I think you slipped a decimal. The LIGO observatories are roughly 3000 km apart, so a straight line lag between them is around 10 milliseconds. A lag of 1 millisecond meansi that the (essentially plane) wave came in at a small angle relative to the perpendicular plane separating them. The triangle involved would (conveniently enough) have a short leg around 300 km long, and that's still a small angle so without a calculator roughly 0.1 radians on one or the other side of the perpendicular plane. I'm not certain how they manage to set the azimuthal angle and decide whether the source is on the northwest or southeast side of the plane (at the moment of detection, which then has a very particular orientation relative to universal coordinates as the earth orbits and rotates) -- maybe they use the shift in the lag AS the earth rotates to do azimuthal triangulation if the signal is long enough, maybe they use multiple detectors at right angles to each other to get an extra angle -- I suppose I could look, but detecting signal lags across meters is easy enough with modern electronics (nanosecond plus time resolution) so they could even do both. It would have been and still would be a lot more precise if they had three, or better, four detectors and could do honest to god 3D triangulation -- they aren't going to do parallax until they put a second detector on (say) the moon or at the lagrange points but they could get a very precise line to the event that way.
Any LIGO-ites on/.? Surely somebody who does this is around to comment with something other than references to the mass of their male parts? Which, on the scale we are discussing, is truly infinitesimal (reminding me of the flea and the elephant, but that's another story...:-)
The "scientists" at Cornell who are getting headlines with this breaking news haven't the foggiest clue how far away the nearest alien intelligent species is from Earth. Possibilities range from living here already among us or lurking in the solar system to "there are no alien intelligent species in the Cosmos", we could be unique. If you assume -- not unreasonably -- that evolution of advanced life requires an extremely unlikely accident -- like a collision with a proto-planet that is just the right size to strip away some atmosphere components and deposit others and rearrange the distribution of massive elements in the developing crust and then produce a moon that initially is very close and produces huge tides, plus a magnetic core, plus the right distance from the right sun, plus the good fortune not to be hit AGAIN just as intelligence is teed up, plus the enormous good fortune of the developing species making it over the self-extinction hump -- we might be alone in the entire galaxy or in very rare company extragalactically, even with a trillion trillion star systems to choose from. Or, the odds could be a D&D 20 sided dice roll per star. We just don't know. There is no evidence, and our theories of planetary evolution and abiogenesis are just that -- theories with very little substantive evidence to support them.
Then there are the other silly aspects of their claim. It is rapidly looking like a developing civilization is likely to have only a narrow window where they radiate a substantial amount of organized radio wave energy, so one has an even narrower window for retarded detection. Also that emitted (wasted!) energy at its peak is on the order of maybe a megawatt or two in any given channel on its brightest day, and the 1/r^2 law is pitiless. Just one light year away your 10^6 watts are spread out across 4\pi (10^15)^2 ~ 10^31 square meters. Let's see: 10^6/10^31 = 10^{-25} watts per square meter. If you turned an entire planetary surface into a directed antenna, it would have a cross sectional area on the order of 10^14 square meters, leaving you with 10 whole trillionths of a watt receiver power. Sure, why not, a piece of cake we can amplify that and resolve signal from noise -- using a planet-sized antenna and black magic.
So a better answer is that we will never be visited by space aliens who "pick up our TV signals" any more than we will pick up their signals. If some NEARBY civilization is crazy enough to point a directional, tight beam radio station right at the solar system and pump it with a terawatt or so, sure, maybe we could receive it here. But resolving the waste signal of a civilization order of tens of light years or more away? The amazing thing is that anybody manages to get this sort of thing funded. Simple arithmetic makes a fairly powerful argument that any SETI effort is a complete waste of time and money. No matter how cool -- and dangerous -- it might be.
I agree. Apple is just weird, sort of a kinder gentler flakier version of M$. They run Unix as their OS, sort of, rely on the open source community for a pretty good chunk of their back-end Unixoid software at least, do HAVE a decent amount of OSS available, but at the same time they emulate the empire of evil at inopportune times.
I keep wondering if one day they are going to learn the Sun Microsystems lesson the hard way. You can be a hardware company, or a software company, but if you try to be both you are just asking for it. Apple has survived balanced on that line, but only because they stopped being a "computer company" for the most part and focused on the children of the humble PDA rearranged into PAD or POD. There (including their phone) they've been able to continue to make consumers buy Apple Koolade -- for now. But they (like Sun) are a high margin sales company. They survive only as long as they remain a premier brand that people will pay a premium for, because you PAY a premium compared to Android devices built much more along OS lines. M$ has failed repeatedly to get any suckers to buy their even more overpriced hardware with integrated software.
We could be moving solidly into the next phase of the small digital device, where one cannot really add more functionality than they already have, where they are already fast enough to do almost anything most people want them to do, where the only dimensions for added value are things like longer battery life or better screens. In the PC world that was signalled by a crash in prices to where survivors survive on the thinnest of margins and where once mighty "name brands" can only eke out a continued, marginally profitable existence but can no longer pay for a dedicated premier sales force and so on. Such a market change could crush Apple (as it crushed Sun, DEC, and countless others during the great Unix shakeout a decade or two ago) and maybe even M$ as well. But M$ still has what remains of the "real computer" world by the balls with its sales agreements, and even though it isn't high margin sales any more, it is nearly free money that they can continue to extort from system vendors indefinitely, and they obviously plan to transform their OS into a rental commodity that you have to renew annually instead of something you buy once to monetize it even after it leaves the store.
A brave new world, where we pay the M$ tax not once, but every year, with Apple not far behind (I'm sure). But what do I care? I've used nothing but Linux for decades at this point -- even my WinXP VMs haven't been booted for over a year. With Steam, even the game issue is largely moot, although coverage is far from perfect or universal. Don't have much time for games these days anyway, sigh.
Ahhh, it reminds me of the good old days of piracy on the open seas, when Microsoft ate Borland and Lotus and Wordstar and...
It's simple economics. Apple, like Microsoft, has a huge stable of code monkeys that they have to feed and water occasionally with Jolt cola and potato chips. In order to have enough spare capacity to be able to fix a critical bug in a timely way, maybe, they have to have maybe 50% overcapacity the rest of the time (and besides, hiring the best keeps them out of M$'s unholy hands even if they do nothing but social media all day). So they look for little projects for them to do.
There, they follow the tried and true M$ path. It is bone simple to wait for somebody else to take all the risk of inventing and developing a new concept or product, and then just use your spare cycles to clone it and make it your own. Since there are a zillion ways to write code, and since it is very difficult to get a software patent these days (and pretty easy to work around it or double dare them to sue you with their finite and your infinite pockets even if there is one) it is zero risk, and since you literally own the operating system and hardware and direct marketing channels, you simply cannot fail to take over anywhere from 1/3 to all of the market. M$ did it over and over again, sometimes leaving the risk taker alive but squeezed down to a tiny market (why kill the goose that lays golden eggs, after all) and sometimes just having goose for dinner. They would even do things like break the code of competitors (but not their own) when releasing OS updates. Who could compete with that, given all of the sales staff to remind customers of how "unreliable" a product has become but not to worry, ours is rock solid...
But this is evolution in action. Anyone dumb enough to develop for Apple or M$ who ends up being eaten alive after taking all of the risk is just being selected against for stupidity. The best you can hope for is that their developers are busy fixing bugs in their OS and that the parent company decides that it is faster to buy you out than it is to clone you and put you out of business.
That is become we are dumb as fenceposts. We watch reality TV and deeply care who the bachelorette has "relations" with. We go to church on Sunday and never doubt that there really was an actual serpent in an actual garden of eden around 6000 years ago right before a really big flood that rose to cover the top of mount everest in only 40 days and nights of rain (water rising at a rate of one inch or so a minute, globally). We truly believe that this flood wiped out all of the dinosaurs, and that all of the millions of surviving species were saved in a giant wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart store (or smaller) ventilated by a single window less than a meter square, who were then delivered back into functional ecologies worldwide by the handful of flood survivors from the vicinity of the middle east, penguins back to the south pole, poison dart frogs back into bromeliads in the Amazonian rain forest, etc. We buy lottery tickets "for education", paying our stupidity taxes at the same time we buy our cigarettes with the money we should be saving for rent or retirement or just plain food for the babies we had because we did not really understand that pregnancy happens because of sex and babies happen because of pregnancy and then you have to feed and change the little suckers for decades before they can get out on the street and be just like mom, dad having left the scene long before. The cigarettes (and junk food purchased at the quick mart along with the lottery tickets and beer) cause the cancer that the government then pays to treat because not to would be inhuman and inhuman, putting billions of dollars in the pockets of special interests galore along the way, and besides, we the people who do all of this stuff -- or at least some of this stuff -- outnumber those who don't and hence we can just vote politicians into office who believe as we do (or claim to) as long as they promise to help us and kick at least one racial, religious, or "different" group in the teeth (which for some reason makes us feel better, to know that however stupid and lazy and worthless we are, there is somebody who just by being who they are is hated by God and Country more). If it just so happens that those congressmen are getting bought off on the side by the same companies that not terribly coincidentally a) make the billions of dollars from not fixing any of the world's serious problems, as actually fixing them would cut off the flow of unearned income; and b) donate huge amounts of money to both political parties because they don't CARE who is in office, as long as they become addicted to the money provided by the corporation to help fund the campaign that puts and keeps them there. Actual bribery is risky, but nobody can afford to piss off their political funding, because we have stood by and watched the cost of a political campaign escalate until nobody can afford to run for office or defend their office once they are seated without the millions donated by their masters. If they get into office swearing to suborn the constitution and pack the supreme court with people as dumb as we are, we're all for it.
We get what we deserve, and apparently we deserve Donald and Hillary. If I believed in a mythological Deity of justice, I would be considering this a sign of Armageddon, the destruction of the world not by fire, not by ice, but by terminal stupidity.
No, you continue to miss the point of what I am saying. The term "truth" has a specific meaning in ontology. From Webster:
Truth: 1. The quality or being true; as: (a) Conformity to fact or reality; exact accordance with that which is, or has been; or shall be.
It has nothing to do with how you feel, or your state of happiness/bliss/etc. It is a real, correct correspondence between a stated belief or hypothesis and an objective reality that is, will be, or has been. It is time independent -- a truth does not become a falsehood, it just is.
The problem is that we do not know a priori which beliefs are true and which ones are false. Beliefs all live in one place -- our minds. The real world lives (mostly) outside of our minds by all appearances, although of course I cannot disprove solipsism if you are silly enough to advance the proposition that you are just making me up in your head, creating something to amuse yourself with all of these annoying observations.
It is here that you make your major mistakes. You consider your mental state and feelings and success at optimizing a particular, desired mental state as personal, non-reproducible or transmissible evidence of Truth with a capital T. If thinking a particular thought or practicing a particular discipline makes you blissful, then that thought must be True. You seem to miss the obvious possibility that it is a documented fact that people can become quite blissful thinking thoughts that are, in pure fact, false, not in conformity to fact or reality. In fact, two groups of people can become blissful thinking diametrically contradictory "religious thoughts", thoughts that differ in explicit content. This is what cognitive dissonance is all about -- the ability of the brain to "make do" to avoid suffering. It is "sour grapes" -- if we cannot reach the grapes, they must have been sour anyway. It is believing with all of your heart that space aliens will take you and your family away at a prophecied time to save you from the evil and destruction of the world, and then -- even after the aliens fail to show up and the prophecy is proven false making up an excuse so that you can continue to have the thoughts about how special you are and how you weren't really wrong. It is a child, praying "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take." as an imaginary defense against the imaginary monsters under the bed and fear of this word "die" that involves birds and goldfish that one day stop moving and are flushed away or buried in a shoebox in the back yard. It is part of how we comfort ourselves in a world that we at best only partially control and that reaches out and hurts us. Or makes us feel good. Or leaves us excited, or bored. But which nearly always makes us afraid.
You really should read e.g. Joel Shore's book on Cognitive Dissonance, if only so that you can recognize it in yourself. I am not a Buddhist, because Siddhartha wasn't a "Buddhist". He was just somebody trying to figure out the world. He made some major mistakes. He also had some brilliant ideas, especially in the field of practical, empirical, social ethics. His "sermon for lay people" is with a single exception a very excellent prescription for living a virtuous life even today, wisdom, not knowledge per se. One of his brilliant ideas, amplified by his followers, is that a person seeking Enlightenment with the capital E should try to see the world exactly as it is, without the invention and complication of cognitive dissonance. This ability to not fool themselves is clearly visible in the writings of zen masters and buddhist thinkers alike. Enlightenment is truly nothing special, but it is also not easy to lay aside all of your wishful thinking for a God and an elaborate fantasy of structure "behind the visible world" to make it all better o
It's very easy to shoot down an RT saying the person is imagining.
Because that's what it is? Fundamentally? Beyond any possible doubt?
However, you are still missing the point. There aren't two kinds of truth. This is muddy thinking. There is just truth. Any proposition or belief concerning reality is either true or false, but (with the single exception of the proposition "I am existing as I think this thought") we don't know which. Seriously. And Bertrand Russell even took issue with the "I" in the statement. I prefer to be more conservative and state that I am certain that something (as opposed to nothing) is existing, some part of which is my experiencing.
You made a number of statements concerning the real world, for example that when I die I will be looking down in some non-corporal form at my dead body as if it was a set of old clothes. That is a specific prediction about a specific event. It is either a true prediction or a false prediction. There is no middle ground. Even granting some poetic license (maybe I won't be looking at it as if it was old clothes specifically) it comes down to you asserting that I as an ego capable of perception of the real world and thought about the real world will survive independent of any body and brain supporting my perceptions and thoughts once that body and brain die. You could not begin, in a million years of contemplation, to describe the mechanism of my thinking or perceiving, because you have arrogantly placed yourself above the need to concern yourself with little details like that. You can't specify what it is that will be looking, how it will "look" (in physics, light is an electromagnetic wave and all interactions are two way, with the observer interacting with the observed), how the energy and information present in whatever it is looking with and at is processed into thought. You complain about the fact that neuroscience hasn't yet worked out every detail of how we think with our brains as if it is proof that we don't think with our brains, but you haven't any theory of any use whatsoever about how we could exist, and interact, and think, with nothing to use to think with, or with something you cannot even begin to describe interacting in ways you cannot imagine to think with, and think that this is a better hypothesis, something that you can assert as a certain "religious" truth?
Of course, you could be right. Heck, the spirit of Louis Armstrong serenading me could be right. Anything you want to assert as "certain truth" could be right, except for one thing. You are no more certain of its truth than I am, because neither of us can be certain that our experiences and thoughts are precise maps of objective reality. The best we can do is make inferences based on observed patterns and stable structurings and orderings of our experience, and inferences are not certain truths.
About your brother or folks like them, how do you know they first have a problem?
I won't dignify this with an answer. As Buddha once observed, "suffering exists". And most of the suffering of the world is utterly beyond our control. It extends throughout the animal kingdom (at least). Humans are just better than most animals at inflicting additional suffering on their fellow humans, although, to be fair, we are also better than most at alleviating it. Well, OK, I will answer. The answer is "compassion". Give it a try. My compassion (and growing up with it in the next room) assures me that Down's syndrome is not equivalent to a special lobotomy that leaves you perpetually happy, or Enlightened, or any other bullshit. It sucks, for absolutely everybody involved, on the best day of its existence. As do strokes. As does mental illness. As does arthritis as you age, spending every day in at least some pain. Suffering exists.
Yes brain does pattern matching. But again the very basic thing is a thought. It's
our whole talk about brain and brain only controls emotions is as baseless as and as without proof as a fairies creating gravity. Did you enter into your brain and see these? Just because some scientist/PhD student desperate to come up with a paper, you believe these things? And are you sure after your body dies, you wont' be there? do you have proof for it? I tell you, when you die, you will watch your body just like you see your cloths when you remove them after work and lay it say on your bed. It will be just like that. Do you need to believe me? no, as I said, this is based on experience. When you hit life in its head, you will come to see those experiences. Those teachers I mentioned never asked anyone to believe them. They only tell there is something more. Osho says you need to experiment with yourself. It takes a zillion times more courage than to master say quantum physics or the reason for God-particle.
On the contrary, it is based on close to a century of hard science. Even without double blind placebo controlled experiments, human damage their brains through accident, abuse, or their brains are damaged by simple aging. One can fairly precisely track loss of functionality through the regions that are damaged. My wife is a physician, but also completed her Ph.D. dissertation in neuropsychology and I typed her papers for her back in the day. Are you saying she was "desperate to come up with a paper" (published as the cover story in Science, BTW) and just made up all the stuff she discovered about afferent pathways in bat brains? Are you contending that neurotransmitters have nothing to do with your brain function, and that if you take drugs that occupy the receptor sites for specific neurotransmitters, your emotions will not change because your brain is special and its emotions don't involve hormones, neurotransmitters, and chemistry?
Seriously, dude, you are completely disconnected from reality. This isn't a matter of point of view. The whole point of science is that when it is done right, the evidence will convince even those that have alternative hypotheses -- unless those people choose to completely ignore mere common sense, the idea that it is better to believe something supported by objective evidence over the arbitrary notions unsupported by evidence that our brains cook up.
Look, we are evolved to be greedy pattern matching engines. We see fluffy sheep in the clouds and the face of Jesus in a piece of toast and extract meaning where there is no actual meaning to be found. We hallucinate. We can close our eyes and visualize entire three ring circuses in fantasy. And this is normal people, normal brains. When you get into abnormal, dysfunctional brains, bipolars, schizophrenics, depressives, psychotics, sociopaths, PTSD victims, the vast list of humans with brains what were broken when they were born with things like Down's syndrome, you at some point realize that even people -- like me (said without ego) -- who have highly functional brains that are capable of high levels of reason and objective analysis are still both bounded and in many ways broken. Our brains, and hence our minds, are far from perfectly functional -- I demonstrate that every day lecturing in physics, where I make mistake great and small as my speaking mind says one thing and my writing mind writes another. Our brains are complex, a multilayered cake of evolutionary baggage and modern additions, with our reptile core largely in control however much our primate cortex with its interior monologue wants to think it is in charge.
I grew up with a brother (2 years older) with Down's syndrome. He could meditate and follow spiritual masters until the next Yuga and never do more than learn to write his own name, because you are so very, very wrong. His brain was broken, and no spiritual practice was ever going to heal it or allow him to think off in some imaginary space where you imagine that your thinking actually occurs simply
Look, I grew up in India, and learned most of the concepts associated with Eastern religions -- in particular Hinduism and Buddhism -- before I was twelve. The real problem with your entire approach is that there are NOT two kinds of Truths. There is only that which is true and that which isn't. In the latter category are many things -- half truths, lies, mistakes, nearly all beliefs (the ones that are true are a vanishingly small set in comparison to the set that is false), religious truths in general (even if some religion is true, by being true it usually makes the rest of them false). Truth doesn't come in "kinds". It just is. Next thing you know, you'll get all Obi-Wan Kanobi on my and say things can be true "from a certain point of view"... which even in the movie was avoiding the obvious fact that Obi-Wan lied to Luke.
The second problem with what you argue is that we do not KNOW what is "true" outside of the immediate empirical truth of our own existence. Everything else is belief. You might say that there are two kinds of beliefs about the real Universe (where by Universe I mean "everything that has objective existence" quite independent of space or time) -- those that are consistent, supported by direct evidence, and that fit consistently into our general web of mutually supporting evidence supported beliefs. These are things that are most probably true, that are in some defensible sense best belief. Then there is the vast, enormous set of things that people just make up, that are from the beginning the fantasies of the mind and are -- usually -- themselves inconsistent (and hence overtly impossible to be true), inconsistent with other well-supported beliefs (and hence unlikely to be true), or are consistent and consistent with well-supported beliefs but are merely unsupported by evidence themselves (e.g. monopoles in my previous example). None of the latter are worthy of belief. They are at best -- at best, mind you -- not contradicted by experience and knowledge that does have a sound foundation. At worst they are nonsense, absurd, impossible. But not even monopoles are worthy of belief, and they are far more worthy of belief than any auto-hypnotic mental experience of union with the All.
What makes you happy and what is true are not equivalent. Not even close to equivalent. What makes me happy is very likely the right mix of chemicals stimulating the right neurons in my brain the right way. What is true is what is objectively true. It might make me happy to close my eyes and "go to a happy place" where I fantasize about being on a beach, staring out at infinity, having my shoulders gently rubbed by a beautiful blond. But that doesn't mean that I am really on such a beach experiencing this, no matter how hard I try to believe that I am. Similarly when I am in direct, immediate pain, denying the reality of that pain or the source of that pain is utterly pointless.
I suppose it might make you "happy" if you won the lottery and suddenly had ten million dollars. But would it make you happy if I just told you that you won, or were fated to win, when you didn't or won't, ever, win the lottery? Even if I told you on your deathbed, so that you could die thinking "at last, I am not poor!" in joyous triumph and totally happy, it still wouldn't make it true, and IMO would not justify the lie.
India turns out Maharishis the way Italy turns out shoes, and for very similar purposes -- they have a high retail value and beat the hell out of living in not-even-genteel poverty but rather in real poverty, in India. Buddha preached fairly extensively about the abuse of the common people by the priesthood, and it continues today 2500 years later, and amazingly, it is often the victims themselves that defend the practice across all religions. Sometimes with arms and violence. As (I recall) Voltaire said, it is a small step from believing an absurdity to committing an atrocity. Because the alternative to defending
I was respectfully suggesting at least one more alternative - specifically, that it is inappropriate to take the universe we observe as a single frame of reference. If we compare this universe to a coin toss that has resulted in an "edge landing", then yes, absolutely, the universe we see is an incredibly rare and precious event. But it is still entirely possible with nothing more than the equivalent of a single coin and an awful lot of coin-flips...
No arguments, except that one has to imagine somewhere a giant urn, filled with Universes, and a big hand pulling them out, one at a time, and saying "B-8" until somewhere, someone cries "Bingo!". So let's call this the bingo hypothesis.
Sadly, we cannot sensibly infer either the urn or the hand any more than we can infer anything at all about the antecedent state of the Universe, so far. And there may be no urn, and no hand. One cannot apply the concept of probability theory to a single observation outside of Bayes' theorem (which sadly requires priors like assumptions about the urns) and even so, the best one can say from the single observation is that the probability of the outcome was manifestly not zero. And so it is. Here is the Universe. One can literally count the infinite improbability of it even internally. And yet it exists.
The answer is obvious for this case. How about a case for which there cannot be an evidence? or an evidence which cannot be encoded in symbols? (eastern spiritual calls it names-forms.. essentially you can't describe it using language or binary-code).
In a case for which there cannot be evidence, assigning some degree of belief to one proposition over another is silly and -- by definition -- a cosmic waste of time. Two cases come to mind. Someone could assert (for whatever reason) that there was -- four quadrillion years ago -- a being who was subjected to spiritual torture and disconnected from its god-like form and plunged into darkness. Since four quadrillion years is many times the period from the inflation of the current space-time to the present, and since the current inflation erased (or at least mixed, chopped, and pureed) all of the information of any state preceding it, there "cannot be any evidence" that would justify the use of the term. I therefore do not believe it -- not because it could not be true, but because it is one of an infinite set of possible states of being that might or might not have existed four quadrillion years ago, assuming that this phrase has any meaning (time being a dimension associated with the current inflation and all). When I analyze the probabilities, the one that stands out is that L. Ron Hubbard just made that up, something he was very good at being a science fiction author and all, and further conclude that people who accept this as true on L. Ron's work are batshit crazy, in addition to being terribly easy to politically manipulate and fleece for their worldly wealth. They end up being an actual menace to society, unsafe for children (for example) to be around.
The second case I offer from physics. Theorists would "like" for a "magnetic monopole" to exist. This is the magnetic equivalent for an electrical charge. If it existed, Maxwell's equations would be symmetric (and hence more beautiful and satisfying, keeping those theorists from feeling "incomplete with the science explanation") as well as keeping the science explanation from being, as it were, incomplete. Moreover, it would explain why charge is quantized (following a theory advanced by Dirac, who is one of the deities of the physics pantheon). That would really fill a yearning in the breast of many scientists as they seek explanations. The problem is, that we have looked for many, many years now and not found a single magnetic monopole. Every year we look and fail to find decreases the estimate of the concentration of monopoles in the Universe, and at this point they are either someplace we cannot look, like concentrated in the heart of the sun and planets, or else they are very rare indeed. And the quantization argument only requires that there be one monopole in a sphere roughly 28 billion light years across. It could well be that they exist and we cannot find them.
Physicists, OTOH, do not believe in monopoles. Nor do they disbelieve. Monopoles are in the status of unproven theories and we hold belief in abeyance pending evidence. This is sane, because until we put salt on one's tail, they might not actually exist and some other explanation for charge quantization and the asymmetry of Maxwell's Equations might hold. It isn't like we haven't been mistaken many times before, even in cases where there was some evidence!
Consider the "invisible fairy" hypothesis. In my opinion (as a physicist) we have pretty good evidence for the existence of a force named "gravity". That doesn't mean that we fully understand gravity or that there isn't other stuff going ont, or that we have completely solved all of physics, but it is nevertheless true that all of our observations are at least approximately consistent with a force of attraction between all the mass-energy concentrations in the visible cosmos, all the way back to the original inflation. However, nothing stops you from
Yeah, and just imagine playing (say) World of Warcraft where when you get hacked to pieces, you feel the pain of being hacked to pieces, when you get fried by dragon breath you feel the pain of burning to death, and where -- like the original nethack -- if you die you are dead, and at best you have to start the game over from the beginning, only there is no Amulet of Yendor to even strive for.
The next step in VR -- direct hookups that allow you to experience the joy of being eviscerated and left to die, or experiencing the pleasure of being eaten alive by flesh-eating bacteria and left blind and without limbs or tongue, or being multiply raped by your uncle at age four before being beaten to death by your mom's current drug abusing boyfriend.
An obvious best seller. Can't wait for it to come out in the stores!
Very likely we are all in an infinite ladder of experience spaces...
Um, I do not think that this phrase means what you think it means...
Again is there any proof for this? no
...and here is why. Here is a question for you, and understanding the correct answer to it will change your life, in particular.
Is it better (in a logically, mathematically defendable sense) to believe in something for which there is evidence or to believe in something for which there is no evidence?
This is a very serious question. If you want to read and understand the derivation of the answer you can read Jaynes' Probability Theory, the Logic of Science or Cox's The Algebra of Probable Inference, where Cox originally derived the answer from a small set of postulates that literally encode mere common sense.
Bear in mind that one can come up with a literal infinity of postulates concerning the nature of those "domains outside of logic" you wish to assert. How, precisely, can you select the ones that are best to believe in, especially when you put them "outside of logic"? You can't use logic to select between them by your own definition. You apparently don't understand the importance of evidence in choosing between them (or the necessity of logical consistency in whatever you choose when you are choosing the set that ultimately constitute your worldview, unless you want to build a worldview that is literally impossible to be correct). In the end, you will find yourself believing something just because you made it up or (worse) something somebody else made up, quite possibly to seduce your money and political power from you to advance their own personal agenda, carefully crafted to "sound nifty", without being able to defend your choice outside of asserting that they sound really cool so they must be true and sure, here's this week's offering, and who should I vote for that will enforce belief in this absurdity by law?.
That's the problem with turning off the reasoning power of your brain. It leads you to a world of fantasy, to a kind of madness, that makes you incredibly dangerous as you shape your life around pure imagination disconnected from the harsh and cruel realities of the real world, which does not give a shit about your imaginations of "men behind the curtain" that make it all work out.
Maybe there are such men, but without stating a coherent, logically consistent hypothesis and providing actual evidence to support it, they could be women, they could be intelligent space aliens, they could be god, they could be gods, they could be pink unicorns magically creating the reality of our experience with a touch of their la-la-loopsy curled horns, or they could be any of a solid aleph prime continuum of non-contradictory possibilities, all a priori equally likely without evidence to help us choose between them and make some of them more likely than others! Currently, the best evidence supported bet is that those little invisible fairies go by the collective name of "the laws of physics", but if you prefer unicorns or god, suit yourself.
I don't mean this as an insult, but it is literally unsane to believe things physical or metaphysical without evidence. Consider sanity. You might like it!
As evidence for an alternative, I would suggest "the coin toss". If you take a coin and toss it a bunch of time, in the vast majority of cases it will result in a coin landing with heads or tails uppermost. But there is an (incredibly narrow) realm in which the coin may land and balance, perfectly, on it's edge.
Unless there is a Sourcerer who has come into power, of course, which really, really significantly shifts the odds. And that's one of many, many problems with Musk's argument. He is basically proposing that our Universe is literally shaped by a Sourcerer, instead of considering the entire idea to be an amusing satire invented by Terry Pratchett...
Who is probably metaphorically rolling over in his grave (and no doubt, landing on his edge:-) to hear this idiocy advanced by an egotistical nut as something to take seriously (in the absence of actual evidence). Pratchett was a better philosopher in his Diskworld series than Musk will be if he lives -- sorry, if his simulated existence as a non-player AI character in my solipsistic game continues -- until he is a hundred.
Solipsism or neo-solipsism or Vedantic Monist Hindu avataric solipsism (where we are all fragments of Brahma, personae of the Visvarupa of the Mahavishnu revealed by Krishna to to Arjuna above the fields of Kurukshetra) or religion in general seems to inevitably be an invention of the narcissist to justify their own probable survival as an ego in a world where every single piece of evidence suggests that life is ugly., nasty, brutish and short (at least some of the time) and then you die, dead, with your ego irreversibly erased into the general field of entropy for (effectively) all time. Do we KNOW that this is true? Of course not. It is just the best bet, given an objective appraisal of the information at hand unbiased by our wish to live forever.
To bet any other way is equivalent to being down to your last thin quarter in the rastiest casino in Las Vegas, and confidently pop it into the slot saying to yourself -- "This is all REALLY just a simulation of a slot machine, and I'm playing this simulated reality game for fun, so I can be absolutely certain that the game will let me win on my very last pull rather than being reduced to panhandling -- again -- on the street to buy my daily sterno ration until my liver fails and I die and am buried in an unmarked grave by the state".
Honestly, life is full of pain (mixed in even to lives that are, on the whole, enjoyable and pain free). Experiencing the pain should be enough to convince Elon that even if he is in some sort of massive simulation, he is at best an NPC AI cursed with self-awareness, but I'm certain that he's telling himself that really, he is a play-ah...
I was going to post to say basically the same thing. It is identical to teleological arguments for God, and (similarly) it ignores the anthropic principle altogether. It also leaves one with a serious problem in nested probabilities, iterations of the same argument. OK, so we are (brain in a jar players? advanced enough AI NPCs that we cannot tell that we are NPCs?) in some sort of massive MMRPG -- a point of view that is almost identical to that promoted by theists only they name the chief programmer "god". But then, how precisely can the programmers and players in THAT "reality" be certain that THEY are not being simulated and only THINK that they've written a vast simulation written by a still more advanced and older civilization one notch up. Rinse, repeat ad nauseam -- at NO level can one be certain that one is observing the "true reality" because all one knows of the reality one is in is sensory information that by hypothesis is being simulated. One doesn't even have to ACTUALLY run simulations inside simulations (which has scaling problems) -- because individual consciousnesses are always individual threads and one massive simulation can do the whole thing unless your "mind" can trace every single execution in the massive computer rather than infer them from (possibly simulated) sensory data that APPEARS to look like the game you've written is running.
To be frank, even things like the Bell inequality are only valid "given that our experiences are of the real Universe" and not a simulation, because I can compute the predicted results from the inequality and design a fully deterministic simulation that will always appear to give the right answer to the appearance of the actual experiments. So it in no sense proves the absence of hidden variables, it just requires one to throw common sense and the principle of parsimony (Occam's razor) out the window in order for there to be any, but nobody can prove that reality has to be sensible or parsimonious without begging the question -- it is simply the simplest assumption to make.
It looks like Musk has watched The Matrix trilogy too many times, ignored Hofstader's Godel, Escher and Bach which advances, IIRC, the braided chain of teleology for God, where at no level can even GOD be certain that there are not external levels of reality superior to the level in which God functions assuming God, which is silly in the ABSENCE OF ACTUAL EVIDENCE. One wonders if he has read James Gunn's The Joy Makers and somehow gotten himself confused, or is so trapped in Plato's Cave that instead of interpreting the shadows on the wall as the best possible projection of reality available that he invents an entire mythology to explain the lifestyle and motivations of the beings that are putting on the shadow play. It is, as you say, ground that has been covered so well, and so many times, by individuals ranging from philosophers to science fiction authors that to hear it as if it is somehow something to take seriously from a self-appointed pundit of reality is just sad.
Not necessary. Cthulhu is a lock on the current election -- I'm sure you'd agree the Elder God is an overwhelmingly better candidate than Hillary or Donald -- and once elected he promises to cleanse the Earth of all evil (but himself) and I'm pretty sure Bill Gates and all WIndows computers on Earth are going to be consumed on crackers with a dash of horseradish as part of the appetizers...
At least, not until one considers that their real double secret plan is to engineer the parts for a sexborg. That way they can mix and match from the same stock to swap out, say, the breasts as they wear out.
On a more serious note, one rather guesses that they will eventually be able to "write" matching tissue and stealth it in past the immune system.
Because it is non-ionizing radiation, incapable of breaking molecular bonds (literally incapable, incapable at a quantum level) AND the total power of the radiation makes it about as dangerous as a flashlight as far as integrated power is concerned. You are at greater risk every time you go out into the sunlight, which is full of ionizing radiation. You are even at greater risk in fluorescent light, which is converted visible light from a UV base and usually with a comparatively high UV component (which is potentially ionizing).
The problem (one of many) with epidemiological studies like this is that correlation is not causality. Yes, I know, so very true and well known that it sounds like a trite little aphorism rather than something to be taken seriously but all the study could be reflecting is that males with cell phones are more likely to fly in airplanes than females with cell phones, and airplanes take you up well above the protective layers of the atmosphere where you get a dose of real ionizing radiation. Or males with cell phones are more likely to work in poorly ventilated buildings made with concrete and hence breathe in more radiation (again, ionizing). Or there may be a covariance with something in their differential diets. Or it could be something two or three fold indirect.
Bottom line, until somebody can suggest a physically plausible mechanism for non-ionizing radiation in power densities far lower than that already present in living tissue to cause cancer, one should pretty much ignore any studies that find borderline "significant" correlation, especially when it isn't consistent (males but not females), especially when there are many other studies that find no significant correlation. I would wax poetic about data dredging, green jelly beans causing acne (obligatory XKCD reference), and Bonferroni corrections to computations of significance in precisely studies of this sort that find something where others have looked many times and found nothing, but why bother?
In the meantime, let's return to the regularly scheduled program linking high voltage power lines to leukemia and holy water to cancer cures...
And again, no. I'd freeze it where it is on all my devices first, and wait for the free fork. I'd also retaliate against Google in every way I could, such as de-selecting its search engine, dumping all of my google-specific apps. I wouldn't like it -- some of those are very useful. But Google is making very close to 4 billion dollars NET profit this year without charging for Android. Android gives them an absolutely critical edge in the mobile phone and tablet markets. It fully justifies its share of the 18 billion or so GROSS profits it makes (and spends, and spends, and spends) on sideline speculative investments like self-driving cars and AI.
I think front end airbags would, as explained, work much better. Among other things, they would actually work, using existing, well-developed, technology. For another, even if we imagine constructing front bumpers that are hollow, perforated on the front with holes that are plugged in such a way that they will rupture out into the incoming body (and not everywhere else where they won't do any good), and filled with a glue that is liquid enough to squirt through the holes AND is pre-bound to the interior of the bumper with enough mechanical strength to actually accomplish bringing a recoiling mass on the order of 100 kg to rest relative to the car in a millisecond or so AND that will actually set and bond to the pedestrian in that same millisecond AND is non-toxic and stable enough to sit inside the bumper without drying or setting until called on to do its job through ice and summer heat (which is a lot of imagination) you are still left with the collision itself, which is basically whacking somebody with a solid object at (say) 20 m/sec hard enough to bring them up to that speed over a distance of a few centimeters (say 5, a couple of inches). An airbag would spread that impulse out over a distance equal to the radius of the inflated airbag (say 50 cm).
Then we can do some very simple algebra/arithmetic:
a = v^2/2D
where v^2 is the velocity of the car at the time of impact, squared, and D is the distance over which one spreads the collision, in meters (not cm!).
Suppose the car has slowed to only 10 m/sec and the pedestrian is initially at rest, finally at 10 m/sec. Then with a glue bumper, or any sort of "soft" bumper that smoothly ruptures:
a = 100/0.1 = 1000 m/sec^2 or 100xg
An impact acceleration of 100g is right at the edge of "almost always fatal or very badly injured" depending, of course, on where you get hit (remember, the average FORCE of the collision is the mass of the pedestrian TIMES this). This is only 22+ mph, but still, big ouch. Without the glue, one simply applies more or less this same average impact force over twice the distance for twice the time.
The airbag, OTOH, does:
a = 100/1 = 100 m/sec^2 = 10xg
An impact acceleration of 10 g would leave the pedestrian bruised, but very likely NOT killed. That's why cars are equipped with them on the inside, right?
Which would you rather have -- a dashboard covered with a gluebag that popped when your face hit it, gluing your face to the dashboard or a dashboard with an airbag that cushioned a 20+ mph -> 0 collision to spread it out over the full half meter in between? No contest, right? And that's ignoring the (slightly humorous, in a black humor sort of way) negative aspects of having your face glued to the dash or your body glued to the front of the car post collision.
Airbags save lives. If one designed an airbag for front bumpers that were INTENDED to be cheaply replaced or even be moderately reusable (and were extra strong as one isn't usually going to be cushioning a face) one could actually protect a car's (expensive) front bumper AND significantly reduce the impact associated with the impulse of a collision with a pedestrian or dog. One might even be able to shape the airbag to lift the latter up over the hood and keep from actually running them over, kind of an "airbag cow-catcher" for the vehicle. The self-driving cars are obviously already going to have all the front-sensory apparatus needed to make the deploy/non-deploy decision, and could even work down a decision tree as to HOW to deploy with more than one mode for deployment with their presumed more than adequate onboard intelligence.
Even a collision at 5 mph with a car is going to be fatal if the pedestrian is knocked down and goes under the tires, and it is a bit unlikely that a 5 mph collision would suffice to make the thin coating "give way", if it is thick enough not to give way when somebody leans over t
Super-good physics. Now consider the practical aspect of driving a car with active glue all over the paint through:
* Bugs. I can coat my windshield with bug guts in a single night drive from my house to the coast through various swampy regions. And my windshield isn't sticky.
* Pollen. I live in NC, and in the spring my car -- well, really everything, not just my car, inside and out -- is coated with a layer of tree pollen so thick that it is virtually opaque. Again, this sticks to hard finish PAINT. I can only imagine how tightly it will adhere to glue as it sits out in the sun.
* Dust. Even when the pollen season is over, there is always dust in the air. Always. That's why we have to wash our cars a few times a year unless we want people to write "wash me" with their fingers on our fenders and windshields.
* Salt + grime. Yes I live in the south without that problem so much but h/t to our northern cousins who have to drive through slushmelt. I'm guessing immersing an active glue surface in slushmelt would pretty much end the effectiveness of the glue.
* Fall leaves. For that matter, summer leaves if you park under live oaks or evergreens. Maple seeds. Acorns. Birds. Squirrels. I can't wait to come out some morning and see my self-driving car with a seagull glued to the front fender. Oh my.
* Children, pets, old people.
I would say that all of this makes it impractical to drive a car with active sticky flypaper instead of paint as a "permanent" primary front coating. Laughably impractical.
Which leaves us with the only alternative -- a "glue bag" as a sort of external equivalent of an internal airbag. Now, is it possible to come up with a formula for stickum that can be sprayed in the (say) millisecond before a collision so that it coats a pedestrian -- but not their mouth or eyes or lungs, which would be "bad" -- and the front bumper just in time to catch the human and stick them and hold during the millisecond or so that they are actually in contact with the bumper/hood? Personally I doubt it. I know of no glues that can be applied and will stick and set in a millisecond, especially glues that are non-toxic and safe to spray onto random humans to lower risk of death. Can you imagine an explosion of super-glue all over somebody -- not that super-glue can come close to bonding in a millisecond.
So this seems like a really stupid idea too. Which makes the entire idea sound incredibly stupid, not worth the money required to patent it. If they wanted to accomplish the same thing in a PRACTICAL way, they could just mount airbags on the front fender that were triggered by certain conditions, such as an impending collision. That would actually be USEFUL -- and not just for humans. Having a heavy-duty airbag go off to cushion a regular collision between two cars could actually significantly reduce the average force during the impulse by spreading it out over a meter BEFORE starting to crumple the front bumper accordion. It would also do exactly the same thing as the glue to a pedestrian only better -- catch them on a meter or so of compressing air while the impulse matches their speed to that of the car. You might even be able to make the bag itself "sticky", although I suspect that would interfere with its explosion -- at least you might be able to make it out of e.g. neoprene with a non-stick stickiness.
... In order to make commercial solar, one has to abandon the wing, not solar power per se. Imagine a blimp whose entire bag is made up of ultrathin solar cells. Now lift is "free" -- all one needs is enough power to run a pusher that can exceed the drag force of the prevailing wind, and surface (of the blimp) to volume works in your favor, as increasing the surface area increases net buoyancy and hence the total weight of storage batteries one can lift. The Chinese are building a prototype already, as are several other folks. They may not go fast, but they can probably go as fast as the solar winged plane did.
Norman Spinrad speculated on a hybrid/inflatable wing solar plane (single person) run by a mix of muscle and wind in "Songs from the Stars". It isn't even a particularly new concept. If any of the new designs for flexible, cheap, e.g. "printable" solar cells work out so one can buy solar plastic by the yard and make up with cheap quantity what one loses in efficiency, people will be building stuff like this in their back yards (right after covering their roofs and houses with cheap siding made from it).
The top article's headline asserting that solar planes aren't the future may be true, but solar powered flight, on the other hand, may work out just fine. And that isn't even considering doing it the easy way -- using solar power to make biofuels to run existing kinds of airplanes or jets. Or directly synthesizing fuels with solar energy. Will solar blimps happen anytime soon? Prototypes, sure, but the real payoff comes when solar technology advances the next notch, as it is very likely to do. Some of the organic solar cell technologies being investigated could yield quite reasonable efficiencies and drop costs by as much as an order of magnitude on mass production compared to solid state cells. One could imagine cars, boats, houses and more being coated in a solar film in a decade that doubles as weatherproofing and dumps power into high storage capacity next-gen batteries all day long, for a cost that isn't that much higher than existing e.g. siding or surface coatings.
The problem with solar is it is (largely) a premature technology. But there is a ton of R&D being done, and I'm pretty confident that it will bear substantial fruit, if it isn't killed dead by functional fusion power making fuel costs for electrical power irrelevant compared to everything else in the distribution system.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you slipped a decimal. The LIGO observatories are roughly 3000 km apart, so a straight line lag between them is around 10 milliseconds. A lag of 1 millisecond meansi that the (essentially plane) wave came in at a small angle relative to the perpendicular plane separating them. The triangle involved would (conveniently enough) have a short leg around 300 km long, and that's still a small angle so without a calculator roughly 0.1 radians on one or the other side of the perpendicular plane. I'm not certain how they manage to set the azimuthal angle and decide whether the source is on the northwest or southeast side of the plane (at the moment of detection, which then has a very particular orientation relative to universal coordinates as the earth orbits and rotates) -- maybe they use the shift in the lag AS the earth rotates to do azimuthal triangulation if the signal is long enough, maybe they use multiple detectors at right angles to each other to get an extra angle -- I suppose I could look, but detecting signal lags across meters is easy enough with modern electronics (nanosecond plus time resolution) so they could even do both. It would have been and still would be a lot more precise if they had three, or better, four detectors and could do honest to god 3D triangulation -- they aren't going to do parallax until they put a second detector on (say) the moon or at the lagrange points but they could get a very precise line to the event that way.
Any LIGO-ites on /.? Surely somebody who does this is around to comment with something other than references to the mass of their male parts? Which, on the scale we are discussing, is truly infinitesimal (reminding me of the flea and the elephant, but that's another story...:-)
rgb
The "scientists" at Cornell who are getting headlines with this breaking news haven't the foggiest clue how far away the nearest alien intelligent species is from Earth. Possibilities range from living here already among us or lurking in the solar system to "there are no alien intelligent species in the Cosmos", we could be unique. If you assume -- not unreasonably -- that evolution of advanced life requires an extremely unlikely accident -- like a collision with a proto-planet that is just the right size to strip away some atmosphere components and deposit others and rearrange the distribution of massive elements in the developing crust and then produce a moon that initially is very close and produces huge tides, plus a magnetic core, plus the right distance from the right sun, plus the good fortune not to be hit AGAIN just as intelligence is teed up, plus the enormous good fortune of the developing species making it over the self-extinction hump -- we might be alone in the entire galaxy or in very rare company extragalactically, even with a trillion trillion star systems to choose from. Or, the odds could be a D&D 20 sided dice roll per star. We just don't know. There is no evidence, and our theories of planetary evolution and abiogenesis are just that -- theories with very little substantive evidence to support them.
Then there are the other silly aspects of their claim. It is rapidly looking like a developing civilization is likely to have only a narrow window where they radiate a substantial amount of organized radio wave energy, so one has an even narrower window for retarded detection. Also that emitted (wasted!) energy at its peak is on the order of maybe a megawatt or two in any given channel on its brightest day, and the 1/r^2 law is pitiless. Just one light year away your 10^6 watts are spread out across 4\pi (10^15)^2 ~ 10^31 square meters. Let's see: 10^6/10^31 = 10^{-25} watts per square meter. If you turned an entire planetary surface into a directed antenna, it would have a cross sectional area on the order of 10^14 square meters, leaving you with 10 whole trillionths of a watt receiver power. Sure, why not, a piece of cake we can amplify that and resolve signal from noise -- using a planet-sized antenna and black magic.
So a better answer is that we will never be visited by space aliens who "pick up our TV signals" any more than we will pick up their signals. If some NEARBY civilization is crazy enough to point a directional, tight beam radio station right at the solar system and pump it with a terawatt or so, sure, maybe we could receive it here. But resolving the waste signal of a civilization order of tens of light years or more away? The amazing thing is that anybody manages to get this sort of thing funded. Simple arithmetic makes a fairly powerful argument that any SETI effort is a complete waste of time and money. No matter how cool -- and dangerous -- it might be.
rgb
http://www.beveragesdirect.com...
Enjoy. Expensive, but enjoy...
I agree. Apple is just weird, sort of a kinder gentler flakier version of M$. They run Unix as their OS, sort of, rely on the open source community for a pretty good chunk of their back-end Unixoid software at least, do HAVE a decent amount of OSS available, but at the same time they emulate the empire of evil at inopportune times.
I keep wondering if one day they are going to learn the Sun Microsystems lesson the hard way. You can be a hardware company, or a software company, but if you try to be both you are just asking for it. Apple has survived balanced on that line, but only because they stopped being a "computer company" for the most part and focused on the children of the humble PDA rearranged into PAD or POD. There (including their phone) they've been able to continue to make consumers buy Apple Koolade -- for now. But they (like Sun) are a high margin sales company. They survive only as long as they remain a premier brand that people will pay a premium for, because you PAY a premium compared to Android devices built much more along OS lines. M$ has failed repeatedly to get any suckers to buy their even more overpriced hardware with integrated software.
We could be moving solidly into the next phase of the small digital device, where one cannot really add more functionality than they already have, where they are already fast enough to do almost anything most people want them to do, where the only dimensions for added value are things like longer battery life or better screens. In the PC world that was signalled by a crash in prices to where survivors survive on the thinnest of margins and where once mighty "name brands" can only eke out a continued, marginally profitable existence but can no longer pay for a dedicated premier sales force and so on. Such a market change could crush Apple (as it crushed Sun, DEC, and countless others during the great Unix shakeout a decade or two ago) and maybe even M$ as well. But M$ still has what remains of the "real computer" world by the balls with its sales agreements, and even though it isn't high margin sales any more, it is nearly free money that they can continue to extort from system vendors indefinitely, and they obviously plan to transform their OS into a rental commodity that you have to renew annually instead of something you buy once to monetize it even after it leaves the store.
A brave new world, where we pay the M$ tax not once, but every year, with Apple not far behind (I'm sure). But what do I care? I've used nothing but Linux for decades at this point -- even my WinXP VMs haven't been booted for over a year. With Steam, even the game issue is largely moot, although coverage is far from perfect or universal. Don't have much time for games these days anyway, sigh.
rgb
Apple's tech approach: "embrace and fuck up"
Ahhh, it reminds me of the good old days of piracy on the open seas, when Microsoft ate Borland and Lotus and Wordstar and...
It's simple economics. Apple, like Microsoft, has a huge stable of code monkeys that they have to feed and water occasionally with Jolt cola and potato chips. In order to have enough spare capacity to be able to fix a critical bug in a timely way, maybe, they have to have maybe 50% overcapacity the rest of the time (and besides, hiring the best keeps them out of M$'s unholy hands even if they do nothing but social media all day). So they look for little projects for them to do.
There, they follow the tried and true M$ path. It is bone simple to wait for somebody else to take all the risk of inventing and developing a new concept or product, and then just use your spare cycles to clone it and make it your own. Since there are a zillion ways to write code, and since it is very difficult to get a software patent these days (and pretty easy to work around it or double dare them to sue you with their finite and your infinite pockets even if there is one) it is zero risk, and since you literally own the operating system and hardware and direct marketing channels, you simply cannot fail to take over anywhere from 1/3 to all of the market. M$ did it over and over again, sometimes leaving the risk taker alive but squeezed down to a tiny market (why kill the goose that lays golden eggs, after all) and sometimes just having goose for dinner. They would even do things like break the code of competitors (but not their own) when releasing OS updates. Who could compete with that, given all of the sales staff to remind customers of how "unreliable" a product has become but not to worry, ours is rock solid...
But this is evolution in action. Anyone dumb enough to develop for Apple or M$ who ends up being eaten alive after taking all of the risk is just being selected against for stupidity. The best you can hope for is that their developers are busy fixing bugs in their OS and that the parent company decides that it is faster to buy you out than it is to clone you and put you out of business.
rgb
That is become we are dumb as fenceposts. We watch reality TV and deeply care who the bachelorette has "relations" with. We go to church on Sunday and never doubt that there really was an actual serpent in an actual garden of eden around 6000 years ago right before a really big flood that rose to cover the top of mount everest in only 40 days and nights of rain (water rising at a rate of one inch or so a minute, globally). We truly believe that this flood wiped out all of the dinosaurs, and that all of the millions of surviving species were saved in a giant wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart store (or smaller) ventilated by a single window less than a meter square, who were then delivered back into functional ecologies worldwide by the handful of flood survivors from the vicinity of the middle east, penguins back to the south pole, poison dart frogs back into bromeliads in the Amazonian rain forest, etc. We buy lottery tickets "for education", paying our stupidity taxes at the same time we buy our cigarettes with the money we should be saving for rent or retirement or just plain food for the babies we had because we did not really understand that pregnancy happens because of sex and babies happen because of pregnancy and then you have to feed and change the little suckers for decades before they can get out on the street and be just like mom, dad having left the scene long before. The cigarettes (and junk food purchased at the quick mart along with the lottery tickets and beer) cause the cancer that the government then pays to treat because not to would be inhuman and inhuman, putting billions of dollars in the pockets of special interests galore along the way, and besides, we the people who do all of this stuff -- or at least some of this stuff -- outnumber those who don't and hence we can just vote politicians into office who believe as we do (or claim to) as long as they promise to help us and kick at least one racial, religious, or "different" group in the teeth (which for some reason makes us feel better, to know that however stupid and lazy and worthless we are, there is somebody who just by being who they are is hated by God and Country more). If it just so happens that those congressmen are getting bought off on the side by the same companies that not terribly coincidentally a) make the billions of dollars from not fixing any of the world's serious problems, as actually fixing them would cut off the flow of unearned income; and b) donate huge amounts of money to both political parties because they don't CARE who is in office, as long as they become addicted to the money provided by the corporation to help fund the campaign that puts and keeps them there. Actual bribery is risky, but nobody can afford to piss off their political funding, because we have stood by and watched the cost of a political campaign escalate until nobody can afford to run for office or defend their office once they are seated without the millions donated by their masters. If they get into office swearing to suborn the constitution and pack the supreme court with people as dumb as we are, we're all for it.
We get what we deserve, and apparently we deserve Donald and Hillary. If I believed in a mythological Deity of justice, I would be considering this a sign of Armageddon, the destruction of the world not by fire, not by ice, but by terminal stupidity.
rgb
No, you continue to miss the point of what I am saying. The term "truth" has a specific meaning in ontology. From Webster:
Truth: 1. The quality or being true; as: (a) Conformity to fact or reality; exact accordance with that which is, or has been; or shall be.
It has nothing to do with how you feel, or your state of happiness/bliss/etc. It is a real, correct correspondence between a stated belief or hypothesis and an objective reality that is, will be, or has been. It is time independent -- a truth does not become a falsehood, it just is.
The problem is that we do not know a priori which beliefs are true and which ones are false. Beliefs all live in one place -- our minds. The real world lives (mostly) outside of our minds by all appearances, although of course I cannot disprove solipsism if you are silly enough to advance the proposition that you are just making me up in your head, creating something to amuse yourself with all of these annoying observations.
It is here that you make your major mistakes. You consider your mental state and feelings and success at optimizing a particular, desired mental state as personal, non-reproducible or transmissible evidence of Truth with a capital T. If thinking a particular thought or practicing a particular discipline makes you blissful, then that thought must be True. You seem to miss the obvious possibility that it is a documented fact that people can become quite blissful thinking thoughts that are, in pure fact, false, not in conformity to fact or reality. In fact, two groups of people can become blissful thinking diametrically contradictory "religious thoughts", thoughts that differ in explicit content. This is what cognitive dissonance is all about -- the ability of the brain to "make do" to avoid suffering. It is "sour grapes" -- if we cannot reach the grapes, they must have been sour anyway. It is believing with all of your heart that space aliens will take you and your family away at a prophecied time to save you from the evil and destruction of the world, and then -- even after the aliens fail to show up and the prophecy is proven false making up an excuse so that you can continue to have the thoughts about how special you are and how you weren't really wrong. It is a child, praying "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take." as an imaginary defense against the imaginary monsters under the bed and fear of this word "die" that involves birds and goldfish that one day stop moving and are flushed away or buried in a shoebox in the back yard. It is part of how we comfort ourselves in a world that we at best only partially control and that reaches out and hurts us. Or makes us feel good. Or leaves us excited, or bored. But which nearly always makes us afraid.
You really should read e.g. Joel Shore's book on Cognitive Dissonance, if only so that you can recognize it in yourself. I am not a Buddhist, because Siddhartha wasn't a "Buddhist". He was just somebody trying to figure out the world. He made some major mistakes. He also had some brilliant ideas, especially in the field of practical, empirical, social ethics. His "sermon for lay people" is with a single exception a very excellent prescription for living a virtuous life even today, wisdom, not knowledge per se. One of his brilliant ideas, amplified by his followers, is that a person seeking Enlightenment with the capital E should try to see the world exactly as it is, without the invention and complication of cognitive dissonance. This ability to not fool themselves is clearly visible in the writings of zen masters and buddhist thinkers alike. Enlightenment is truly nothing special, but it is also not easy to lay aside all of your wishful thinking for a God and an elaborate fantasy of structure "behind the visible world" to make it all better o
It's very easy to shoot down an RT saying the person is imagining.
Because that's what it is? Fundamentally? Beyond any possible doubt?
However, you are still missing the point. There aren't two kinds of truth. This is muddy thinking. There is just truth. Any proposition or belief concerning reality is either true or false, but (with the single exception of the proposition "I am existing as I think this thought") we don't know which. Seriously. And Bertrand Russell even took issue with the "I" in the statement. I prefer to be more conservative and state that I am certain that something (as opposed to nothing) is existing, some part of which is my experiencing.
You made a number of statements concerning the real world, for example that when I die I will be looking down in some non-corporal form at my dead body as if it was a set of old clothes. That is a specific prediction about a specific event. It is either a true prediction or a false prediction. There is no middle ground. Even granting some poetic license (maybe I won't be looking at it as if it was old clothes specifically) it comes down to you asserting that I as an ego capable of perception of the real world and thought about the real world will survive independent of any body and brain supporting my perceptions and thoughts once that body and brain die. You could not begin, in a million years of contemplation, to describe the mechanism of my thinking or perceiving, because you have arrogantly placed yourself above the need to concern yourself with little details like that. You can't specify what it is that will be looking, how it will "look" (in physics, light is an electromagnetic wave and all interactions are two way, with the observer interacting with the observed), how the energy and information present in whatever it is looking with and at is processed into thought. You complain about the fact that neuroscience hasn't yet worked out every detail of how we think with our brains as if it is proof that we don't think with our brains, but you haven't any theory of any use whatsoever about how we could exist, and interact, and think, with nothing to use to think with, or with something you cannot even begin to describe interacting in ways you cannot imagine to think with, and think that this is a better hypothesis, something that you can assert as a certain "religious" truth?
Of course, you could be right. Heck, the spirit of Louis Armstrong serenading me could be right. Anything you want to assert as "certain truth" could be right, except for one thing. You are no more certain of its truth than I am, because neither of us can be certain that our experiences and thoughts are precise maps of objective reality. The best we can do is make inferences based on observed patterns and stable structurings and orderings of our experience, and inferences are not certain truths.
About your brother or folks like them, how do you know they first have a problem?
I won't dignify this with an answer. As Buddha once observed, "suffering exists". And most of the suffering of the world is utterly beyond our control. It extends throughout the animal kingdom (at least). Humans are just better than most animals at inflicting additional suffering on their fellow humans, although, to be fair, we are also better than most at alleviating it. Well, OK, I will answer. The answer is "compassion". Give it a try. My compassion (and growing up with it in the next room) assures me that Down's syndrome is not equivalent to a special lobotomy that leaves you perpetually happy, or Enlightened, or any other bullshit. It sucks, for absolutely everybody involved, on the best day of its existence. As do strokes. As does mental illness. As does arthritis as you age, spending every day in at least some pain. Suffering exists.
Yes brain does pattern matching. But again the very basic thing is a thought. It's
our whole talk about brain and brain only controls emotions is as baseless as and as without proof as a fairies creating gravity. Did you enter into your brain and see these? Just because some scientist/PhD student desperate to come up with a paper, you believe these things? And are you sure after your body dies, you wont' be there? do you have proof for it? I tell you, when you die, you will watch your body just like you see your cloths when you remove them after work and lay it say on your bed. It will be just like that. Do you need to believe me? no, as I said, this is based on experience. When you hit life in its head, you will come to see those experiences. Those teachers I mentioned never asked anyone to believe them. They only tell there is something more. Osho says you need to experiment with yourself. It takes a zillion times more courage than to master say quantum physics or the reason for God-particle.
On the contrary, it is based on close to a century of hard science. Even without double blind placebo controlled experiments, human damage their brains through accident, abuse, or their brains are damaged by simple aging. One can fairly precisely track loss of functionality through the regions that are damaged. My wife is a physician, but also completed her Ph.D. dissertation in neuropsychology and I typed her papers for her back in the day. Are you saying she was "desperate to come up with a paper" (published as the cover story in Science, BTW) and just made up all the stuff she discovered about afferent pathways in bat brains? Are you contending that neurotransmitters have nothing to do with your brain function, and that if you take drugs that occupy the receptor sites for specific neurotransmitters, your emotions will not change because your brain is special and its emotions don't involve hormones, neurotransmitters, and chemistry?
Seriously, dude, you are completely disconnected from reality. This isn't a matter of point of view. The whole point of science is that when it is done right, the evidence will convince even those that have alternative hypotheses -- unless those people choose to completely ignore mere common sense, the idea that it is better to believe something supported by objective evidence over the arbitrary notions unsupported by evidence that our brains cook up.
Look, we are evolved to be greedy pattern matching engines. We see fluffy sheep in the clouds and the face of Jesus in a piece of toast and extract meaning where there is no actual meaning to be found. We hallucinate. We can close our eyes and visualize entire three ring circuses in fantasy. And this is normal people, normal brains. When you get into abnormal, dysfunctional brains, bipolars, schizophrenics, depressives, psychotics, sociopaths, PTSD victims, the vast list of humans with brains what were broken when they were born with things like Down's syndrome, you at some point realize that even people -- like me (said without ego) -- who have highly functional brains that are capable of high levels of reason and objective analysis are still both bounded and in many ways broken. Our brains, and hence our minds, are far from perfectly functional -- I demonstrate that every day lecturing in physics, where I make mistake great and small as my speaking mind says one thing and my writing mind writes another. Our brains are complex, a multilayered cake of evolutionary baggage and modern additions, with our reptile core largely in control however much our primate cortex with its interior monologue wants to think it is in charge.
I grew up with a brother (2 years older) with Down's syndrome. He could meditate and follow spiritual masters until the next Yuga and never do more than learn to write his own name, because you are so very, very wrong. His brain was broken, and no spiritual practice was ever going to heal it or allow him to think off in some imaginary space where you imagine that your thinking actually occurs simply
Look, I grew up in India, and learned most of the concepts associated with Eastern religions -- in particular Hinduism and Buddhism -- before I was twelve. The real problem with your entire approach is that there are NOT two kinds of Truths. There is only that which is true and that which isn't. In the latter category are many things -- half truths, lies, mistakes, nearly all beliefs (the ones that are true are a vanishingly small set in comparison to the set that is false), religious truths in general (even if some religion is true, by being true it usually makes the rest of them false). Truth doesn't come in "kinds". It just is. Next thing you know, you'll get all Obi-Wan Kanobi on my and say things can be true "from a certain point of view"... which even in the movie was avoiding the obvious fact that Obi-Wan lied to Luke.
The second problem with what you argue is that we do not KNOW what is "true" outside of the immediate empirical truth of our own existence. Everything else is belief . You might say that there are two kinds of beliefs about the real Universe (where by Universe I mean "everything that has objective existence" quite independent of space or time) -- those that are consistent, supported by direct evidence, and that fit consistently into our general web of mutually supporting evidence supported beliefs. These are things that are most probably true, that are in some defensible sense best belief. Then there is the vast, enormous set of things that people just make up, that are from the beginning the fantasies of the mind and are -- usually -- themselves inconsistent (and hence overtly impossible to be true), inconsistent with other well-supported beliefs (and hence unlikely to be true), or are consistent and consistent with well-supported beliefs but are merely unsupported by evidence themselves (e.g. monopoles in my previous example). None of the latter are worthy of belief. They are at best -- at best, mind you -- not contradicted by experience and knowledge that does have a sound foundation. At worst they are nonsense, absurd, impossible. But not even monopoles are worthy of belief, and they are far more worthy of belief than any auto-hypnotic mental experience of union with the All.
What makes you happy and what is true are not equivalent. Not even close to equivalent. What makes me happy is very likely the right mix of chemicals stimulating the right neurons in my brain the right way. What is true is what is objectively true. It might make me happy to close my eyes and "go to a happy place" where I fantasize about being on a beach, staring out at infinity, having my shoulders gently rubbed by a beautiful blond. But that doesn't mean that I am really on such a beach experiencing this, no matter how hard I try to believe that I am. Similarly when I am in direct, immediate pain, denying the reality of that pain or the source of that pain is utterly pointless.
I suppose it might make you "happy" if you won the lottery and suddenly had ten million dollars. But would it make you happy if I just told you that you won, or were fated to win, when you didn't or won't, ever, win the lottery? Even if I told you on your deathbed, so that you could die thinking "at last, I am not poor!" in joyous triumph and totally happy, it still wouldn't make it true, and IMO would not justify the lie.
India turns out Maharishis the way Italy turns out shoes, and for very similar purposes -- they have a high retail value and beat the hell out of living in not-even-genteel poverty but rather in real poverty, in India. Buddha preached fairly extensively about the abuse of the common people by the priesthood, and it continues today 2500 years later, and amazingly, it is often the victims themselves that defend the practice across all religions. Sometimes with arms and violence. As (I recall) Voltaire said, it is a small step from believing an absurdity to committing an atrocity. Because the alternative to defending
I was respectfully suggesting at least one more alternative - specifically, that it is inappropriate to take the universe we observe as a single frame of reference. If we compare this universe to a coin toss that has resulted in an "edge landing", then yes, absolutely, the universe we see is an incredibly rare and precious event. But it is still entirely possible with nothing more than the equivalent of a single coin and an awful lot of coin-flips ...
No arguments, except that one has to imagine somewhere a giant urn, filled with Universes, and a big hand pulling them out, one at a time, and saying "B-8" until somewhere, someone cries "Bingo!". So let's call this the bingo hypothesis.
Sadly, we cannot sensibly infer either the urn or the hand any more than we can infer anything at all about the antecedent state of the Universe, so far. And there may be no urn, and no hand. One cannot apply the concept of probability theory to a single observation outside of Bayes' theorem (which sadly requires priors like assumptions about the urns) and even so, the best one can say from the single observation is that the probability of the outcome was manifestly not zero. And so it is. Here is the Universe. One can literally count the infinite improbability of it even internally. And yet it exists.
rgb
The answer is obvious for this case. How about a case for which there cannot be an evidence? or an evidence which cannot be encoded in symbols? (eastern spiritual calls it names-forms.. essentially you can't describe it using language or binary-code).
In a case for which there cannot be evidence, assigning some degree of belief to one proposition over another is silly and -- by definition -- a cosmic waste of time. Two cases come to mind. Someone could assert (for whatever reason) that there was -- four quadrillion years ago -- a being who was subjected to spiritual torture and disconnected from its god-like form and plunged into darkness. Since four quadrillion years is many times the period from the inflation of the current space-time to the present, and since the current inflation erased (or at least mixed, chopped, and pureed) all of the information of any state preceding it, there "cannot be any evidence" that would justify the use of the term. I therefore do not believe it -- not because it could not be true, but because it is one of an infinite set of possible states of being that might or might not have existed four quadrillion years ago, assuming that this phrase has any meaning (time being a dimension associated with the current inflation and all). When I analyze the probabilities, the one that stands out is that L. Ron Hubbard just made that up, something he was very good at being a science fiction author and all, and further conclude that people who accept this as true on L. Ron's work are batshit crazy, in addition to being terribly easy to politically manipulate and fleece for their worldly wealth. They end up being an actual menace to society, unsafe for children (for example) to be around.
The second case I offer from physics. Theorists would "like" for a "magnetic monopole" to exist. This is the magnetic equivalent for an electrical charge. If it existed, Maxwell's equations would be symmetric (and hence more beautiful and satisfying, keeping those theorists from feeling "incomplete with the science explanation") as well as keeping the science explanation from being, as it were, incomplete. Moreover, it would explain why charge is quantized (following a theory advanced by Dirac, who is one of the deities of the physics pantheon). That would really fill a yearning in the breast of many scientists as they seek explanations. The problem is, that we have looked for many, many years now and not found a single magnetic monopole. Every year we look and fail to find decreases the estimate of the concentration of monopoles in the Universe, and at this point they are either someplace we cannot look, like concentrated in the heart of the sun and planets, or else they are very rare indeed. And the quantization argument only requires that there be one monopole in a sphere roughly 28 billion light years across. It could well be that they exist and we cannot find them.
Physicists, OTOH, do not believe in monopoles. Nor do they disbelieve. Monopoles are in the status of unproven theories and we hold belief in abeyance pending evidence. This is sane, because until we put salt on one's tail, they might not actually exist and some other explanation for charge quantization and the asymmetry of Maxwell's Equations might hold. It isn't like we haven't been mistaken many times before, even in cases where there was some evidence!
Consider the "invisible fairy" hypothesis. In my opinion (as a physicist) we have pretty good evidence for the existence of a force named "gravity". That doesn't mean that we fully understand gravity or that there isn't other stuff going ont, or that we have completely solved all of physics, but it is nevertheless true that all of our observations are at least approximately consistent with a force of attraction between all the mass-energy concentrations in the visible cosmos, all the way back to the original inflation. However, nothing stops you from
the bugs are in the 100s of millions
Sorry, was that a typo? Did you mean "borgs"?
Yeah, and just imagine playing (say) World of Warcraft where when you get hacked to pieces, you feel the pain of being hacked to pieces, when you get fried by dragon breath you feel the pain of burning to death, and where -- like the original nethack -- if you die you are dead, and at best you have to start the game over from the beginning, only there is no Amulet of Yendor to even strive for.
The next step in VR -- direct hookups that allow you to experience the joy of being eviscerated and left to die, or experiencing the pleasure of being eaten alive by flesh-eating bacteria and left blind and without limbs or tongue, or being multiply raped by your uncle at age four before being beaten to death by your mom's current drug abusing boyfriend.
An obvious best seller. Can't wait for it to come out in the stores!
Very likely we are all in an infinite ladder of experience spaces...
Um, I do not think that this phrase means what you think it means...
Again is there any proof for this? no
...and here is why. Here is a question for you, and understanding the correct answer to it will change your life, in particular.
Is it better (in a logically, mathematically defendable sense) to believe in something for which there is evidence or to believe in something for which there is no evidence?
This is a very serious question. If you want to read and understand the derivation of the answer you can read Jaynes' Probability Theory, the Logic of Science or Cox's The Algebra of Probable Inference, where Cox originally derived the answer from a small set of postulates that literally encode mere common sense.
Bear in mind that one can come up with a literal infinity of postulates concerning the nature of those "domains outside of logic" you wish to assert. How, precisely, can you select the ones that are best to believe in, especially when you put them "outside of logic"? You can't use logic to select between them by your own definition. You apparently don't understand the importance of evidence in choosing between them (or the necessity of logical consistency in whatever you choose when you are choosing the set that ultimately constitute your worldview, unless you want to build a worldview that is literally impossible to be correct). In the end, you will find yourself believing something just because you made it up or (worse) something somebody else made up, quite possibly to seduce your money and political power from you to advance their own personal agenda, carefully crafted to "sound nifty", without being able to defend your choice outside of asserting that they sound really cool so they must be true and sure, here's this week's offering, and who should I vote for that will enforce belief in this absurdity by law?.
That's the problem with turning off the reasoning power of your brain. It leads you to a world of fantasy, to a kind of madness, that makes you incredibly dangerous as you shape your life around pure imagination disconnected from the harsh and cruel realities of the real world, which does not give a shit about your imaginations of "men behind the curtain" that make it all work out.
Maybe there are such men, but without stating a coherent, logically consistent hypothesis and providing actual evidence to support it, they could be women, they could be intelligent space aliens, they could be god, they could be gods, they could be pink unicorns magically creating the reality of our experience with a touch of their la-la-loopsy curled horns, or they could be any of a solid aleph prime continuum of non-contradictory possibilities, all a priori equally likely without evidence to help us choose between them and make some of them more likely than others! Currently, the best evidence supported bet is that those little invisible fairies go by the collective name of "the laws of physics", but if you prefer unicorns or god, suit yourself.
I don't mean this as an insult, but it is literally unsane to believe things physical or metaphysical without evidence. Consider sanity. You might like it!
rgb
As evidence for an alternative, I would suggest "the coin toss". If you take a coin and toss it a bunch of time, in the vast majority of cases it will result in a coin landing with heads or tails uppermost. But there is an (incredibly narrow) realm in which the coin may land and balance, perfectly, on it's edge.
Unless there is a Sourcerer who has come into power, of course, which really, really significantly shifts the odds. And that's one of many, many problems with Musk's argument. He is basically proposing that our Universe is literally shaped by a Sourcerer, instead of considering the entire idea to be an amusing satire invented by Terry Pratchett...
Who is probably metaphorically rolling over in his grave (and no doubt, landing on his edge:-) to hear this idiocy advanced by an egotistical nut as something to take seriously (in the absence of actual evidence). Pratchett was a better philosopher in his Diskworld series than Musk will be if he lives -- sorry, if his simulated existence as a non-player AI character in my solipsistic game continues -- until he is a hundred.
Solipsism or neo-solipsism or Vedantic Monist Hindu avataric solipsism (where we are all fragments of Brahma, personae of the Visvarupa of the Mahavishnu revealed by Krishna to to Arjuna above the fields of Kurukshetra) or religion in general seems to inevitably be an invention of the narcissist to justify their own probable survival as an ego in a world where every single piece of evidence suggests that life is ugly., nasty, brutish and short (at least some of the time) and then you die, dead, with your ego irreversibly erased into the general field of entropy for (effectively) all time. Do we KNOW that this is true? Of course not. It is just the best bet, given an objective appraisal of the information at hand unbiased by our wish to live forever.
To bet any other way is equivalent to being down to your last thin quarter in the rastiest casino in Las Vegas, and confidently pop it into the slot saying to yourself -- "This is all REALLY just a simulation of a slot machine, and I'm playing this simulated reality game for fun, so I can be absolutely certain that the game will let me win on my very last pull rather than being reduced to panhandling -- again -- on the street to buy my daily sterno ration until my liver fails and I die and am buried in an unmarked grave by the state".
Honestly, life is full of pain (mixed in even to lives that are, on the whole, enjoyable and pain free). Experiencing the pain should be enough to convince Elon that even if he is in some sort of massive simulation, he is at best an NPC AI cursed with self-awareness, but I'm certain that he's telling himself that really, he is a play-ah ...
rgb
I was going to post to say basically the same thing. It is identical to teleological arguments for God, and (similarly) it ignores the anthropic principle altogether. It also leaves one with a serious problem in nested probabilities, iterations of the same argument. OK, so we are (brain in a jar players? advanced enough AI NPCs that we cannot tell that we are NPCs?) in some sort of massive MMRPG -- a point of view that is almost identical to that promoted by theists only they name the chief programmer "god". But then, how precisely can the programmers and players in THAT "reality" be certain that THEY are not being simulated and only THINK that they've written a vast simulation written by a still more advanced and older civilization one notch up. Rinse, repeat ad nauseam -- at NO level can one be certain that one is observing the "true reality" because all one knows of the reality one is in is sensory information that by hypothesis is being simulated. One doesn't even have to ACTUALLY run simulations inside simulations (which has scaling problems) -- because individual consciousnesses are always individual threads and one massive simulation can do the whole thing unless your "mind" can trace every single execution in the massive computer rather than infer them from (possibly simulated) sensory data that APPEARS to look like the game you've written is running.
To be frank, even things like the Bell inequality are only valid "given that our experiences are of the real Universe" and not a simulation, because I can compute the predicted results from the inequality and design a fully deterministic simulation that will always appear to give the right answer to the appearance of the actual experiments. So it in no sense proves the absence of hidden variables, it just requires one to throw common sense and the principle of parsimony (Occam's razor) out the window in order for there to be any, but nobody can prove that reality has to be sensible or parsimonious without begging the question -- it is simply the simplest assumption to make.
It looks like Musk has watched The Matrix trilogy too many times, ignored Hofstader's Godel, Escher and Bach which advances, IIRC, the braided chain of teleology for God, where at no level can even GOD be certain that there are not external levels of reality superior to the level in which God functions assuming God, which is silly in the ABSENCE OF ACTUAL EVIDENCE. One wonders if he has read James Gunn's The Joy Makers and somehow gotten himself confused, or is so trapped in Plato's Cave that instead of interpreting the shadows on the wall as the best possible projection of reality available that he invents an entire mythology to explain the lifestyle and motivations of the beings that are putting on the shadow play. It is, as you say, ground that has been covered so well, and so many times, by individuals ranging from philosophers to science fiction authors that to hear it as if it is somehow something to take seriously from a self-appointed pundit of reality is just sad.
Sigh.
Not necessary. Cthulhu is a lock on the current election -- I'm sure you'd agree the Elder God is an overwhelmingly better candidate than Hillary or Donald -- and once elected he promises to cleanse the Earth of all evil (but himself) and I'm pretty sure Bill Gates and all WIndows computers on Earth are going to be consumed on crackers with a dash of horseradish as part of the appetizers...
rgb
Nothing about this makes sense.
At least, not until one considers that their real double secret plan is to engineer the parts for a sexborg. That way they can mix and match from the same stock to swap out, say, the breasts as they wear out.
On a more serious note, one rather guesses that they will eventually be able to "write" matching tissue and stealth it in past the immune system.
rgb
You forgot smash with a hammer and burn the scraps.
Because it is non-ionizing radiation, incapable of breaking molecular bonds (literally incapable, incapable at a quantum level) AND the total power of the radiation makes it about as dangerous as a flashlight as far as integrated power is concerned. You are at greater risk every time you go out into the sunlight, which is full of ionizing radiation. You are even at greater risk in fluorescent light, which is converted visible light from a UV base and usually with a comparatively high UV component (which is potentially ionizing).
The problem (one of many) with epidemiological studies like this is that correlation is not causality. Yes, I know, so very true and well known that it sounds like a trite little aphorism rather than something to be taken seriously but all the study could be reflecting is that males with cell phones are more likely to fly in airplanes than females with cell phones, and airplanes take you up well above the protective layers of the atmosphere where you get a dose of real ionizing radiation. Or males with cell phones are more likely to work in poorly ventilated buildings made with concrete and hence breathe in more radiation (again, ionizing). Or there may be a covariance with something in their differential diets. Or it could be something two or three fold indirect.
Bottom line, until somebody can suggest a physically plausible mechanism for non-ionizing radiation in power densities far lower than that already present in living tissue to cause cancer, one should pretty much ignore any studies that find borderline "significant" correlation, especially when it isn't consistent (males but not females), especially when there are many other studies that find no significant correlation. I would wax poetic about data dredging, green jelly beans causing acne (obligatory XKCD reference), and Bonferroni corrections to computations of significance in precisely studies of this sort that find something where others have looked many times and found nothing, but why bother?
In the meantime, let's return to the regularly scheduled program linking high voltage power lines to leukemia and holy water to cancer cures...
rgb
And again, no. I'd freeze it where it is on all my devices first, and wait for the free fork. I'd also retaliate against Google in every way I could, such as de-selecting its search engine, dumping all of my google-specific apps. I wouldn't like it -- some of those are very useful. But Google is making very close to 4 billion dollars NET profit this year without charging for Android. Android gives them an absolutely critical edge in the mobile phone and tablet markets. It fully justifies its share of the 18 billion or so GROSS profits it makes (and spends, and spends, and spends) on sideline speculative investments like self-driving cars and AI.
And, I wish them the best of luck with that.
I think front end airbags would, as explained, work much better. Among other things, they would actually work, using existing, well-developed, technology. For another, even if we imagine constructing front bumpers that are hollow, perforated on the front with holes that are plugged in such a way that they will rupture out into the incoming body (and not everywhere else where they won't do any good), and filled with a glue that is liquid enough to squirt through the holes AND is pre-bound to the interior of the bumper with enough mechanical strength to actually accomplish bringing a recoiling mass on the order of 100 kg to rest relative to the car in a millisecond or so AND that will actually set and bond to the pedestrian in that same millisecond AND is non-toxic and stable enough to sit inside the bumper without drying or setting until called on to do its job through ice and summer heat (which is a lot of imagination) you are still left with the collision itself, which is basically whacking somebody with a solid object at (say) 20 m/sec hard enough to bring them up to that speed over a distance of a few centimeters (say 5, a couple of inches). An airbag would spread that impulse out over a distance equal to the radius of the inflated airbag (say 50 cm).
Then we can do some very simple algebra/arithmetic:
a = v^2/2D
where v^2 is the velocity of the car at the time of impact, squared, and D is the distance over which one spreads the collision, in meters (not cm!).
Suppose the car has slowed to only 10 m/sec and the pedestrian is initially at rest, finally at 10 m/sec. Then with a glue bumper, or any sort of "soft" bumper that smoothly ruptures:
a = 100/0.1 = 1000 m/sec^2 or 100xg
An impact acceleration of 100g is right at the edge of "almost always fatal or very badly injured" depending, of course, on where you get hit (remember, the average FORCE of the collision is the mass of the pedestrian TIMES this). This is only 22+ mph, but still, big ouch. Without the glue, one simply applies more or less this same average impact force over twice the distance for twice the time.
The airbag, OTOH, does:
a = 100/1 = 100 m/sec^2 = 10xg
An impact acceleration of 10 g would leave the pedestrian bruised, but very likely NOT killed. That's why cars are equipped with them on the inside, right?
Which would you rather have -- a dashboard covered with a gluebag that popped when your face hit it, gluing your face to the dashboard or a dashboard with an airbag that cushioned a 20+ mph -> 0 collision to spread it out over the full half meter in between? No contest, right? And that's ignoring the (slightly humorous, in a black humor sort of way) negative aspects of having your face glued to the dash or your body glued to the front of the car post collision.
Airbags save lives. If one designed an airbag for front bumpers that were INTENDED to be cheaply replaced or even be moderately reusable (and were extra strong as one isn't usually going to be cushioning a face) one could actually protect a car's (expensive) front bumper AND significantly reduce the impact associated with the impulse of a collision with a pedestrian or dog. One might even be able to shape the airbag to lift the latter up over the hood and keep from actually running them over, kind of an "airbag cow-catcher" for the vehicle. The self-driving cars are obviously already going to have all the front-sensory apparatus needed to make the deploy/non-deploy decision, and could even work down a decision tree as to HOW to deploy with more than one mode for deployment with their presumed more than adequate onboard intelligence.
Even a collision at 5 mph with a car is going to be fatal if the pedestrian is knocked down and goes under the tires, and it is a bit unlikely that a 5 mph collision would suffice to make the thin coating "give way", if it is thick enough not to give way when somebody leans over t
Super-good physics. Now consider the practical aspect of driving a car with active glue all over the paint through:
* Bugs. I can coat my windshield with bug guts in a single night drive from my house to the coast through various swampy regions. And my windshield isn't sticky.
* Pollen. I live in NC, and in the spring my car -- well, really everything, not just my car, inside and out -- is coated with a layer of tree pollen so thick that it is virtually opaque. Again, this sticks to hard finish PAINT. I can only imagine how tightly it will adhere to glue as it sits out in the sun.
* Dust. Even when the pollen season is over, there is always dust in the air. Always. That's why we have to wash our cars a few times a year unless we want people to write "wash me" with their fingers on our fenders and windshields.
* Salt + grime. Yes I live in the south without that problem so much but h/t to our northern cousins who have to drive through slushmelt. I'm guessing immersing an active glue surface in slushmelt would pretty much end the effectiveness of the glue.
* Fall leaves. For that matter, summer leaves if you park under live oaks or evergreens. Maple seeds. Acorns. Birds. Squirrels. I can't wait to come out some morning and see my self-driving car with a seagull glued to the front fender. Oh my.
* Children, pets, old people.
I would say that all of this makes it impractical to drive a car with active sticky flypaper instead of paint as a "permanent" primary front coating. Laughably impractical.
Which leaves us with the only alternative -- a "glue bag" as a sort of external equivalent of an internal airbag. Now, is it possible to come up with a formula for stickum that can be sprayed in the (say) millisecond before a collision so that it coats a pedestrian -- but not their mouth or eyes or lungs, which would be "bad" -- and the front bumper just in time to catch the human and stick them and hold during the millisecond or so that they are actually in contact with the bumper/hood? Personally I doubt it. I know of no glues that can be applied and will stick and set in a millisecond, especially glues that are non-toxic and safe to spray onto random humans to lower risk of death. Can you imagine an explosion of super-glue all over somebody -- not that super-glue can come close to bonding in a millisecond.
So this seems like a really stupid idea too. Which makes the entire idea sound incredibly stupid, not worth the money required to patent it. If they wanted to accomplish the same thing in a PRACTICAL way, they could just mount airbags on the front fender that were triggered by certain conditions, such as an impending collision. That would actually be USEFUL -- and not just for humans. Having a heavy-duty airbag go off to cushion a regular collision between two cars could actually significantly reduce the average force during the impulse by spreading it out over a meter BEFORE starting to crumple the front bumper accordion. It would also do exactly the same thing as the glue to a pedestrian only better -- catch them on a meter or so of compressing air while the impulse matches their speed to that of the car. You might even be able to make the bag itself "sticky", although I suspect that would interfere with its explosion -- at least you might be able to make it out of e.g. neoprene with a non-stick stickiness.
Not impressed, wouldn't invest.
... In order to make commercial solar, one has to abandon the wing, not solar power per se. Imagine a blimp whose entire bag is made up of ultrathin solar cells. Now lift is "free" -- all one needs is enough power to run a pusher that can exceed the drag force of the prevailing wind, and surface (of the blimp) to volume works in your favor, as increasing the surface area increases net buoyancy and hence the total weight of storage batteries one can lift. The Chinese are building a prototype already, as are several other folks. They may not go fast, but they can probably go as fast as the solar winged plane did.
Norman Spinrad speculated on a hybrid/inflatable wing solar plane (single person) run by a mix of muscle and wind in "Songs from the Stars". It isn't even a particularly new concept. If any of the new designs for flexible, cheap, e.g. "printable" solar cells work out so one can buy solar plastic by the yard and make up with cheap quantity what one loses in efficiency, people will be building stuff like this in their back yards (right after covering their roofs and houses with cheap siding made from it).
The top article's headline asserting that solar planes aren't the future may be true, but solar powered flight, on the other hand, may work out just fine. And that isn't even considering doing it the easy way -- using solar power to make biofuels to run existing kinds of airplanes or jets. Or directly synthesizing fuels with solar energy. Will solar blimps happen anytime soon? Prototypes, sure, but the real payoff comes when solar technology advances the next notch, as it is very likely to do. Some of the organic solar cell technologies being investigated could yield quite reasonable efficiencies and drop costs by as much as an order of magnitude on mass production compared to solid state cells. One could imagine cars, boats, houses and more being coated in a solar film in a decade that doubles as weatherproofing and dumps power into high storage capacity next-gen batteries all day long, for a cost that isn't that much higher than existing e.g. siding or surface coatings.
The problem with solar is it is (largely) a premature technology. But there is a ton of R&D being done, and I'm pretty confident that it will bear substantial fruit, if it isn't killed dead by functional fusion power making fuel costs for electrical power irrelevant compared to everything else in the distribution system.
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