I think the brain is more like a massively parallel system with really slow processors. Driving tends to become like a background, or idle task. Many people can't even remember the drive after arriving at their destination, because it becomes so automatic. I couldn't imagine trying to concentrate on driving for the whole drive (unless I was going really fast). I think as long as you're looking at the road, thinking about something else doesn't slow your reaction time by any significant factor.
I wouldn't correlate driving and talking with multitasking, either. Multitasking requires concentrating on several things at once; driving is so automatic that it mostly doesn't require concentration.
I can see how texting while driving can make you a bad driver; but talking while driving? People have been talking while driving for years. I don't think it's anywhere near as distracting as this experiment makes it out to be. The percentage of bad drivers on the road increases with car density. I didn't see a huge jump in bad drivers when cellphones got popular. Just a gradual climb as more and more drivers tried to fit on the same roads.
Personally, I feel less comfortable riding in a car with someone who holds the steering wheel with both hands and refuses to be distracted by anything.
I don't think people should have the "right to not be offended." I believe originally, free speech was limited not to prevent people from getting offended, but to prevent people from getting killed for opening their mouths. But with the (relatively) recent "politically correct" movement, all the sudden you can't say anything that hurts anyone's feelings. If you get your feelings hurt now, you can sue. That's BS.
And here's why: If the government wants to say, "you can't say offensive things" then it's also up to the government to decide what is offensive, which they will naturally do a poor job of. Of course, this doesn't include slander. I'm merely talking about opinions, which anyone should be allowed to voice freely. You can't change a person's feelings by silencing them; in fact, it's likely to do the opposite.
What's so bad about getting your feelings hurt anyway? Sticks and stones.
Did you know that if you take 666^666, convert it to binary, cut it into 7-bit sequences, and map them to the ascii table, that it spells out the words to "Stars are Blind" by Paris Hilton in reverse?
"the phenomenon that the majority of the gravitational effects within galaxies are unaccounted for, but are now commonly attributed to some kind of 'invisible matter'" just seemed like too much to write. Alas, I ended up writing it anyway.
I thought this story sounded familiar. Then I clicked the link, and lo and behold, there's the exact same video I remembered watching a year ago. I double checked -- the video was dated March of 2007. So why is this just now making headlines? I could understand if they re-ran the simulation with new physics that proved to be more accurate or something, but why link to the old video?
Agreed, I don't understand why more people don't see that. It's through simulations like these that we test our theories about the universe. Wasn't it computer simulations of galaxies that led to the discovery of dark matter? If we already perfectly understood the physics of supernovae, there would be no need to run the simulation in the first place.
Great metaphor, with the flea and the elephant. I tire of hearing people's lofty predictions of the future of mankind and the speculation of the nature of the universe based on such limited information. Basically all we can determine right now is that no other advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe both knows we exist and wants us to know they exist (I'm following the Contact logic and assuming any lifeform that knows we exist is also capable of making contact with us.)
There probably are many "Great Filters", as the author says, but most or all of them probably aren't as "great" as he makes them out to be. Instead of one great filter ruling out virtually all intelligence, I think there are many small filters, ruling out whatever they can whenever they can.
Also, I agree with the parent post on a lot of points. It may not be a sensible endeavor for a sufficiently advanced civilization to attempt to colonize planets lightyears away (especially assuming that lightspeed is unbreakable). Also, ET life may not necessarily be organic, as it is on Earth, due to a large temperature difference or other reasons. We just don't know enough yet.
The author talks about worries that a Great Filter may be in our future, one that we will eventually have to face. I believe that we are our own great filter, and that any other sexually reproducing lifeforms that formed in the same evolutionary way as us (ie, survival of the fittest) would also face the same filter, that filter being total annihilation by our own technology, because it is in our nature to destroy each other. Although that is a sad protent, I don't necessarily believe that's our future, but I do believe it is the greatest thing that we as a species have to fear, being this far along in our technological and evolutionary progress and ruling out the possibility of being invaded by a superior species.
And you would not believe how many people will still argue that one! "Well if you're not there to hear it then how can you PROVE it makes a sound?" to which I reply "Well if you weren't there to see it, how can you prove it fell in the first place?"
Any single object you see is an observation of the number one!
Oh, and clearly math was (and is) discovered. Math is merely a system of laws used to define observed phenomena. Algorithms can be invented, but to achieve the desired results, they must comply with the rest of the mathematical system which is modeled to reflect the physical world. I do believe that certain mathematical concepts were invented, only because they seem to have surfaced in math before they were observed in nature. For example, i was created to solve a math problem, and it wasn't until the rules for complex mathematics were ironed out that people began to see how it in nature. Nevertheless, the intricacies of the physical world existed before humans saw the correlation between them and the math we "invented".
I may be wrong, but I always thought the backbones were privately owned... IANAL, but doesn't that mean that the govt is not even allowed to tap that data from them without a warrant in the first place?
Dear Technical Support:
I recently upgraded from The Govt OS ver 1.7.7.6 (beta) to the latest release, Govt ver 2.0.0.8, and I noticed a few unexpected changes. For one thing, I have noticed that many of my favorite programs (most of which are the reason I bought the OS to begin with) will no longer run, or only run in a crippled state with most of their features disabled. These include Bill of Rights v1.17, Due Process v3.02, and Privacy v6.9. I've also noticed that this new Govt ver 2 is full of bloatware like Evil Coporation 6, Big Brother v19.84, and Bush Administration v2.0. I opened task manager and noticed that Govt 2 has spawned several background processes, like War.Iraq, Phone.Tap, and Irresponsible.Spending, which seem to be interfering with my previously installed programs. I've been thinking about going back to Govt 1.7, but the uninstall feature doesn't work.
Please help,
Worried Citizen
Dear Worried Citizen:
This is a common problem. What most people don't understand about Govt v1.7.7.6 is that it really wasn't an OS. It was merely an extension built on the backbone of the previous OS, WeThePeople. Govt v2.0.0.8 has completely phased out WeThePeople, and now runs standalone (much like the upgrade to Windows 98). Unfortunately it is not possible to uninstall this OS as it overwrites the boot sector. We suggest installing background applications Pay_Taxes and Support_Troops. Although these processes will help to smooth operation, every so often you will have to run the command C:\Vote. While this command may help to reset corrupted processes, unfortunately this OS is still not designed to run your older programs. However, Govt 2 comes with it's OWN version of these these applications, combined into a suite called Illusion of Security, which attempts to emulate some of those features. Warning! Do not, under any circumstances, install Anarchy 3.1, this program causes irreversible damage to the OS.
Good luck,
Fox News
True, and I don't see what good this is doing anyway. Terrorists will find ways to get around the security systems regardless. I don't feel any safer after being pat down, I just feel violated. Plus, this is what they wanted anyway. Whatever happened to "give me libery or give me death?"
Are you kidding? Solar could easily solve all our power needs, and then some. Also, solar thermal plants are capable of running at night. While it's sunny, they generally produce a lot more heat than the generators can use, so that extra heat is transferred to storage tanks to be used during the evening. The output is lower, yes, but nevertheless they do run through the night.
You are correct, the size of the metric changes as space expands, however we can detect this expansion because of the limit of the speed of light. Imagine a galaxy that emitted photons 10bn ly ago, and during the time those photons have been traveling toward us, space has been expanding. This has caused the photons to redshift, so we can derive how much space has expanded since that time and how far away the galaxy would now be. So when we say a galaxy is 40 bn ly away, we mean it would take 40 bn ly for light emmited NOW to reach us. It doesn't mean that the light we are seeing has been travelling for 40 bn years or that the galaxy was that far away when the light was emitted.
Although 3-dimensional space is nearly Euclidian, spacetime is not. The balloon is a good analogy, except that normal people don't take into account the universal speed limit when they imagine it.
I agree, I absolutely HATE white backgrounds, and I avoided them for as long as I could. I've always liked green, yellow, and white on black, or yellow and white on blue. Thanks to Vista, (and even sometimes XP) dark backgrounds are now impossible because usually they'll be surrounded by bright colors that you can't change, making it even worse. For example, try using Word or Visual Studio with a black background!
Yeah it does that with polarized shades, too. Very annoying if you want to use your computer outside. But it IS a good way to detect cheaply polarized sunglasses. Sometimes the polarization is up to 30 degrees off vertical, and sometimes each lens is polarized slightly differently. You get what you pay for, I guess.
There is another method I've heard of that uses LCD shutters synched to the television. When it displays the left frame, the right shutter goes black, and vice versa. I haven't seen them in action, but they should work on most TVs (especially DLP, which has faster image response time). The downside is I think they may be a bit bulky. The polarized glasses require a special projector to project the 2 polarized images.
Comcast is the only option for some people. The only other option in my area, right now, is U-Verse. And from talking to people who have it, it kind of seems a bit too beta at the moment. And besides, AT&T is kind of like the Microsoft of the telecommunications industry. I have actually hit 1MB/s downloading from a server while using Linux before (using comcast), but I don't think I've passed the 300K mark with Vista. But with bittorrent, I don't think I've ever passed 200. I can't tell if they're throttling or not, but they shouldn't be allowed to even consider the option. I know if I decided to only pay them $15 a month, I would find myself in court before I knew what happened.
I'm actually somewhat optimistic about this. If the singer sucks, the singer still sucks, but now they just suck with backing vocals/chords. But what if someone *is* talented but doesn't have the time/money/connections/luck/whatever to find some good accompaniment? Well this may give them the chance to create a more robust piece of art than they could alone. As with any good tool, I'm sure it will be used for both good and evil, and I don't believe it will ever be able to replace a talented person, but for someone who has little to work with, I think it may be a very useful tool indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the brain is more like a massively parallel system with really slow processors. Driving tends to become like a background, or idle task. Many people can't even remember the drive after arriving at their destination, because it becomes so automatic. I couldn't imagine trying to concentrate on driving for the whole drive (unless I was going really fast). I think as long as you're looking at the road, thinking about something else doesn't slow your reaction time by any significant factor.
I wouldn't correlate driving and talking with multitasking, either. Multitasking requires concentrating on several things at once; driving is so automatic that it mostly doesn't require concentration.
I can see how texting while driving can make you a bad driver; but talking while driving? People have been talking while driving for years. I don't think it's anywhere near as distracting as this experiment makes it out to be. The percentage of bad drivers on the road increases with car density. I didn't see a huge jump in bad drivers when cellphones got popular. Just a gradual climb as more and more drivers tried to fit on the same roads.
Personally, I feel less comfortable riding in a car with someone who holds the steering wheel with both hands and refuses to be distracted by anything.
Valedictorian, huh?
Just goes to show that education and intelligence are two different things.
I don't think people should have the "right to not be offended." I believe originally, free speech was limited not to prevent people from getting offended, but to prevent people from getting killed for opening their mouths. But with the (relatively) recent "politically correct" movement, all the sudden you can't say anything that hurts anyone's feelings. If you get your feelings hurt now, you can sue. That's BS.
And here's why: If the government wants to say, "you can't say offensive things" then it's also up to the government to decide what is offensive, which they will naturally do a poor job of. Of course, this doesn't include slander. I'm merely talking about opinions, which anyone should be allowed to voice freely. You can't change a person's feelings by silencing them; in fact, it's likely to do the opposite.
What's so bad about getting your feelings hurt anyway? Sticks and stones.
Did you know that if you take 666^666, convert it to binary, cut it into 7-bit sequences, and map them to the ascii table, that it spells out the words to "Stars are Blind" by Paris Hilton in reverse?
Seriously, I'm not making this up!
"the phenomenon that the majority of the gravitational effects within galaxies are unaccounted for, but are now commonly attributed to some kind of 'invisible matter'" just seemed like too much to write. Alas, I ended up writing it anyway.
But having a car made entirely of carbon fiber would!
I thought this story sounded familiar. Then I clicked the link, and lo and behold, there's the exact same video I remembered watching a year ago. I double checked -- the video was dated March of 2007. So why is this just now making headlines? I could understand if they re-ran the simulation with new physics that proved to be more accurate or something, but why link to the old video?
Agreed, I don't understand why more people don't see that. It's through simulations like these that we test our theories about the universe. Wasn't it computer simulations of galaxies that led to the discovery of dark matter? If we already perfectly understood the physics of supernovae, there would be no need to run the simulation in the first place.
Great metaphor, with the flea and the elephant. I tire of hearing people's lofty predictions of the future of mankind and the speculation of the nature of the universe based on such limited information. Basically all we can determine right now is that no other advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe both knows we exist and wants us to know they exist (I'm following the Contact logic and assuming any lifeform that knows we exist is also capable of making contact with us.)
There probably are many "Great Filters", as the author says, but most or all of them probably aren't as "great" as he makes them out to be. Instead of one great filter ruling out virtually all intelligence, I think there are many small filters, ruling out whatever they can whenever they can.
Also, I agree with the parent post on a lot of points. It may not be a sensible endeavor for a sufficiently advanced civilization to attempt to colonize planets lightyears away (especially assuming that lightspeed is unbreakable). Also, ET life may not necessarily be organic, as it is on Earth, due to a large temperature difference or other reasons. We just don't know enough yet.
The author talks about worries that a Great Filter may be in our future, one that we will eventually have to face. I believe that we are our own great filter, and that any other sexually reproducing lifeforms that formed in the same evolutionary way as us (ie, survival of the fittest) would also face the same filter, that filter being total annihilation by our own technology, because it is in our nature to destroy each other. Although that is a sad protent, I don't necessarily believe that's our future, but I do believe it is the greatest thing that we as a species have to fear, being this far along in our technological and evolutionary progress and ruling out the possibility of being invaded by a superior species.
How about Elephantium? Got the idea from someone who couldn't spell elephant, believe it or not...
And you would not believe how many people will still argue that one! "Well if you're not there to hear it then how can you PROVE it makes a sound?" to which I reply "Well if you weren't there to see it, how can you prove it fell in the first place?"
Then I kick myself for arguing with them.
Any single object you see is an observation of the number one!
Oh, and clearly math was (and is) discovered. Math is merely a system of laws used to define observed phenomena. Algorithms can be invented, but to achieve the desired results, they must comply with the rest of the mathematical system which is modeled to reflect the physical world. I do believe that certain mathematical concepts were invented, only because they seem to have surfaced in math before they were observed in nature. For example, i was created to solve a math problem, and it wasn't until the rules for complex mathematics were ironed out that people began to see how it in nature. Nevertheless, the intricacies of the physical world existed before humans saw the correlation between them and the math we "invented".
I may be wrong, but I always thought the backbones were privately owned... IANAL, but doesn't that mean that the govt is not even allowed to tap that data from them without a warrant in the first place?
I got a packet they can sniff!
Whoops, forgot the HTML. Damn!
Dear Technical Support: I recently upgraded from The Govt OS ver 1.7.7.6 (beta) to the latest release, Govt ver 2.0.0.8, and I noticed a few unexpected changes. For one thing, I have noticed that many of my favorite programs (most of which are the reason I bought the OS to begin with) will no longer run, or only run in a crippled state with most of their features disabled. These include Bill of Rights v1.17, Due Process v3.02, and Privacy v6.9. I've also noticed that this new Govt ver 2 is full of bloatware like Evil Coporation 6, Big Brother v19.84, and Bush Administration v2.0. I opened task manager and noticed that Govt 2 has spawned several background processes, like War.Iraq, Phone.Tap, and Irresponsible.Spending, which seem to be interfering with my previously installed programs. I've been thinking about going back to Govt 1.7, but the uninstall feature doesn't work. Please help, Worried Citizen Dear Worried Citizen: This is a common problem. What most people don't understand about Govt v1.7.7.6 is that it really wasn't an OS. It was merely an extension built on the backbone of the previous OS, WeThePeople. Govt v2.0.0.8 has completely phased out WeThePeople, and now runs standalone (much like the upgrade to Windows 98). Unfortunately it is not possible to uninstall this OS as it overwrites the boot sector. We suggest installing background applications Pay_Taxes and Support_Troops. Although these processes will help to smooth operation, every so often you will have to run the command C:\Vote. While this command may help to reset corrupted processes, unfortunately this OS is still not designed to run your older programs. However, Govt 2 comes with it's OWN version of these these applications, combined into a suite called Illusion of Security, which attempts to emulate some of those features. Warning! Do not, under any circumstances, install Anarchy 3.1, this program causes irreversible damage to the OS. Good luck, Fox News
True, and I don't see what good this is doing anyway. Terrorists will find ways to get around the security systems regardless. I don't feel any safer after being pat down, I just feel violated. Plus, this is what they wanted anyway. Whatever happened to "give me libery or give me death?"
No, they're just afraid the security guards will laugh at their small penises.
Are you kidding? Solar could easily solve all our power needs, and then some. Also, solar thermal plants are capable of running at night. While it's sunny, they generally produce a lot more heat than the generators can use, so that extra heat is transferred to storage tanks to be used during the evening. The output is lower, yes, but nevertheless they do run through the night.
You are correct, the size of the metric changes as space expands, however we can detect this expansion because of the limit of the speed of light. Imagine a galaxy that emitted photons 10bn ly ago, and during the time those photons have been traveling toward us, space has been expanding. This has caused the photons to redshift, so we can derive how much space has expanded since that time and how far away the galaxy would now be. So when we say a galaxy is 40 bn ly away, we mean it would take 40 bn ly for light emmited NOW to reach us. It doesn't mean that the light we are seeing has been travelling for 40 bn years or that the galaxy was that far away when the light was emitted. Although 3-dimensional space is nearly Euclidian, spacetime is not. The balloon is a good analogy, except that normal people don't take into account the universal speed limit when they imagine it.
I agree, I absolutely HATE white backgrounds, and I avoided them for as long as I could. I've always liked green, yellow, and white on black, or yellow and white on blue. Thanks to Vista, (and even sometimes XP) dark backgrounds are now impossible because usually they'll be surrounded by bright colors that you can't change, making it even worse. For example, try using Word or Visual Studio with a black background!
Yeah it does that with polarized shades, too. Very annoying if you want to use your computer outside. But it IS a good way to detect cheaply polarized sunglasses. Sometimes the polarization is up to 30 degrees off vertical, and sometimes each lens is polarized slightly differently. You get what you pay for, I guess.
There is another method I've heard of that uses LCD shutters synched to the television. When it displays the left frame, the right shutter goes black, and vice versa. I haven't seen them in action, but they should work on most TVs (especially DLP, which has faster image response time). The downside is I think they may be a bit bulky. The polarized glasses require a special projector to project the 2 polarized images.
Comcast is the only option for some people. The only other option in my area, right now, is U-Verse. And from talking to people who have it, it kind of seems a bit too beta at the moment. And besides, AT&T is kind of like the Microsoft of the telecommunications industry.
I have actually hit 1MB/s downloading from a server while using Linux before (using comcast), but I don't think I've passed the 300K mark with Vista. But with bittorrent, I don't think I've ever passed 200. I can't tell if they're throttling or not, but they shouldn't be allowed to even consider the option. I know if I decided to only pay them $15 a month, I would find myself in court before I knew what happened.
I'm actually somewhat optimistic about this. If the singer sucks, the singer still sucks, but now they just suck with backing vocals/chords. But what if someone *is* talented but doesn't have the time/money/connections/luck/whatever to find some good accompaniment? Well this may give them the chance to create a more robust piece of art than they could alone. As with any good tool, I'm sure it will be used for both good and evil, and I don't believe it will ever be able to replace a talented person, but for someone who has little to work with, I think it may be a very useful tool indeed.