You've just reinforced my point by not understanding how the brain works. Neuron inputs and outputs are known to be pulse coded, and as you would imagine with chemical based transmitters, the pulse frequency is low (it evolved, it didn't get designed from first principles!) So it is perfectly possible to represent a neuron by a time-slicing parallel system, because it is extremely low bandwidth, and its output varies very slowly, but is NEVER DC. As a result, the output of the neuron does not need to be continuously available and it never needs to be polled. Your statement that "some things must happen at the same time" is just incorrect, quite irrespective of a theoretical physicist telling you that it is impossible. It is exactly the same principle by which you can send multiple audio channels over a digital RF channel.
However, to make this work you need a very efficient inter-process messaging prototcol that allows multiple virtual neurons to send messages to another virtual neuron. Languages like Erlang are optimised for doing this.
If I wanted to replicate the "brain" of a sea slug, which has (I believe) about 26 neurons, it would be much easier and cheaper to do this on a standard computer running 26 pseudo-parallel processes, than on 26 computers each imitating a single neuron, with a huiige number of potential interconnects.
As to what those pseudo-parallel processes look like, they have to respond every time a message is received (equivalent to a pulse from another neuron) by doing a calculation based on state history and then deciding when next to send an output to the destination process. For small numbers of neurons this is a manageable programming task; for large numbers, like brains with billions of neurons it is not.
There is a very big difference between AI - which is based on guesses about how "intelligence" works, and studies of brain function. I'm going to make a totally unjustified sweeping generalisation and suggest that one reason that AI has generally been a failure is because we have had quite wrong ideas about how the brain actually works. That's to say, the focus has been on how the brain seems to be like a distributed computer (neurons and the axons that relay their output) because up till now nobody has really understood how the brain stores and organises memory in parallel- which seems to be the key to it all, and is all about the software.
So my feeling is that the first people really to get anywhere with AI will either work for Google or be the neurobiologists who finally crack what is actually going on in there. If I wasn't close to retirement, and wanted to build a career in AI, I'd be looking at how mapreduce works, and the work being done building on that, rather than robotics. I'd also be looking as seriously parallel processing.
So my initial suggestion is nothing to do with conventional AI at all - look at Programming Erlang, and anything you can find about how Google does its stuff.
But here it is: the parent post is unfair to President Bush. To misquote Obelix apropros the last French presidential election, "ils sont fous ces francais".
The 1-click patent is more complex than some people seem to appreciate; it is not just "buying something with one click of the mouse". And it raises an interesting point about business methods.
Checkout in shops has always been subject to innovation. Remember the overhead pneumatic tube system to avoid having lots of cash registers and to protect against thieves? Supermarket tills have been constantly improved with innovations like conveyor belts and laser barcode readers. All of these things are patentable. Now consider the back office. Business methods are not patentable, but you don't let the competition into the back office to see how well you have integrated all your systems.
Amazon's problem is that their ingenious checkout system is in software so it cannot be patented, but also it is seen by the user so it cannot be a secret clever backoffice system. They fall between two stalls. This will inevitably discourage people from developing innovative POS systems in software, because it is far cheaper to reinvent something already known.
Solution? Yes, I have a solution. Reasonably, if a large department store introduced a pneumatic system, their competitors could follow them in around a 1-2 year timescale. What's more, they were free to visit the first one installed and look at its advantages and disadvantages. So why not allow software patents and business method patents but give them only a 2 year life from filing and a 1 year life from first commercialisation, whichever results in the earliest expiry? A year of leadership is a long time in retail.
In fact, short terms for different classes of IP seems reasonable nowadays, when books are usually remaindered in a year or so and and popular music rarely lasts more than a few months. As a first shot, how about:
No time at all for algorithms
1 year for business methods and software patents
5 years for books and recordings
10 years for medicines
20 years for heavy industry and advanced technology
At present, musicians get a ridiculously long copyright period even when they are just making derivative works, and this probably does more than anything else tobring the system into disrepute.
If you see exam passes as currency - which they are on the job market - then this is an example of Gresham's Law, that bad currency drives out good currency.
The sad fact is that nowadays for good jobs recruiters have a list of good courses from good universities. For graduate training, the interview can be little more than a check to make sure that the person submitting the CV really is the person who got or is doing the degree, as there is so much dishonesty in CVs nowadays. I suspect that this is one reason why we worry so little about school exams any more.
Behavior is so bad in UK schools at the moment that I'm amazed the kids learn anything at all.
One of my children currently heads the maths department in a London comprehensive school in a deprived borough, and would not agree. However, your comment about the generally low level of educational attainment in the 70s (which was indeed a dire time in British education) is one I agree with. I spent part of the 70s teaching maths in an independent school, and parents and grandparents would practically bankrupt themselves to get kids out of the local State system (Camden), which was indeed out of control. But then that was part of a general social problem. At the time I literally lived 100 metres over the border in Barnet. You could actually see the dividing line between the boroughs: on one side uncollected rubbish, dirt, broken street furniture and on the other, still on the same road with similar houses, clean and orderly streets. We had a severe attack of a kind of socialism which the Soviet Union would never have tolerated for a moment.
and your comment is nonsense. The reasons behind the changes are quite simple.
I went to a selective school - called a "grammar school" - which took the top 20% of the population based on a mixed IQ/attainment test. I was then in the top set for maths and the three sciences - so that's the top 5%. In the last two years at school I was in special groups that were applying to Cambridge (our school was heavily science biased to did not have Oxford applicants, who had to do Latin)- the top 1% in maths and physics. If you failed the Cambridge Entrance there was always Durham, Imperial or University College London, or Sussex.
There is your explanation. The exams in the 60s were aimed at - let's call it an elite. In those days there were few distractions - hardly anything on television, no mobile phones, electronic gadgets were basically for nerds who were already into electronics, music was about playing instruments or listening to a few very expensive recordings, not the iPod generation, theatre was about the school theatre group or the local AmDram society if you were good enough. To be absolutely honest, if you were a nerd, and there were enough of us, school was actually the most interesting place to be, where really intelligent adults spent quite a lot of spare time encouraging those of us who were interested in their subjects.
Nowadays schools are expected to spread their teaching assets over the entire pupil list, and the children have far more things to think about outside school. Exams are taken by most children, not just around 15% in each subject. Of course the emphasis has changed.
But if you are one of the top few percent, you can still get the education you want. Despite going through the state system, my children and their friends still go to Oxbridge and the top tier universities, and they still emerge just as well educated as our generation ever did.
I don't think the problem is anything at all to do with exams. It is that society nowadays needs a higher percentage of technically educated people, but the media give the impression that the best opportunities for the bright are in banking, finance, law and celebrity culture. Most journalists are technically illiterate, and the rest follows.
As for maths, you are simply wrong through ignorance. My generation used calculators. They just were not electronic. We had Brunswiga mechanical calculators, mathematical tables (which are basically a hand operated calculator system) and slide rules. The knowledge of how to use them is obsolete, but the principle of assisted calculation is the same.
I guess you work in banking, because like most bankers I've had to do with you do not understand the difference between money, economic activity and production.
Cities are net contributors to the generation of money and services, especially as in much of the world manufacturing activity is concentrated in cities. But in terms of water, food, and energy they are net consumers and in terms of environmental damage they are net contributors. The result is that cities attempt to dominate their surroundings because it's the only way their model is sustainable. If the people who actually grew things, extracted things, and managed hydrology were ever able to control the resources they manage and unite, cities would die out.
Currently civilisations have managed to control resources in such a way that they are produced at minimal cost, while creating very high margins in selling and distribution. Thus we have the picture of trainers produced for a couple of dollars in the 3rd world and sold for a hundred. To a banker, that makes the selling and distribution process a net contributor. But another way of looking at it is exploitation. Your argument about "globally uncompetitive industries" is usually an argument about how the controllers of the money supply manage to relocate resources to places in the world where exploitation is maximal.
London is dirty because people live in million pound houses and try to avoid paying their servant class adequate wages. I've heard a Londoner quite recently claim, in the space of five minutes, that his company was being mean because "£80000 doesn't buy you a decent car nowadays", and then complain that the Inland Revenue refused to accept his argument that his cleaner was self-employed, so he did not have to pay National Insurance (perhaps a few £ a week). That's your problem: meanness and greed. I left in the late 70s (and took a big pay cut) because I didn't want my children living there.
I'm not opposed to genuine entrepreneurialism - where people create real new industries and new opportunities - but London is not the home of any of these. Look at the really big new things. Mobile phones - the US, Finland, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Germany, France. Airbus - the City wanted BAe to sell it off. High speed trains - Japan and France. Nuclear power -anywhere but the UK. Solar power - Germany, US, Japan. Advanced vehicles - Germany, Japan, US. Computing - the West Coast, the East Coast, the Far East. London's problem is that its reliance on banking makes it parasitic, and when the banking system goes tits up it's rason d'etre goes with it. It just becomes a mediocre city that produces very little. It doesn't have a world class University even, and I say this sadly because of my family connections with UCL.
I've worked for numerous US companies, and I've got used to the belief that the UK consists of four states called London, Stratford, Wales and Scotland (not really surprising given UK self publicity). But Dorset is not in London, it borders the South Coast. Nothing about it relates to the London part of the Olympics (also, although I've referred to the pork barrel aspects and got downmodded as a result, as a boat owner myself I think the Dorset end is actually worth the money. We in the UK live on an island and we are good at boats!)
The comment above about the roads is also well made. Central Government sees no need to improve infrastructure that does anything other than let Londoners get to their weekend houses. The main road to the West (A303) has been so neglected that part of it has to be closed completely for three months to fix the damage. This year, the main road from Bristol to Southampton (two major cities) was closed for 3 months over 6 miles for the same reason. The Olympic Committee had better hope that everybody who wants to watch the sailing arrives by sea.
The London Olympics is pure pork barrel. It was intended to allow Government to divert funds to one of the more undeveloped parts of London while allowing an unsavoury collection of washed up politicians to enjoy lots of jollies. It is distorting the infrastructure of South-East England and spending still more money in an area that already gets more than its fair share.
Londoners go on about how London subsidises the rest of the country, but this has actually always translated as "controls the banking system and so rips off your profit and claims it as its own". This has just gone massively pear shaped...so now the Government wants the rest of the country to pay for the Olympics through general taxes.
Don't get me wrong, I am an expat Londoner. But the mismanagement of London, where some of the most deprived areas of the country are next to some of the richest, and people earning £1 million a year try to avoid paying their cleaners even minimum wages, is truly horrible. I'm glad to live in a much more egalitarian part of the country where we don't have the resulting crime and drug problems.
GB cannot really afford the Olympics, which has become completely bloated owing to the ludicrous over promotion of the IOC. We should either tell the IOC to go deflate itself and run a Games that London can afford, or let Beijing have it a second time, thus helping them to pay for all those facilities. I favour the first option...in which case this should only be the start and there should be rigorous pruning of excess. Beginning with replacing Tessa Jowell and Sebastian Coe with Second Life avatars who won't be able to spend lots of public money on entertaining corrupt functionaries.
It's actually very difficult to disentangle how good a physicist Hawking is from the media attention to his disability. Hawking has needed to cultivate celebrity because it has brought in enough money to pay for his 24 hour care (which is said to be why he wrote his book in the first place), but it is actually quite hard to point to anything he has done that is conclusively demonstrated and has had long term implications for physics. Someone will correct me if I am wrong...
Hawking is one of a group of scientists who are famous for non-scientific aspects of their lives (including Dawkins and Chomsky). Unfortunately this tends to send all the wrong messages, because the most productive scientists are usually too busy doing science to appear on TV, and the best science communicators won't dumb down enough for it.
Jay Gould was a far better science communicator than Hawking, and Olivia Judson is proving a worthy successor (while Dawkins rants at Creationists, Judson gently takes them apart by explaining slowly and carefully how evolution actually works, with real life examples.) Neither of them have the instant name recognition of Hawking, but I suspect that, in terms of getting potential biologists interested in biology, both of them are much better than Hawking has been in terms of getting potential physicists interested in doing physics.
My point here is that, in a way, Canada is doing itself no favors. Hawking's achievement is to fight severe disability while still being a working mathematical physicist, and this should be recognised for what it is, a major achievement of the human will, but using his name (since he will not really be working in the job) to try and get some publicity for Canadian physics is pure dumbing down.
In addition to the other post about this, let me add that utility companies in the UK have been putting solar panels on their telemetering boxes for some time. There is one along a path I use, and obviously while somebody periodically cleans the cells, I've seen no other signs of maintenance.
However, I agree about cell phones. Most people do not bring them out in sunshine, where they don't work very well, and they don't like heat anyway.
Interesting (to me anyway) the talking web was forecast in the 1960s in a book, published in the UK, called "Metatopia". I think it sold hardly any copies and I only know about it because the author lived in our road. Metatopia was a kind of rebuff to Brave New World, and it proposed a future that most North Americans would absolutely hate - a combination of socialism and libertarianism (hence the "meta" - Greek for "in the middle) but his talking Internet had e-commerce, a kind of Wikipedia, and the delivery of audio content free on demand.
(I know an AC has already replied but, of course, with low visibility. And I have no mod points. So I will try to give a nontechnical explanation.
First of all, entropy only increases with time in what is called a closed system. Nothing in, nothing out. If I mix water and salt, I increase the entropy (there are more ways the atoms can be arranged, in effect.) But if I am allowed to bring in energy from outside, I can fix this. I could boil the mixture in a flask, asnd condense the steam. Now I have the water and the salt separated again, but only because I fed "high grade" heat energy in, and I removed "low grade" heat energy from the steam. The water and salt have lost entropy, but the heat source and sink show a net gain. Overall, it can be shown that the entropy gained by the heat source alwasy exceeds the entropy lsot by the water/salt solution.
In the same way, life on Earth can use high grade energy from the Sun to reduce entropy locally, but that energy then has to be re-radiated as low grade energy, with a net gain in entropy. (If the energy wasn't re-radiated, the Earth would get hotter and hotter, gaining entropy. There is no fix for this.)
However, there is an additional point. Evolution does NOT mean evolving from a lower to a more organised state. You need to read Jay Gould on this, he explains it very well. But, in a nutshell, suppose that as a result of human or other activity the earth became unsuitable for any life forms other than high temperature sulfur bacteria. Evolution would ensure that bacteria evolved to fill this ecological niche and more complex lifeforms died out. This is the "survival of the fittest", which does not mean "survival of those with the biggest muscles".
Life maintains itself by keeping down its local entropy. It does this by, in effect, causing entropy to increase somewhere else and then getting rid of the high entropy "waste products", ultimately into space.
In doing so, life may cause geological changes by e.g. depositing calcarious skeletons in rivers and seabeds, or changing the atmosphere and rainfall patterns. You could say that some rocks are INVOLVED in the evolutionary process, and to that extent at least the article is correct.
Is it just my imagination or is there a subtle change of emphasis since the US Presidential election?
This isn't flamebait (I hope) but a genuine query. I have the distinct impression that, now people know that, specifically, Cheney is on the way out, judges are perhaps slightly more willing to assert the rights of the individual and liberal institutions and politicians are starting to find their backbones. (I'm reminded of Jay Gould's joke about the biologists who discovered a creature with a very small brain and almost no backbone, only it turned out to be a fish not a member of the House.) After all, the President-Elect is an expert on the Constitution, whereas the previous Administration seems to have contained some people who were experts on bypassing it.
It is not just in the US. Would the British Labor Party have dared to increase taxes on the rich and cut consumption taxes if Obama had not proposed something similar? Would they have dared to have an attack of socialism where the banks are concerned had Bush not had to do exactly the same?
As Clinton so rightly said, it's the economy, stupid.
Basic plumbing skills now take a day to acquire and, by following the instructions, you can do a safe job. But plumbers are still employed
The people you are referring to do not follow the instructions. (and to be honest I don't have "basic mechanical aptitude" - I have a 30 year engineering career including 5 years as a general manager of a plumbing company - as a result I have some experience of getting untrained people to use modern plumbing fixtures. It was while working for this company that I got interested first in MRPII and then in the actual coding of MRPII systems, which is how I come to have 3 years of assembler, 5 years of C, 8 years of Java, as well as ten years of management and four years of metallurgy and component design. So perhaps I do have a clue as to the value of experience.) The skill level of your straw men is not comparable to that of the average IT worker. You have to take my remarks in context - that is, that in software just as in metallurgy, once people know how to do something properly less skilled people can build on it. Graphic designers can build working websites without knowing anything about Apache under the hood.
To take an example from the automotive world, one of the most basic cars money can buy - the Hyundai i10 - has an engine with 3 valves per cylinder, electronic management, and electronic fuel injection - all of which would be unavailable on an exotic sports car of the 1960s. The industry now regards this as an entry level bread and butter engine, using technology freely available to anybody.
Do you remember when it took real skill to be a plumber? To attach a faucet to a pipe, you had to be able to melt solder and shape it with tools while using a kerosene-fueled blowtorch. Get it wrong and you melted the lead pipe. Putting in a faucet was half a day's work. When it froze, pipes split and had to be cut out and repaired, also at vast expense. The training to do all the jobs was expensive and took years.
Now go round the hardware store. In ours there are several kinds of push fit and screw fit plumbing. The pipe is plastic, you cut it with a simple little tool. I recently had to replace the water softener and the new one had different plumbing. It took me nearly half an hour to put in four bends and a few joints.
That's the race for the bottom. Basic plumbing skills now take a day to acquire and, by following the instructions, you can do a safe job. But plumbers are still employed. I'm not about to service my boiler, or install a bath. I have more sense than to try to put in an oil tank and all the safety equipment, following all the codes.
It's like that with software. It is not a race for the bottom, it is called progress. An SMTP server is now a basic piece of kit. The learning curve for spreadsheet design is, basically, over. Unlike the so-called creative arts, engineering does not recognise the idea that somebody should be rewarded forever for a one-off contribution. In a knowledge society, new knowledge has value but old knowledge is free.
Eventually, kicking and screaming, I expect we will get Open Source Law, and so-called lawyers will no longer be able to charge excessively for basic legal advice in simple cases. But specialist lawyers and the Supreme Court will still be needed, because there will still be hard cases. The same should really apply to all professions. And if you want a guaranteed source of income, make something essential that wears out. Grow food, make clothes or shoes.
Parts of the country also have Virgin Media (cable), and the mobile phone operators Vodafone and 3 have well publicised 3G networks. These do not go over BT lines at all.
The BT network is in fact so poor in our area that I do all my deployment update downloads for our company at home on Virgin (20Mbit/s downloads) and thus get better total download speeds than our office BT business lines.
Although BT is officially a private company, it cannot really be one because national infrastructure runs over its lines. It badly needs a complete overhaul, but it cannot get the investment as a private company, and the Government dare not spend billions of taxpayer money on it, as it will screw up. I wouldn't be surprised if in the long term Virgin, Vodafone and Hutchinson Whampoa end up running the country's Internet infrastructure, as 3G technology improves.
As a Copernicus fan (just look at my nick...and find out what his actual name was) some of the posts above miss quite a lot of the point. Copernicus knew his views would be unpopular with the Church and had them printed posthumously, since he did not want to be kicked out of his canonry, or worse. His mother had already been accused of witchcraft, in a period when that was often a cover up for someone being seen as being too clever (Gerber, despite being Pope, was accused of witchcraft because he could divide one number by another.)
His knowledge of the Universe was limited by optical astronomy; there was simply no way he could have guessed the Sun was not the largest thing in the Universe. And his system was not actually simpler than Ptolemy's, because although he had reduced the number of epicycles by correcting the basic mistake (i.e. the Sun is a better point of reference than the Earth) he had better observations to go on, and so had to deal with discrepancies in the Ptolemaic model than Ptolemy did not. Until Kepler and Newton, the more accurate observations were, the worse a system based on epicycles would look in terms of complexity.
Copernicus was a true nerd, doing difficult maths because he wanted to satisfy himself on a matter that was important to him and to very few other people. The location of his tomb doesn't ultimately matter, because (as it says on Wren's monument) si monumentum requiris circumspice. But for Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and Newton and a few others like them, we might live in a very different society.
And if he is really good and knows his stuff he will not run for the exits. He will ask you some questions. ISO 9000 is a general description of the things you must have to have quality management at various levels in your organisation (production, R&D). The effectiveness of your quality system depends on how well you have implemented it.
Unfortunately many US corporations saw it as a cynical box-ticking exercise to gain a certification. The Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Germans and Scandinavians saw it as a way to leverage their engineering skills and create product differentiation (like car engines that routinely go 120000-200000 miles with only routine maintenance). Which is one reason why companies with names like Honda, Toyota, Samsung, Hyundai, Acer, Asus, BMW, VW and Nokia make so much of the stuff that today the US cannot make for itself.
The disadvantage of ISO 9001 in a hire and fire environment, or one with a lot of contractors, is that only someone with years of experience across the board really knows enough to pull it all together. If you have implemented ISO 9000 seriously and well, the wise job applicant will know that you are less likely to have major failures like product recalls, you are more likely to handle customer service issues efficiently, and he is less likely to lose nights and weekends fixing other people's mistakes.
The Sun and the Mail are demanding that the Germans of 4600 years ago rise up and attack the local Social Services Department, who did nothing to prevent it. They want to know why nobody has been sacked.
If you do some research into wind power, you will see it is exactly the problems with putting 2MW low rev capable gearboxes at the top of towers that has led to this electrical solution. Wind turbines turn very slowly, hence the tooth loading on any gearbox, planetary or not, is enormous. Remember that at any given time the entire loading is on one or two teeth per gear, and that includes shock loads which are worsened because of the inertia of the rest of the gear train. What's more, your solution requires a 90 degree bevel drive, and these are very difficult indeed, as well as expensive, to engineer well at high powers. (The low speed gearbox problem is one reason that ships are propelled by very low speed direct drive Diesels; to get the desired low prop revolutions it is actually better and more efficient to make vast longstroke engines doing around 75rpm than to gear down physically much more compact medium speed engines. Even crankshafts 300mm in diameter sometimes break in heavy seas. Imagine the loading on a single gear tooth.)
I've used hydraulics. The efficiency is rather poor (remember in a wind turbine the hoses have to rotate or you need a rotating pressure joint - the thing has to face the wind, and to get good output the prop center needs to be high up meaning long hose runs.) I find it very hard indeed to believe that a PM generator with adaptive electronic control needs more maintenance than hydraulic systems, or that any cost savings outweigh the loss of efficiency over a 20 year plus lifespan. As a simple example, rail locomotives are Diesel-electric rather than Diesel-hydraulic. Hydraulics are (to the best of my knowledge) mainly useful when you want to get variable speed drives off constant speed prime movers, such as when you want the same prime mover to act as an AC generator on fixed 60 or 50Hz while also using it to power thrusters.
You may not have noticed that same-charge particles repel. Otherwise you could create magnetic containment boxes full of ordinary electrons or nuclei. A simple experiment with a school Van Der Graaf generator will quickly show you just how strong that repulsion gets when even a tiny quantity of electrons are persuaded to gather in one place. To get a significant quantity of positrons or anti-protons, you are ideally going to need a large, geologically stable area, some very big metalwork and a huge budget. None of the current examples are terribly portable, in fact one of them extends under two different countries.
Of course, if you made do with neutral antimatter you could clump it together, but then your magnetic containment won't work.
This whole multiverse thing is as far from physics as is theology. Like the "proofs" of the existence of God, it's just an infinite regress. The fact is, that we observe one universe. Our existence is unexplained. So the theist says "ah well, we're here because God created us." So we say "Fine, now you have to explain not only our existence but that of God as well".
The String Theorist says "hey, I just found this really cool mathematical technique which allows me to express the observed laws of Nature in a different way." We say "Ah, but now you have to explain why your theory fails to predict the existence of only one type of Universe". The String Theorist waves his hands a bit and says "perhaps all of the possible types of Universe exist, it's just that we can only see this one." So then we ask, where did this multiverse come from?
In both cases the gorilla in the room is Bill Ockham's shaving instrument - in order to explain what is, something much bigger and more complicated has to be postulated which is not observable.
Personally, I think String Theory is going to be another Phlogiston or Ptolemaic Epicycles - both of these required observed behaviour to be explained by the unobservable, whether it was the negative mass phlogiston that left heated materials, or the invisible angels needed to keep the Sun and all the planets revolving around the Earth. Both were "scientific" orthodoxy for some time.
The fundamental mystery is still "Why is there anything at all?", and none of the current "explanations" actually have any explanatory power. We should recognise this. (And perhaps put more physics effort into cheap, safe nuclear power and solar energy? But that's just applied physics, even if it is far more likely to keep physics departments open for the next fifty years or so.)
And swallow a camel. You are not, of course, answering my main point (that the first Book of the Bible is a collection of heterogeneous legends with more than one theology) while trying to absorb the oddity that Elohim _is_ a plural, and the claim that it isn't in this context is based on bar'a and bar'u. To give a simple analogy from German, if I wrote "Der Goetter" rather than "Die Goetter", it's more likely that I didn't know the correct form of the article than that I really mean "Der Gott". In the Biblical case, if I was a scribe coming along later who wanted to clean things up a bit as regards monotheism, faced with the difference between changing a single letter and replacing a whole word, I might well decide to slide in one of the few vowels that actually appears in unpointed text. Especially as vowels are less sacred than consonants. (Wikipedia writer, btw, hedges bets by writing "is traditionally understood").
The second issue is quite basic. Fundamentalists, to preserve their interpretation against the evidence, have to pretend that the Bible is literally correct. If you preserve an actual mistake - because the word Jehovah is a mistake, not a mispronunciation - you are admitting to your Bible something that is not literally correct. And if you have done that, how many other scribes and copyists may have done the same?
It's OK. Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens, and I know the battle is unwinnable. I wouldn't have bothered, had not your original post been so ridiculous.
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However, to make this work you need a very efficient inter-process messaging prototcol that allows multiple virtual neurons to send messages to another virtual neuron. Languages like Erlang are optimised for doing this.
If I wanted to replicate the "brain" of a sea slug, which has (I believe) about 26 neurons, it would be much easier and cheaper to do this on a standard computer running 26 pseudo-parallel processes, than on 26 computers each imitating a single neuron, with a huiige number of potential interconnects.
As to what those pseudo-parallel processes look like, they have to respond every time a message is received (equivalent to a pulse from another neuron) by doing a calculation based on state history and then deciding when next to send an output to the destination process. For small numbers of neurons this is a manageable programming task; for large numbers, like brains with billions of neurons it is not.
So my feeling is that the first people really to get anywhere with AI will either work for Google or be the neurobiologists who finally crack what is actually going on in there. If I wasn't close to retirement, and wanted to build a career in AI, I'd be looking at how mapreduce works, and the work being done building on that, rather than robotics. I'd also be looking as seriously parallel processing.
So my initial suggestion is nothing to do with conventional AI at all - look at Programming Erlang, and anything you can find about how Google does its stuff.
But here it is: the parent post is unfair to President Bush. To misquote Obelix apropros the last French presidential election, "ils sont fous ces francais".
Checkout in shops has always been subject to innovation. Remember the overhead pneumatic tube system to avoid having lots of cash registers and to protect against thieves? Supermarket tills have been constantly improved with innovations like conveyor belts and laser barcode readers. All of these things are patentable. Now consider the back office. Business methods are not patentable, but you don't let the competition into the back office to see how well you have integrated all your systems.
Amazon's problem is that their ingenious checkout system is in software so it cannot be patented, but also it is seen by the user so it cannot be a secret clever backoffice system. They fall between two stalls. This will inevitably discourage people from developing innovative POS systems in software, because it is far cheaper to reinvent something already known.
Solution? Yes, I have a solution. Reasonably, if a large department store introduced a pneumatic system, their competitors could follow them in around a 1-2 year timescale. What's more, they were free to visit the first one installed and look at its advantages and disadvantages. So why not allow software patents and business method patents but give them only a 2 year life from filing and a 1 year life from first commercialisation, whichever results in the earliest expiry? A year of leadership is a long time in retail.
In fact, short terms for different classes of IP seems reasonable nowadays, when books are usually remaindered in a year or so and and popular music rarely lasts more than a few months. As a first shot, how about:
At present, musicians get a ridiculously long copyright period even when they are just making derivative works, and this probably does more than anything else tobring the system into disrepute.
The sad fact is that nowadays for good jobs recruiters have a list of good courses from good universities. For graduate training, the interview can be little more than a check to make sure that the person submitting the CV really is the person who got or is doing the degree, as there is so much dishonesty in CVs nowadays. I suspect that this is one reason why we worry so little about school exams any more.
One of my children currently heads the maths department in a London comprehensive school in a deprived borough, and would not agree. However, your comment about the generally low level of educational attainment in the 70s (which was indeed a dire time in British education) is one I agree with. I spent part of the 70s teaching maths in an independent school, and parents and grandparents would practically bankrupt themselves to get kids out of the local State system (Camden), which was indeed out of control. But then that was part of a general social problem. At the time I literally lived 100 metres over the border in Barnet. You could actually see the dividing line between the boroughs: on one side uncollected rubbish, dirt, broken street furniture and on the other, still on the same road with similar houses, clean and orderly streets. We had a severe attack of a kind of socialism which the Soviet Union would never have tolerated for a moment.
I went to a selective school - called a "grammar school" - which took the top 20% of the population based on a mixed IQ/attainment test. I was then in the top set for maths and the three sciences - so that's the top 5%. In the last two years at school I was in special groups that were applying to Cambridge (our school was heavily science biased to did not have Oxford applicants, who had to do Latin)- the top 1% in maths and physics. If you failed the Cambridge Entrance there was always Durham, Imperial or University College London, or Sussex.
There is your explanation. The exams in the 60s were aimed at - let's call it an elite. In those days there were few distractions - hardly anything on television, no mobile phones, electronic gadgets were basically for nerds who were already into electronics, music was about playing instruments or listening to a few very expensive recordings, not the iPod generation, theatre was about the school theatre group or the local AmDram society if you were good enough. To be absolutely honest, if you were a nerd, and there were enough of us, school was actually the most interesting place to be, where really intelligent adults spent quite a lot of spare time encouraging those of us who were interested in their subjects.
Nowadays schools are expected to spread their teaching assets over the entire pupil list, and the children have far more things to think about outside school. Exams are taken by most children, not just around 15% in each subject. Of course the emphasis has changed.
But if you are one of the top few percent, you can still get the education you want. Despite going through the state system, my children and their friends still go to Oxbridge and the top tier universities, and they still emerge just as well educated as our generation ever did.
I don't think the problem is anything at all to do with exams. It is that society nowadays needs a higher percentage of technically educated people, but the media give the impression that the best opportunities for the bright are in banking, finance, law and celebrity culture. Most journalists are technically illiterate, and the rest follows.
As for maths, you are simply wrong through ignorance. My generation used calculators. They just were not electronic. We had Brunswiga mechanical calculators, mathematical tables (which are basically a hand operated calculator system) and slide rules. The knowledge of how to use them is obsolete, but the principle of assisted calculation is the same.
Cities are net contributors to the generation of money and services, especially as in much of the world manufacturing activity is concentrated in cities. But in terms of water, food, and energy they are net consumers and in terms of environmental damage they are net contributors. The result is that cities attempt to dominate their surroundings because it's the only way their model is sustainable. If the people who actually grew things, extracted things, and managed hydrology were ever able to control the resources they manage and unite, cities would die out.
Currently civilisations have managed to control resources in such a way that they are produced at minimal cost, while creating very high margins in selling and distribution. Thus we have the picture of trainers produced for a couple of dollars in the 3rd world and sold for a hundred. To a banker, that makes the selling and distribution process a net contributor. But another way of looking at it is exploitation. Your argument about "globally uncompetitive industries" is usually an argument about how the controllers of the money supply manage to relocate resources to places in the world where exploitation is maximal.
London is dirty because people live in million pound houses and try to avoid paying their servant class adequate wages. I've heard a Londoner quite recently claim, in the space of five minutes, that his company was being mean because "£80000 doesn't buy you a decent car nowadays", and then complain that the Inland Revenue refused to accept his argument that his cleaner was self-employed, so he did not have to pay National Insurance (perhaps a few £ a week). That's your problem: meanness and greed. I left in the late 70s (and took a big pay cut) because I didn't want my children living there.
I'm not opposed to genuine entrepreneurialism - where people create real new industries and new opportunities - but London is not the home of any of these. Look at the really big new things. Mobile phones - the US, Finland, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Germany, France. Airbus - the City wanted BAe to sell it off. High speed trains - Japan and France. Nuclear power -anywhere but the UK. Solar power - Germany, US, Japan. Advanced vehicles - Germany, Japan, US. Computing - the West Coast, the East Coast, the Far East. London's problem is that its reliance on banking makes it parasitic, and when the banking system goes tits up it's rason d'etre goes with it. It just becomes a mediocre city that produces very little. It doesn't have a world class University even, and I say this sadly because of my family connections with UCL.
The comment above about the roads is also well made. Central Government sees no need to improve infrastructure that does anything other than let Londoners get to their weekend houses. The main road to the West (A303) has been so neglected that part of it has to be closed completely for three months to fix the damage. This year, the main road from Bristol to Southampton (two major cities) was closed for 3 months over 6 miles for the same reason. The Olympic Committee had better hope that everybody who wants to watch the sailing arrives by sea.
Londoners go on about how London subsidises the rest of the country, but this has actually always translated as "controls the banking system and so rips off your profit and claims it as its own". This has just gone massively pear shaped...so now the Government wants the rest of the country to pay for the Olympics through general taxes.
Don't get me wrong, I am an expat Londoner. But the mismanagement of London, where some of the most deprived areas of the country are next to some of the richest, and people earning £1 million a year try to avoid paying their cleaners even minimum wages, is truly horrible. I'm glad to live in a much more egalitarian part of the country where we don't have the resulting crime and drug problems.
GB cannot really afford the Olympics, which has become completely bloated owing to the ludicrous over promotion of the IOC. We should either tell the IOC to go deflate itself and run a Games that London can afford, or let Beijing have it a second time, thus helping them to pay for all those facilities. I favour the first option...in which case this should only be the start and there should be rigorous pruning of excess. Beginning with replacing Tessa Jowell and Sebastian Coe with Second Life avatars who won't be able to spend lots of public money on entertaining corrupt functionaries.
Hawking is one of a group of scientists who are famous for non-scientific aspects of their lives (including Dawkins and Chomsky). Unfortunately this tends to send all the wrong messages, because the most productive scientists are usually too busy doing science to appear on TV, and the best science communicators won't dumb down enough for it.
Jay Gould was a far better science communicator than Hawking, and Olivia Judson is proving a worthy successor (while Dawkins rants at Creationists, Judson gently takes them apart by explaining slowly and carefully how evolution actually works, with real life examples.) Neither of them have the instant name recognition of Hawking, but I suspect that, in terms of getting potential biologists interested in biology, both of them are much better than Hawking has been in terms of getting potential physicists interested in doing physics.
My point here is that, in a way, Canada is doing itself no favors. Hawking's achievement is to fight severe disability while still being a working mathematical physicist, and this should be recognised for what it is, a major achievement of the human will, but using his name (since he will not really be working in the job) to try and get some publicity for Canadian physics is pure dumbing down.
However, I agree about cell phones. Most people do not bring them out in sunshine, where they don't work very well, and they don't like heat anyway.
Interesting (to me anyway) the talking web was forecast in the 1960s in a book, published in the UK, called "Metatopia". I think it sold hardly any copies and I only know about it because the author lived in our road. Metatopia was a kind of rebuff to Brave New World, and it proposed a future that most North Americans would absolutely hate - a combination of socialism and libertarianism (hence the "meta" - Greek for "in the middle) but his talking Internet had e-commerce, a kind of Wikipedia, and the delivery of audio content free on demand.
First of all, entropy only increases with time in what is called a closed system. Nothing in, nothing out. If I mix water and salt, I increase the entropy (there are more ways the atoms can be arranged, in effect.) But if I am allowed to bring in energy from outside, I can fix this. I could boil the mixture in a flask, asnd condense the steam. Now I have the water and the salt separated again, but only because I fed "high grade" heat energy in, and I removed "low grade" heat energy from the steam. The water and salt have lost entropy, but the heat source and sink show a net gain. Overall, it can be shown that the entropy gained by the heat source alwasy exceeds the entropy lsot by the water/salt solution.
In the same way, life on Earth can use high grade energy from the Sun to reduce entropy locally, but that energy then has to be re-radiated as low grade energy, with a net gain in entropy. (If the energy wasn't re-radiated, the Earth would get hotter and hotter, gaining entropy. There is no fix for this.)
However, there is an additional point. Evolution does NOT mean evolving from a lower to a more organised state. You need to read Jay Gould on this, he explains it very well. But, in a nutshell, suppose that as a result of human or other activity the earth became unsuitable for any life forms other than high temperature sulfur bacteria. Evolution would ensure that bacteria evolved to fill this ecological niche and more complex lifeforms died out. This is the "survival of the fittest", which does not mean "survival of those with the biggest muscles".
Life maintains itself by keeping down its local entropy. It does this by, in effect, causing entropy to increase somewhere else and then getting rid of the high entropy "waste products", ultimately into space.
In doing so, life may cause geological changes by e.g. depositing calcarious skeletons in rivers and seabeds, or changing the atmosphere and rainfall patterns. You could say that some rocks are INVOLVED in the evolutionary process, and to that extent at least the article is correct.
This isn't flamebait (I hope) but a genuine query. I have the distinct impression that, now people know that, specifically, Cheney is on the way out, judges are perhaps slightly more willing to assert the rights of the individual and liberal institutions and politicians are starting to find their backbones. (I'm reminded of Jay Gould's joke about the biologists who discovered a creature with a very small brain and almost no backbone, only it turned out to be a fish not a member of the House.) After all, the President-Elect is an expert on the Constitution, whereas the previous Administration seems to have contained some people who were experts on bypassing it.
It is not just in the US. Would the British Labor Party have dared to increase taxes on the rich and cut consumption taxes if Obama had not proposed something similar? Would they have dared to have an attack of socialism where the banks are concerned had Bush not had to do exactly the same?
As Clinton so rightly said, it's the economy, stupid.
The people you are referring to do not follow the instructions. (and to be honest I don't have "basic mechanical aptitude" - I have a 30 year engineering career including 5 years as a general manager of a plumbing company - as a result I have some experience of getting untrained people to use modern plumbing fixtures. It was while working for this company that I got interested first in MRPII and then in the actual coding of MRPII systems, which is how I come to have 3 years of assembler, 5 years of C, 8 years of Java, as well as ten years of management and four years of metallurgy and component design. So perhaps I do have a clue as to the value of experience.) The skill level of your straw men is not comparable to that of the average IT worker. You have to take my remarks in context - that is, that in software just as in metallurgy, once people know how to do something properly less skilled people can build on it. Graphic designers can build working websites without knowing anything about Apache under the hood.
To take an example from the automotive world, one of the most basic cars money can buy - the Hyundai i10 - has an engine with 3 valves per cylinder, electronic management, and electronic fuel injection - all of which would be unavailable on an exotic sports car of the 1960s. The industry now regards this as an entry level bread and butter engine, using technology freely available to anybody.
Now go round the hardware store. In ours there are several kinds of push fit and screw fit plumbing. The pipe is plastic, you cut it with a simple little tool. I recently had to replace the water softener and the new one had different plumbing. It took me nearly half an hour to put in four bends and a few joints.
That's the race for the bottom. Basic plumbing skills now take a day to acquire and, by following the instructions, you can do a safe job. But plumbers are still employed. I'm not about to service my boiler, or install a bath. I have more sense than to try to put in an oil tank and all the safety equipment, following all the codes.
It's like that with software. It is not a race for the bottom, it is called progress. An SMTP server is now a basic piece of kit. The learning curve for spreadsheet design is, basically, over. Unlike the so-called creative arts, engineering does not recognise the idea that somebody should be rewarded forever for a one-off contribution. In a knowledge society, new knowledge has value but old knowledge is free.
Eventually, kicking and screaming, I expect we will get Open Source Law, and so-called lawyers will no longer be able to charge excessively for basic legal advice in simple cases. But specialist lawyers and the Supreme Court will still be needed, because there will still be hard cases. The same should really apply to all professions. And if you want a guaranteed source of income, make something essential that wears out. Grow food, make clothes or shoes.
The BT network is in fact so poor in our area that I do all my deployment update downloads for our company at home on Virgin (20Mbit/s downloads) and thus get better total download speeds than our office BT business lines.
Although BT is officially a private company, it cannot really be one because national infrastructure runs over its lines. It badly needs a complete overhaul, but it cannot get the investment as a private company, and the Government dare not spend billions of taxpayer money on it, as it will screw up. I wouldn't be surprised if in the long term Virgin, Vodafone and Hutchinson Whampoa end up running the country's Internet infrastructure, as 3G technology improves.
His knowledge of the Universe was limited by optical astronomy; there was simply no way he could have guessed the Sun was not the largest thing in the Universe. And his system was not actually simpler than Ptolemy's, because although he had reduced the number of epicycles by correcting the basic mistake (i.e. the Sun is a better point of reference than the Earth) he had better observations to go on, and so had to deal with discrepancies in the Ptolemaic model than Ptolemy did not. Until Kepler and Newton, the more accurate observations were, the worse a system based on epicycles would look in terms of complexity.
Copernicus was a true nerd, doing difficult maths because he wanted to satisfy himself on a matter that was important to him and to very few other people. The location of his tomb doesn't ultimately matter, because (as it says on Wren's monument) si monumentum requiris circumspice. But for Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and Newton and a few others like them, we might live in a very different society.
Unfortunately many US corporations saw it as a cynical box-ticking exercise to gain a certification. The Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Germans and Scandinavians saw it as a way to leverage their engineering skills and create product differentiation (like car engines that routinely go 120000-200000 miles with only routine maintenance). Which is one reason why companies with names like Honda, Toyota, Samsung, Hyundai, Acer, Asus, BMW, VW and Nokia make so much of the stuff that today the US cannot make for itself.
The disadvantage of ISO 9001 in a hire and fire environment, or one with a lot of contractors, is that only someone with years of experience across the board really knows enough to pull it all together. If you have implemented ISO 9000 seriously and well, the wise job applicant will know that you are less likely to have major failures like product recalls, you are more likely to handle customer service issues efficiently, and he is less likely to lose nights and weekends fixing other people's mistakes.
The Sun and the Mail are demanding that the Germans of 4600 years ago rise up and attack the local Social Services Department, who did nothing to prevent it. They want to know why nobody has been sacked.
If you do some research into wind power, you will see it is exactly the problems with putting 2MW low rev capable gearboxes at the top of towers that has led to this electrical solution. Wind turbines turn very slowly, hence the tooth loading on any gearbox, planetary or not, is enormous. Remember that at any given time the entire loading is on one or two teeth per gear, and that includes shock loads which are worsened because of the inertia of the rest of the gear train. What's more, your solution requires a 90 degree bevel drive, and these are very difficult indeed, as well as expensive, to engineer well at high powers. (The low speed gearbox problem is one reason that ships are propelled by very low speed direct drive Diesels; to get the desired low prop revolutions it is actually better and more efficient to make vast longstroke engines doing around 75rpm than to gear down physically much more compact medium speed engines. Even crankshafts 300mm in diameter sometimes break in heavy seas. Imagine the loading on a single gear tooth.)
I've used hydraulics. The efficiency is rather poor (remember in a wind turbine the hoses have to rotate or you need a rotating pressure joint - the thing has to face the wind, and to get good output the prop center needs to be high up meaning long hose runs.) I find it very hard indeed to believe that a PM generator with adaptive electronic control needs more maintenance than hydraulic systems, or that any cost savings outweigh the loss of efficiency over a 20 year plus lifespan. As a simple example, rail locomotives are Diesel-electric rather than Diesel-hydraulic. Hydraulics are (to the best of my knowledge) mainly useful when you want to get variable speed drives off constant speed prime movers, such as when you want the same prime mover to act as an AC generator on fixed 60 or 50Hz while also using it to power thrusters.
Of course, if you made do with neutral antimatter you could clump it together, but then your magnetic containment won't work.
The String Theorist says "hey, I just found this really cool mathematical technique which allows me to express the observed laws of Nature in a different way." We say "Ah, but now you have to explain why your theory fails to predict the existence of only one type of Universe". The String Theorist waves his hands a bit and says "perhaps all of the possible types of Universe exist, it's just that we can only see this one." So then we ask, where did this multiverse come from?
In both cases the gorilla in the room is Bill Ockham's shaving instrument - in order to explain what is, something much bigger and more complicated has to be postulated which is not observable.
Personally, I think String Theory is going to be another Phlogiston or Ptolemaic Epicycles - both of these required observed behaviour to be explained by the unobservable, whether it was the negative mass phlogiston that left heated materials, or the invisible angels needed to keep the Sun and all the planets revolving around the Earth. Both were "scientific" orthodoxy for some time.
The fundamental mystery is still "Why is there anything at all?", and none of the current "explanations" actually have any explanatory power. We should recognise this. (And perhaps put more physics effort into cheap, safe nuclear power and solar energy? But that's just applied physics, even if it is far more likely to keep physics departments open for the next fifty years or so.)
The second issue is quite basic. Fundamentalists, to preserve their interpretation against the evidence, have to pretend that the Bible is literally correct. If you preserve an actual mistake - because the word Jehovah is a mistake, not a mispronunciation - you are admitting to your Bible something that is not literally correct. And if you have done that, how many other scribes and copyists may have done the same?
It's OK. Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens, and I know the battle is unwinnable. I wouldn't have bothered, had not your original post been so ridiculous.