Its interesting to note that the most genetically homogeneous of all mammels at the moment is
humans See the comments about transplantation and think of all those hearts, kidneys ectra....
Stallmans arguement comes down to a wish to be able to help other people.
But lets extend it into the real world - what if you substitute "your program" with "my house" in these discussions. What if I want my friends to share your house, or your car. What's the problem with that
Well, alot of things - your kids might not like it for a start. I write software for a living, I would like to continue to have a living, and the whole purpose of the FSF seems to be to prevent me from charging people to use the fruits of my labours.
Some nice people do let strangers share their house. I let my friends share my house sometimes... but I don't know you, and my family need somewhere to sleep.
Didn't one of the cold fusion "good people" have a Nobel Laureate?
Also they weren't given "proof" you can't prove a negative - it's like saying "pigs can't fly because I've never seen a flying pig" you may well be right, but you haven't *proved* a thing.
No one replicated the cold fusion results, cold fusion almost certainly didn't happen, but there are a lot of things about water (cavitation, luminesence) that are badly understood... it's unwise to dismiss things because other people *say* it ain't so.
Well, it's not surprising that demand hasn't been overwhelming in europe for 3G services yet... because none have been deployed!!!
Clearly consumers won't pay for what they can't get, so breaking even isn't even an option yet.
The reason why 3G licenses were so expensive was very simple. Mobile phone companies without these license will simply cease to exist. Why? Because without the UMTS technology and the bandwidth associated with the areas of spectrum auctioned in the government sales in Germany, Britain, Holland and Italy (France didn't do an auction, instead they did sealed bids) it will not be possible to support mass use of mobile services like on-demand music, location sensitive information, conference calls, remote dictation ectra. These services can be supported at great expense for limited numbers of users using GPRS technology, but basically the sums make UMTS (3G) a much better bet.
In fact a much more interesting fact associated with the 3G auctions is that they have precipitated the tech collapse by forcing a massive (>$150B) trasfer of capital from private multinationals and banks to state treasuries in Europe. So when you yanks are wondering why your retirement fund is so thin now the nasdaq has collapsed, turn around and face the wind: look to europe that was once as speculative as you.
TDIDT (Top down induction of decision trees) is an oldfashioned type of machine learning. The intuition that it is based on is this: each item of data (event) has a class and a set of attribute values. The class might be "good" and the attributes might be "killno", "kissno". The values for "killno" and "kissno" might be "5" and "500". The root of the decision tree is a description that maps to the whole data set. A question is constructed at the root from the data set by seeing what the most "informative" or "significant" split in the data set is. So, if you have a situation where all "good" things have kissno>killno then the question at the root is "if kissno>killno branch 1, else branch 2". You can construct algorithms that use any criteria to do this, depending on the language that you choose, but the more complex the question, the higher the search complexity of finding a decision tree that maps to the data set. The idea is that you generate questions for every branch until you have a tree that has leaves with only one class - ie. good or bad.... DT's are ok, but they are exposed to structural risk, that is to say, they can become so complex that they overfit to the problem... a very bushy tree probably represents more information than the domain theory that it was induced from, and that information is probably just noise, so the tree will not generalise well to data from outside the original data set. Another problem is that dts are bad at catching data at the margins of distributions, because they tend to use measures based on statistical or information theory.
Modern machine learning uses algorithms like Support Vector Machines, because these have properties that limit the sturctural risk. Alternatively you can use fuzzy neural nets, and these deal with marginal cases much better.
Of course I have a number of unpublished algorithms that do better than both of these techniques... but I can't tell you about them, because I would have to kill you;-)
Have a look at (randomly from google) http://www.cis.tugraz.at/igi/tnatschl/online/3rd_g en_eng/3rd_gen_eng.html
Spike train networks... Been around for a bit, never understood the attraction (geddit!) personally. Ok, here is the view from research mountain: neural networks (shock horror) are nothing special, infact, if you have a look at the work on Support Vector Machines it will dawn on you that NN's are basically generalised n'NN algorithms trained by gradient descent.
Research themes for AI:
* representation
* understanding the representation
* reintegrating new things (learning)
* deciding how to act on what you know
So that would be no change there for 40 years then... but, I have to say, the spin offs are spectacular. To answer your comments one at a time:
* Neural nets are probably not capable of consiousness because beings with a digital matrix cannot conceivably operate in a linear fashion. What will time mean when you can live in any "when" that you, or anyone else, recorded? So no "self" , no "stream of being".
* Subsystems - good research theme - look at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jimmyd/summaries/chandra sekaran1988-1.html
for a summary of Chandrasekaran's seminal paper.
LGM was what the discovering astronomer (a woman incedentally) wrote on the printout at the moment that she saw it! Basically they were just really surprised by what they saw, and had to think really hard about a physical process that could produce something like a pulsar.
In fact, if you consider the bizzar nature of neurton stars (spining at relativistic speeds, exotic matter - neutronium) LGM is the simplest explanation - so apply Occam to to that!
By the way Occam's razor is actually "if two explantions are equally good pick the simplest"
Re:Is this the right thing to do?
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
Tasmanian tigers were never a dangerous menace.
And if there is a place for dingo's, why not tigers?
Probably Austrailia is the most hospitable country going for wildlife...
Read Greg Bear's "The Forge of God"
A. Bad idea: humanity has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use new wepons on other humans cf. Hiroshima.
B. Bad idea: daughter civilizations are real likey to come back and haunt you. There may be resouce contention and so war at some point in the future. Again humans will kill humans for trivial things, like blankets, or bits of shiny rock
C. I am ok with this so long as passive methods only are used. Infact I think that a major "turn off the radars and radios" effort should be undertaken, possibly in conjunction with some extensive cable laying.
The little child wanders through the woods, calling for friends, and crying at the sheer enormity of the world... all the while the wolves come ever closer.
What a load of rubbish.
No one knows why we have the solar system structure we do have. All the observations that people have had of gas giants orbiting close to primaries have completely junked the previous ideas of solar system formation, so frankly NOONE knows.
Epsilon Eridani is pretty sun like in the stella scale of things anyway.
Lack of motivation. If you are having problems focusing it is because you no longer deeply care about it. So you lose your house - so what? People at work think you are lame - so what? The client hates you and you cause a multi-billion dollar project to go tits up - so what? If you are in this position re-evaluate what you are doing with your life. Cutting code all day can be a little soul destroying, if it has got to you then give it a rest. When your unconsious speakes, LISTEN.
The problem is that Sysadmins are seen as low status by code monkies and suits (analysts). Which means that they get trained and then piss off at a moments notice, which means that the next one doesn't get trained. I think that this will change as systems get to be more of "the system" and less "just" the iron that it runs on.
Unfortunately the fuel required to escape from Jupiter is just not there on Galileo. The only option is to crash it into the giant planet! Jupiter just underwent a large alteration when that comet bombarded it a few years back so it should be ok.
Home of the HyperLink. Good things: errr, you can work at BT. Labs. property is cheap beer is cheap Bad things: the women are ugly (although they will want to sleep with you, something about fresh genes or some such) the nightlife is... limited.
If you don't want to pay then use something that is free... it isn't as if there are no free alternatives, and if there isn't a free alterenative: write one.
disappointment the likes of which haven't been seen since Viking.
What? Viking was a triumph.
Honestly, people who see a disappointment in the stagering acheivement of sending a 60's tech era probe 90'odd million miles and then soft landing it and then getting it to do experiments, essentially by clockwork and to cap it all, just to prove that it wasn't a fluke, doing it again ;are beyond redemption.
This seems to be a theme amongst the oldsters out there. I heard a famous AI professor, (libel laws being what they are I decline to name him) give a presentation that essentally claimed that nothing had changed since 1962.
These old men make me laugh. Just substitute the word "sex" for "systems software research" and you will see what I mean. But there are some serious points here.
1) Orthodoxy. He is dead on with this one. Most of the grad students we have had at the lab I work in are incapable of imagening that there is any way but there way. There intellectual arrogance is staggering, and their lack of imagination frightening.
I am sure that this comes from the narrowness of the people in computer science departments in major universities. My own education was in minor universities (cow colleges), but I was able to meet people who had come into computing from accountancy, maths, physics, electronics, sociology, even history. I am sure that this helps me to think unconventionally. Sadly I am almost always wrong, but thats another issue.
2) Microspecialisation. Most academics identify themselves as "AI planning researchers" or "I'm investigating solving TSP's with constraint solvers" or "I'm interested in methodologies for engineering systems of collaborative intelligent BDI agents" (these are all AI things, but thats me...) AI is a tiny field, come to think of it the WHOLE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE is a tiny field. How can someone investigate machine learning without considering the interaction of humans with the learning system? What is the point of investigating how robots play soccer without asking can we build the robots? Yet many respected academics do just that.
I blame the journals, and the conferences, but most of all I blame the reviewers. It is impossible to publish "out there" research anywhere but in a workshop. People will simply bounce it, even presenting ideas and tryouts (or failures) at workshops invites derision. Workshop publications are seen as worthless, yet workshops are still almost invariably run around presentations and a refereed paper collection. I dispare of the infrastructure for research. The Springer-Verlag LNCS series should be piled up, and we could set it alight and dance round it naked, like red in^B^B^B^B^B^B native americans.
We could throw the journals on as well.
3) Grandma, marketing and start ups: e-commerce is corrosive, both socially (it has cost me friends) but also personally:people have ruined their careers and lives, but made some money (think about this). Happily I think that major disruptors in the form of The Grid and GnuTella, and Other THINGS are on the horizon.
Finally a link to Zeus this is a project about programming distributed systems, one of the points Dr. Pike makes. There are many others; perhaps he is unaware of them all, perhaps I don't know what he meant, perhaps I don't care what he meant.
I, and many others on/. have seen the future. It will sweep away everything that we have seen so far. Hang on folks, it's going to be some ride.
Hi, it is interesting that you are so focused on your academic acheivements in your email, but seem unhappy with the idea that others might apply the same standards to you. It is also sad that you dengrate people as rank and file code grinders; perhaps the attitued "respected colleagues and friends" might be more helpful? My experience is that people evaluate new entrants to their workgroups very carefully. This is because we all hate working with arseholes. Sometimes new people seem to think everyone is stupider than they are, surprisingly this is badly received. Sometimes they seem to think that they don't have to work, and this also is badly received. If you are worried about how you will be greeted then I suggest that you do the following. When you start try and be friends with everyone. Try to appear bright and keen, try to be nice all the time. Come in on time, and go home a little (but not too much) late - people will know you are working hard, but not showing them up. Don't worry about their response(s) in IT your time will come. Wait for the crisis, you won't have long! Pitch in when the crisis comes, demonstrate your value. Afterwards you will find that the team will accept you, and will accord you more respect. When the next person joins go out of your way to be kind to them. This will not go unnoticed by your team mates, and will reflect well on you.
I am pretty sure that slashdot is being wound up here, Chris Morris is the name of a comedian notorious for lampooning the pompus by putting silly assertions to them and watching how they react.
1) Penrose argues that minds are not computers and so AI is not possible. However he does admit that minds are part of the physical universe (how else could he write the book).
This implies that a non computational device could be built that is properly intelligent. Turing foresaw such devices, and refuted Penrose in the process, with his B-Machines (this is a poor reference but the only online mention I could find quickly, the full one is "Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science" B. Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, Scientific American April 1999.
Apparently Turing couldn't get this work published, while Penrose has sold tens of thousands of copies of his book; another piece of proof for my theories about peer review and publication (dark glower, bitter mumblings).
Roger Penrose is a great physicist, and an amazing mathematician; he is truly important to science in the way that Turing or Einstein are. It is a puzzle as to why he has got such a bee into his bonnet about AI, and rather flattering that he considers it so important as to divert his attention from his real (and probably more fundamental and important work).
2) Creationists argue that there are instances of "irreducible complexity" in biological organisms, and that this means that they could not have evolved, but were created instead. This is clearly bunk, however even if we accept it, and all its axioms, then it is actually an argument in support of the AI project. If we are created then there exists an existence proof for creation of intelligence.
Here is a frightener for you. Millions of people have their savings, and pensions, tied up in dot.coms at the moment. Pension socialism is something that alot of people have been talking about for a while, if we all have a stake in mega corporates, then they will have to do what we say, act in our interest ectra. The pension funds represent massive capital warehouses. Now, lets say that you want that money. What do you do? Well, you buy a load of shares some years ago, you venture out some seed capital... You wait, and you stoke the shares up. A few little things can be done to help you here... if you have access to the media, you might run a load of articles that announce that billions can be made by any fool, you let things run for a while to encourage confidence. Then you sell. Now, when you dump your stock it will be snapped up by the hungry punters, but pretty soon, they smell a rat. They try to get out, to limit their losses. But lets say, for example, that they can't go anywhere, lets say that all the online trade sights are down, lets say that their broker can't even sell for them. All they can do is sit, and watch the prices spiralling down, and down. You, on the other hand, have cleared your position. Things are bright - you have the money now. But for the punters... Bye bye savings, hello starving in a basement eating cardboard! You might not think that this effects you, but if you have any managed saving account it almost certainly does. Reminds me of cons and pyramid schemes throught history. If it looks to good to be true, it probably isn't.
There is no grammar, is a theory.
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 1
There is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, is one new theory about information.We could use some help from physicists and biologists here.
And some help from an English teacher as well, I fear.
Has anyone thought? If these planets are of gas giant class, and do support life, on a solid surface, it is going to have evolved to be real paranoid about heights. No friendly alien space travellers from there I think!
Slashdot Mirror
Its interesting to note that the most genetically homogeneous of all mammels at the moment is
humans See the comments about transplantation and think of all those hearts, kidneys ectra....
But lets extend it into the real world - what if you substitute "your program" with "my house" in these discussions. What if I want my friends to share your house, or your car. What's the problem with that
Well, alot of things - your kids might not like it for a start. I write software for a living, I would like to continue to have a living, and the whole purpose of the FSF seems to be to prevent me from charging people to use the fruits of my labours.
Some nice people do let strangers share their house. I let my friends share my house sometimes... but I don't know you, and my family need somewhere to sleep.
Microsoft has approximately $30 billon (and growing) in the bank, in cash.
To give some perspective: MS could buy a major telco, from cash.
Now, that would be trouble!
Also they weren't given "proof" you can't prove a negative - it's like saying "pigs can't fly because I've never seen a flying pig" you may well be right, but you haven't *proved* a thing.
No one replicated the cold fusion results, cold fusion almost certainly didn't happen, but there are a lot of things about water (cavitation, luminesence) that are badly understood... it's unwise to dismiss things because other people *say* it ain't so.
Clearly consumers won't pay for what they can't get, so breaking even isn't even an option yet.
The reason why 3G licenses were so expensive was very simple. Mobile phone companies without these license will simply cease to exist. Why? Because without the UMTS technology and the bandwidth associated with the areas of spectrum auctioned in the government sales in Germany, Britain, Holland and Italy (France didn't do an auction, instead they did sealed bids) it will not be possible to support mass use of mobile services like on-demand music, location sensitive information, conference calls, remote dictation ectra. These services can be supported at great expense for limited numbers of users using GPRS technology, but basically the sums make UMTS (3G) a much better bet.
In fact a much more interesting fact associated with the 3G auctions is that they have precipitated the tech collapse by forcing a massive (>$150B) trasfer of capital from private multinationals and banks to state treasuries in Europe. So when you yanks are wondering why your retirement fund is so thin now the nasdaq has collapsed, turn around and face the wind: look to europe that was once as speculative as you.
;-)
Modern machine learning uses algorithms like Support Vector Machines, because these have properties that limit the sturctural risk. Alternatively you can use fuzzy neural nets, and these deal with marginal cases much better.
Of course I have a number of unpublished algorithms that do better than both of these techniques... but I can't tell you about them, because I would have to kill you ;-)
Research themes for AI:
* representation
* understanding the representation
* reintegrating new things (learning)
* deciding how to act on what you know
So that would be no change there for 40 years then... but, I have to say, the spin offs are spectacular. To answer your comments one at a time:a sekaran1988-1.html
for a summary of Chandrasekaran's seminal paper.
* Neural nets are probably not capable of consiousness because beings with a digital matrix cannot conceivably operate in a linear fashion. What will time mean when you can live in any "when" that you, or anyone else, recorded? So no "self" , no "stream of being".
* Subsystems - good research theme - look at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jimmyd/summaries/chandr
Hope that is of interest,
Si.
Ha ha ha aha ha ha ha hah ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha aha ha ha ha hah ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha aha ha ha ha hah ha ha ha ha ha
Serves you all right.
When did you last do anything for africa?
In fact, if you consider the bizzar nature of neurton stars (spining at relativistic speeds, exotic matter - neutronium) LGM is the simplest explanation - so apply Occam to to that!
By the way Occam's razor is actually "if two explantions are equally good pick the simplest"
And if there is a place for dingo's, why not tigers?
Probably Austrailia is the most hospitable country going for wildlife...
A. Bad idea: humanity has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use new wepons on other humans cf. Hiroshima.
B. Bad idea: daughter civilizations are real likey to come back and haunt you. There may be resouce contention and so war at some point in the future. Again humans will kill humans for trivial things, like blankets, or bits of shiny rock
C. I am ok with this so long as passive methods only are used. Infact I think that a major "turn off the radars and radios" effort should be undertaken, possibly in conjunction with some extensive cable laying.
The little child wanders through the woods, calling for friends, and crying at the sheer enormity of the world... all the while the wolves come ever closer.
What a load of rubbish. No one knows why we have the solar system structure we do have. All the observations that people have had of gas giants orbiting close to primaries have completely junked the previous ideas of solar system formation, so frankly NOONE knows. Epsilon Eridani is pretty sun like in the stella scale of things anyway.
Lack of motivation. If you are having problems focusing it is because you no longer deeply care about it. So you lose your house - so what? People at work think you are lame - so what? The client hates you and you cause a multi-billion dollar project to go tits up - so what? If you are in this position re-evaluate what you are doing with your life. Cutting code all day can be a little soul destroying, if it has got to you then give it a rest. When your unconsious speakes, LISTEN.
The problem is that Sysadmins are seen as low status by code monkies and suits (analysts). Which means that they get trained and then piss off at a moments notice, which means that the next one doesn't get trained. I think that this will change as systems get to be more of "the system" and less "just" the iron that it runs on.
Unfortunately the fuel required to escape from Jupiter is just not there on Galileo.
The only option is to crash it into the giant planet! Jupiter just underwent a large alteration when that comet bombarded it a few years back so it should be ok.
Home of the HyperLink. Good things: errr, you can work at BT. Labs. property is cheap beer is cheap Bad things: the women are ugly (although they will want to sleep with you, something about fresh genes or some such) the nightlife is... limited.
If you don't want to pay then use something that is free... it isn't as if there are no free alternatives, and if there isn't a free alterenative: write one.
What? Viking was a triumph.
Honestly, people who see a disappointment in the stagering acheivement of sending a 60's tech era probe 90'odd million miles and then soft landing it and then getting it to do experiments, essentially by clockwork and to cap it all, just to prove that it wasn't a fluke, doing it again ;are beyond redemption.
You sad little freak of nature.
These old men make me laugh. Just substitute the word "sex" for "systems software research" and you will see what I mean. But there are some serious points here.
1) Orthodoxy. He is dead on with this one. Most of the grad students we have had at the lab I work in are incapable of imagening that there is any way but there way. There intellectual arrogance is staggering, and their lack of imagination frightening.
I am sure that this comes from the narrowness of the people in computer science departments in major universities. My own education was in minor universities (cow colleges), but I was able to meet people who had come into computing from accountancy, maths, physics, electronics, sociology, even history. I am sure that this helps me to think unconventionally. Sadly I am almost always wrong, but thats another issue.
2) Microspecialisation. Most academics identify themselves as "AI planning researchers" or "I'm investigating solving TSP's with constraint solvers" or "I'm interested in methodologies for engineering systems of collaborative intelligent BDI agents" (these are all AI things, but thats me...) AI is a tiny field, come to think of it the WHOLE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE is a tiny field. How can someone investigate machine learning without considering the interaction of humans with the learning system? What is the point of investigating how robots play soccer without asking can we build the robots? Yet many respected academics do just that.
I blame the journals, and the conferences, but most of all I blame the reviewers. It is impossible to publish "out there" research anywhere but in a workshop. People will simply bounce it, even presenting ideas and tryouts (or failures) at workshops invites derision. Workshop publications are seen as worthless, yet workshops are still almost invariably run around presentations and a refereed paper collection. I dispare of the infrastructure for research. The Springer-Verlag LNCS series should be piled up, and we could set it alight and dance round it naked, like red in^B^B^B^B^B^B native americans.
We could throw the journals on as well.
3) Grandma, marketing and start ups: e-commerce is corrosive, both socially (it has cost me friends) but also personally :people have ruined their careers and lives, but made some money (think about this). Happily I think that major disruptors in the form of The Grid and GnuTella, and Other THINGS are on the horizon.
Finally a link to Zeus this is a project about programming distributed systems, one of the points Dr. Pike makes. There are many others; perhaps he is unaware of them all, perhaps I don't know what he meant, perhaps I don't care what he meant.
I, and many others on /. have seen the future. It will sweep away everything that we have seen so far. Hang on folks, it's going to be some ride.
Hi, it is interesting that you are so focused on your academic acheivements in your email, but seem unhappy with the idea that others might apply the same standards to you. It is also sad that you dengrate people as rank and file code grinders; perhaps the attitued "respected colleagues and friends" might be more helpful? My experience is that people evaluate new entrants to their workgroups very carefully. This is because we all hate working with arseholes. Sometimes new people seem to think everyone is stupider than they are, surprisingly this is badly received. Sometimes they seem to think that they don't have to work, and this also is badly received. If you are worried about how you will be greeted then I suggest that you do the following. When you start try and be friends with everyone. Try to appear bright and keen, try to be nice all the time. Come in on time, and go home a little (but not too much) late - people will know you are working hard, but not showing them up. Don't worry about their response(s) in IT your time will come. Wait for the crisis, you won't have long! Pitch in when the crisis comes, demonstrate your value. Afterwards you will find that the team will accept you, and will accord you more respect. When the next person joins go out of your way to be kind to them. This will not go unnoticed by your team mates, and will reflect well on you.
I am pretty sure that slashdot is being wound up here, Chris Morris is the name of a comedian notorious for lampooning the pompus by putting silly assertions to them and watching how they react.
This implies that a non computational device could be built that is properly intelligent. Turing foresaw such devices, and refuted Penrose in the process, with his B-Machines (this is a poor reference but the only online mention I could find quickly, the full one is "Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science" B. Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, Scientific American April 1999.
Apparently Turing couldn't get this work published, while Penrose has sold tens of thousands of copies of his book; another piece of proof for my theories about peer review and publication (dark glower, bitter mumblings).
Roger Penrose is a great physicist, and an amazing mathematician; he is truly important to science in the way that Turing or Einstein are. It is a puzzle as to why he has got such a bee into his bonnet about AI, and rather flattering that he considers it so important as to divert his attention from his real (and probably more fundamental and important work).
2) Creationists argue that there are instances of "irreducible complexity" in biological organisms, and that this means that they could not have evolved, but were created instead. This is clearly bunk, however even if we accept it, and all its axioms, then it is actually an argument in support of the AI project. If we are created then there exists an existence proof for creation of intelligence.
Here is a frightener for you. Millions of people have their savings, and pensions, tied up in dot.coms at the moment. Pension socialism is something that alot of people have been talking about for a while, if we all have a stake in mega corporates, then they will have to do what we say, act in our interest ectra. The pension funds represent massive capital warehouses. Now, lets say that you want that money. What do you do? Well, you buy a load of shares some years ago, you venture out some seed capital... You wait, and you stoke the shares up. A few little things can be done to help you here... if you have access to the media, you might run a load of articles that announce that billions can be made by any fool, you let things run for a while to encourage confidence. Then you sell. Now, when you dump your stock it will be snapped up by the hungry punters, but pretty soon, they smell a rat. They try to get out, to limit their losses. But lets say, for example, that they can't go anywhere, lets say that all the online trade sights are down, lets say that their broker can't even sell for them. All they can do is sit, and watch the prices spiralling down, and down. You, on the other hand, have cleared your position. Things are bright - you have the money now. But for the punters... Bye bye savings, hello starving in a basement eating cardboard! You might not think that this effects you, but if you have any managed saving account it almost certainly does. Reminds me of cons and pyramid schemes throught history. If it looks to good to be true, it probably isn't.
And some help from an English teacher as well, I fear.
Has anyone thought? If these planets are of gas giant class, and do support life, on a solid surface, it is going to have evolved to be real paranoid about heights. No friendly alien space travellers from there I think!