulties, including serious contradictions between the Biblical text and other extant texts from that time period. This is annoying to not just Biblical literalists but also historians and archaeologists.
just as there are an infinite number of primes. It's not like the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi is any more significant than say the 200th. At least with primes you reduce the time for factorization.
Actually finding large primes has very little to do with factorization. In general, the most efficient factorization procedures, the elliptic curve sieve and the general number field sieve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_field_sieve don't benefit from knowing any primes in advance beyond a few very small primes. Moreover, the largest primes known are all of special forms that don't show up very often. For example, the very largest primes are known as Mersenne primes which are primes which are 1 less than a power of 2. We can determine if such numbers are prime using a very efficient test called the Lucas-Lehmer test. The largest such prime known today is 2^43,112,609-1. This is much, much larger than any number we'd want to practically factor (for example numbers used in RSA encryption are generally on the order of a few hundred digits. It is believed that numbers with 2000 or so digits will be secure for the indefinite future). So yeah, finding large primes is about as useful as this when it comes to practical factoring. There are other somewhat good reasons to be interested in finding large primes, but factoring isn't one of them.
Actually, there was quite a fight on where to put it, the final contender were Japan and France. I'm not sure why France won, perhaps fewer earthquake (a significant factor over several decades).
I'm not aware of earthquakes being a concern. Only some parts of Japan have serious Earthquake problems. A large part of the matter was politics as usual but as I understand it one of the actual reasons France won was that they had more pre-existing relevant infrastructure and research set up.
So, because Blizzard has made games that you like, they're above reproach?
The claim being responded to is whether Blizzard is original in their games. The comparison being made was between Blizzard and Zynga where Zynga gets pretty much all of its products by copying what competitors have done. The point is that Blizzard has been very creative. That doesn't say anything about Blizzard being "beyond reproach."
Blizzard has certainly had some games that were derivative. Warcraft was in some ways derivative of Dune. And Diablo was essentially just a standard rogue-like game but with better graphics and slightly more options. And there wasn't much that was innovative to WoW. However, some things Blizzard has done have been very noteworthy. Starcraft for example was the first real time strategy game that had very different tech trees and units for each side but was still balanced. And they did that with not just two, but three sides. Warcraft III then did the same thing with even more variation and four sides. And Blizzard has done a fantastic job at pushing the boundaries when it comes to graphics. The comparison beween Blizzard and these people doesn't hold at all.
What does the claim that 17% of the population believe in a geocentric earth mean? Even assuming that there's no one in that population that is simply saying that for kicks, it seems probable that a large part are simply answering that way because they don't know anything either way and are just guessing. At some level that's not as bad as having people who actively believe in geocentrism. But at another level, that means that one should expect that around 34% are really ignorant and have of them just got lucky when asked. That's not good. However, I suspect that some of these answers really are just people messing with the polsters or not bothering to thing.
But one thing to note is that many of the geocentrists are religious. Not only is geocentrism common among Christians but there's a substantial fraction of ultra-Orthodox (charedi) Jews who are affirmatively geocentrist. This is especially common among the chabad chassidim who are often geocentrists because their guru, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, made pro-geocentrist comments and because they want to preserve the word of Maimonides as inerrant (of course some of these are the same sort of people who refuse kidney transplants because the Talmud says that one kidney is the seat of your good instincts and the other is the seat of your bad instincts. So we're not talking about highly enlightened individuals). There are however, some very disturbing studies by Alexander Nussbaum showing that even among modern Orthodox Jews, anti-science views are disturbingly common. See for example http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_orthodox_judaism_and_evolution.html .
However, one thing to note is that although the conference in question in the top post is Catholic, affirmative geocentrism is not nearly as uncommon among evangelical Protestants as one would hope. Indeed, it is common enough that Answers in Genesis, one of the world's largest young earth creatonist ministries, feels a need to have essays that talk about why Christians don't need to be geocentrists. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/geocentrism.asp . Incidentally, There's some evidence that anti-Copernican sentiment actually started in Protestants and only spread to Catholics a few years later. Thomas Kuhn discusses this in his excellent book "The Copernican Revolution" although my understanding is that more modern historians disagree with him on this point and many don't think that there is a strong case for anti-Copernicanism as an originally Protestant ideology.
Finally, note that there are still some flat-earthers out there although they are very rare. They aren't as uncommon in the Islamic world. See for example this segment on Iraqi TV http://haha.nu/interesting/iraqi-tv-debate-is-the-earth-flat/ . In the West there is still some flat-Earthism but it is often more conspiratorial than religious in nature. See http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/ although some of the people there are trolls, some are quite sincere.
The poster you are replying to did not say IQ, he said intelligence. But let's for a second assume that he had said IQ. Would your evidence about someone with a 195 IQ be useful? Well, considering that this is an anecdote from a book called "Outliers" and an outlier is an extreme point in a statistical distribution that doesn't match the rest of the data, I'm going to go with that not being very relevant. And in fact there's a correlation between IQ and income. The exact correlation is unclear, with there being some evidence that there's a diminishing marginal return (that is, at low IQs slightly higher IQ adds a lot of income but as IQ gets higher, adding more IQ doesn't increase the chance of a high income by that much). See for example http://pss.sagepub.com/content/15/6/373 (that study actually looked primarily at SAT scores but they have a method of estimating a conversion between the two.) See also the work by Jay Zagorsky which found a correlation between IQ and net wealth (Unfortunately, I don't have a citation for that off the top of my head other than secondary sources such as http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm and I can't find the studies on the OSU website. They used to be at http://www.chrr.osu.edu/surveys but they don't seem to be linked there anymore. This should be good enough for a Slashdot comment.)
Didn't Gödel prove that you can't prove this or any statement like this?
No, the statement given looks at bounded proof lengths (that is proofs of at most some length). Those can be listed completely up to any given bound. What Godel's shows you is that you can't in general ask "is there a proof of statement s from axioms in A" but the class here is "Is there a proof of statement s from axioms in A with the proof length at most k?" which is much easier to answer.
I don't think you can really estimate the size of a proof by the complexity of the problem stated.
You are correct that you cannot. In fact, this is a consequence of Godel's theorem. Proof sketch: Assume we have some nice axiomatic system A, that can model the arithmetic of the natural numbers (say Peano arithmetic), and assume that this system is not stupid (axioms are recursively enumerable, valid proofs are recursively enumerable, system is consistent. I think that's all I need but there may be some other silly issues). Assume that there is a computable function f, such that any true statement in A of length n has a proof of length at most f(n). Then I claim that we can use this to resolve whether any given statement has a proof in A by looking at all proofs of length up to f(n). This contradicts standard corollaries of Godel's theorem. So no such f can exist. Thus, minimum proof length for some statements must be much longer than the length of the statements.
To summarize what difficulty the proof ran into: There's a general class of NP-complete problems known as SAT. SAT is essentially given a collection of Boolean variables (so can have values "yes" or "no") and given some logical statement of those variables is there an assignment to those variables that makes the statement true? So for example, for A ^ ~ A, there isn't one, but for say A v B there are satisfactory solutions. This problem is the canonical NP-complete problem. Now, the attempted proof examined k-SAT, which is a subset of SAT known to also be NP-complete. k-SAT is the same thing as SAT but each statement must be a sequence of ands containing k inputs into set of ors. So for example if one was looking at 3-SAT "(A v B v ~ C) ^ (A v A v ~D)" would be a valid example. Now, it happens that for k>2, k-SAT is NP-complete. Deolalikar tried to examine the statistical properties of k-SAT and derive a contradiction from the assumption that k-SAT was polynomial time solvable. However, this runs into issues because from a statistical perspective 2-SAT is known to look statistically more or less the same as k-SAT, and 2-SAT is polynomial time solvable. This is a deep barrier which the proof did not overcome.
There are other deep barriers that the paper did not obviously overcome, including what is known as the "natural proof" barrier and the "relativization" barrier. The last essentially says that P=NP is true in some other computing models very similar to the standard Turing model (you consider Turing machines with special black boxes called oracles attached which answer specific questions quickly.) Similarly, it turns out that P != NP for some oracles as well. Thus, any valid resolution of P=NP will have to break down in some more or less obvious way when one tries to run the proof through for an oracle machine. If one can't point to where in a proof this would occur, this is a good indication that the proof is not valid.
Overall, I'm highly pessimistic that we are going to resolve P=NP anytime soon although I strongly believe that P != NP. There are currently much weaker claims than P=NP that we still cannot prove. We can't as far as I'm aware even get a strongly non-trivial result of the form for some explicit constant C, "No NP complete problem can be solved in polynomial time with a polynomial of degree at most C." And that's much weaker than showing that P != NP, because P !=NP is essentially that statement made for any value of C. We seem to need serious new insights and possibly lots of new machinery and structures before we can have a really good chance at cracking this nut.
While the parent has been modified "funny" it really should be modified as informative or insightful. Scott Aaronson for example has discussed this issue in detail. If P=NP then we expect proofs in general in some sense to be easy but if P !=NP then in some sense proofs are difficult. (More rigorously speaking, given a well-behaved axiomatic system A, questions of the form "Is there a proof of statement s from axioms in A with the proof length at most k?" are NP-hard and for reasonable enough systems in fact NP-complete. So if P=NP proving that in some rough sense should be easy. But if P != NP then we expect proofs to be difficult. This is one of the reasons many experts actually believe P !=NP.
Did you read TFA and the paragraph with Prof Fisher where she connects this to millions of years of evolution for what would be relevant for men throwing weapons?
This sort of study might be interesting but it seems clear that the article and one of the quoted anthropologists are assuming that this is a human universal or close to that. But this study was done in a single country with a small group of people. Without a lot more detail it isn't possible to tell if this is an ingrained preference or is culturally driven. Overarching conclusions from interesting but not broad studies like this give ev psych and anthropology a bad name.
I don't have time to watch this right now, but if I have to make a guess, the primary points are going to be about the common misconceptions about quantum computers. The most common such belief seems to be the belief that a quantum computer can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. This is false although many problems which are believed to be in NP are believed to be not in P are solvable with quantum computer. The most prominent example is integer factoring since the difficulty of factoring large integers is something many crypto systems depend on (such as RSA). There's probably some addressing also that consciousness probably has nothing to do with any quantum effects in the human brain because structures there are generally too warm and too large to have meaningful quantum entanglement.
"The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine it, it's stranger than we can imagine it. (A. Einstein)
That's a misquote. It is a garbled quote of a line actually due to biologist J. B. S. Haldane who said "My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." The line is from "Possible Worlds" (sometimes titled "Possible Worlds and Other Papers.")
Being a non-american and having lived in many different countries, it's sometimes really weird how US people so often think every other country is the root of evil and only US is good. You know, it's of course impossible that US government might want to paint a worse picture of their enemies than what they actually are! It's not even only Cuba.. It's China, Russia, North Korea, whatever country with different views, culture and society.
And being an American, it is sometimes really weird how non-Americans have this strange view of Americans that makes us into a monolithic hive mind with views that actual Americans generally don't have. Yes, most Americans probably consider the North Korean government to be evil. That's a government which systematically abuses and starves its residents. Most Europeans probably have similar attitudes about North Korea. And I'm pretty sure that most Americans don't see Russia or China as at all in the same category as North Korea. And the notion that Americans think that there's something deeply wrong with "whatever country with different views, culture and society." I doubt that Americans think that about most European countries or Japan or India or Brazil or many other places.
There are few things more annoying than finding something impressive or good about someone I dislike and consider responsible for a lot of people suffering. I'd love to hear about how Castro hates the internet and considers it to be a series of tubes filled with lies. But using it to keep track of the news in detail across the globe? That's something that many people his age simply cannot or will not do. Stupid facts messing with my preconceptions again...
It's certainly easier than, you know, actually acknowledging and dealing with their ideas...
What ideas? You mean ideas like somehow thinking that Patrick Henry was a supporter of the US Constitution http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/09/patrick_henry_and_the_tea_part_1.php. Or maybe you mean Glenn Beck's pseudoscientific ideas about how the Smithsonian is involved in a massive conspiracy to cover up 19th century archaelogical facts?http://anthroslug.blogspot.com/2010/08/glenn-becks-pseudo-archaeology-part-1.html. Or maybe you mean the idea that Obama is going to put Republicans into concentration camps http://boingboing.net/2009/03/17/foxs-glenn-beck-says.html? You know, what? I'm sick of the notion that there is anything resembling worthwhile ideas coming from this man. At a certain point, it is a waste of time to actually respond to this paranoid nonsense in any other way than ridicule. And to the people who believe him or listen to him? Fuck 'em. Fuck every one of them for being too lazy or too stupid or too tribalistic to exercise their brains at all.
Now, if you just we're talking about the saner end of the Tea Partiers then there might be some argument that they have actual ideas, mainly resembling the form "I like government policies that make life better for me but not for other people." Do I need to address what's wrong with that also or are we done?
One possible solution is to only let it kick out IP addresses or computers that are new to the account and only let one do so from an IP range that has been used by the account previously.
Your claim that science should stay out of religion is misguided: People frequently make this claim and have had the area that constituted religion be simply larger. 300 years ago this consisteted of explaining lightning. 150 years ago explaining the origin of species was science stamping on religion. 130 years ago explaining the biological cause of disease was science moving into the sphere of religion. It is insufficient to say "Well, we don't already understand this so I'm going to label this as only for theology. Keep out science!"
Your claim that scientific evidence never convinces religious people is also wrong. When I was a little kid I was a Young Earth Creationist and later had strong sympathies with Old Earth Creationism. I changed my mind when it became clear to me that the scientific evidence was overwhelmingly against such positions (the general mendacity and ignorance of the creationists didn't help matters either). So let science do everything it can do. And if someone won't listen? That's their own damn fault.
I'm someone who argued strongly against removing of spoiler warnings from Wikipedia and someone who has argued with David Gerard over lots of stuff on Wikipedia. I can say pretty easily that most of the above is utter nonsense. Of course, I'm someone who also seems to get on the list of corrupt Wikipedians pretty often. So take it as you will...
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't they tally up the numbers in 1650. So it's at LEAST 6360 years old now.
Usher published his calculation the late 1648. Note that he gives the initial date of creation as 4004 BC, Sunday October 23rd. That makes the current year 6014. However, he's not the first person to make such a calculation. The traditional Jewish calendar which has been used for about 1500 years at minimum, puts the current year as 5771 since creation. Some Christian denominations with literalist leanings have gotten other numbers as well. In general, a literal reading of the Bible gets you an age somewhere between 5400 and 7000 or so but the exact time span is complicated. For example, the book of Judges has irregularities and vague parts so working out how much time it is supposed to be is difficult (most likely Judges is a compilation of different stories from each of the tribes in the pre-monarchical period that then became ascribed to leaders of the united tribes. Some of the stories in Judges explicitly have leaders who only control a handful of the Twelve tribes). There are other issues. For example, the sections in Kings and Chronicles have different chronologies, giving different lengths of reign for some kings. Also, working out the chronology from the end of the First Kingdom to the middle of the Second Kingdom is frat with difficulties, including serious contradictions between the Biblical text and other extant texts from that time period. This is annoying to not just Biblical literalists but also historians and archaeologists.
Yes, sorry I think I was thinking "binary digits" and then somehow dropped a word. Either that or there was a generic stupidity moment on my part.
Ok. Reread it. Now confused. What did you mean when you said "At least with primes you reduce the time for factorization"?
just as there are an infinite number of primes. It's not like the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi is any more significant than say the 200th. At least with primes you reduce the time for factorization.
Actually finding large primes has very little to do with factorization. In general, the most efficient factorization procedures, the elliptic curve sieve and the general number field sieve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_field_sieve don't benefit from knowing any primes in advance beyond a few very small primes. Moreover, the largest primes known are all of special forms that don't show up very often. For example, the very largest primes are known as Mersenne primes which are primes which are 1 less than a power of 2. We can determine if such numbers are prime using a very efficient test called the Lucas-Lehmer test. The largest such prime known today is 2^43,112,609-1. This is much, much larger than any number we'd want to practically factor (for example numbers used in RSA encryption are generally on the order of a few hundred digits. It is believed that numbers with 2000 or so digits will be secure for the indefinite future). So yeah, finding large primes is about as useful as this when it comes to practical factoring. There are other somewhat good reasons to be interested in finding large primes, but factoring isn't one of them.
Actually, there was quite a fight on where to put it, the final contender were Japan and France. I'm not sure why France won, perhaps fewer earthquake (a significant factor over several decades).
I'm not aware of earthquakes being a concern. Only some parts of Japan have serious Earthquake problems. A large part of the matter was politics as usual but as I understand it one of the actual reasons France won was that they had more pre-existing relevant infrastructure and research set up.
Even if you go off the grid the terminators will still track you down.. SkyNet will triumph. Neither Arnold nor Summer Glau can save you.
So, because Blizzard has made games that you like, they're above reproach?
The claim being responded to is whether Blizzard is original in their games. The comparison being made was between Blizzard and Zynga where Zynga gets pretty much all of its products by copying what competitors have done. The point is that Blizzard has been very creative. That doesn't say anything about Blizzard being "beyond reproach."
Blizzard has certainly had some games that were derivative. Warcraft was in some ways derivative of Dune. And Diablo was essentially just a standard rogue-like game but with better graphics and slightly more options. And there wasn't much that was innovative to WoW. However, some things Blizzard has done have been very noteworthy. Starcraft for example was the first real time strategy game that had very different tech trees and units for each side but was still balanced. And they did that with not just two, but three sides. Warcraft III then did the same thing with even more variation and four sides. And Blizzard has done a fantastic job at pushing the boundaries when it comes to graphics. The comparison beween Blizzard and these people doesn't hold at all.
What does the claim that 17% of the population believe in a geocentric earth mean? Even assuming that there's no one in that population that is simply saying that for kicks, it seems probable that a large part are simply answering that way because they don't know anything either way and are just guessing. At some level that's not as bad as having people who actively believe in geocentrism. But at another level, that means that one should expect that around 34% are really ignorant and have of them just got lucky when asked. That's not good. However, I suspect that some of these answers really are just people messing with the polsters or not bothering to thing.
But one thing to note is that many of the geocentrists are religious. Not only is geocentrism common among Christians but there's a substantial fraction of ultra-Orthodox (charedi) Jews who are affirmatively geocentrist. This is especially common among the chabad chassidim who are often geocentrists because their guru, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, made pro-geocentrist comments and because they want to preserve the word of Maimonides as inerrant (of course some of these are the same sort of people who refuse kidney transplants because the Talmud says that one kidney is the seat of your good instincts and the other is the seat of your bad instincts. So we're not talking about highly enlightened individuals). There are however, some very disturbing studies by Alexander Nussbaum showing that even among modern Orthodox Jews, anti-science views are disturbingly common. See for example http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_orthodox_judaism_and_evolution.html .
However, one thing to note is that although the conference in question in the top post is Catholic, affirmative geocentrism is not nearly as uncommon among evangelical Protestants as one would hope. Indeed, it is common enough that Answers in Genesis, one of the world's largest young earth creatonist ministries, feels a need to have essays that talk about why Christians don't need to be geocentrists. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/geocentrism.asp . Incidentally, There's some evidence that anti-Copernican sentiment actually started in Protestants and only spread to Catholics a few years later. Thomas Kuhn discusses this in his excellent book "The Copernican Revolution" although my understanding is that more modern historians disagree with him on this point and many don't think that there is a strong case for anti-Copernicanism as an originally Protestant ideology.
Finally, note that there are still some flat-earthers out there although they are very rare. They aren't as uncommon in the Islamic world. See for example this segment on Iraqi TV http://haha.nu/interesting/iraqi-tv-debate-is-the-earth-flat/ . In the West there is still some flat-Earthism but it is often more conspiratorial than religious in nature. See http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/ although some of the people there are trolls, some are quite sincere.
The poster you are replying to did not say IQ, he said intelligence. But let's for a second assume that he had said IQ. Would your evidence about someone with a 195 IQ be useful? Well, considering that this is an anecdote from a book called "Outliers" and an outlier is an extreme point in a statistical distribution that doesn't match the rest of the data, I'm going to go with that not being very relevant. And in fact there's a correlation between IQ and income. The exact correlation is unclear, with there being some evidence that there's a diminishing marginal return (that is, at low IQs slightly higher IQ adds a lot of income but as IQ gets higher, adding more IQ doesn't increase the chance of a high income by that much). See for example http://pss.sagepub.com/content/15/6/373 (that study actually looked primarily at SAT scores but they have a method of estimating a conversion between the two.) See also the work by Jay Zagorsky which found a correlation between IQ and net wealth (Unfortunately, I don't have a citation for that off the top of my head other than secondary sources such as http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm and I can't find the studies on the OSU website. They used to be at http://www.chrr.osu.edu/surveys but they don't seem to be linked there anymore. This should be good enough for a Slashdot comment.)
The entire problem is that we can't show that SAT isn't in P. The claim that P != NP is identical to the claim that SAT is not in P.
Didn't Gödel prove that you can't prove this or any statement like this?
No, the statement given looks at bounded proof lengths (that is proofs of at most some length). Those can be listed completely up to any given bound. What Godel's shows you is that you can't in general ask "is there a proof of statement s from axioms in A" but the class here is "Is there a proof of statement s from axioms in A with the proof length at most k?" which is much easier to answer.
I don't think you can really estimate the size of a proof by the complexity of the problem stated.
You are correct that you cannot. In fact, this is a consequence of Godel's theorem. Proof sketch: Assume we have some nice axiomatic system A, that can model the arithmetic of the natural numbers (say Peano arithmetic), and assume that this system is not stupid (axioms are recursively enumerable, valid proofs are recursively enumerable, system is consistent. I think that's all I need but there may be some other silly issues). Assume that there is a computable function f, such that any true statement in A of length n has a proof of length at most f(n). Then I claim that we can use this to resolve whether any given statement has a proof in A by looking at all proofs of length up to f(n). This contradicts standard corollaries of Godel's theorem. So no such f can exist. Thus, minimum proof length for some statements must be much longer than the length of the statements.
To summarize what difficulty the proof ran into: There's a general class of NP-complete problems known as SAT. SAT is essentially given a collection of Boolean variables (so can have values "yes" or "no") and given some logical statement of those variables is there an assignment to those variables that makes the statement true? So for example, for A ^ ~ A, there isn't one, but for say A v B there are satisfactory solutions. This problem is the canonical NP-complete problem. Now, the attempted proof examined k-SAT, which is a subset of SAT known to also be NP-complete. k-SAT is the same thing as SAT but each statement must be a sequence of ands containing k inputs into set of ors. So for example if one was looking at 3-SAT "(A v B v ~ C) ^ (A v A v ~D)" would be a valid example. Now, it happens that for k>2, k-SAT is NP-complete. Deolalikar tried to examine the statistical properties of k-SAT and derive a contradiction from the assumption that k-SAT was polynomial time solvable. However, this runs into issues because from a statistical perspective 2-SAT is known to look statistically more or less the same as k-SAT, and 2-SAT is polynomial time solvable. This is a deep barrier which the proof did not overcome.
There are other deep barriers that the paper did not obviously overcome, including what is known as the "natural proof" barrier and the "relativization" barrier. The last essentially says that P=NP is true in some other computing models very similar to the standard Turing model (you consider Turing machines with special black boxes called oracles attached which answer specific questions quickly.) Similarly, it turns out that P != NP for some oracles as well. Thus, any valid resolution of P=NP will have to break down in some more or less obvious way when one tries to run the proof through for an oracle machine. If one can't point to where in a proof this would occur, this is a good indication that the proof is not valid.
Overall, I'm highly pessimistic that we are going to resolve P=NP anytime soon although I strongly believe that P != NP. There are currently much weaker claims than P=NP that we still cannot prove. We can't as far as I'm aware even get a strongly non-trivial result of the form for some explicit constant C, "No NP complete problem can be solved in polynomial time with a polynomial of degree at most C." And that's much weaker than showing that P != NP, because P !=NP is essentially that statement made for any value of C. We seem to need serious new insights and possibly lots of new machinery and structures before we can have a really good chance at cracking this nut.
While the parent has been modified "funny" it really should be modified as informative or insightful. Scott Aaronson for example has discussed this issue in detail. If P=NP then we expect proofs in general in some sense to be easy but if P !=NP then in some sense proofs are difficult. (More rigorously speaking, given a well-behaved axiomatic system A, questions of the form "Is there a proof of statement s from axioms in A with the proof length at most k?" are NP-hard and for reasonable enough systems in fact NP-complete. So if P=NP proving that in some rough sense should be easy. But if P != NP then we expect proofs to be difficult. This is one of the reasons many experts actually believe P !=NP.
Did you read TFA and the paragraph with Prof Fisher where she connects this to millions of years of evolution for what would be relevant for men throwing weapons?
This sort of study might be interesting but it seems clear that the article and one of the quoted anthropologists are assuming that this is a human universal or close to that. But this study was done in a single country with a small group of people. Without a lot more detail it isn't possible to tell if this is an ingrained preference or is culturally driven. Overarching conclusions from interesting but not broad studies like this give ev psych and anthropology a bad name.
I don't have time to watch this right now, but if I have to make a guess, the primary points are going to be about the common misconceptions about quantum computers. The most common such belief seems to be the belief that a quantum computer can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. This is false although many problems which are believed to be in NP are believed to be not in P are solvable with quantum computer. The most prominent example is integer factoring since the difficulty of factoring large integers is something many crypto systems depend on (such as RSA). There's probably some addressing also that consciousness probably has nothing to do with any quantum effects in the human brain because structures there are generally too warm and too large to have meaningful quantum entanglement.
"The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine it, it's stranger than we can imagine it. (A. Einstein)
That's a misquote. It is a garbled quote of a line actually due to biologist J. B. S. Haldane who said "My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." The line is from "Possible Worlds" (sometimes titled "Possible Worlds and Other Papers.")
Being a non-american and having lived in many different countries, it's sometimes really weird how US people so often think every other country is the root of evil and only US is good. You know, it's of course impossible that US government might want to paint a worse picture of their enemies than what they actually are! It's not even only Cuba.. It's China, Russia, North Korea, whatever country with different views, culture and society.
And being an American, it is sometimes really weird how non-Americans have this strange view of Americans that makes us into a monolithic hive mind with views that actual Americans generally don't have. Yes, most Americans probably consider the North Korean government to be evil. That's a government which systematically abuses and starves its residents. Most Europeans probably have similar attitudes about North Korea. And I'm pretty sure that most Americans don't see Russia or China as at all in the same category as North Korea. And the notion that Americans think that there's something deeply wrong with "whatever country with different views, culture and society." I doubt that Americans think that about most European countries or Japan or India or Brazil or many other places.
There are few things more annoying than finding something impressive or good about someone I dislike and consider responsible for a lot of people suffering. I'd love to hear about how Castro hates the internet and considers it to be a series of tubes filled with lies. But using it to keep track of the news in detail across the globe? That's something that many people his age simply cannot or will not do. Stupid facts messing with my preconceptions again...
It's certainly easier than, you know, actually acknowledging and dealing with their ideas...
What ideas? You mean ideas like somehow thinking that Patrick Henry was a supporter of the US Constitution http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/09/patrick_henry_and_the_tea_part_1.php. Or maybe you mean Glenn Beck's pseudoscientific ideas about how the Smithsonian is involved in a massive conspiracy to cover up 19th century archaelogical facts?http://anthroslug.blogspot.com/2010/08/glenn-becks-pseudo-archaeology-part-1.html. Or maybe you mean the idea that Obama is going to put Republicans into concentration camps http://boingboing.net/2009/03/17/foxs-glenn-beck-says.html? You know, what? I'm sick of the notion that there is anything resembling worthwhile ideas coming from this man. At a certain point, it is a waste of time to actually respond to this paranoid nonsense in any other way than ridicule. And to the people who believe him or listen to him? Fuck 'em. Fuck every one of them for being too lazy or too stupid or too tribalistic to exercise their brains at all.
Now, if you just we're talking about the saner end of the Tea Partiers then there might be some argument that they have actual ideas, mainly resembling the form "I like government policies that make life better for me but not for other people." Do I need to address what's wrong with that also or are we done?
One possible solution is to only let it kick out IP addresses or computers that are new to the account and only let one do so from an IP range that has been used by the account previously.
Your claim that science should stay out of religion is misguided: People frequently make this claim and have had the area that constituted religion be simply larger. 300 years ago this consisteted of explaining lightning. 150 years ago explaining the origin of species was science stamping on religion. 130 years ago explaining the biological cause of disease was science moving into the sphere of religion. It is insufficient to say "Well, we don't already understand this so I'm going to label this as only for theology. Keep out science!"
Your claim that scientific evidence never convinces religious people is also wrong. When I was a little kid I was a Young Earth Creationist and later had strong sympathies with Old Earth Creationism. I changed my mind when it became clear to me that the scientific evidence was overwhelmingly against such positions (the general mendacity and ignorance of the creationists didn't help matters either). So let science do everything it can do. And if someone won't listen? That's their own damn fault.
I'm someone who argued strongly against removing of spoiler warnings from Wikipedia and someone who has argued with David Gerard over lots of stuff on Wikipedia. I can say pretty easily that most of the above is utter nonsense. Of course, I'm someone who also seems to get on the list of corrupt Wikipedians pretty often. So take it as you will...