Well, actually I was thinking something a little more than your typical RTS I guess. If you produce 50 of the same unit, some of them will be faster than others, some will do more damage, some have a longer range, some have more health, etc, etc. The units that survive would reproduce when they returned to base. Battles would be raised over the course of generations. Not necessarily human generations, your units could be some creature that procreates at a higher rate to make things more reasonable.
Doesn't spore teach much much more about the idea of creationism (under the form of 'guided evolution') than it does about true evolution?
If you want to teach about evolution, make an RTS where everyone starts out with the same units, but depending on how you use them (and which units come back alive) they change over time. Still guided evolution I guess, since you could put your units in situations that would produce traits that you desire, but at least a few steps up the ladder of scientific validity.
the first should result in the second failing to get a patent
No, it really shouldn't. There's a difference between describing a physical phenomenon and coming up with an application for it. Just because tape produces x-rays does not mean that it is intuitivly obvious how to create a portable x-ray machine out of it. Ask yourself if you could knock one together in your garage this weekend, knowing only that x causes y.
Publishing "Peeling transparent tape in a vacuum produces x-rays" is not the same as patenting "A mobile x-ray device with no power requirements, with x-rays being generated by peeling transparent tape"
You are applying a very, very limited definition of religion, almost to the point of being a straw man attack. Personally, I don't believe that God created man in his image, or built the planet Earth, or even caused the big bang. I don't believe that God reaches down and cures people's cancer overnight, or that he causes hurricanes and earthquakes to punish those who anger him. I'm not at all convinced that he does or ever has put holy words into the minds of prophets, or inspired any book that holds the answers to life's mysteries.
But I do believe in a higher power. It's not a logical belief, I have no proof or even anecdotal evidence. For all I know it is a curious perversion of brain chemistry or just something that has been engrained into me from my youth. I don't let it rule my morality, my morality is defined very simply as 'do unto others...'. It certainly doesn't change the way I see and understand science. It doesn't affect my life, or anyone elses, in any negative way.
I often go to read creationist websites, simply to be prepaired with counter-arguments if someone tries to defend creationism as science. One of the most common themes is that science is attacking religion just as much as religion is attacking science. Now, when religion is encroaching on science, science has every right to fight back using evidence, fact, and logic. But when those who would defend science continue attacking religion beyond the area that science speaks, how is that any different?
The point is, religious views don't have to constrain science. Gregor Mendel was a monk when he discovered the laws of genetic inheritence. Charles Darwin saw no conflict between the 'Origin of the Species' and the christian religion. Copernicus was a Catholic Cleric for most of his life, including when he published 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres'.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible.
Not necissarily true. I think the important thing is to get people thinking of a maglev more the way they think of airplanes than the way they think of trains. Americans in general are very resistant to rail travel for some reason, mostly because the only experience they have with it is a friend of a friend who rode Amtrak once. Why not have non-stop routs between the major cities of each region (LA, Chicago, Houston, Miami, New York). Put the Maglev terminals at the airport and consider them another part of the air transportation network.
Alternatively, put maglev lines between airports that are close together but still see lots of traffic. I'm thinking something like Mineapolis to Chicago since that is what I am familiar with. Generally, if you want to fly into or out of Minneapolis, it is cheaper to go through Chicago. It would save a lot of time, money, and polution if you could ride the maglev between them. If it worked out and was profitable, it would also be a powerful proof of concept for longer lines in the future.
Ok, give every nation 10 nuclear weapons, to be deployed against any nation, ally or enemy, that launches nukes first. Suddenly, using nukes leads not just to the country being attacked retaliating, but also to 1600 nuclear missiles flying at you from litterally every corner of the globe.
The problem with MAD is that it is only a halfway solution. It might just be possible for the US or the Soviet union to remove enough of the others nuclear arsenal that a victory is possible without massive civilian casualties on either side, or at least the attacking side. To ensure peace you need to remove the possibility of victory completely. Either by removing the missiles themselves (which, as you imply, is impossible to verify) or by ensuring that any country that launches nuclear missiles is utterly devastated by an undefensible attack.
The problem is that, in theory, there is nothing in the wikipedia guidelines that values one source over the other. In theory, you could have one article say 'People are in disagreement over when dinosour fossils were created, some say millions of years ago[1], other says just thousands[2]'. Where source #1 is every piece of scientific research in the past 80 years, and source #2 is some religions fundamentalist's website.
The theory that we're being watched and or studied is not dismissed, it even has a name. The zoo hypothesis is one of the proposed explanations to the Fermi Paradox. There are at least a couple problems with it however. First, all civilizations would have to agree not to announce themselves (if you assume that there is one alien race it is probably safe to assume there are hundreds or thousands). Second, you would have to have a way to prevent the people of earth from detecting civilizations remotely, i.e. via radio or even optical spectrum.
Also, if you're assuming manned missions to monitor our planet, you have to assume (as a minumum) some form of near immortality or faster than light travel. Unless if we are very wrong about our universe, FTL travel is impossible (yes yes, I know with millions of years of technology it might be possible but if it is then we can throw causality out the window). I can believe that an advanced race could find a way to live forever, but I still can't believe they would want to spend tens of thousands of years just to study an up and coming intelligence.
If there is intelligent life besides us the in the galaxy, I doubt they bother with us at all. Statistics says that any intelligence is bound to be millions of years older than us. Them studying us would be more like the study of ants than anthropology.
You seem to think that 'being green' is a binary position; that every action is either good for the environment or bad for it and there is no ambiguity or overlap.
Google runs their chips at higher temperatures and yes, that causes more than the average number of failures. Of course, Google data centers require much, much less cooling than their compition's data centers do. I'd be willing to bet that they save more power by reducing cooling costs, than they waste by requiring more CPUs to be manufactured.
It's the same thing with all green technology, there are always trade offs. A new hybrid with a lithium ion battery is much more energy intesive to design and build than a car with a standard drivetrain. I'm not saying that hybrids are bad for the environment, I'm just saying that whether a technology is a net gain or loss for the environment isn't so easy to calculate as just looking at a single number.
Does a paper ballot verify your identity before you fill in the little circles? It's not the machine's responsibility to verify the voter's right to vote. That is up to the poll workers just as it is now.
If banks can transfer billions of dollars every day safely and securely (in many cases without even a paper trail), there is no reason why a decent electronic voting system can't be made. Compared to an ATM, a voting machine should be a piece of cake, you don't have to worry about verifying the user's identity. You don't need to check the balances and rights. All you need to do is accept and record the current user's vote, them reset for the next user.
Do give us open source so there are 50,000 coders doing Q&A on it. Do give us a paper trail so that if there is any suspision then the vote can be verified. Do involve election officials in at least the requirements process.
Don't give us a function that clears all votes made on the system so that polling officers can 'adjust' the vote. Don't give us hardware which uses the same exact key to unlock every case. Most important, Don't try to cover it up if you screw the pooch; let us know so the recount can be performed by hand.
Re:The cycle length can vary...
on
The Quietest Sun
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· Score: 1
Ussually though, even during the solar minimum, there are at least some sunspots. This year has seen virtually zero spots until very recently and now the number of sunspots is increasing very, very slowly. If this means that the active part of the cycle will be unusually quiet that could be a very big deal.
We might not be sure why or how, but we do know that there is a correlation between sunspot activity and weather in at least a some locations on Earth. If someday we can predict droughts and floods a year in advance based on the sun's behavior, thousands of lives could be saved. It's also important that we understand how much, if at all, sunspots affect global temperatures; otherwise it will be just another variable that our climate models ignore.
Parents start shopping for the holiday season starting in late October, early Novemeber. They are more likely to choose to buy the game that is most prominantly displayed. During the holiday rush, dozens of games are release and games don't get to have the massive display for long before it is pushed out by some other game. Therefore, it can be extremely advantagous to wait until the holiday rush has begun to release your game.
Marketing and timing can make a huge difference in a games success, especially for games released for the holiday season. To be fair, I don't think it would matter as much for games such as Fallout 3, it is targeted to an older, already attached audience. If this were a title like LittleBigPlanet (new audience, younger target) for instance, releasing a couple of weeks early could be devastating.
I just don't understand this logic. Why do you feel that you have a right to the game as soon as it is complete? Doesn't the company have a right (actually, a responsibilty to thier shareholders) to maximize their profit through marketing and targeted release dates?
In my opinion, a real Turing test would be to pose the AI the same question posed to the people. Only when the AI can successfully solve problems that it isn't specifically programmed to solve will I call it true AI.
Tell the program to identify which people it is talking to that it thinks are male/female, intelligent/stupid, boring/funny. Then the program not only has to be able to converse, but also decide which questions to ask to get the answers it needs as well as determining how each answer gives it more information regarding it's goal.
I understand that this isn't really the test that Turing worked out, but really all the Turing test does is measure how well a computer can pretend to be a thinking thing.
I've only read the first page of the article but it mentions that the people being eavesdropped were talking on satelite phones from the Middle East. I was under the impression that as soon as you broadcaste something you could no longer claim it was private. Isn't this why it's legal to sell police and cell phone scanners? Is this different for satelite phones or am I completely off base here?
So, wait a minute. You were worried enough about being searched that you chose to bring your "noncritical laptop" (I'm assuming that's oposed to your critical one). And you packed this laptop right next to your drug stash?
Also, last time I was on a cruise they had bomb/drug dogs checking the bags both while loading and unloading, so I'm not sure how safe it is to pack contraband on your way out of the country either. Though they weren't checking bags if you carried them onto the boat yourself so I guess that's just one more example of security theater.
Metallic Hydrogen? Though you would think that it would begin to fuse at that kind of mass-density. Then again, 26 times the mass of Jupiter is still less than 3% the mass of the sun so perhaps not. My guess is that this is the edge case. If there were even a little more mass it would have collapsed into a red dwarf and started fusing hydrogen.
Because the asteroid was itentified and tracked days before it entered the atmosphere. For the first time, astronomers were able to predict the exact time and location the asteroid would strike (well, would have stuck if it hadn't exploded in the atmosphere). Also, what we see as shooting stars are little more than grains of sand, this was more like a good sized boulder and would have made a noticable fireball as it tracked across the sky.
I thought we already knew this. If the algorithm comes back with even.1% false positives the system is totally worthless. There's 365 million people in the US,.1% means that the FBI/CIA/NSA would have 365,000 people to investigate. Now go and talk to someone in the AI field and see if even.1% false positive is possible.
I'm betting that if a system is going to catch any decent percentage of terrorists (greater than 50%) the false positive rate will be above 1%. Even if you only apply the system to a relatively small number of people (say people entering a leaving the country) you are going to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to investigate. Combine any kind of realistic false positive rate with the fact that about.00001% of the population deserves to be investigated and the system is worse than worthless; all it will do is distract from the people who should be investigated.
If you're trying to accelerate from 70 to 90 mph to avoid an accident I'd be willing to bet that you would have been much better off just hitting the brakes anyway. If they were talking about restricting acceleration, you might have a point. As it is, I don't see having a limited top speed causing any accidents.
I know it's all in fun but seriously, just because research is funny doesn't mean it isn't meaningful. One paper was in knot theory, which is apparently a pretty large and under-researched area of mathmatics. Another was convincing people that their potato chips were fresh by playing crunching noises while they were being eaten, which I imagine provides insights into how what we taste is influenced by our other senses.
Don't forget, the point of the Ig Nobel Awards is to 'Make you laugh, then make you think'.
See, I think there's a different reason that this doesn't get mainstream coverage. Go ask your most computer illiterate family member if they think someone should be able to take my work that I posted for everyone to use, patent it, and then bill me for using it in my own projects. I think everyone will agree that if that's the way the law works, then the law is retarded. It doesn't get coverage because everyone assumes that the world already worked this way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, actually I was thinking something a little more than your typical RTS I guess. If you produce 50 of the same unit, some of them will be faster than others, some will do more damage, some have a longer range, some have more health, etc, etc. The units that survive would reproduce when they returned to base. Battles would be raised over the course of generations. Not necessarily human generations, your units could be some creature that procreates at a higher rate to make things more reasonable.
Doesn't spore teach much much more about the idea of creationism (under the form of 'guided evolution') than it does about true evolution?
If you want to teach about evolution, make an RTS where everyone starts out with the same units, but depending on how you use them (and which units come back alive) they change over time. Still guided evolution I guess, since you could put your units in situations that would produce traits that you desire, but at least a few steps up the ladder of scientific validity.
the first should result in the second failing to get a patent
No, it really shouldn't. There's a difference between describing a physical phenomenon and coming up with an application for it. Just because tape produces x-rays does not mean that it is intuitivly obvious how to create a portable x-ray machine out of it. Ask yourself if you could knock one together in your garage this weekend, knowing only that x causes y.
Publishing "Peeling transparent tape in a vacuum produces x-rays" is not the same as patenting "A mobile x-ray device with no power requirements, with x-rays being generated by peeling transparent tape"
You are applying a very, very limited definition of religion, almost to the point of being a straw man attack. Personally, I don't believe that God created man in his image, or built the planet Earth, or even caused the big bang. I don't believe that God reaches down and cures people's cancer overnight, or that he causes hurricanes and earthquakes to punish those who anger him. I'm not at all convinced that he does or ever has put holy words into the minds of prophets, or inspired any book that holds the answers to life's mysteries.
But I do believe in a higher power. It's not a logical belief, I have no proof or even anecdotal evidence. For all I know it is a curious perversion of brain chemistry or just something that has been engrained into me from my youth. I don't let it rule my morality, my morality is defined very simply as 'do unto others...'. It certainly doesn't change the way I see and understand science. It doesn't affect my life, or anyone elses, in any negative way.
I often go to read creationist websites, simply to be prepaired with counter-arguments if someone tries to defend creationism as science. One of the most common themes is that science is attacking religion just as much as religion is attacking science. Now, when religion is encroaching on science, science has every right to fight back using evidence, fact, and logic. But when those who would defend science continue attacking religion beyond the area that science speaks, how is that any different?
The point is, religious views don't have to constrain science. Gregor Mendel was a monk when he discovered the laws of genetic inheritence. Charles Darwin saw no conflict between the 'Origin of the Species' and the christian religion. Copernicus was a Catholic Cleric for most of his life, including when he published 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres'.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible.
Not necissarily true. I think the important thing is to get people thinking of a maglev more the way they think of airplanes than the way they think of trains. Americans in general are very resistant to rail travel for some reason, mostly because the only experience they have with it is a friend of a friend who rode Amtrak once. Why not have non-stop routs between the major cities of each region (LA, Chicago, Houston, Miami, New York). Put the Maglev terminals at the airport and consider them another part of the air transportation network.
Alternatively, put maglev lines between airports that are close together but still see lots of traffic. I'm thinking something like Mineapolis to Chicago since that is what I am familiar with. Generally, if you want to fly into or out of Minneapolis, it is cheaper to go through Chicago. It would save a lot of time, money, and polution if you could ride the maglev between them. If it worked out and was profitable, it would also be a powerful proof of concept for longer lines in the future.
Ok, give every nation 10 nuclear weapons, to be deployed against any nation, ally or enemy, that launches nukes first. Suddenly, using nukes leads not just to the country being attacked retaliating, but also to 1600 nuclear missiles flying at you from litterally every corner of the globe.
The problem with MAD is that it is only a halfway solution. It might just be possible for the US or the Soviet union to remove enough of the others nuclear arsenal that a victory is possible without massive civilian casualties on either side, or at least the attacking side. To ensure peace you need to remove the possibility of victory completely. Either by removing the missiles themselves (which, as you imply, is impossible to verify) or by ensuring that any country that launches nuclear missiles is utterly devastated by an undefensible attack.
The problem is that, in theory, there is nothing in the wikipedia guidelines that values one source over the other. In theory, you could have one article say 'People are in disagreement over when dinosour fossils were created, some say millions of years ago[1], other says just thousands[2]'. Where source #1 is every piece of scientific research in the past 80 years, and source #2 is some religions fundamentalist's website.
The theory that we're being watched and or studied is not dismissed, it even has a name. The zoo hypothesis is one of the proposed explanations to the Fermi Paradox. There are at least a couple problems with it however. First, all civilizations would have to agree not to announce themselves (if you assume that there is one alien race it is probably safe to assume there are hundreds or thousands). Second, you would have to have a way to prevent the people of earth from detecting civilizations remotely, i.e. via radio or even optical spectrum.
Also, if you're assuming manned missions to monitor our planet, you have to assume (as a minumum) some form of near immortality or faster than light travel. Unless if we are very wrong about our universe, FTL travel is impossible (yes yes, I know with millions of years of technology it might be possible but if it is then we can throw causality out the window). I can believe that an advanced race could find a way to live forever, but I still can't believe they would want to spend tens of thousands of years just to study an up and coming intelligence.
If there is intelligent life besides us the in the galaxy, I doubt they bother with us at all. Statistics says that any intelligence is bound to be millions of years older than us. Them studying us would be more like the study of ants than anthropology.
You seem to think that 'being green' is a binary position; that every action is either good for the environment or bad for it and there is no ambiguity or overlap.
Google runs their chips at higher temperatures and yes, that causes more than the average number of failures. Of course, Google data centers require much, much less cooling than their compition's data centers do. I'd be willing to bet that they save more power by reducing cooling costs, than they waste by requiring more CPUs to be manufactured.
It's the same thing with all green technology, there are always trade offs. A new hybrid with a lithium ion battery is much more energy intesive to design and build than a car with a standard drivetrain. I'm not saying that hybrids are bad for the environment, I'm just saying that whether a technology is a net gain or loss for the environment isn't so easy to calculate as just looking at a single number.
Does a paper ballot verify your identity before you fill in the little circles? It's not the machine's responsibility to verify the voter's right to vote. That is up to the poll workers just as it is now.
If banks can transfer billions of dollars every day safely and securely (in many cases without even a paper trail), there is no reason why a decent electronic voting system can't be made. Compared to an ATM, a voting machine should be a piece of cake, you don't have to worry about verifying the user's identity. You don't need to check the balances and rights. All you need to do is accept and record the current user's vote, them reset for the next user.
Do give us open source so there are 50,000 coders doing Q&A on it. Do give us a paper trail so that if there is any suspision then the vote can be verified. Do involve election officials in at least the requirements process.
Don't give us a function that clears all votes made on the system so that polling officers can 'adjust' the vote. Don't give us hardware which uses the same exact key to unlock every case. Most important, Don't try to cover it up if you screw the pooch; let us know so the recount can be performed by hand.
Ussually though, even during the solar minimum, there are at least some sunspots. This year has seen virtually zero spots until very recently and now the number of sunspots is increasing very, very slowly. If this means that the active part of the cycle will be unusually quiet that could be a very big deal.
We might not be sure why or how, but we do know that there is a correlation between sunspot activity and weather in at least a some locations on Earth. If someday we can predict droughts and floods a year in advance based on the sun's behavior, thousands of lives could be saved. It's also important that we understand how much, if at all, sunspots affect global temperatures; otherwise it will be just another variable that our climate models ignore.
Parents start shopping for the holiday season starting in late October, early Novemeber. They are more likely to choose to buy the game that is most prominantly displayed. During the holiday rush, dozens of games are release and games don't get to have the massive display for long before it is pushed out by some other game. Therefore, it can be extremely advantagous to wait until the holiday rush has begun to release your game.
Marketing and timing can make a huge difference in a games success, especially for games released for the holiday season. To be fair, I don't think it would matter as much for games such as Fallout 3, it is targeted to an older, already attached audience. If this were a title like LittleBigPlanet (new audience, younger target) for instance, releasing a couple of weeks early could be devastating.
I just don't understand this logic. Why do you feel that you have a right to the game as soon as it is complete? Doesn't the company have a right (actually, a responsibilty to thier shareholders) to maximize their profit through marketing and targeted release dates?
In my opinion, a real Turing test would be to pose the AI the same question posed to the people. Only when the AI can successfully solve problems that it isn't specifically programmed to solve will I call it true AI.
Tell the program to identify which people it is talking to that it thinks are male/female, intelligent/stupid, boring/funny. Then the program not only has to be able to converse, but also decide which questions to ask to get the answers it needs as well as determining how each answer gives it more information regarding it's goal.
I understand that this isn't really the test that Turing worked out, but really all the Turing test does is measure how well a computer can pretend to be a thinking thing.
I've only read the first page of the article but it mentions that the people being eavesdropped were talking on satelite phones from the Middle East. I was under the impression that as soon as you broadcaste something you could no longer claim it was private. Isn't this why it's legal to sell police and cell phone scanners? Is this different for satelite phones or am I completely off base here?
So, wait a minute. You were worried enough about being searched that you chose to bring your "noncritical laptop" (I'm assuming that's oposed to your critical one). And you packed this laptop right next to your drug stash?
Also, last time I was on a cruise they had bomb/drug dogs checking the bags both while loading and unloading, so I'm not sure how safe it is to pack contraband on your way out of the country either. Though they weren't checking bags if you carried them onto the boat yourself so I guess that's just one more example of security theater.
Metallic Hydrogen? Though you would think that it would begin to fuse at that kind of mass-density. Then again, 26 times the mass of Jupiter is still less than 3% the mass of the sun so perhaps not. My guess is that this is the edge case. If there were even a little more mass it would have collapsed into a red dwarf and started fusing hydrogen.
Because the asteroid was itentified and tracked days before it entered the atmosphere. For the first time, astronomers were able to predict the exact time and location the asteroid would strike (well, would have stuck if it hadn't exploded in the atmosphere). Also, what we see as shooting stars are little more than grains of sand, this was more like a good sized boulder and would have made a noticable fireball as it tracked across the sky.
I thought we already knew this. If the algorithm comes back with even .1% false positives the system is totally worthless. There's 365 million people in the US, .1% means that the FBI/CIA/NSA would have 365,000 people to investigate. Now go and talk to someone in the AI field and see if even .1% false positive is possible.
I'm betting that if a system is going to catch any decent percentage of terrorists (greater than 50%) the false positive rate will be above 1%. Even if you only apply the system to a relatively small number of people (say people entering a leaving the country) you are going to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to investigate. Combine any kind of realistic false positive rate with the fact that about .00001% of the population deserves to be investigated and the system is worse than worthless; all it will do is distract from the people who should be investigated.
If you're trying to accelerate from 70 to 90 mph to avoid an accident I'd be willing to bet that you would have been much better off just hitting the brakes anyway. If they were talking about restricting acceleration, you might have a point. As it is, I don't see having a limited top speed causing any accidents.
I know it's all in fun but seriously, just because research is funny doesn't mean it isn't meaningful. One paper was in knot theory, which is apparently a pretty large and under-researched area of mathmatics. Another was convincing people that their potato chips were fresh by playing crunching noises while they were being eaten, which I imagine provides insights into how what we taste is influenced by our other senses.
Don't forget, the point of the Ig Nobel Awards is to 'Make you laugh, then make you think'.
See, I think there's a different reason that this doesn't get mainstream coverage. Go ask your most computer illiterate family member if they think someone should be able to take my work that I posted for everyone to use, patent it, and then bill me for using it in my own projects. I think everyone will agree that if that's the way the law works, then the law is retarded. It doesn't get coverage because everyone assumes that the world already worked this way.
As opposed to the price of gas?