Some people are listed on multiple tracks. So for example Emmy Noether is listed for both math and physics. But other decisions seem questionable. For example, I'm not at all convinced that Einstein should be listed for both math and physics rather than just physics. Similarly Sheldon Glashow is listed as both math and physics whereas I'd put him down almost completely as physics. But Riemann only gets math and no physics? What's up with that? And there are also some odd choices to leave out. For example, G.H. Hardy is not included at all (presumably would go in both the math and natural history lines). There are also a lot of gaps in the math line in the last few years. The different lines seem to also end in slightly different times. The physics end has a fair number of fairly young physicists but the math end lacks Terry Tao for example (in fact the math line seems to be very sparse over the last few years). I'd be very curious as to how they made their various decisions for whom to include or not.
Given the wording of the law and the clear legislative intent, the decision seems to be legally correct. The solution here requires congress to act. An additional unfortunate detail is that the Democrats are completely spineless and so getting them to deal with this problem is going to be tough even though this majority of Americans support embryonic stem cell research (source- http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/poll010626.html).
David Hajdu's "The Ten-Cent Plague" gives a good, readable history of the reaction against comics including the events discussed in in the summary and TFA. The book becomes slightly polemical at points but overall is a good read.
According to TFA, neutrinos shouldn't be altered much by solar flares which seems to be an almost slamdunk argument against the solar flare part of the claim. In order for this to make sense we'd need wrong not just about neutrino physics but also about basic star modeling. The point that much of the data examined comes from older labs where they have not gone and looked for possible causes in variations also seems to be a strong one. Right now, I'm pretty skeptical of these claims but it should be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.
This sort of thing was common even through the early 90s for computer games. People understood that the graphical level on the boxes wasn't anywhere near the level of the games. It is misleading to call this sort of thing misleading.
This doesn't rule out other methods of speeding up using quantum tricks. Also, keep in mind that this may all be for naught since no work of this form can rule out the existence of a fast classical algorithm for handling the problem. Thus, implicitly, all these sorts of results are interesting primarily if one assumes that these sorts of problems don't lie in P. The good news is that the hidden subgroup problem is very likely not in P.
No, no that should be a reversal. Here the laptop watches you. So the Soviet reversal would be "In Soviet Russia you watch laptop." And no, you shouldn't be worried that the Soviet reversal puts the you first and makes sense. That just means you are communist scum who hate freedom and want the terrorists to win.
The singularity is to nerds what the rapture is to fundamentalist protestant wackjobs....
This is a standard meme and it isn't terribly interesting. Certainly many Singularitarians regard the Singularity in a borderline religious fashion. There are, however, multiple major distinctions: First, the Singularity in most forms has as an eschatology a minimally plausible framework based on the known laws of physics and optimistic estimates for technological growth. Thus, comparing the Singularity to such religious notions which are purely irrational is not accurate. Second, in standard religious eschatologies like the rapture, only a small fraction of people, the saved, attain salvation/enlightenment/ascension. Singularitarians don't think that only the people who believe in a Singularity will be saved or any nonsense like that. It lacks the deeply vindictive and self-centered aspect one generally sees in religious apocalyptic fantasies. Thus, both on epistemological and moral grounds, the comparison between the Singularity and the Rapture is an unhelpful one.
That is the one in 2nd person. He did that not as a gimmick so much as that he had the first chapter in that form and then decided to more or less keep going with it. It is difficult to read but if you get through the first three or four chapters and aren't reading anything else it gets a little more natural.
Good catch, I actually meant to write that BPP is almost certainly a subset of NP and is tentatively equal to P. Somehow the "almost certainly" didn't end up getting written. Um, blame my fingers?
Charlie Stross wrote an excellent novel, Halting State, which revolves around a criminal investigation of an in-game robbery of a bank in the game. Headlines like this seem to make that sort of situation more and more plausible. It makes me worry if some of Stross's other novels might happen too. Considering that The Atrocity Archives revolves around using math to accidentally summon Cthulhu and other nameless horrors, and some of his other works focus on really nasty AIs arising from bad-Singularities, I certainly hope not.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant what's the next big problem in computer science.
Assuming this proof holds up, the next set of questions are how much the complexity hierarchy breaks down. There are a host of complexity classes between P and NP. Other important classes include PP and BPP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PP_(complexity). BPP is a subset of NP and is tentatively believed to be equal to P. Another important class is BQP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP which is the class of problems which can be solved quickly by a quantum computer. If this proof goes through it may generalize to showing that some of these other classes are distinct (proving that BQP is not equal to P would be almost as big a deal as proving that P !=NP).
If "non-deterministic polynomial time" is an actual "algorithmic complexity class' then so is my "anomalous quantum field" which generally intersects with a "temporal phase disturbance."
So apparently if something sounds technical and you don't know what it is you assume it is nonsense? Non-deterministic polynomial time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(complexity) is a concept is theoretical computer science. The idea is that a set of problems is in NP if when there is a "yes" answer to an example there is a short proof of the answer (where short means the length of the proof and checking its validity is bounded by a polynomial function of the length of the input). For example, the problem "is a given integer n composite?" is in NP because if the answer is yes, one can prove this quickly by simply giving a non-trivial divisor. The other relevant class is P, which are the set of problems which can be answered within time bounded by a polynomial function of the input. One of the great unsolved mathematical problems of our time is whether P equals NP. Roughly speaking, the question asks whether there exist problems which are hard to solve but where solutions can be checked quickly.
I am not too informed about the radiation levels and how they work, but I have some curiosity about how this compares to the spots where the A-bombs where dropped in Japan during WWII. Are those areas populated again? If so, how long did it take for them to be habitable again? Or is this a whole different level of radiation and thus incomparable?/
The radiation levels here are much worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, partially due to the fact that those were comparatively small airborn detonations. That means that the radioactive byproducts were mainly spread by wind to a large area. My impression also is that meltdowns produce more dirty products than deliberate detonations, but I'm not sure. Whatever the reasons, Nagasaki was safe enough to have rebuilding begin shortly after the war, and the same was true of Hiroshima. Both are once again, large, functioning cities. Radiation levels remaining are almost statistically negligible.
Just because someone works for SETI doesn't mean they can't do related research about exobiology. This is especially the case because if we discover actual extraterrestrial life, even microbial life, the chance of SETI being successful goes way up. And as we find out more, we get a better idea what sort of star systems to look for for life or intelligent life.
You don't suck the water out, you remove most of the blood and pump in the cryoprotectants while providing cardiopulmonary support to ensure that the compounds actually get to most of the body. See other reply in this subthread where I discuss how they've actually used this technique successfully on rabbit kidneys and then brought them back and transplanted them. The anti-freeze compounds don't penetrate perfectly so there's still some ice formation, but it occurs at a pretty minimal level. Essentially, you keep pumping in cryoprotectants as you gradually reduce the temperature. See http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CardiopulmonarySupport.html which outlines much of the process.
You don't prep people while they are alive. You do it right after they've died (at least clinically dead, not heart beat and no substantial brain activity). Then you prep them and bring the temperature down.
Until the first person has been woken up from cryonic "sleep", I think it is silly to have any kind of confidence in it. But everything will be wonderful when the cargo comes, right?
Simply making a comparison to a cargo cult might be rhetorically fun but it doesn't actually help. First, almost no one is claiming that they have high confidence in cryonics. Indeed, most proponents of cryonics estimate fairly low chances of it working. For example, Robin Hanson estimates around a 5% chance that cryonics will actually work http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.html. Indeed, when proponents have low confidence like this, claiming that there's a cargo cult mentality fails pretty miserably. Note that just because part of a technology hasn't been fully developed doesn't mean we can't make estimates about the technologies viability in the future. To use a fairly silly example, the largest hard drives today are a few terabytes. I can confidently predict that there will be 40 terabyte hard drives even though no one has made them yet. Note that cryonics proponents aren't claiming that we are anywhere near the tech level we need today. The primary claim is that from what we understand of the brain, the relevant information is preserved close to completely intact in cryonic preservation. That's the central claim. If one agrees that that is likely, it becomes highly likely that we'll eventually reach the tech level to be able to repair that functionality.
Freezing is not the problem, thawing is. Also, do these cryoprotectants work on cell level so the walls aren't punctured by ice crystals?
Yes, they do. This problem was solved for in the late 90s by using much more advance cryoprotectants which allow the body to vitrify at low temperatures rather than freeze. This has been true for about a decade now. Indeed, they've now successfully brought rabbit kidneys down to liquid nitrogen temperatures and brought back up, transplanted them, and had the kidneys function. See http://www.cryonics.org/reports/Scientific_Justification.pdf which includes discussion of this and other research (including direct examination of vitrified rat brains which show the cellular and synaptic structure largely intact.)
It seems like on civil liberties issues Obama is being almost as bad as Bush. There's something deeply wrong with my country when I read a headline and my first thought is "Well, at least this President isn't having people tortured."
> Wouldn't that come out in a debate?
Not necessarily. What happens in a debate is much more about who is a better speaker and who can martial better sounding (note not better- important difference!) arguments than anything connected to truth. This is strongly the experience I got from debating in highschool for example, and from helping judge debates in college. One sees this also in the real world in some other contexts such as how creationists often do surprisingly well against mainstream scientists. The creationists haven't done science but have prepared to sound good and have lots of nice sounding arguments. One common tactic for example is the so-called Gish Gallop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop#Debates where a large number of arguments are presented in a rapid fire fashion and explaining why any given one of them is wrong takes a lot of time.
So Google is bad for being transparent and releasing data which is aggregated and highly anonymous? It is a good thing I don't run Google because after enough articles like this I'd be tempted to say "you know, we get so much crap even when we're being helpful. Let's see what happens if we just try to act really, really evil for a few months." Seriously, this criticism comes down to Google releasing interesting data which in the long run could be actually useful to sociologists and other academics. It already has been used to help accurately get an idea of where the common flu is and how bad it is at any given time http://www.google.org/flutrends/. And the complaint in TFA is that unethical people can abuse this data at the margins. The obvious question is whether that minor abuse outweighs the positive good created by having this data. At least for me, the answer seems to be know, but that's partially because I have a strong ideological commitment to transparency and openness. When in doubt, give people access to data when it can be done easily.
I did remember a story about one of the scientists working on that Mars probe that crashed due to the feet/meter thing, she'd been working on it for 7 years which went up in a ball of fire. Now that's failure.
Minor nitpick, the units issue was an issue of newtons of force v. pounds of force. Probe in question was the Mars Climate Orbiter.
Yes. For many academic and research purposes, larger storage devices matter a lot. And as many sensing and measuring technologies improve the need for more storage will grow. For example, astronomers now routinely produce data sets in the terabyte range. Modeling also requires larger and larger data sets. Even if the regular consumer doesn't directly need larger storage devices, most of academia will want them. Furthermore, many people don't trust (with good reason) putting their data in the cloud, so if you want to ensure access to lots of high def video files and the like, your best bet is to have copies of your own. That means you need lots of storage space.
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Some people are listed on multiple tracks. So for example Emmy Noether is listed for both math and physics. But other decisions seem questionable. For example, I'm not at all convinced that Einstein should be listed for both math and physics rather than just physics. Similarly Sheldon Glashow is listed as both math and physics whereas I'd put him down almost completely as physics. But Riemann only gets math and no physics? What's up with that? And there are also some odd choices to leave out. For example, G.H. Hardy is not included at all (presumably would go in both the math and natural history lines). There are also a lot of gaps in the math line in the last few years. The different lines seem to also end in slightly different times. The physics end has a fair number of fairly young physicists but the math end lacks Terry Tao for example (in fact the math line seems to be very sparse over the last few years). I'd be very curious as to how they made their various decisions for whom to include or not.
Given the wording of the law and the clear legislative intent, the decision seems to be legally correct. The solution here requires congress to act. An additional unfortunate detail is that the Democrats are completely spineless and so getting them to deal with this problem is going to be tough even though this majority of Americans support embryonic stem cell research (source- http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/poll010626.html).
David Hajdu's "The Ten-Cent Plague" gives a good, readable history of the reaction against comics including the events discussed in in the summary and TFA. The book becomes slightly polemical at points but overall is a good read.
According to TFA, neutrinos shouldn't be altered much by solar flares which seems to be an almost slamdunk argument against the solar flare part of the claim. In order for this to make sense we'd need wrong not just about neutrino physics but also about basic star modeling. The point that much of the data examined comes from older labs where they have not gone and looked for possible causes in variations also seems to be a strong one. Right now, I'm pretty skeptical of these claims but it should be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.
This sort of thing was common even through the early 90s for computer games. People understood that the graphical level on the boxes wasn't anywhere near the level of the games. It is misleading to call this sort of thing misleading.
Riding bikes can lead to impotence in human males. See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/health/nutrition/04bike.html. I don't think this is what the candidate was thinking about...
This doesn't rule out other methods of speeding up using quantum tricks. Also, keep in mind that this may all be for naught since no work of this form can rule out the existence of a fast classical algorithm for handling the problem. Thus, implicitly, all these sorts of results are interesting primarily if one assumes that these sorts of problems don't lie in P. The good news is that the hidden subgroup problem is very likely not in P.
No, no that should be a reversal. Here the laptop watches you. So the Soviet reversal would be "In Soviet Russia you watch laptop." And no, you shouldn't be worried that the Soviet reversal puts the you first and makes sense. That just means you are communist scum who hate freedom and want the terrorists to win.
The singularity is to nerds what the rapture is to fundamentalist protestant wackjobs....
This is a standard meme and it isn't terribly interesting. Certainly many Singularitarians regard the Singularity in a borderline religious fashion. There are, however, multiple major distinctions: First, the Singularity in most forms has as an eschatology a minimally plausible framework based on the known laws of physics and optimistic estimates for technological growth. Thus, comparing the Singularity to such religious notions which are purely irrational is not accurate. Second, in standard religious eschatologies like the rapture, only a small fraction of people, the saved, attain salvation/enlightenment/ascension. Singularitarians don't think that only the people who believe in a Singularity will be saved or any nonsense like that. It lacks the deeply vindictive and self-centered aspect one generally sees in religious apocalyptic fantasies. Thus, both on epistemological and moral grounds, the comparison between the Singularity and the Rapture is an unhelpful one.
That is the one in 2nd person. He did that not as a gimmick so much as that he had the first chapter in that form and then decided to more or less keep going with it. It is difficult to read but if you get through the first three or four chapters and aren't reading anything else it gets a little more natural.
Good catch, I actually meant to write that BPP is almost certainly a subset of NP and is tentatively equal to P. Somehow the "almost certainly" didn't end up getting written. Um, blame my fingers?
Charlie Stross wrote an excellent novel, Halting State, which revolves around a criminal investigation of an in-game robbery of a bank in the game. Headlines like this seem to make that sort of situation more and more plausible. It makes me worry if some of Stross's other novels might happen too. Considering that The Atrocity Archives revolves around using math to accidentally summon Cthulhu and other nameless horrors, and some of his other works focus on really nasty AIs arising from bad-Singularities, I certainly hope not.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant what's the next big problem in computer science.
Assuming this proof holds up, the next set of questions are how much the complexity hierarchy breaks down. There are a host of complexity classes between P and NP. Other important classes include PP and BPP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PP_(complexity). BPP is a subset of NP and is tentatively believed to be equal to P. Another important class is BQP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP which is the class of problems which can be solved quickly by a quantum computer. If this proof goes through it may generalize to showing that some of these other classes are distinct (proving that BQP is not equal to P would be almost as big a deal as proving that P !=NP).
If "non-deterministic polynomial time" is an actual "algorithmic complexity class' then so is my "anomalous quantum field" which generally intersects with a "temporal phase disturbance."
So apparently if something sounds technical and you don't know what it is you assume it is nonsense? Non-deterministic polynomial time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(complexity) is a concept is theoretical computer science. The idea is that a set of problems is in NP if when there is a "yes" answer to an example there is a short proof of the answer (where short means the length of the proof and checking its validity is bounded by a polynomial function of the length of the input). For example, the problem "is a given integer n composite?" is in NP because if the answer is yes, one can prove this quickly by simply giving a non-trivial divisor. The other relevant class is P, which are the set of problems which can be answered within time bounded by a polynomial function of the input. One of the great unsolved mathematical problems of our time is whether P equals NP. Roughly speaking, the question asks whether there exist problems which are hard to solve but where solutions can be checked quickly.
I am not too informed about the radiation levels and how they work, but I have some curiosity about how this compares to the spots where the A-bombs where dropped in Japan during WWII. Are those areas populated again? If so, how long did it take for them to be habitable again? Or is this a whole different level of radiation and thus incomparable?/
The radiation levels here are much worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, partially due to the fact that those were comparatively small airborn detonations. That means that the radioactive byproducts were mainly spread by wind to a large area. My impression also is that meltdowns produce more dirty products than deliberate detonations, but I'm not sure. Whatever the reasons, Nagasaki was safe enough to have rebuilding begin shortly after the war, and the same was true of Hiroshima. Both are once again, large, functioning cities. Radiation levels remaining are almost statistically negligible.
Just because someone works for SETI doesn't mean they can't do related research about exobiology. This is especially the case because if we discover actual extraterrestrial life, even microbial life, the chance of SETI being successful goes way up. And as we find out more, we get a better idea what sort of star systems to look for for life or intelligent life.
You don't suck the water out, you remove most of the blood and pump in the cryoprotectants while providing cardiopulmonary support to ensure that the compounds actually get to most of the body. See other reply in this subthread where I discuss how they've actually used this technique successfully on rabbit kidneys and then brought them back and transplanted them. The anti-freeze compounds don't penetrate perfectly so there's still some ice formation, but it occurs at a pretty minimal level. Essentially, you keep pumping in cryoprotectants as you gradually reduce the temperature. See http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CardiopulmonarySupport.html which outlines much of the process.
You don't prep people while they are alive. You do it right after they've died (at least clinically dead, not heart beat and no substantial brain activity). Then you prep them and bring the temperature down.
Until the first person has been woken up from cryonic "sleep", I think it is silly to have any kind of confidence in it. But everything will be wonderful when the cargo comes, right?
Simply making a comparison to a cargo cult might be rhetorically fun but it doesn't actually help. First, almost no one is claiming that they have high confidence in cryonics. Indeed, most proponents of cryonics estimate fairly low chances of it working. For example, Robin Hanson estimates around a 5% chance that cryonics will actually work http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.html. Indeed, when proponents have low confidence like this, claiming that there's a cargo cult mentality fails pretty miserably. Note that just because part of a technology hasn't been fully developed doesn't mean we can't make estimates about the technologies viability in the future. To use a fairly silly example, the largest hard drives today are a few terabytes. I can confidently predict that there will be 40 terabyte hard drives even though no one has made them yet. Note that cryonics proponents aren't claiming that we are anywhere near the tech level we need today. The primary claim is that from what we understand of the brain, the relevant information is preserved close to completely intact in cryonic preservation. That's the central claim. If one agrees that that is likely, it becomes highly likely that we'll eventually reach the tech level to be able to repair that functionality.
Freezing is not the problem, thawing is. Also, do these cryoprotectants work on cell level so the walls aren't punctured by ice crystals?
Yes, they do. This problem was solved for in the late 90s by using much more advance cryoprotectants which allow the body to vitrify at low temperatures rather than freeze. This has been true for about a decade now. Indeed, they've now successfully brought rabbit kidneys down to liquid nitrogen temperatures and brought back up, transplanted them, and had the kidneys function. See http://www.cryonics.org/reports/Scientific_Justification.pdf which includes discussion of this and other research (including direct examination of vitrified rat brains which show the cellular and synaptic structure largely intact.)
It seems like on civil liberties issues Obama is being almost as bad as Bush. There's something deeply wrong with my country when I read a headline and my first thought is "Well, at least this President isn't having people tortured."
> Wouldn't that come out in a debate? Not necessarily. What happens in a debate is much more about who is a better speaker and who can martial better sounding (note not better- important difference!) arguments than anything connected to truth. This is strongly the experience I got from debating in highschool for example, and from helping judge debates in college. One sees this also in the real world in some other contexts such as how creationists often do surprisingly well against mainstream scientists. The creationists haven't done science but have prepared to sound good and have lots of nice sounding arguments. One common tactic for example is the so-called Gish Gallop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop#Debates where a large number of arguments are presented in a rapid fire fashion and explaining why any given one of them is wrong takes a lot of time.
So Google is bad for being transparent and releasing data which is aggregated and highly anonymous? It is a good thing I don't run Google because after enough articles like this I'd be tempted to say "you know, we get so much crap even when we're being helpful. Let's see what happens if we just try to act really, really evil for a few months." Seriously, this criticism comes down to Google releasing interesting data which in the long run could be actually useful to sociologists and other academics. It already has been used to help accurately get an idea of where the common flu is and how bad it is at any given time http://www.google.org/flutrends/. And the complaint in TFA is that unethical people can abuse this data at the margins. The obvious question is whether that minor abuse outweighs the positive good created by having this data. At least for me, the answer seems to be know, but that's partially because I have a strong ideological commitment to transparency and openness. When in doubt, give people access to data when it can be done easily.
I did remember a story about one of the scientists working on that Mars probe that crashed due to the feet/meter thing, she'd been working on it for 7 years which went up in a ball of fire. Now that's failure.
Minor nitpick, the units issue was an issue of newtons of force v. pounds of force. Probe in question was the Mars Climate Orbiter.
Yes. For many academic and research purposes, larger storage devices matter a lot. And as many sensing and measuring technologies improve the need for more storage will grow. For example, astronomers now routinely produce data sets in the terabyte range. Modeling also requires larger and larger data sets. Even if the regular consumer doesn't directly need larger storage devices, most of academia will want them. Furthermore, many people don't trust (with good reason) putting their data in the cloud, so if you want to ensure access to lots of high def video files and the like, your best bet is to have copies of your own. That means you need lots of storage space.