Google on the other hand, works on the principle of democracy, not in political terms, but by the definition derived from "the majority of
the people".
That is a new definition to me. I used to think democracy was "rule of the people". Thanks for enlightening me in my ignorance.
However let us not stop at a democratic search engine, I would like a democratic word processor as well. It will choose words that most people think are appropriate.
#$%*@ &$%@#*%!!! Oops, that was not appropriate...
Have to shut it down...
I think it is one of the biggest moons in the solar system. Similar to the Moon in size, maybe slightly bigger. It is much further from the Sun than Mars. I would guess about three times as far.
I feel sorry for guys who spent years to design the things. Ok, they got paid for it, but it must be painful to watch them burn.
As to the waste of resources, it is not such a big deal. A single air carrier represents a much bigger waste. Or what about the proposed $60bn missile defence program?
I guess I misunderstood you because you said "even lucid". In any case, I do not usually pick on
language, just posted on impulse to elucidate a perceived misconception.;)
However, I think that a simple generative grammar, even a context-sensitive turing complete one is basically doomed to failure, since "valid english sentences" is a fuzzy set.
That is precisely the reason why a lot of people believe that a natural language parser should assign probabilities to the corpus. However a simpleminded statistical approach works very poorly since a most bigrams occur once or just a few times even in a very large corpus, and (say) 4-grams are more or less unique (so-called sparse data problem).
There are a few methods to deal with that but none entirely satisfactory.
I cannot produce any data offhand but I guess
a lot of the difference is stylistic. I recall that even modern texts on different topics have somewhat surprisingly different bigram distributions. A serious difficulty in computer natural language processing is that data collected on the basis of one corpus may not be applicable to a different corpus, Shakespeare is a somewhat extreme example. People put a lot of effort into creating represantative corpora but they are never really representative.
I looked at a couple of your posts, you must have
knowledge of linguistics. While I am not a linguist, I am quite interested in natural language processing. The variety and numbers of constructions one encounters make any comparison to between computer and natural languages almost laughable. As far as I know no complete (or close to complete) grammar exist for any natural language.
I have been an owner of some Corel stock for a very long time. Cowpland has been very little
but an embarassment for Corel for all these years. Srarting with his ill-fated purchase of Word Perfect for something like $100M, his Java office, Corel network appliance, Corel PDA, videoconferencing equipment,the list goes on... While he might have some appreciation for technology and novelty, he has
wasted staggering amounts of money on his ill-conceived schemes. I think Corel will be a better company company after his departure.
Your are in error. Shakespeare is considered the beginning of "modern english", which is what we speak today. 95% of his vocabulary is the same (though some spellings differ), and most of the grammatical constructs we see in Shakespeare are still used today.
His vocabulary is similar if you disregard the spelling, which is something fairly easy for humans but very difficult for computers. However even correcting for that,
if you look at bigrams (i.e. pairs of words) in Shakespeare and, say, a newspaper article there will be very few in common and even those will mostly include prepositions.
Despite that, the language is similar enough for the modern reader (who might have never seen a lot of the words spelled or used like that before)
to understand it reasonably well.
Think about Shakespeare, for example. The language of Shakespeare is so different from standard English as to have virtually no intersection. Yet we somehow recognize it as English and can (fairly easily) read it. And it is not only the result of the age, thing about modern poetry.
If you read a paper on (say) math or biology
the language will be sufficiently different to make the contents incomprehensible unless you happen to be a specialist. Yet again we recognize it to be English.
How the language used influences the thought process is a fascinating subject. For example, Allan Bloom in his "Closing of the American Mind" points out that
a lot of the words or to be more precise the way we use them nowdays, such as lifestyle, charisma, values, superman, etc are actually a trivialization of ideas of German philosophers
(notably Nietsche). He argues that very little general discourse would be possible now without using some of these words.
Compared to natural languages, as you said, computer languages seem rather uninteresting as computers are still much more primitive than humans.
The point of research
is to develop technology for the good of society, right? So what's wrong with combining that with capatalism?
That is a very modern way to view research.
Even quite recently people thought that the point of research was to try to understand the divine design. Even now quite a few people (myself included) would argue that technology is but a
side effect of science (granted, an important side effect), while the real purpose of science is to make the universe comprehensible to the human mind.
If you accept this point of view the tension between science and capitlism becomes rather obvious as their respective goals have very little in common.
The point is that while the group is doing the job it is the power of the individual that makes it tick.
Antisemitism was strong in Germany after WWI, but Germany would not have become a fascist power and embarked on the task of world domination without Hitler.
Groups are powerless without leaders who infuse them with their will. Thus there is no restricting power of the group without infringing on the rights of the individual.
solar cell today still takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce in its usable life.
Not only that but they have a bank of batteries for backup. Needless to say the batteries are expensive to manufacrture, contain a lot of nasty chemicals and have to be replaced periodically.
Considering that they have enough to run the whole operations for 5 days, one wonders just how enviromentally friendly they are.
For example, your average German circa 1941 was as decent a
human being as any other, but grouped together as "Nazi Germany" they did a lot of horrible things.
There was a single individual, someone known as Adolph Hitler who brought all these horrible things into being.
The power of a single person can be quite amazing
provided the right conditions and a bit of luck.
Genghis Khan's armies conquered a great part of Asia and most of Europe and would have conquered all of it, if he did not die and his lieuteunants did not have to go back to choose a new leader.
Alexander the Great similarly conquered all of the known world and most of his empire collapsed after his death.
I can give a lot more examples of the awesome power of individuals and how often the prominence of a state (or a corporation) stems from an individual person.
So should fascist speech be restricted to make sure another Hitler does not rise to lead the country? The answer is far from clear to me.
As long as we remain human beings,
we won't tolerate life at the extremes that either you, or your hardcore individualist/objectivist opponents, advocate.
I do not advocate any particular philosophy and certainly not communism, which seems to be just as misguided. However I do feel a strong distaste
to a philosophy that makes a virtue out of egotism. Just because free markets work well does not mean the governments should be abolished and the poor abandoned. Just because nature is brutal
does not mean that man should follow nature and certainly does not mean that brutality is virtuous.
I totally agree with you about the need for a balanced and pragmatical approach and in fact
think that enlightened self-interest is a good working model.
Just let us remember the best and highest of human achievement and not idolize the lowest in human nature.
P.S.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Diderot
You know, during and after the Russian revolution
bolsheviks understood this quote quite literally;)
Perhaps, but then there are people like me who have spent the majority of their lives scrambling to pay the bills and who refused to accept
government aid on principle. Not everyone who adheres to libertarian principles is doing so out of convenience, habit, or some misguided aesthetic
sense. While it may be convenient to claim so, because it lets you dismiss it, it is not true.
I said most not all. However I agree, there are certainly people who have thought about it extensively and believe in it. However unlike
say Cristianity, libertarianism does provide a very comfortoble ground to stand on.
Most people already act in their own interest. It should not be too hard to convince oneself that it is the right way to go. It does not require great sacrifice or a leap of faith.
Modern western society essentially tells you
that one's goal is the pursuit of happiness and that it can be achieved through material possessions. Acting in one's own interest
fits very well with that framework. Self-interest
is pretty much the lowest common denominator of all human behaviour.
I think making a moral virtue out of it is extremely self-serving and if such a view is not a limited understanding of humanity I do not know what could be.
Perhaps I got carried away with my rhetoric but the point still stands.
I think a major reason why libertarianism can be very appealing for certain people is that it provides an easy justification for the things they find convenient and desireble to believe in.
E.g. I use Internet a lot, I find it very useful and would rather not see anyone interfering with my use of it. Thus I make it a moral imperative that Internet should not be tampered with.
It is quite ironic that people who are (among other things) against government funding of social programs on moral grounds are usually young and affluent and would probably never
need these services in the first place.
Elevation of (not all that enlightened) self-interest
(amusingly the French expression for it is amour propre, i.e. love of oneself) to a moral highground and sometimes even a law of nature
seems to very clearly indicate just how limited an intellegent human being can be and how modern culture promotes this kind of short-sightedness.
Libertarianism is essentially a rather watered-down form of Nietzscian pfilosophy paracticed by men who have neither will not self-confidence or thoughtfulness to truly consider themselves overman. Instead they are
hiding behind things like "I know what's best for myself", "as long as I do not do any harm to others I should be allowed to do whatever I choose", etc. Not suprisingly these meek excuses
crumble to dust in even the mildest confronation with reason.
How much easier it is to close your eyes and
to defend your untenable views by getting angry and irate with the questions that threaten and disturb you.
Not only the libraries do filter their books, they
should filter the books. Would you want you kids to go to the local library if most magazines on the shelves were porn? Would you like your library to have extensive how-to sections on bomb-making and manufacturing drugs? Would you like to have
shelves dedicated to fascist propaganda, racist literature, reasons why Jews should be exterminated?
I would not. And certainly not with the government money.
You should realize that libraries do choose their books. Try going to a public library
and look for porn or fascist propaganda. You are unlikely to find any.
The issue is not as straightforward as it might seem. Do you really think that government money should sponsor anyone who publishes a book, no matter what their views are? There is a difference between the freedom of expression and priviliged access.
While I do not think that legislating the use of filtering programs is a good solution as these programs are expensive and ineffective, the problem is quite real. The goverment should not expadite access to the materials deemed inappropriate for minors (or adults for that matter, say information on bomb-making).
We need a more rational and pragmatic approach to these problems. Ideology only goes so far.
Generally planets are so much smaller than the star they orbit that any affect they have on the stars brightness is very minimal, if any, and thus
differences in relative brightness are not a good way to detect extrasolar planets.
We have no proof of that so far exactly for the reason you mentioned. Small planets cannot be detected with the existing equipment. Thus we cannot really claim that planets are generally small. However it is a reasonable assumption.
I agree. Let us put our priorities straight and spend money on the things we really need: stealth fighters, air carriers, nuclear submarines, missile defence system. After all we need real world means to deal with real world problems. Who needs the Space Station, when American army is not yet ready to fight two wars at once!
Publishers care little. Very few people have the name recognition of Stephen King. The great majority of writers do not have the Midas touch and have to rely on publishers for promoting their books.
Stephen King is making a show out of a fairly trivial event. Of course, this will only increase his name recognition and will add more value to his already valuable brand name. More power to him.
Thought process is a mystery to me and I want to belive that it cannot be described by a Turing machine. Well, let's substitute one mystery with a different one (i.e. quantum mechanics), which is not predictable and hence is not a Turing machine. I win.
Wishful thinking coming from a respected scientist...
Biological neurons are extremely complicated. In fact Hodgkin and Huxley received a Nobel prize for modelling a giant squid axon in 50s. They used three partial differential equation to describe a simple neuron. And even that description was far from complete. In fact I don't think even now there is a realistic comprehensive model for cell interactions in the brain.
Nobody knows much about their computational capacity or how they do computations and transmit information.
Artificial neurons in neural nets are exceedingly crude approximations to the real thing.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a new definition to me. I used to think democracy was "rule of the people". Thanks for enlightening me in my ignorance.
However let us not stop at a democratic search engine, I would like a democratic word processor as well. It will choose words that most people think are appropriate.
#$%*@ &$%@#*%!!! Oops, that was not appropriate... Have to shut it down...
I think it is one of the biggest moons in the solar system. Similar to the Moon in size, maybe slightly bigger. It is much further from the Sun than Mars. I would guess about three times as far.
As to the waste of resources, it is not such a big deal. A single air carrier represents a much bigger waste. Or what about the proposed $60bn missile defence program?
I guess I misunderstood you because you said "even lucid". In any case, I do not usually pick on language, just posted on impulse to elucidate a perceived misconception. ;)
Lucid means clear. Lux means light in Latin. Sorry for picking on language.
That is precisely the reason why a lot of people believe that a natural language parser should assign probabilities to the corpus. However a simpleminded statistical approach works very poorly since a most bigrams occur once or just a few times even in a very large corpus, and (say) 4-grams are more or less unique (so-called sparse data problem).
There are a few methods to deal with that but none entirely satisfactory.
I looked at a couple of your posts, you must have knowledge of linguistics. While I am not a linguist, I am quite interested in natural language processing. The variety and numbers of constructions one encounters make any comparison to between computer and natural languages almost laughable. As far as I know no complete (or close to complete) grammar exist for any natural language.
I have been an owner of some Corel stock for a very long time. Cowpland has been very little but an embarassment for Corel for all these years. Srarting with his ill-fated purchase of Word Perfect for something like $100M, his Java office, Corel network appliance, Corel PDA, videoconferencing equipment,the list goes on... While he might have some appreciation for technology and novelty, he has wasted staggering amounts of money on his ill-conceived schemes. I think Corel will be a better company company after his departure.
Despite that, the language is similar enough for the modern reader (who might have never seen a lot of the words spelled or used like that before) to understand it reasonably well.
If you read a paper on (say) math or biology the language will be sufficiently different to make the contents incomprehensible unless you happen to be a specialist. Yet again we recognize it to be English.
How the language used influences the thought process is a fascinating subject. For example, Allan Bloom in his "Closing of the American Mind" points out that a lot of the words or to be more precise the way we use them nowdays, such as lifestyle, charisma, values, superman, etc are actually a trivialization of ideas of German philosophers (notably Nietsche). He argues that very little general discourse would be possible now without using some of these words.
Compared to natural languages, as you said, computer languages seem rather uninteresting as computers are still much more primitive than humans.
That is a very modern way to view research. Even quite recently people thought that the point of research was to try to understand the divine design. Even now quite a few people (myself included) would argue that technology is but a side effect of science (granted, an important side effect), while the real purpose of science is to make the universe comprehensible to the human mind.
If you accept this point of view the tension between science and capitlism becomes rather obvious as their respective goals have very little in common.
Groups are powerless without leaders who infuse them with their will. Thus there is no restricting power of the group without infringing on the rights of the individual.
Not only that but they have a bank of batteries for backup. Needless to say the batteries are expensive to manufacrture, contain a lot of nasty chemicals and have to be replaced periodically. Considering that they have enough to run the whole operations for 5 days, one wonders just how enviromentally friendly they are.
There was a single individual, someone known as Adolph Hitler who brought all these horrible things into being. The power of a single person can be quite amazing provided the right conditions and a bit of luck.
Genghis Khan's armies conquered a great part of Asia and most of Europe and would have conquered all of it, if he did not die and his lieuteunants did not have to go back to choose a new leader.
Alexander the Great similarly conquered all of the known world and most of his empire collapsed after his death.
I can give a lot more examples of the awesome power of individuals and how often the prominence of a state (or a corporation) stems from an individual person.
So should fascist speech be restricted to make sure another Hitler does not rise to lead the country? The answer is far from clear to me.
I do not advocate any particular philosophy and certainly not communism, which seems to be just as misguided.
However I do feel a strong distaste to a philosophy that makes a virtue out of egotism.
Just because free markets work well does not mean the governments should be abolished and the poor abandoned.
Just because nature is brutal does not mean that man should follow nature and certainly does not mean that brutality is virtuous.
I totally agree with you about the need for a balanced and pragmatical approach and in fact think that enlightened self-interest is a good working model.
Just let us remember the best and highest of human achievement and not idolize the lowest in human nature.
P.S.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Diderot
You know, during and after the Russian revolution bolsheviks understood this quote quite literally ;)
I said most not all. However I agree, there are certainly people who have thought about it extensively and believe in it. However unlike say Cristianity, libertarianism does provide a very comfortoble ground to stand on. Most people already act in their own interest. It should not be too hard to convince oneself that it is the right way to go. It does not require great sacrifice or a leap of faith.
Modern western society essentially tells you that one's goal is the pursuit of happiness and that it can be achieved through material possessions. Acting in one's own interest fits very well with that framework. Self-interest is pretty much the lowest common denominator of all human behaviour. I think making a moral virtue out of it is extremely self-serving and if such a view is not a limited understanding of humanity I do not know what could be.
Perhaps I got carried away with my rhetoric but the point still stands.
E.g. I use Internet a lot, I find it very useful and would rather not see anyone interfering with my use of it. Thus I make it a moral imperative that Internet should not be tampered with.
It is quite ironic that people who are (among other things) against government funding of social programs on moral grounds are usually young and affluent and would probably never need these services in the first place.
Elevation of (not all that enlightened) self-interest (amusingly the French expression for it is amour propre, i.e. love of oneself) to a moral highground and sometimes even a law of nature seems to very clearly indicate just how limited an intellegent human being can be and how modern culture promotes this kind of short-sightedness.
Libertarianism is essentially a rather watered-down form of Nietzscian pfilosophy paracticed by men who have neither will not self-confidence or thoughtfulness to truly consider themselves overman. Instead they are hiding behind things like "I know what's best for myself", "as long as I do not do any harm to others I should be allowed to do whatever I choose", etc. Not suprisingly these meek excuses crumble to dust in even the mildest confronation with reason.
How much easier it is to close your eyes and to defend your untenable views by getting angry and irate with the questions that threaten and disturb you.
I would not. And certainly not with the government money.
The issue is not as straightforward as it might seem. Do you really think that government money should sponsor anyone who publishes a book, no matter what their views are? There is a difference between the freedom of expression and priviliged access.
While I do not think that legislating the use of filtering programs is a good solution as these programs are expensive and ineffective, the problem is quite real. The goverment should not expadite access to the materials deemed inappropriate for minors (or adults for that matter, say information on bomb-making).
We need a more rational and pragmatic approach to these problems. Ideology only goes so far.
I agree. Let us put our priorities straight and spend money on the things we really need: stealth fighters, air carriers, nuclear submarines, missile defence system. After all we need real world means to deal with real world problems. Who needs the Space Station, when American army is not yet ready to fight two wars at once!
Stephen King is making a show out of a fairly trivial event. Of course, this will only increase his name recognition and will add more value to his already valuable brand name. More power to him.
Of course I will have to be paid more to read it.
His reasoning goes as following:
Thought process is a mystery to me and I want to belive that it cannot be described by a Turing machine. Well, let's substitute one mystery with a different one (i.e. quantum mechanics), which is not predictable and hence is not a Turing machine. I win.
Wishful thinking coming from a respected scientist...
Biological neurons are extremely complicated. In fact Hodgkin and Huxley received a Nobel prize for modelling a giant squid axon in 50s. They used three partial differential equation to describe a simple neuron. And even that description was far from complete. In fact I don't think even now there is a realistic comprehensive model for cell interactions in the brain.
Nobody knows much about their computational capacity or how they do computations and transmit information.
Artificial neurons in neural nets are exceedingly crude approximations to the real thing.