I predict two kinds of computer languages in the future. One will be a stylized form of English. You write some documentation describing your data entities and operations. It wont have a rigorous vocabulary or syntax like an OOP language. A natural language complier will extract this for you.
This was one of the original intentions of COBOL with its quasi-natural language objects like sentences and paragraphs. However COBOL was not flexible enough to resemble natural language and too bloated for efficient notation.
I think something CYCL, the terminalogy language of the CYC knowledge project, is moving in that direction. If they'd only get rid of those parentheses held over from the LISP implementation...
The other direction will be to directly implement the compact symbolic algebras that scientists already use in mathematics, chemistry, etc. Mathematica goes pretty far in this direction. The compiler will automatically arrange all the storage, and map the serialization or parallelization.
As intelligence operating outside of human beings. This includes Decarte's mechas, a HAL-like computer program, extra-terrestials, chimps and dolphins, a ghost, gaia, etc.
Islamic law requires one donate at least 2.5% of their income to charity. This is pretty widely followed, compared to the the 10% number used in some Xtian sects. So all kinds of organizations have arisen to "handle" this money- most legitimate and some sleazy. Religious education and widows are the most popular causes.
Some US companies also came under investigation for donations to fake Islamic charities. However, this was for the most part automatic matching funds companies make for employee donations.
Analog photos can be altered too.
One is by setting lighting and degree of focusing. The NY Times Sunday magazine uses portrait photos with harsh lighting- wrinkles, acne scars, blush marks, become pronounced. This the opposite of "air brushing" or softening frequently done in yearbook and wedding photos. I find these harshened portraits interesting.
The color of photos can be changed too. "Fuji-izing" is brightening hues beyond reality. Home photographers think this makes better pictures. At least one major film vendor builds this into their film.
An interesting controversy about eight years ago was a NY Times magazine piece on OJ Simpson. Readers complained his cover photo was darker than reality, making look like an African menance.
With 300K votes less than the competitor
and a lot of help from brother.
Millennia of artificial sentience stories
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is not a new topic. The Greek myths had Hephaesteus making servants out of metal and Pygmalian made a girlfriend out of clay. The latter even considers the issue whether she has the free will to accept or reject her creator and live her own life. Many other traditions have their artificial sentience- voodoo animation, etc. In the modern world we've just replaced the know-it-how with mechanism and computing.
Like Star Wars it was about a disaffected teenager who discovers adventure in space.
It had the mentor type.
It lacked a strong female lead.
It had some some cool special effects, though the technology is cheesy now.
The Last Starfighter essentially killed the F/X CGI industry for about seven years. Its CGI was was extremely expensive and unrealistic. Its F/X company had even bought a Cray super-computer (About the speed of Pentium on a good day).
Most of the major F/X houses went bankrupt that time. the revival was thought to be the movie Abyss by ILM. The gellatinous alien was so realistic that many thought it was a model rather than CGI.
Since an N.I.R. means negative light velocity or light going backwards. This could make the perfect headlights for French military vehicles that only "retreat" anyways.
and the epitaph on his tombstone a magnifying
glass to read. A little bit of morbid humor
here, but "portable" back circa 1980 meant
about 30 pounds and a five inch CRT screen.
Still in that era when a PC cost almost as much
as car or 2-3 months salary, many people couldn't
afford to have more than one at the home and office. And portability meant the whole setup quickly assembled into a single package for transport.
The main technique is to concatinate the first syllable
of each word or phrase. Like "SoMa" meaning "South Manhattan in English.
The counter-example is to wade through Mao's political writings. Never has so much (words) said so little. He uses lots of four-syllable words (two is the average).
One motivation for preserving languages is that some are better at expressing certain concepts than others. An extreme example of this is Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" where students acquire stunning psychic powers after learning the Martian language. This is also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that some languages express special ideas better than others due to exotic grammar or vocabulary. Languages such as Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Hopi, etc. are often the language of magical incantations because they (accidentally?) became the liturgical language of major religions.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has come under fire lately. Commonly cited examples like the Eskimos have 30 words for snow, so they perceive the northlands more vividly, just isnt true. Rebuttlist argue that any sufficiently developed language can express the ideas of another language. There 30 words in English for snow used by mountain climbers. Another cited example is Chinese verbs dont have tenses, so time is perceived differently. However, they use time adverbs, making the time as clear or ambiguious as English.
Perhaps computer programming might be the strongest example in support of Sapir-Worf. Many people claim you can write more powerful and less-buggy algorithms in language "X" due to its grammar, etc. Other scientific dialects such as mathematics, logic,etc. have similiar claims.
Amorality pervades US society from the Presidents to thieving downloading pre-teens. First we have a president that does know what adultery is. No we have one that wants to start war at a drop of a hat. No wonder the rest of society is confused.
Ten years at ten hours a day- my how time flies!
An exaggeration, but not that far off.
With 36,500 hours, I could have
- made $365,000 (at $10/hr),
- raised two more kids,
- helped 3650 people with 10 hours of assistance
- played 7300 games of Quake....
Yourdon: "Decline...American...Programmer"
on
U.S. Jobs Jumping Ship
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Predicted long ago by the cantankerous Edward Yourdon. Ed was complaining about sloppy US software engineering as well as cheap, competent international labor. Ed wrote a sequel during the dot.com boom rebutting his earlier thesis, but the earlier ideas seem more accurate. Ed's numerous books start with some current social commentary, then repeat his personal brand of software engineering.
Well-known branch of astronomy called "LOD" or length of day measurements. Changes up to a millisecond or so each year. Atomic clocks and satellites allowed microsecond precision now.
Weather, magnetic storms, earthquakes, ocean currents all tought to affect LOD.
Its one thing to design something, and another to manufacture it efficiently. China has introduced other state-of-the-art machines before, such as the Cray knockoff called Galaxy, but at an economic cost around a hundred times the labor to construct and run compared to a Cray. Low production computers dont cut it economically.
Last year the childhood prodigy and creator of Mathematica published a 1400 page book claiming the cellular automata will revolutionize and replace physics as we know it. This effort has many of the hallmarks of fringe science- fantastic claims and working in isolation (he cites few mainstream references and rarely published the past 20 years). On the other hand, he did eventually publish it all in great detail (sometimes amazing, sometimes tedious). The "scientific process" now has enough documentation to decide whether to accept or reject his claims.
In some sense Wolfram resembles Isaac Newton who is ranked as the top scientist of al time for the major inventions of the calculas, unification of terrestial with celestial gravitation, spectral optics, and the reflecting telescope. Newton was also paranoid secrative and took over 20 years to publish his results. Newton also did extensive work in Bible studies and alchemy, which turned out to be non-scientific. Newton also helped run the first professional society and scientific journal (Royal philosphical society).
They find the isotope of element 36 in solid form which does not occur on earth at normal temperatures and pressures. If you hold this material next some kinds of aliens, it makes them weak and eventually kills them.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict two kinds of computer languages in the future. One will be a stylized form of English. You write some documentation describing your data entities and operations. It wont have a rigorous vocabulary or syntax like an OOP language. A natural language complier will extract this for you.
This was one of the original intentions of COBOL with its quasi-natural language objects like sentences and paragraphs. However COBOL was not flexible enough to resemble natural language and too bloated for efficient notation.
I think something CYCL, the terminalogy language of the CYC knowledge project, is moving in that direction. If they'd only get rid of those parentheses held over from the LISP implementation...
The other direction will be to directly implement the compact symbolic algebras that scientists already use in mathematics, chemistry, etc. Mathematica goes pretty far in this direction. The compiler will automatically arrange all the storage, and map the serialization or parallelization.
As intelligence operating outside of human beings. This includes Decarte's mechas, a HAL-like computer program, extra-terrestials, chimps and dolphins, a ghost, gaia, etc.
Perhaps you added a zero to the date.
Islamic law requires one donate at least 2.5% of their income to charity. This is pretty widely followed, compared to the the 10% number used in some Xtian sects. So all kinds of organizations have arisen to "handle" this money- most legitimate and some sleazy. Religious education and widows are the most popular causes.
Some US companies also came under investigation for donations to fake Islamic charities. However, this was for the most part automatic matching funds companies make for employee donations.
Analog photos can be altered too. One is by setting lighting and degree of focusing. The NY Times Sunday magazine uses portrait photos with harsh lighting- wrinkles, acne scars, blush marks, become pronounced. This the opposite of "air brushing" or softening frequently done in yearbook and wedding photos. I find these harshened portraits interesting.
The color of photos can be changed too. "Fuji-izing" is brightening hues beyond reality. Home photographers think this makes better pictures. At least one major film vendor builds this into their film.
An interesting controversy about eight years ago was a NY Times magazine piece on OJ Simpson. Readers complained his cover photo was darker than reality, making look like an African menance.
With 300K votes less than the competitor and a lot of help from brother.
This is not a new topic. The Greek myths had Hephaesteus making servants out of metal and Pygmalian made a girlfriend out of clay. The latter even considers the issue whether she has the free will to accept or reject her creator and live her own life. Many other traditions have their artificial sentience- voodoo animation, etc. In the modern world we've just replaced the know-it-how with mechanism and computing.
I like the movie when it came out.
Like Star Wars it was about a disaffected teenager who discovers adventure in space.
It had the mentor type. It lacked a strong female lead.
It had some some cool special effects, though the technology is cheesy now.
The Last Starfighter essentially killed the F/X CGI industry for about seven years. Its CGI was was extremely expensive and unrealistic. Its F/X company had even bought a Cray super-computer (About the speed of Pentium on a good day). Most of the major F/X houses went bankrupt that time. the revival was thought to be the movie Abyss by ILM. The gellatinous alien was so realistic that many thought it was a model rather than CGI.
Since an N.I.R. means negative light velocity or light going backwards. This could make the perfect headlights for French military vehicles that only "retreat" anyways.
(troll)
and the epitaph on his tombstone a magnifying glass to read. A little bit of morbid humor here, but "portable" back circa 1980 meant about 30 pounds and a five inch CRT screen. Still in that era when a PC cost almost as much as car or 2-3 months salary, many people couldn't afford to have more than one at the home and office. And portability meant the whole setup quickly assembled into a single package for transport.
The main technique is to concatinate the first syllable of each word or phrase. Like "SoMa" meaning "South Manhattan in English.
The counter-example is to wade through Mao's political writings. Never has so much (words) said so little. He uses lots of four-syllable words (two is the average).
Its really nice to break the two-gig barrier in program buffers. Sun-SPARC and SGI-MIPS have been 64-bit since 1994.
One motivation for preserving languages is that some are better at expressing certain concepts than others. An extreme example of this is Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" where students acquire stunning psychic powers after learning the Martian language. This is also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that some languages express special ideas better than others due to exotic grammar or vocabulary. Languages such as Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Hopi, etc. are often the language of magical incantations because they (accidentally?) became the liturgical language of major religions.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has come under fire lately. Commonly cited examples like the Eskimos have 30 words for snow, so they perceive the northlands more vividly, just isnt true. Rebuttlist argue that any sufficiently developed language can express the ideas of another language. There 30 words in English for snow used by mountain climbers. Another cited example is Chinese verbs dont have tenses, so time is perceived differently. However, they use time adverbs, making the time as clear or ambiguious as English.
Perhaps computer programming might be the strongest example in support of Sapir-Worf. Many people claim you can write more powerful and less-buggy algorithms in language "X" due to its grammar, etc. Other scientific dialects such as mathematics, logic,etc. have similiar claims.
They are the experts. However, the supply runs out after six years (unlike a junior high school) so you have make more them on a regular basis!
Amorality pervades US society from the Presidents to thieving downloading pre-teens. First we have a president that does know what adultery is. No we have one that wants to start war at a drop of a hat. No wonder the rest of society is confused.
Ten years at ten hours a day- my how time flies! An exaggeration, but not that far off.
/hr),
....
With 36,500 hours, I could have
- made $365,000 (at $10
- raised two more kids,
- helped 3650 people with 10 hours of assistance
- played 7300 games of Quake
Predicted long ago by the cantankerous Edward Yourdon. Ed was complaining about sloppy US software engineering as well as cheap, competent international labor. Ed wrote a sequel during the dot.com boom rebutting his earlier thesis, but the earlier ideas seem more accurate. Ed's numerous books start with some current social commentary, then repeat his personal brand of software engineering.
The Oscar ceremony will be delayed and/or moved to a completely isolated location to the initial terrorism reactions of the Iraq war.
Well-known branch of astronomy called "LOD" or length of day measurements. Changes up to a millisecond or so each year. Atomic clocks and satellites allowed microsecond precision now. Weather, magnetic storms, earthquakes, ocean currents all tought to affect LOD.
It was too exepensive to run power lines to villages in China, so they used methane power for a long time.
Its one thing to design something, and another to manufacture it efficiently. China has introduced other state-of-the-art machines before, such as the Cray knockoff called Galaxy, but at an economic cost around a hundred times the labor to construct and run compared to a Cray. Low production computers dont cut it economically.
Last year the childhood prodigy and creator of Mathematica published a 1400 page book claiming the cellular automata will revolutionize and replace physics as we know it. This effort has many of the hallmarks of fringe science- fantastic claims and working in isolation (he cites few mainstream references and rarely published the past 20 years). On the other hand, he did eventually publish it all in great detail (sometimes amazing, sometimes tedious). The "scientific process" now has enough documentation to decide whether to accept or reject his claims.
In some sense Wolfram resembles Isaac Newton who is ranked as the top scientist of al time for the major inventions of the calculas, unification of terrestial with celestial gravitation, spectral optics, and the reflecting telescope. Newton was also paranoid secrative and took over 20 years to publish his results. Newton also did extensive work in Bible studies and alchemy, which turned out to be non-scientific. Newton also helped run the first professional society and scientific journal (Royal philosphical society).
These school rampages have been happening since there schools such as in Bath Michigan, 1927 . But they really picked up in the late 1990s.
They find the isotope of element 36 in solid form which does not occur on earth at normal temperatures and pressures. If you hold this material next some kinds of aliens, it makes them weak and eventually kills them.
Dudnt people see that star trek movie?