That is fascinating isn't it? A couple years ago I became very interested in dreams and the practice of "lucid dreaming" in which the dreamer achieves a state of semi-consciousness within a dream, usually being aware of being asleep yet completely within his dreamed environment. The ability to attain such a state has opened up new doors into the study of dreams.
One study which I read about was done to test the theory that time can go by very quickly in dreams (you hear all the time about someone waking to their alarm, hitting snooze and waking up five minutes later having experienced an incredibly involved dream). The way the study worked was participants were asked while awake to move their eyes left and right at one second intervals, ten times. They were then trained to do the same thing when they were sleeping, if they became lucid and remembered their task (this works because your eyes are unaffected by sleep paralysis and seem to move about as you gaze at different things in your dreams, just as they do in your waking life). The study found that all the subjects seemed to be living their dreams in realtime while performing the eye moving task.
My personal theory of this phenomena is that people only really experience these richly detailed dreams in retrospect, as their conscious minds traverse the paths that have been set up while they were sleeping, filling in detail and providing a linear narrative. After all at the end of the day you have the impression and certainty of having been awake for an entire day of activity, but how can you be certain if your mind doesn't traverse your entire day again in real time?
For some really interesting theories about consciousness that will blow your mind, I would suggest picking up a copy of Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.
That is in fact the opposite of what the experiment seemed to show. If you're not going to read even the summary, you could have at least chosen to use a car analogy to illustrate your point. I mean, come on.
it's like Seinfeld, but instead of being funny it's mind-numbingly retarded. C'mon Slashdot, wasn't there any Apple nooze in the queue? I'd rather read about the iToaster than this crap.
In a perfect world, the same would hold for literal translations of text, musical recordings that are faithful representations of a public-domain score, and other mechanical transforms. Neither of those examples you give are "mechanical transformations". Especially in the case of music, a written score bears absolutely no resemblance to a musical performance.
Likewise the translation of literature and poetry requires considerable skill and creativity.
What grandparent is saying is that considering that we have yet to discover a planet outside our own galaxy, 0% is a very good approximation of the percentage of the few planets in the Universe which we have discovered.
And why shouldn't the research for, and development of treatments for disease be one of the primary products of our tax dollars? What has kept us as a society from organizing ourselves in order to cure disease? What has kept us from organizing our society to accomplish so many of the great tasks that we could be undertaking? Instead we get Iraq, and a thousand other insanities.
I agree completely. If Britannica was capable of presenting well-written, factual articles on the most obscure topics, don't you think they would? Why is Wikipedia trying to conform to an outdated, dead tree model?
Wikipedia is valuable for its obscure articles, especially the ones that relate to things like internet phenomena, that provide background and context where it would be otherwise impossible to find.
I agree that the notion, which seems to be popular in the "organic movement", that GM food are inherently less healthy than their traditional counterpart is probably not true. But I also believe that we need to realize that any tampering with the genes of an organism can and probably will have consequences that we could never have predicted. A mild example (which I'm sure was anticipated beforehand) is the way Bt Corn led to resistance in pest populations to that toxin.
This is what scares me about technology: 40 years ago it was within the power of the two world's super powers to literally destroy the world. Now one of the smallest nations in the world (Israel) has that capability. At the point that it becomes feasible for a small and determined group of people to, say, create self-replicating nano-bots that can eat all of earth's biomass in a week, what's to stop it from happening?
Same experience here. I know they're doing the whole "independent thing" with this release, but maybe Radiohead should have let someone else code the website... you know like someone who is a web developer... and not high.
I tried to pre-order and pay for the download about ten days before the release, but after spending a good half hour breaking their server in various ways I just gave up. The site was serving me up captchas that weren't working, sending me in circles entering my billing info over and over. The pretty colors were nice, but functionality would have been, you know, nice.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.voxtec.com/ - (flash w/ sound warning)
Okay, fine:
http://gebweb.net/optimap/
No, I won't link you to the site. It's the first hit when you google: travelling salesman google maps You fail at the internet.
*robotic laugh* AH-AH-AH. Humor Acknowledged.
That is fascinating isn't it? A couple years ago I became very interested in dreams and the practice of "lucid dreaming" in which the dreamer achieves a state of semi-consciousness within a dream, usually being aware of being asleep yet completely within his dreamed environment. The ability to attain such a state has opened up new doors into the study of dreams.
One study which I read about was done to test the theory that time can go by very quickly in dreams (you hear all the time about someone waking to their alarm, hitting snooze and waking up five minutes later having experienced an incredibly involved dream). The way the study worked was participants were asked while awake to move their eyes left and right at one second intervals, ten times. They were then trained to do the same thing when they were sleeping, if they became lucid and remembered their task (this works because your eyes are unaffected by sleep paralysis and seem to move about as you gaze at different things in your dreams, just as they do in your waking life). The study found that all the subjects seemed to be living their dreams in realtime while performing the eye moving task.
My personal theory of this phenomena is that people only really experience these richly detailed dreams in retrospect, as their conscious minds traverse the paths that have been set up while they were sleeping, filling in detail and providing a linear narrative. After all at the end of the day you have the impression and certainty of having been awake for an entire day of activity, but how can you be certain if your mind doesn't traverse your entire day again in real time?
For some really interesting theories about consciousness that will blow your mind, I would suggest picking up a copy of Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.
That is in fact the opposite of what the experiment seemed to show. If you're not going to read even the summary, you could have at least chosen to use a car analogy to illustrate your point. I mean, come on.
I got through half of it and turned that crap off. About as smart as your average YouTube comments thread IMO.
In an effort to address these issues, I would like to propose a new voting system which utilizes the more simplified "first post" scheme:
Each election consists of one vote, the first one...
Woot.
it's like Seinfeld, but instead of being funny it's mind-numbingly retarded. C'mon Slashdot, wasn't there any Apple nooze in the queue? I'd rather read about the iToaster than this crap.
You didn't get the memo? Slashdot changed their slogan to "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters or goes bibbidy-doop-boop. LULZ."
What grandparent is saying is that considering that we have yet to discover a planet outside our own galaxy, 0% is a very good approximation of the percentage of the few planets in the Universe which we have discovered.
And why shouldn't the research for, and development of treatments for disease be one of the primary products of our tax dollars? What has kept us as a society from organizing ourselves in order to cure disease? What has kept us from organizing our society to accomplish so many of the great tasks that we could be undertaking? Instead we get Iraq, and a thousand other insanities.
Hate to be pedantic (okay, that's a lie) but the tag on the article is a misquotation.
I agree completely. If Britannica was capable of presenting well-written, factual articles on the most obscure topics, don't you think they would? Why is Wikipedia trying to conform to an outdated, dead tree model? Wikipedia is valuable for its obscure articles, especially the ones that relate to things like internet phenomena, that provide background and context where it would be otherwise impossible to find.
I think you mean the internet sphere, the Intersphere if you will. It's spherical.
I agree that the notion, which seems to be popular in the "organic movement", that GM food are inherently less healthy than their traditional counterpart is probably not true. But I also believe that we need to realize that any tampering with the genes of an organism can and probably will have consequences that we could never have predicted. A mild example (which I'm sure was anticipated beforehand) is the way Bt Corn led to resistance in pest populations to that toxin. This is what scares me about technology: 40 years ago it was within the power of the two world's super powers to literally destroy the world. Now one of the smallest nations in the world (Israel) has that capability. At the point that it becomes feasible for a small and determined group of people to, say, create self-replicating nano-bots that can eat all of earth's biomass in a week, what's to stop it from happening?
and watch it happen.
is there no problem you can't solve?
Same experience here. I know they're doing the whole "independent thing" with this release, but maybe Radiohead should have let someone else code the website... you know like someone who is a web developer... and not high.
I tried to pre-order and pay for the download about ten days before the release, but after spending a good half hour breaking their server in various ways I just gave up. The site was serving me up captchas that weren't working, sending me in circles entering my billing info over and over. The pretty colors were nice, but functionality would have been, you know, nice.