You mean uniquely identify your location to within a few meters so that anyone in the world who has access can find you in a way that is different from the way the cell phone that is almost certainly in your pocket does it right now? Forget congress and the cops -- it is a commercial service and if I was willing to pay Verizon another medium sized wad of cash every month I could spend my afternoons watching my own children move around on itty-bitty maps as they ride the bus home...
Wow. Good idea to keep that barn door firmly shut. The horse that's peering over your shoulder as you nail it closed is a bit puzzled, though.
There are a few things everybody is just going to have to get used to in the next decade. One, for example, is that copyright laws are going to survive in an era when it is impossible to prevent the zero-marginal-cost instant reproduction of all electronic forms of art. Evolution in action on that one, and as always the cute little rats and cockroaches are winning and eating the guts out of the publishing industry dinosaurs, which is about to do a major fail as the brick and mortar book industry more or less collapses the way the brick and mortar music distribution industry and the brick and mortar movie rental industry already have. Another is that any notion of personal privacy when connected to The Network you might have had is going to evaporate, with a tiny handful of ubergeek exceptions capable of staying ahead of the security and privacy curve. Every time you connect to an ISP, you are located. Every second you are online you are located and for the most part, unless you use a secure connection protocol (which I note that/. didn't adopt as part of its new look, so we are all vulnerable to sheepish exploitation I suppose -- this might not even be me typing these words, I dunno) every word you type is exposed and your connection itself is available for hijack. Every time you use a credit card or bank card to make a purchase, you are located to within meters to anyone with access. To anyone with access to ALL of this stuff -- your precise location (plus all of your phone conversations, obviously easily tappable) via your cell phone, your electronic transactions via your electronically mediated consumer transaction history, your online connection patter and perhaps 2/3 of its actual unprotected content -- well hell, I could sit here in my house in a bathrobe, scratching my balls, and watch a significant fraction of your life unfold in real time without your knowledge.
And it is still only 2011. Cash money still exists. We haven't yet installed the road control network that we will install, the nearly ubiquitous electronic eyes that we will install, the electronic health monitoring systems that we will install that will (for example) continuously record and report things like blood sugar and eeg information via transient bursts of network connection to save your life -- and in the process function as a de facto lie detector and personal locator quite possibly built right into your skin along with your pacemaker, we don't yet have the neural interfaces that will provide butt-kicking amazing access and control to video games and work and cybernetic prostheses -- all snoopable for everything from personal location to lie-stress information to real-time access to audio and/or video without your knowledge. Cell phones that can be remotely turned on without your knowledge so that they just passively listen to your environment. They could be doing it now, couldn't they? How would you ever know? Gee, your battery runs down a little faster than you expected -- like that never happens.
So enough of the paranoia. Either drop off of the grid -- move to the jungles of Panama, or find yourself an island in the south pacific with no cell service and no internet -- or accept the fact that security and privacy are and always have been a trade-off, one that dates back to the first social groups
Cover a hundred kilometers square of moon with solar cells, collecting roughly 100 Watts/meter^2 (or one TW, peak). Don't worry, we just build robots that mine the materials and smelt and install the cells in place, using local materials.
Now build a really, really big maser. I'm talking big, now, Godzilla-sized. Remember, it's all a vacuum, so you can build uber-cheap, uber large tubes by just hanging the parts on the walls of simple stone partitions. Think of a kilometer high Klystron, or a Magnetron the size of the Metrodome! point the "waveguide" at the end back at Earth. Justify it all as a "solar energy project" that will beam all of that energy down to earth to power our flying cars by means of a simple antenna for free, no moving parts. Consumers can even cook hot dogs by just hanging them out the window!
But we will know better, mmwahahahah! If we just flip this switch here (oomph) and pull this lever then GZZZZAAAP! We've built a totally rad TW-scale death ray capable of focussing all of that energy on a target the size of, well, the size of...
Montana? How much would a 1 cm coherent TW beam spread out over 384,000 km, anyway?
...that even today, even on slashdot, people can't say "anecdotal evidence" and dump this result in their own personal/dev/null.
I want to see a few hundred pairs of jeans worn by all sorts of people with different personal habits and occupations -- some who wear underwear, some who don't, some who shovel horse manure for a living, some who work construction in the hot, sweaty south. I'd bet that 20% of them would end up with that colorful affliction known as "crotch rot" -- any of various fungal infections -- and of course this would instantly become chronic as they'd constantly reinfect themselves. Then there are the various mites that would be living on the sloughed skin cells packed into the weave, the bacteria (harmful or otherwise) fed by the trapped sweat and spilled food and drink and french fry grease wiped off on the thighs, and...
...what if you got actually sick while wearing them, or got lice, or...
Even in the dirty old dark ages, they would wash clothes once or twice a year. Just yuk. And "bad science" yuk at that to draw a conclusion from an N of one.
Absolutely agreed, to the whole post including the bit about GS, and re the next one, I too have the hardcopy because I believe in supporting authors of fabulous books. When I said "we" I meant "the human race, from ancient days" has really wanted to know "the truth" and it is only within the last hundred years that it has become clear that this cannot and will not ever happen, not even in the realm of mathematics and far less so in the realm of epistemology. And sure, a consistent physical theory is one that leads to good correlative agreement with data both from the past and (as it is obtained) in the future. (Which tempts me to start a rant on climate modelling but I will refrain:-)
I don't think most of its core conceptual ideas are bullshit per se, or at least they are less so than many things. My primary issues with it are that it became a hammer looking for a nail, going way, way overboard with language and the way it relates to human behavior. And the religion thing. What sort of website tolerates people putting up articles with lines like "This short essay thus honors Korzybski and gives thanks for his work"...?
I actually agree with you (I think), that it works better as the partial basis for an epistemology and not so well as an explanation for human perceptions and filtering (where it is basically more than half bullshit in the precise sense that it is divorced from biological psychology, information theory in computer science, and other sort of hard science that might refute its pretty ideas). If it comes right down to it, Malinowski, Dorothy Lee, Sapir and Whorf, all came up with anthropological of philosophical systems that link language to thought, and much as I love them all -- they were a partial focus of my undergrad major -- they simply aren't as strongly supported by actual unambiguous evidence as one might like. And Wittgenstein has alas always left me cold -- Russell's student he might have been (but then, so was my undergraduate philosophy guru) but he was no Russell.
Ultimately, language and sensory filtering is without doubt important in understanding understanding, but it is far from being the key to understanding it in the sense that the IGS wishes to promote.
Where it is most useful is (again, I think) the insight that it gives one into the whole semiotic/ontology/epistemology chain in logic, math, inference, reason, and even that insight I think is less penetrating than what one can get from studying abstract information theory and encoding in computer science (where it is quantitative and measurable in addition to providing one with essentially the same insights). I've mentioned it before, I'll mention it again:
is free, online, and amazing. It can change your life (if you can make it through the math:-). Compare this to IGS stuff, which is just plain yucky. It drips.
I'm not sure your Jaynes reservation is apropos. First of all, the ultimate product of Cox or Jaynes is a "plausibility" or "probability". Plausibility or probability of what? That a given proposition is true. In the context of physics and science, that is entirely appropriate. I don't want to know if Newton's law of gravitation is in a more or less accurate correspondence with the observations -- that is the data and it speaks for itself. What I want is to be able to go from the data to some sort of estimate as to how plausible or likely it is that Newton's law of gravitation is true, even though I can casually invent an infinity of ways to explain the data with it or without it and can never be certain that even the most basic premises of my measurement and analysis process are themselves true.
What we thirst for is truth. What we get is a more or less consistent "physical theory", more or less well corroborated by experience and experiment.
One of my favorites (from the Princess Bride) too...
My favorite Aristotle quote is from Bertrand Russell:
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Russell, it seemed, didn't think much of Aristotle -- for good reason.
The "debt" owed to Aristotle by Galileo and Newton is primarily that he wrote a physics at all, given that pretty much all of what he wrote down is not only incorrect, but wrong-headed, not even close. Newton's first law (which follows trivially from his second law, although modern physicists have found some meat in it regarding inertial frames and thing Newton probably never thought of or intended) was basically the "in your face, Aristotle" law that established the direct contradiction between his equations of motion and Aristotle's.
I agree that Aristotle's logic was useful enough, although incompletely specified (nonrigorous, if you like). It isn't completely clear how much of it he actually worked out and how much derives from e.g. Heraclitus, Parmenides and was taught to him by Plato and only written down by Aristotle or his students. But kudos to him for making the clearest and most systematic statement up to his time.
As for the invalidity of symbolic logic, clearly we live in different Universes, one where the word "valid" means something entirely different. Not only Godel, but Boole lived in vain, I see, and the invention of first and second order (symbolic) logic and formal set theory is all just "invalid" and all those courses I took in logic and computation theory lead to perdition. Righhht...
Yeah, I like some parts of GS, without quite being able to adopt it as the pseudoreligion it seems to have become post-Korzybski. In particular, I enjoy A. E. Van Vogt's Null-A books and Heinlein's occasional references to GS in SF, and I do think "The map is not the territory" is a pithy little sound bit that captures an important truth very succinctly. Beyond that, way to much of GS devolves into bullshit, as does Rand's objectivism. GS, however, retains at least an awareness of the imperfection of language (as a peculiar sort of map) and sensation/perception (as another) compared to "reality", where Rand argues that one's perception of a pink unicorn cannot simply be an error in perception. She simply didn't hang out with real schizophrenics enough. The failure to think about language also invalidates her entire discussion of "axioms", since axioms have to be expressed in some sort of symbolic language, and languages are whole matrices of unprovable priors. Axioms at the end of the day remain what Euclid considered them to be -- worthy assumptions that lead to a (hopefully) consistent theory, and not self-evident, self-consistent, or unavoidable truth! I mean, did Godel live in vain, or what? Rand was many things, but she wasn't a physicist (although Atlas Shrugged is physicist-friendly science fiction, except for the places she egregiously violates things like the laws of thermodynamics and electromagnetism) and she wasn't a logician or mathematician. Neither was Korzybski. And hence the problem(s).
Nowadays even people who have studied actual physics and mathematics and logic and set theory are all too likely to end up with nonsense because, as Jaynes pointed out in the quote above, "...they don't have to do anything right" as soon as they step outside of the boundaries of mere common sense and try to prove something deep about reality as being true instead of being a strong consistent belief.
Anyway, I'm sure we could indeed find something fun to "discuss";-)
The mind projection fallacy that he not only attacked, but named. Jaynes wasn't a man of philosophy at all -- he was a physicist, and all physicists are anti-Aristotelians. Really. Aristotle was an idiot, or to be a bit more charitable, Aristotle's teachings as recorded by his students and transmitted in manuscript are largely incoherent -- his recorded writings are idiocy.
As for the rest, Jaynes did indeed seem to subscribe to at least some of the ideas of general semantics -- again, physicists in general probably nearly always do (as do a lot of mathematicians) even if they don't know what GS actually is. The idea that our mental image of reality is not itself reality, that the map (in our minds) is not the territory (reality) is the inevitable starting point of any non-stupid epistemology, one that breaks out of the solipsist dead end. Similarly, the whole point of his introduction of the Cox "desiderata" (axioms) is that without them, one cannot make the best map: they are the minimal prescription for a consistent optimization process that competing epistemologies are at least half-blind to.
Correlation is not causality, but it's all we've got. We either make the best of it -- literally -- which is the Cox-Jaynes Bayesian epistemology, or we sit around making pronouncements about the fundamental nature of reality on the basis of our imagination of reality without even the attempt to make a rigorous and consistent connection between the two. Either way, to create an epistemology requires numerous questions to be begged, as several edge case but completely valid -- and useless -- epistemologies clearly demonstrate: methodological skepticism (Hume) where we can be certain of nothing, solipsism, chaos, the religion of your choice. Without (for example) Ockham's Razor, one can merely multiply causes and make every explanation an ad hoc explanation.
Then it is clearly time to play a round or two of backgammon, drink a few beers to clear your head, and go right back to begging the damn question, accept the Cox-Jaynes quantified common sense axioms, make the mind projection fallacy as needed (thereby inferring useful things like "the laws of physics" that are obviously purely imaginary mental constructs and quite possibly incorrect but which work damn well from a Bayesian point of view) and live effectively in the presumed but unprovable external objective real world.
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I have no idea what "mathematical units" versus "logical units" are, or what "concepts" versus "anti-concepts" might be. I do have a pretty good idea what propositions, definitions, axioms, theorems, corollaries, lemmas and so on are, and I might have studied symbolic logic somewhere back there in the past, but somehow they left all that out. In fact, if I ever heard either a mathematician or logician or physicist use the term "concept" to describe anything more than a general and intuitive overview of a theory or parts of a theory, I seem to have forgotten it, and if I myself were asked, I would have said that a concept is a premise, a proposition, a hypothesis, and an anti-concept is just another, possibly disjoint, premise, proposition, or hypothesis.
As much as I do love two of Rand's novels -- I majored in physics and philosophy in large part because of Atlas Shrugged -- I'm afraid that one of the things that I learned studying physics, philosophy, and mathematics fairly deeply is that objectivism is yet another piece of philosophical bullshit that wants to beg the question of just what reality "really is" its own particular way. As a fundamental epistemology, it is as empty as (and closely related to) materialism or its "anti concept", idealism. GS (and Jaynes) cut through all of the bullshit by differentiating clearly between existential self and inferred world, recognizing at the very least that we are a highly complex and self-referential map that appears to be embedded in a vast and highly structured territory; enough so that practically speaking it is best to go ahead and formally state as an axiom that this is so. Where axiom, recall, means assumption, not "self-evident truth".
As I said above, Kline makes this point far more eloquently than you or I can, unless we also take a few hundred pages to do so. Or rather, philosophy can easily prove that various extremely simple mathematical systems can be consistent and complete theories of contingent truth -- contingent upon the axioms, using second order logic. Godel starts with axiomatic systems "capable of expressing arithmetic" in complexity, at which point yes, one cannot have a theory that is both complete and consistent, and any theory that can prove its own consistency is, in fact, inconsistent.
However, Hilbert's "grand plan" of axiomatizing mathematics was, as they say, a major, major fail.
The situation only gets worse when one throws in a "real Universe" and wish to determine the truth of assertions pertaining to it. One then perforce begins with the contingent truths of mathematics (with Godel lurking, waiting to pounce the moment one gets overly ambitious or overweening in one's claims on the mathematical side) and has to end by assigning consistent probable truth values to not just this or that assertion, but to the entire reasonably-mutually-consistent network of joint and conditional probable truths. Knowledge of chemistry both stands on its own empirical feet and has to be consistent with empirically-footed knowledge of physics in one direction and with empirically footed knowledge of biochemistry and biology in the other direction. But still, as Kline points out, mirroring the fact that both curved space geometry and flat space geometry are equally valid theories (so we cannot call one "true" and the other "false", both are true contingent upon the appropriate axioms) we cannot even tell if the real Cosmos we live in is flat or curved using those theories, because our Cosmos appears to be a manifold (that is, locally flat) and hence one can always construct a map such that either one works.
A lot of it is encapsulated in the Mobil lectures -- the book is basically those lectures fleshed out and made more algebraically complete and extensive. Although given that Jaynes distributed about a zillion copies of his own book before he died -- I have my very own copy in the original, widely distributed tex sources -- I find it difficult to believe that any sort of meaningful copyright could hold up here. How widely does one have to distribute something without any sort of restriction before it becomes public domain?
As for the brain, I'd strongly suggest reading Mackay's book (it's free, online, and awesome). However, note well that the human brain comes preprogrammed (by evolution and mucho very subtle biochemistry) with tons of Bayesian priors, and is in its earliest stages an overwhelmingly greedy Bayesian inference engine. Not by any means "purely" -- reality appears to be messy, and "good enough" is the rule. But it is pretty clear that much of our earliest learning serves as Bayesian priors and logical axioms (is there a difference?) for what we learn later at a higher level. It is also particularly pernicious and difficult to shake off. Hence the enormous difficulty humans have had shaking off religious superstition in spite of the enormous cognitive dissonance it creates with its many internal inconsistencies and external absurdities.
If one learns "Jesus is real" at a sufficiently early age and with sufficient intensity, it becomes a Bayesian prior that forces an enormous distortion of one's entire worldview in order to accomodate the facts of everyday experience. I was walking through Barnes and Nobel last night and saw a book entitled:
This is pretty astounding. An entire book devoted to making confirmation bias applied to anecdotal evidence an acceptable way of dealing with cognitive dissonance and an acceptable form of "proof" of deity. Something one would never do if one hadn't had "God exists" tattooed on one's brain as a Bayesian prior long before one could actually reason, to the extent where one is perfectly happy reinventing reason itself as long as it permits one's worldview to avoid contradicting this prime axiom/prior.
No arguments, although Jeffreys and Keynes didn't quite make it all the way to the derivation of Cox from three simple meta-axioms (plus all of the axioms of ordinary algebra and numbers), nor did they quite accomplish what Cox and Jaynes accomplished in terms of deriving statistical mechanics from this sound axiomatic basis without direct recourse to the Gibbs prescription/ansatz.
But yes, both are worthy of mention in the chain and are acknowledged (Keynes in particular by Cox, Jeffreys by IIRC Keynes and Jaynes).
No matter how and by whom it was worked out, though, many modern epistemologists who spend far too much time worrying about whether or not a proposition is verifiable or falsifiable in order to have meaning have missed the essential point -- 1 and 0, true and false, verification and falsification of any assertion concerning the real world outside of a tiny handful of existential tautologies such as "I exist" and corollaries thereof are outside of human grasp, and so we must resort to an ordinal system of continuous degrees of plausible knowledge in order to infer any sort of knowledge at all from our sensory streams.
The empirical process of scientific discovery and the resulting scientific worldview is thus an optimization process on a complex landscape and literally the best coherent set of things to believe, so far, given our experience (data) and the reasoned application of Bayesian inference to that data, in a fuzzy and highly dynamic sort of way. It isn't that solipsism or religious worldviews are provably right or wrong, it is just that they aren't the best explanation (in either case) of our ongoing experience, in a way that Laplace, Boole, Jeffreys, Keynes, Cox, and Jaynes make reasonably precise and understandable (and David Mackay summarizes nicely by tying it into the very way that we think).
If it comes right down to it, I'm very fond of e.g. Rand and objectivism, but ultimately it is just another bullshit piece of philosophy, as empty as the endless materialism/idealism debate. One can assert materialism or objectivism or idealism as firmly and often as one likes and it will still, ultimately be nothing but begging the question. You'd think that nobody ever studied Plato's Cave or the Chinese Room problem or thought about brain-in-vat scenarios or (in modern times) watched "The Matrix" series or played World of Warcraft. We cannot know if the "real Universe" is ultimately material or ideal or objective as all we have is our own personal instantaneous awarenesses centered around what appears to be a sensory stream and looped back set of memories.
To quote the Morpheus character from The Matrix:
"If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
...if the signals interpreted by our brain concerning our brain and its electrical signals are, in fact, themselves a faithful representation of our brain's or our mind's, true structure. One cannot escape the problems of Godel and self-referentiality in this -- best belief is not and cannnot be certain truth, because the map (our beliefs in whatever "our brains" may really be) is not the territory (reality). Ultimately all we can say is that our belief set appears to be consistent, and that the more global the consistency the more likely it is that our beliefs are, if not true, at least the best (and most useful) set of beliefs to hold.
I post the interested reader at Morris Kline's "Mathematics and the Loss of Certainty", which makes the argument better than any philosophy.
I also have a nice little sound bite for epistemology:
We should believe the most what we can doubt the least, based on a mix of evidence and reasoning from a self-mostly-consistent Bayesian network of inferences, when we try to doubt very hard.
Cox (who was a physicist at Johns Hopkins and published his theory originally in the context of an axiomatic approach to statistical mechanics) followed by Jaynes -- with extensive examples in both algebra and human words illustrating that this is indeed how we actually think -- provide us with a semi-quantitative ordinal basis for rank-ordering our degree of belief in networks of propositions, the self-consistently best way to determine at least approximately "best belief".
Note well that what Cox and Jaynes provide are the valid metaphysical and epistemological basis for knowledge. One simply cannot do any better, given our experience.
By the way, the logic derived is the generalization of the Aristotle/Boole binary algebra to recover the algebra postulated by Laplace that has pretty much the same rules but manages plausible truth values that range (on a suitably but arbitrarily normalized scale) from 0 to 1. That happens to directly be the expression of Bayes' Theorem in conditional probability theory, and was the algebra Boole himself worked out (without derivation or formal support in "Investigation into the Laws of Thought".
I think radtea is dead on the money. Hume proved that philosophy was bullshit, but sadly noted that once that entirely valid conclusion was reached, the only solution was to go play backgammon and clear his mind so that he could start believing his own eyes and ears and common sense again. Philosophers for centuries afterward refused to accept his conclusion that philosophy was bullshit (although he did prove it quite thoroughly) and hence much bullshit ensued, so much so that in order to be rational and sane scientists stopped talking to bullshit philosophers along the way. Cox came as close as it is possible to get to deriving from self-evident axioms a theory of consistent knowledge capable of surviving Godel -- and most people don't even know he ever existed. Which is a shame. Even with Jaynes' book published posthumously, far too many people don't know that Jaynes existed, and he was a pretty well-known physicist. Shannon a lot of people have heard of -- but have no idea that Cox beat him to his primary result (although they are very differently formulated).
And alas, some four out of five philosophers became philosophers (in academia, given that there is no profession here outside of academica) in part because they simply cannot do "real math".
The problem with books like this -- even by physicists -- is that they all too rarely study the right things physicists have done. Induction/inference in epistemology is put on a mathematically sound axiom-based foundation by Richard Cox and E. T. Jaynes. The former wrote a truly marvellous monograph entitled "The Algebra of Probable Inference" (readily available on Amazon). E. T. Jaynes arrived at a very similar result following instead from Shannon's Information Theory (which is a consequence of Cox's prior work, although this is not generally recognized) and later enthusiastically adopted Cox's axioms as the basis for his own opus major "Probability Theory, the Logic of Science". Both are available as a twofer on Amazon (or even as part of a threefer with Sivia's work on Bayesian Analysis).
They have one enormous redeeming value -- they don't refer to any work on philosophy including any by Ayn Rand. These are serious works on mathematics, logic, probability theory, and science, and they contain algebra, not handwaving. Absolutely amazing algebra, by the way. The sum total of philosophy in Cox is his highly restrained observation that his work seems to have solved Hume's basic problem -- deriving the theory of inference so it is on a sound mathematical footing.
Two other places where this general topic is reviewed: David Mackay's superb: "Information Theory, Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks" where he explores the consequences of Shannon's Theorem in cryptography and data compression and reliable storage, then moves on to argue quite persuasively that the human brain and neural networks in general function as a Bayesian inference engine; and my own book-in-writing "Axioms".
I am the author of one of the relatively few open source/free random number generator testing programs out there (dieharder) and I will affirm that there are plenty of people who are nominally statisticians who have no clue as to what e.g. p means when testing against a null hypothesis (which is the most common basis of random number generator testing). The problem is that they are taught the rule in ordinary English that if you perform a statistical test and compute p, the probability of getting your result given a null hypothesis, then if p is larger than some cutoff one "passes the test" at some confidence level.
This is complete bullshit, as is the counter-error, that if p is less than that cutoff (where people tend to pick something absurdly large, like 0.05) one has failed the test at the 5% confidence level.
The truth is that (as the famous George Marsaglia remarks in the diehard documentation) "p happens". In fact, for a correctly designed test, p is itself a uniform deviate. What that means is that one can easily get a p value of 0.001 even if the null hypothesis is true -- one will get this value (or lower) one in a thousand test runs, for a perfectly good random number generator and test, or else the generator should fail the test. One is precisely as justified at failing the generator if p happens to be in the range 0.5-0.55 as one is at failing it if p is in the 0.0-0.05 range.
The relevance of this is hopefully clear. The way to test is to run many tests and look at the distribution of p (or do the moral equivalent of running many tests if testing other ways).
Unfortunately, this immediately introduces two problems. First is that more tests cost more money -- a lot more money because of the need for e.g. HIPAA compliance in medicine. People prematurely publish results that basically might be significant as if they are significant once they've done all of the testing they can afford, at least for now. Second, if many statisticians don't properly appreciate the meaning of p in hypothesis testing and use terms like "confidence level" in places where they mean nothing of the sort, how can one expect people for whom statistics and calculus and math in general was a struggle, working in contexts that reward "results" (however shaky) and punish "no results" (however honest), to get this right?
When you get right down to it, Bayes pretty much lived in vain. Once you get out of the simple realm of hypothesis testing you run right into Bayes. The correct computation of posterior probabilities seems elusive, even in statistical analyses that more or less demand the use of Bayes theorem because of the wealth of prior knowledge we have available. However, if you asked any medical researcher about Bayes theorem, I predict (as a testable hypothesis:-) that no more than two in ten would identify it as something important in statistics, and not one in twenty would be able to actually write it down or explain how it works and why it is important...
I'm glad you posted, as it saves me the work, but you're too kind. s/I'm not sure this is a clever idea./This is the stupidest idea in a long list of monumentally stupid ideas that the military has had over the years./
Don't they watch those old WW II movies, where the Nazis have these nifty radio locating trucks that they drive around triangulating resistance radios?
Or let's see, how much work would it take even now to engineer the "cell phone signal seeking missile" in flavors ranging from single target antipersonnel to beefier take-out-a-whole-platoon versions? I'm no rocket scientist (I'm a theorist, actually, not an experimentalist) but I'll bet even I could go hack something together out of a couple of cell phones and other OTC parts. Heck, you could probably make them target INDIVIDUAL cell phones, sort of like predator drones. In fact, to find Osama all that is really needed is his cell phone number, isn't it?
So let's "paint" all of our troops in all of our potential battle theaters with the targeting dye that makes it maximally easy for our opposition to score real home runs in killing efficiency with minimal collateral damage. Or heck, maybe we can have them all stand up in a neat row and hold bullseyes instead.
After all, if you are a normal stupid person, you can't really understand what all of that "science" stuff is all about. All you know is the damfools who participate in it seem to think that the Lord's Creation is older than 6000 years and that we are descended from monkeys. Imagine that! Monkeys! And what has science ever done for us, really? Compared to, say, Jesus?
Really? So they're planning to remove The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I'm sure everyone knows is precisely a book about incest and its consequences (not to mention rape, torture, serial murder, blackmail, and serious illegal hacking:-)
Oh wait, not. That would cost them a rather lot of money and cause an actual public ruckus as people who've paid for a bestseller see it disappear into the censor's maw. No, they are only removing books with incest in them that don't make much money! Probably without bothering to even read them.
Of course, in the 1800s the world was just coming out of a century where the metaphorical fairies had a cork in their ass, also known as the "Little Ice Age". Curiously, the Little Ice Age (probably connected to a Maunder Minimum and the Gleissberg Cycle) managed to happen even though the CO_2 concentration of the atmosphere was then, as now, monotonically increasing. You don't suppose that there could be long term drivers of things like fairy farts (such as whether or not they have recently eaten beans or just what the world population of fairies is or the variations in the Earth's orbital eccentricity due to gravitational resonances or the long term variability of the solar cycle). Things in the enormously complex open system that confound the "correlation is causality" that has attended the unsurprising general increase in average temperature since a period of anomalous cold that had nothing to do with CO_2?
Look, I'll give you a very, very simple reason to doubt "evidence" of AGW so far. Take a look at estimated global temperatures over any time scale you like, as long as it is longer than 1000 years and isn't the flawed Mann "hockey puck" graph (bristle cone pines are great, but not that great, as proxies). You will see that the temperature fluctuates. It fluctuates a lot. Go back to the start of the Holocene. Wow, a lot a lot, including non-CO_2 driven events like the Younger Dryas, the Medieval Optimum, Maunder Minima.
We do not know how to explain this data. We do not have any model that can even approximately account for these temperature fluctuations, or predict whether or not the temperature in a decade will be (on average) warmer or cooler. In the 60's it was so cold that equally alarmist climate scientists were publicly speculating about whether or not the Holocene was drawing to an end. But that too was silly, because we had no reliable climate models then either. For one thing, a reliable climate model has to start with a reliable model of solar dynamics, because Mr. Sun is the great source of all fairy farts, so to speak, and hey -- we don't have a reliable model of solar dynamics! We do know that what happens on the surface now was largely determined by the state of the fusion core around 100,000 years ago, and we have observational evidence that the Sun may well have a significant long term variability superimposed on top of its 22 year pole-switching cycle. We don't even know how much inductive heating of the atmosphere occurs when the Sun switches poles -- there is one single paper on it (published a century ago) that suggests that it is probably a significant fraction of the Earth's energy budget.
Then there is the fact that we don't have reliable data on global temperatures at all that is older than perhaps 30 to 40 years. Most of what we know comes from samples contaminated by urban island heating, extrapolated backwards by proxies that are sensitive to many confounding causes. There are all of the enormously simple experiments that could be done (or could have been done) to demonstrate the effect. Observing it in an urban setting is all but impossible -- there is damn well local warming of urban centers that can easily be measured by simply driving out into the country (and of course local warming of the airports, continuously blanketed by the CO_2 and water vapor given off by all of those jet engines and the expressways that feed them -- oh, wait, are those the same airports that are the primary sources of data used to demonstrate warming in the first place ?-- They are..). Not so easy in the country of temperate wet climates, because that pesky water vapor confounds the measurement by being several orders of magnitude stronger of a greenhouse gas on the one hand, and having the ability to come in with either sign -- warming at night and enormously cooling by day due to its visible light albedo. In boy scouts long, long ago I learned that cloudy nights are warm, it is the clear nigh
My only real problem with answering this post is that I generally charge $200 or so an hour for this sort of thing as well (not unlike spikevodka and others who responded). The problem is that if you don't already know the answers to the questions you post, you are (no offense intended) a poor choice for the person to put all of this together. I, like many others on the list, got the experience needed to answer it well and correctly and efficiently over 24 years of work as a sysadmin and general computer person. That means that I have enough experience to not to try to answer your questions based on the limited description you gave of the task. There are too many unanswered questions, and the answers to those questions make a huge difference to the best/cheapest most robust and scalable solution.
The biggest question isn't the services -- those are trivial to provide in many ways, most of them very inexpensively these days. It is the software. For starters is there any mission critical software package that only runs on architecture X that absolutely must be on everybody's desktop? For example, you mention many videos -- does this mean that you do things with graphical image editing and (perhaps) absolutely require some particular package that only runs on Windows clients or Mac clients? And so on.
As far as the services per se are concerned, my own inclination -- based on the limited description you've given -- would be to set up a small rackmount multiprocessor server stack -- probably (for only 20 employees) only two physical boxes. I would run Linux as the toplevel OS on those servers, and virtualize all other specific services both for failover and security reasons. If the software stack required for a typical desktop is just a browser, office suite, email client (that might also be the browser) and a few simple utilities I'd be very inclined to make the desktop clients boilerplate Linux boxes automagically installed via e.g. kickstart or any other automated tool, but once again one has decision forks when one considers the possibility that some people will want laptops (that have to be able to stand alone), other people will need desktops that are centrally managed and carefully defended, a few people may insist on Macs, others may whine if their system doesn't run Windoze of some sort..
Ultimately, as you can already see, working out the details of this sort of thing is where I very much earn at least midlevel consulting fees ($200/hour isn't really high end) when I do this professionally. I've got direct experience with all of this -- I've set up servers (virtualized and otherwise) since 1986, I've worked with many major architectures and made them play at least moderately happily together, I understand networking in quite a bit of detail and I understand network and computer security. How can I, how can anyone, tell you all of the questions to ask, all of the decision points you should consider? You'd have to become a chela and work under my supervision for a year or two before you even started to be competent to work through all of this on your own...
In it an amazing new computational method of producing a 3d image of all of the synaptic connections in a mouse brain from high resolution tomographic slices 70 nanometers thick was developed by a young graduate student named Busse. The entire process is stupendous with "heroic" achievements all around (the actual process of staining involved antibodies with colored dye fluorescent molecules attached -- it sure beats the old days, things like horseradish peroxidase and stains and looking at slices one at a time through a microscope to see perhaps a single set of mutually activated neural connections) and many of them are directly connected to young researchers like Busse.
Nearly every issue of Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, or what have you contains "heroic" work by young researchers. Entire game companies are founded by young geeks. Google was started by young geeks. SAS was founded by young geeks. Not all of them remain young, of course, but every generation produces its crop of new ones from the self-renewing resource of our University and research system. They're pretty easy to find in particular in the many articles posted on slashdot, so this is a great place to mine for them.
It could easily be a meteor crater or a sinkhole, or even an old quarry (depending on the quality of the rock). If it is a meteor crater that size, you really have hit the jackpot, because meteors are worth money. However, the people who buy them aren't idiots, so you won't make money pretending; you have to find out. If it was formed by a meteor, there would have been splatter in all directions, but more in one direction than the others. Get a metal detector and search not just inside but all around the periphery up to three or four hundred meters away. If it really is from a meteor, and nobody has "mined" out the many fragments it would have produced, and it was the right kind of meteor (many are nickel-iron, some are stony, nickel-iron are the ones you can find and identify with a metal detector) you will find some chunks that aren't just teensy bits, but are large, partially fused, chunks of mixed iron and rock. They are hard to miss -- their density is close to twice that of ordinary rock (specific gravity closer to five than three). As another poster pointed out, even stony meteors can usually be identified by sawing and polishing -- the origins of meteor rock are typically quite different from earthbound rocks and they have a characteristic structure. But limestone chunks are probably not going to be meteors...;-)
Anyway, if you have a real crater with lots of real meteorite fragments, bear in mind that they will sell for hundreds to thousands of dollars each, depending on size, composition, and provenance. Even tens of thousands for large bits. And yes, there are geology departments at Universities that would like very much to help you search for pieces and study the crater itself, and you should give them first dibs before making money out of it as knowledge is more important than money.
Good luck, but don't hold your breath. No matter where you are sitting, you are sitting on top of at least meteor dust as a contant rain of that drifts down from the sky every day, and fragments from tiny to small are rather commonplace. Larger fragments are increasingly rare, though, and really big impact craters (that have been identified as such) are very rare.
Gee, logging into slashdot to post, it is difficult not to observe that it is a straight low security non-SSL login. Oh no! I could be hot mutton at any minute! Perhaps, in fact, this isn't even me posting this reply (an interesting existential dilemma).
There are several fairly obvious solutions to the security problem. Obviously any solutions involving the setting of a common password are muttonheaded -- that's just like setting no password at all, sort of like the people who buy a WiFi and leave the default admin password set to "admin". MitM attacks become straightforward if nothing else. Requiring the registration of any open WiFi with a certificate authority and using SSL would work, but is expensive and relies on small cafe's and restaurants and bookstores having somebody who is not an idiot setting up their network, which is both expensive and unlikely. Solutions have to be idiot proof and robust, meaning that either one of the well-known robust solutions has to be implemented damn the expense by the access point provider (allowing idiot clients to connect safely) or a well-known robust solution has to be implemented by the client (allowing them to safely connect to an idiot provider). No solution exists to cover the part of the space where both the owner of the open access point and the connecting client are idiots, because you can't fix stupid (at least not without mandates from a higher level authority and greater expense, such as toplevel registration of all IP numbers in the web universe with a certificate authority so all web connections are secure by law, something that makes my head ache just to think about).
Solution one: Get organizations such as facebook and slashdot(!) to change their logins to https; "encourage" all social website providers to use encrypted connections as standard/best practice. Cost: moderate -- most social sites are text-mostly traffic, which means that the efficiency penalty of encryption is likely not so great that it will bring either servers or the network backbone to its knees -- graphics and movies and music are a different matter, but even there one can easily maintain a reasonably authenticated connection and pass large items (interceptible) out of band unencrypted. The good thing is this solution is idiot proof everywhere but at the level of the social network provider involved, and a social mechanism exists (inventing firesheep for example and then publicizing the ease of embarrassing the clients of the service) for forcing the desired change without the need for laws or regulations. The marketplace doth provide.
Solution two: SSL Proxies. Companies such as B&N and/or Starbucks can easily enough set up their networks (and often do) so that you have to pass through one of their SSL-authed servers to reach the internet. Or, use a (usually paid) SSL-based proxy provider. This has the dual advantage of encrypting your point to point traffic and hiding your IP number when you go snooping around top secret government installations or cruising for porn. Google, in its business plan of taking over the world, could offer this solution to pretty much everybody almost overnight and instantly close its already crushing fist on the gonads of Microsoft and its other competitors still further, and probably do it for free for those users. Cost: Typically an annual fee, although a really large core provider e.g. Google might be able to provide it for free on the user side and still make money in the process. It also requires that you trust the proxy provider not to be a honeypot or the FBI in disguise, and remember those lovely no-warrant wiretap provisions and court decisions post-"Patriot" act. Basically, you can't REALLY trust your provider (including Google) if you are engaging in illegal activity or the (any) government doesn't "like" you for some reason, but a commercial/corporate ssl proxy provider is still fairly robust once the not-a-complete-idiot user has it set up.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean uniquely identify your location to within a few meters so that anyone in the world who has access can find you in a way that is different from the way the cell phone that is almost certainly in your pocket does it right now? Forget congress and the cops -- it is a commercial service and if I was willing to pay Verizon another medium sized wad of cash every month I could spend my afternoons watching my own children move around on itty-bitty maps as they ride the bus home...
/. didn't adopt as part of its new look, so we are all vulnerable to sheepish exploitation I suppose -- this might not even be me typing these words, I dunno) every word you type is exposed and your connection itself is available for hijack. Every time you use a credit card or bank card to make a purchase, you are located to within meters to anyone with access. To anyone with access to ALL of this stuff -- your precise location (plus all of your phone conversations, obviously easily tappable) via your cell phone, your electronic transactions via your electronically mediated consumer transaction history, your online connection patter and perhaps 2/3 of its actual unprotected content -- well hell, I could sit here in my house in a bathrobe, scratching my balls, and watch a significant fraction of your life unfold in real time without your knowledge.
Wow. Good idea to keep that barn door firmly shut. The horse that's peering over your shoulder as you nail it closed is a bit puzzled, though.
There are a few things everybody is just going to have to get used to in the next decade. One, for example, is that copyright laws are going to survive in an era when it is impossible to prevent the zero-marginal-cost instant reproduction of all electronic forms of art. Evolution in action on that one, and as always the cute little rats and cockroaches are winning and eating the guts out of the publishing industry dinosaurs, which is about to do a major fail as the brick and mortar book industry more or less collapses the way the brick and mortar music distribution industry and the brick and mortar movie rental industry already have. Another is that any notion of personal privacy when connected to The Network you might have had is going to evaporate, with a tiny handful of ubergeek exceptions capable of staying ahead of the security and privacy curve. Every time you connect to an ISP, you are located. Every second you are online you are located and for the most part, unless you use a secure connection protocol (which I note that
And it is still only 2011. Cash money still exists. We haven't yet installed the road control network that we will install, the nearly ubiquitous electronic eyes that we will install, the electronic health monitoring systems that we will install that will (for example) continuously record and report things like blood sugar and eeg information via transient bursts of network connection to save your life -- and in the process function as a de facto lie detector and personal locator quite possibly built right into your skin along with your pacemaker, we don't yet have the neural interfaces that will provide butt-kicking amazing access and control to video games and work and cybernetic prostheses -- all snoopable for everything from personal location to lie-stress information to real-time access to audio and/or video without your knowledge. Cell phones that can be remotely turned on without your knowledge so that they just passively listen to your environment. They could be doing it now, couldn't they? How would you ever know? Gee, your battery runs down a little faster than you expected -- like that never happens.
So enough of the paranoia. Either drop off of the grid -- move to the jungles of Panama, or find yourself an island in the south pacific with no cell service and no internet -- or accept the fact that security and privacy are and always have been a trade-off, one that dates back to the first social groups
Cover a hundred kilometers square of moon with solar cells, collecting roughly 100 Watts/meter^2 (or one TW, peak). Don't worry, we just build robots that mine the materials and smelt and install the cells in place, using local materials.
Now build a really, really big maser. I'm talking big, now, Godzilla-sized. Remember, it's all a vacuum, so you can build uber-cheap, uber large tubes by just hanging the parts on the walls of simple stone partitions. Think of a kilometer high Klystron, or a Magnetron the size of the Metrodome! point the "waveguide" at the end back at Earth. Justify it all as a "solar energy project" that will beam all of that energy down to earth to power our flying cars by means of a simple antenna for free, no moving parts. Consumers can even cook hot dogs by just hanging them out the window!
But we will know better, mmwahahahah! If we just flip this switch here (oomph) and pull this lever then GZZZZAAAP! We've built a totally rad TW-scale death ray capable of focussing all of that energy on a target the size of, well, the size of...
Montana? How much would a 1 cm coherent TW beam spread out over 384,000 km, anyway?
rgb
...that even today, even on slashdot, people can't say "anecdotal evidence" and dump this result in their own personal /dev/null.
...what if you got actually sick while wearing them, or got lice, or...
I want to see a few hundred pairs of jeans worn by all sorts of people with different personal habits and occupations -- some who wear underwear, some who don't, some who shovel horse manure for a living, some who work construction in the hot, sweaty south. I'd bet that 20% of them would end up with that colorful affliction known as "crotch rot" -- any of various fungal infections -- and of course this would instantly become chronic as they'd constantly reinfect themselves. Then there are the various mites that would be living on the sloughed skin cells packed into the weave, the bacteria (harmful or otherwise) fed by the trapped sweat and spilled food and drink and french fry grease wiped off on the thighs, and...
Even in the dirty old dark ages, they would wash clothes once or twice a year. Just yuk. And "bad science" yuk at that to draw a conclusion from an N of one.
rgb
Absolutely agreed, to the whole post including the bit about GS, and re the next one, I too have the hardcopy because I believe in supporting authors of fabulous books. When I said "we" I meant "the human race, from ancient days" has really wanted to know "the truth" and it is only within the last hundred years that it has become clear that this cannot and will not ever happen, not even in the realm of mathematics and far less so in the realm of epistemology. And sure, a consistent physical theory is one that leads to good correlative agreement with data both from the past and (as it is obtained) in the future. (Which tempts me to start a rant on climate modelling but I will refrain:-)
rgb
I don't think most of its core conceptual ideas are bullshit per se, or at least they are less so than many things. My primary issues with it are that it became a hammer looking for a nail, going way, way overboard with language and the way it relates to human behavior. And the religion thing. What sort of website tolerates people putting up articles with lines like "This short essay thus honors Korzybski and gives thanks for his work"...?
I actually agree with you (I think), that it works better as the partial basis for an epistemology and not so well as an explanation for human perceptions and filtering (where it is basically more than half bullshit in the precise sense that it is divorced from biological psychology, information theory in computer science, and other sort of hard science that might refute its pretty ideas). If it comes right down to it, Malinowski, Dorothy Lee, Sapir and Whorf, all came up with anthropological of philosophical systems that link language to thought, and much as I love them all -- they were a partial focus of my undergrad major -- they simply aren't as strongly supported by actual unambiguous evidence as one might like. And Wittgenstein has alas always left me cold -- Russell's student he might have been (but then, so was my undergraduate philosophy guru) but he was no Russell.
Ultimately, language and sensory filtering is without doubt important in understanding understanding, but it is far from being the key to understanding it in the sense that the IGS wishes to promote.
Where it is most useful is (again, I think) the insight that it gives one into the whole semiotic/ontology/epistemology chain in logic, math, inference, reason, and even that insight I think is less penetrating than what one can get from studying abstract information theory and encoding in computer science (where it is quantitative and measurable in addition to providing one with essentially the same insights). I've mentioned it before, I'll mention it again:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html
is free, online, and amazing. It can change your life (if you can make it through the math:-). Compare this to IGS stuff, which is just plain yucky. It drips.
I'm not sure your Jaynes reservation is apropos. First of all, the ultimate product of Cox or Jaynes is a "plausibility" or "probability". Plausibility or probability of what? That a given proposition is true. In the context of physics and science, that is entirely appropriate. I don't want to know if Newton's law of gravitation is in a more or less accurate correspondence with the observations -- that is the data and it speaks for itself. What I want is to be able to go from the data to some sort of estimate as to how plausible or likely it is that Newton's law of gravitation is true, even though I can casually invent an infinity of ways to explain the data with it or without it and can never be certain that even the most basic premises of my measurement and analysis process are themselves true.
What we thirst for is truth. What we get is a more or less consistent "physical theory", more or less well corroborated by experience and experiment.
Oh, well.
rgb
One of my favorites (from the Princess Bride) too...
My favorite Aristotle quote is from Bertrand Russell:
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Russell, it seemed, didn't think much of Aristotle -- for good reason.
The "debt" owed to Aristotle by Galileo and Newton is primarily that he wrote a physics at all, given that pretty much all of what he wrote down is not only incorrect, but wrong-headed, not even close. Newton's first law (which follows trivially from his second law, although modern physicists have found some meat in it regarding inertial frames and thing Newton probably never thought of or intended) was basically the "in your face, Aristotle" law that established the direct contradiction between his equations of motion and Aristotle's.
I agree that Aristotle's logic was useful enough, although incompletely specified (nonrigorous, if you like). It isn't completely clear how much of it he actually worked out and how much derives from e.g. Heraclitus, Parmenides and was taught to him by Plato and only written down by Aristotle or his students. But kudos to him for making the clearest and most systematic statement up to his time.
As for the invalidity of symbolic logic, clearly we live in different Universes, one where the word "valid" means something entirely different. Not only Godel, but Boole lived in vain, I see, and the invention of first and second order (symbolic) logic and formal set theory is all just "invalid" and all those courses I took in logic and computation theory lead to perdition. Righhht...
Yeah, I like some parts of GS, without quite being able to adopt it as the pseudoreligion it seems to have become post-Korzybski. In particular, I enjoy A. E. Van Vogt's Null-A books and Heinlein's occasional references to GS in SF, and I do think "The map is not the territory" is a pithy little sound bit that captures an important truth very succinctly. Beyond that, way to much of GS devolves into bullshit, as does Rand's objectivism. GS, however, retains at least an awareness of the imperfection of language (as a peculiar sort of map) and sensation/perception (as another) compared to "reality", where Rand argues that one's perception of a pink unicorn cannot simply be an error in perception. She simply didn't hang out with real schizophrenics enough. The failure to think about language also invalidates her entire discussion of "axioms", since axioms have to be expressed in some sort of symbolic language, and languages are whole matrices of unprovable priors. Axioms at the end of the day remain what Euclid considered them to be -- worthy assumptions that lead to a (hopefully) consistent theory, and not self-evident, self-consistent, or unavoidable truth! I mean, did Godel live in vain, or what? Rand was many things, but she wasn't a physicist (although Atlas Shrugged is physicist-friendly science fiction, except for the places she egregiously violates things like the laws of thermodynamics and electromagnetism) and she wasn't a logician or mathematician. Neither was Korzybski. And hence the problem(s).
Nowadays even people who have studied actual physics and mathematics and logic and set theory are all too likely to end up with nonsense because, as Jaynes pointed out in the quote above, "...they don't have to do anything right" as soon as they step outside of the boundaries of mere common sense and try to prove something deep about reality as being true instead of being a strong consistent belief.
Anyway, I'm sure we could indeed find something fun to "discuss";-)
rgb
The mind projection fallacy that he not only attacked, but named. Jaynes wasn't a man of philosophy at all -- he was a physicist, and all physicists are anti-Aristotelians. Really. Aristotle was an idiot, or to be a bit more charitable, Aristotle's teachings as recorded by his students and transmitted in manuscript are largely incoherent -- his recorded writings are idiocy.
As for the rest, Jaynes did indeed seem to subscribe to at least some of the ideas of general semantics -- again, physicists in general probably nearly always do (as do a lot of mathematicians) even if they don't know what GS actually is. The idea that our mental image of reality is not itself reality, that the map (in our minds) is not the territory (reality) is the inevitable starting point of any non-stupid epistemology, one that breaks out of the solipsist dead end. Similarly, the whole point of his introduction of the Cox "desiderata" (axioms) is that without them, one cannot make the best map: they are the minimal prescription for a consistent optimization process that competing epistemologies are at least half-blind to.
Correlation is not causality, but it's all we've got. We either make the best of it -- literally -- which is the Cox-Jaynes Bayesian epistemology, or we sit around making pronouncements about the fundamental nature of reality on the basis of our imagination of reality without even the attempt to make a rigorous and consistent connection between the two. Either way, to create an epistemology requires numerous questions to be begged, as several edge case but completely valid -- and useless -- epistemologies clearly demonstrate: methodological skepticism (Hume) where we can be certain of nothing, solipsism, chaos, the religion of your choice. Without (for example) Ockham's Razor, one can merely multiply causes and make every explanation an ad hoc explanation.
Then it is clearly time to play a round or two of backgammon, drink a few beers to clear your head, and go right back to begging the damn question, accept the Cox-Jaynes quantified common sense axioms, make the mind projection fallacy as needed (thereby inferring useful things like "the laws of physics" that are obviously purely imaginary mental constructs and quite possibly incorrect but which work damn well from a Bayesian point of view) and live effectively in the presumed but unprovable external objective real world.
rgb
I have no idea what "mathematical units" versus "logical units" are, or what "concepts" versus "anti-concepts" might be. I do have a pretty good idea what propositions, definitions, axioms, theorems, corollaries, lemmas and so on are, and I might have studied symbolic logic somewhere back there in the past, but somehow they left all that out. In fact, if I ever heard either a mathematician or logician or physicist use the term "concept" to describe anything more than a general and intuitive overview of a theory or parts of a theory, I seem to have forgotten it, and if I myself were asked, I would have said that a concept is a premise, a proposition, a hypothesis, and an anti-concept is just another, possibly disjoint, premise, proposition, or hypothesis.
As much as I do love two of Rand's novels -- I majored in physics and philosophy in large part because of Atlas Shrugged -- I'm afraid that one of the things that I learned studying physics, philosophy, and mathematics fairly deeply is that objectivism is yet another piece of philosophical bullshit that wants to beg the question of just what reality "really is" its own particular way. As a fundamental epistemology, it is as empty as (and closely related to) materialism or its "anti concept", idealism. GS (and Jaynes) cut through all of the bullshit by differentiating clearly between existential self and inferred world, recognizing at the very least that we are a highly complex and self-referential map that appears to be embedded in a vast and highly structured territory; enough so that practically speaking it is best to go ahead and formally state as an axiom that this is so. Where axiom, recall, means assumption, not "self-evident truth".
As I said above, Kline makes this point far more eloquently than you or I can, unless we also take a few hundred pages to do so. Or rather, philosophy can easily prove that various extremely simple mathematical systems can be consistent and complete theories of contingent truth -- contingent upon the axioms, using second order logic. Godel starts with axiomatic systems "capable of expressing arithmetic" in complexity, at which point yes, one cannot have a theory that is both complete and consistent, and any theory that can prove its own consistency is, in fact, inconsistent.
However, Hilbert's "grand plan" of axiomatizing mathematics was, as they say, a major, major fail.
The situation only gets worse when one throws in a "real Universe" and wish to determine the truth of assertions pertaining to it. One then perforce begins with the contingent truths of mathematics (with Godel lurking, waiting to pounce the moment one gets overly ambitious or overweening in one's claims on the mathematical side) and has to end by assigning consistent probable truth values to not just this or that assertion, but to the entire reasonably-mutually-consistent network of joint and conditional probable truths. Knowledge of chemistry both stands on its own empirical feet and has to be consistent with empirically-footed knowledge of physics in one direction and with empirically footed knowledge of biochemistry and biology in the other direction. But still, as Kline points out, mirroring the fact that both curved space geometry and flat space geometry are equally valid theories (so we cannot call one "true" and the other "false", both are true contingent upon the appropriate axioms) we cannot even tell if the real Cosmos we live in is flat or curved using those theories, because our Cosmos appears to be a manifold (that is, locally flat) and hence one can always construct a map such that either one works.
rgb
A lot of it is encapsulated in the Mobil lectures -- the book is basically those lectures fleshed out and made more algebraically complete and extensive. Although given that Jaynes distributed about a zillion copies of his own book before he died -- I have my very own copy in the original, widely distributed tex sources -- I find it difficult to believe that any sort of meaningful copyright could hold up here. How widely does one have to distribute something without any sort of restriction before it becomes public domain?
As for the brain, I'd strongly suggest reading Mackay's book (it's free, online, and awesome). However, note well that the human brain comes preprogrammed (by evolution and mucho very subtle biochemistry) with tons of Bayesian priors, and is in its earliest stages an overwhelmingly greedy Bayesian inference engine. Not by any means "purely" -- reality appears to be messy, and "good enough" is the rule. But it is pretty clear that much of our earliest learning serves as Bayesian priors and logical axioms (is there a difference?) for what we learn later at a higher level. It is also particularly pernicious and difficult to shake off. Hence the enormous difficulty humans have had shaking off religious superstition in spite of the enormous cognitive dissonance it creates with its many internal inconsistencies and external absurdities.
If one learns "Jesus is real" at a sufficiently early age and with sufficient intensity, it becomes a Bayesian prior that forces an enormous distortion of one's entire worldview in order to accomodate the facts of everyday experience. I was walking through Barnes and Nobel last night and saw a book entitled:
http://www.amazon.com/When-GOD-Winks-Coincidence-Guides/dp/0743467078
This is pretty astounding. An entire book devoted to making confirmation bias applied to anecdotal evidence an acceptable way of dealing with cognitive dissonance and an acceptable form of "proof" of deity. Something one would never do if one hadn't had "God exists" tattooed on one's brain as a Bayesian prior long before one could actually reason, to the extent where one is perfectly happy reinventing reason itself as long as it permits one's worldview to avoid contradicting this prime axiom/prior.
rgb
No arguments, although Jeffreys and Keynes didn't quite make it all the way to the derivation of Cox from three simple meta-axioms (plus all of the axioms of ordinary algebra and numbers), nor did they quite accomplish what Cox and Jaynes accomplished in terms of deriving statistical mechanics from this sound axiomatic basis without direct recourse to the Gibbs prescription/ansatz.
...if the signals interpreted by our brain concerning our brain and its electrical signals are, in fact, themselves a faithful representation of our brain's or our mind's, true structure. One cannot escape the problems of Godel and self-referentiality in this -- best belief is not and cannnot be certain truth, because the map (our beliefs in whatever "our brains" may really be) is not the territory (reality). Ultimately all we can say is that our belief set appears to be consistent, and that the more global the consistency the more likely it is that our beliefs are, if not true, at least the best (and most useful) set of beliefs to hold.
But yes, both are worthy of mention in the chain and are acknowledged (Keynes in particular by Cox, Jeffreys by IIRC Keynes and Jaynes).
No matter how and by whom it was worked out, though, many modern epistemologists who spend far too much time worrying about whether or not a proposition is verifiable or falsifiable in order to have meaning have missed the essential point -- 1 and 0, true and false, verification and falsification of any assertion concerning the real world outside of a tiny handful of existential tautologies such as "I exist" and corollaries thereof are outside of human grasp, and so we must resort to an ordinal system of continuous degrees of plausible knowledge in order to infer any sort of knowledge at all from our sensory streams.
The empirical process of scientific discovery and the resulting scientific worldview is thus an optimization process on a complex landscape and literally the best coherent set of things to believe, so far, given our experience (data) and the reasoned application of Bayesian inference to that data, in a fuzzy and highly dynamic sort of way. It isn't that solipsism or religious worldviews are provably right or wrong, it is just that they aren't the best explanation (in either case) of our ongoing experience, in a way that Laplace, Boole, Jeffreys, Keynes, Cox, and Jaynes make reasonably precise and understandable (and David Mackay summarizes nicely by tying it into the very way that we think).
If it comes right down to it, I'm very fond of e.g. Rand and objectivism, but ultimately it is just another bullshit piece of philosophy, as empty as the endless materialism/idealism debate. One can assert materialism or objectivism or idealism as firmly and often as one likes and it will still, ultimately be nothing but begging the question. You'd think that nobody ever studied Plato's Cave or the Chinese Room problem or thought about brain-in-vat scenarios or (in modern times) watched "The Matrix" series or played World of Warcraft. We cannot know if the "real Universe" is ultimately material or ideal or objective as all we have is our own personal instantaneous awarenesses centered around what appears to be a sensory stream and looped back set of memories.
To quote the Morpheus character from The Matrix: "If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
rgb
The version you found is not current -- it is of an early draft that kind of got lost when examining some of the technical details.
A current draft of the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the eventual book can be found here:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/axioms.pdf
Forgive the occasional typos and so on.
rgb
I post the interested reader at Morris Kline's "Mathematics and the Loss of Certainty", which makes the argument better than any philosophy.
I also have a nice little sound bite for epistemology:
We should believe the most what we can doubt the least, based on a mix of evidence and reasoning from a self-mostly-consistent Bayesian network of inferences, when we try to doubt very hard.
Cox (who was a physicist at Johns Hopkins and published his theory originally in the context of an axiomatic approach to statistical mechanics) followed by Jaynes -- with extensive examples in both algebra and human words illustrating that this is indeed how we actually think -- provide us with a semi-quantitative ordinal basis for rank-ordering our degree of belief in networks of propositions, the self-consistently best way to determine at least approximately "best belief".
Note well that what Cox and Jaynes provide are the valid metaphysical and epistemological basis for knowledge. One simply cannot do any better, given our experience.
By the way, the logic derived is the generalization of the Aristotle/Boole binary algebra to recover the algebra postulated by Laplace that has pretty much the same rules but manages plausible truth values that range (on a suitably but arbitrarily normalized scale) from 0 to 1. That happens to directly be the expression of Bayes' Theorem in conditional probability theory, and was the algebra Boole himself worked out (without derivation or formal support in "Investigation into the Laws of Thought".
I think radtea is dead on the money. Hume proved that philosophy was bullshit, but sadly noted that once that entirely valid conclusion was reached, the only solution was to go play backgammon and clear his mind so that he could start believing his own eyes and ears and common sense again. Philosophers for centuries afterward refused to accept his conclusion that philosophy was bullshit (although he did prove it quite thoroughly) and hence much bullshit ensued, so much so that in order to be rational and sane scientists stopped talking to bullshit philosophers along the way. Cox came as close as it is possible to get to deriving from self-evident axioms a theory of consistent knowledge capable of surviving Godel -- and most people don't even know he ever existed. Which is a shame. Even with Jaynes' book published posthumously, far too many people don't know that Jaynes existed, and he was a pretty well-known physicist. Shannon a lot of people have heard of -- but have no idea that Cox beat him to his primary result (although they are very differently formulated).
And alas, some four out of five philosophers became philosophers (in academia, given that there is no profession here outside of academica) in part because they simply cannot do "real math".
rgb
The problem with books like this -- even by physicists -- is that they all too rarely study the right things physicists have done. Induction/inference in epistemology is put on a mathematically sound axiom-based foundation by Richard Cox and E. T. Jaynes. The former wrote a truly marvellous monograph entitled "The Algebra of Probable Inference" (readily available on Amazon). E. T. Jaynes arrived at a very similar result following instead from Shannon's Information Theory (which is a consequence of Cox's prior work, although this is not generally recognized) and later enthusiastically adopted Cox's axioms as the basis for his own opus major "Probability Theory, the Logic of Science". Both are available as a twofer on Amazon (or even as part of a threefer with Sivia's work on Bayesian Analysis).
They have one enormous redeeming value -- they don't refer to any work on philosophy including any by Ayn Rand. These are serious works on mathematics, logic, probability theory, and science, and they contain algebra, not handwaving. Absolutely amazing algebra, by the way. The sum total of philosophy in Cox is his highly restrained observation that his work seems to have solved Hume's basic problem -- deriving the theory of inference so it is on a sound mathematical footing.
Two other places where this general topic is reviewed: David Mackay's superb: "Information Theory, Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks" where he explores the consequences of Shannon's Theorem in cryptography and data compression and reliable storage, then moves on to argue quite persuasively that the human brain and neural networks in general function as a Bayesian inference engine; and my own book-in-writing "Axioms".
rgb
I am the author of one of the relatively few open source/free random number generator testing programs out there (dieharder) and I will affirm that there are plenty of people who are nominally statisticians who have no clue as to what e.g. p means when testing against a null hypothesis (which is the most common basis of random number generator testing). The problem is that they are taught the rule in ordinary English that if you perform a statistical test and compute p, the probability of getting your result given a null hypothesis, then if p is larger than some cutoff one "passes the test" at some confidence level.
This is complete bullshit, as is the counter-error, that if p is less than that cutoff (where people tend to pick something absurdly large, like 0.05) one has failed the test at the 5% confidence level.
The truth is that (as the famous George Marsaglia remarks in the diehard documentation) "p happens". In fact, for a correctly designed test, p is itself a uniform deviate. What that means is that one can easily get a p value of 0.001 even if the null hypothesis is true -- one will get this value (or lower) one in a thousand test runs, for a perfectly good random number generator and test, or else the generator should fail the test. One is precisely as justified at failing the generator if p happens to be in the range 0.5-0.55 as one is at failing it if p is in the 0.0-0.05 range.
The relevance of this is hopefully clear. The way to test is to run many tests and look at the distribution of p (or do the moral equivalent of running many tests if testing other ways).
Unfortunately, this immediately introduces two problems. First is that more tests cost more money -- a lot more money because of the need for e.g. HIPAA compliance in medicine. People prematurely publish results that basically might be significant as if they are significant once they've done all of the testing they can afford, at least for now. Second, if many statisticians don't properly appreciate the meaning of p in hypothesis testing and use terms like "confidence level" in places where they mean nothing of the sort, how can one expect people for whom statistics and calculus and math in general was a struggle, working in contexts that reward "results" (however shaky) and punish "no results" (however honest), to get this right?
When you get right down to it, Bayes pretty much lived in vain. Once you get out of the simple realm of hypothesis testing you run right into Bayes. The correct computation of posterior probabilities seems elusive, even in statistical analyses that more or less demand the use of Bayes theorem because of the wealth of prior knowledge we have available. However, if you asked any medical researcher about Bayes theorem, I predict (as a testable hypothesis:-) that no more than two in ten would identify it as something important in statistics, and not one in twenty would be able to actually write it down or explain how it works and why it is important...
rgb
Hear, hear.
Or, as one might (and I have, in a book) "Correlation may not be causality, but it's all we've got."
After all, how do you think inference and the scientific method work? Why do you think they work?
I'm glad you posted, as it saves me the work, but you're too kind. s/I'm not sure this is a clever idea./This is the stupidest idea in a long list of monumentally stupid ideas that the military has had over the years./
Don't they watch those old WW II movies, where the Nazis have these nifty radio locating trucks that they drive around triangulating resistance radios?
Or let's see, how much work would it take even now to engineer the "cell phone signal seeking missile" in flavors ranging from single target antipersonnel to beefier take-out-a-whole-platoon versions? I'm no rocket scientist (I'm a theorist, actually, not an experimentalist) but I'll bet even I could go hack something together out of a couple of cell phones and other OTC parts. Heck, you could probably make them target INDIVIDUAL cell phones, sort of like predator drones. In fact, to find Osama all that is really needed is his cell phone number, isn't it?
So let's "paint" all of our troops in all of our potential battle theaters with the targeting dye that makes it maximally easy for our opposition to score real home runs in killing efficiency with minimal collateral damage. Or heck, maybe we can have them all stand up in a neat row and hold bullseyes instead.
After all, if you are a normal stupid person, you can't really understand what all of that "science" stuff is all about. All you know is the damfools who participate in it seem to think that the Lord's Creation is older than 6000 years and that we are descended from monkeys. Imagine that! Monkeys! And what has science ever done for us, really? Compared to, say, Jesus?
Really? So they're planning to remove The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I'm sure everyone knows is precisely a book about incest and its consequences (not to mention rape, torture, serial murder, blackmail, and serious illegal hacking:-)
Oh wait, not. That would cost them a rather lot of money and cause an actual public ruckus as people who've paid for a bestseller see it disappear into the censor's maw. No, they are only removing books with incest in them that don't make much money! Probably without bothering to even read them.
rgb
Of course, in the 1800s the world was just coming out of a century where the metaphorical fairies had a cork in their ass, also known as the "Little Ice Age". Curiously, the Little Ice Age (probably connected to a Maunder Minimum and the Gleissberg Cycle) managed to happen even though the CO_2 concentration of the atmosphere was then, as now, monotonically increasing. You don't suppose that there could be long term drivers of things like fairy farts (such as whether or not they have recently eaten beans or just what the world population of fairies is or the variations in the Earth's orbital eccentricity due to gravitational resonances or the long term variability of the solar cycle). Things in the enormously complex open system that confound the "correlation is causality" that has attended the unsurprising general increase in average temperature since a period of anomalous cold that had nothing to do with CO_2?
Look, I'll give you a very, very simple reason to doubt "evidence" of AGW so far. Take a look at estimated global temperatures over any time scale you like, as long as it is longer than 1000 years and isn't the flawed Mann "hockey puck" graph (bristle cone pines are great, but not that great, as proxies). You will see that the temperature fluctuates. It fluctuates a lot. Go back to the start of the Holocene. Wow, a lot a lot, including non-CO_2 driven events like the Younger Dryas, the Medieval Optimum, Maunder Minima.
We do not know how to explain this data. We do not have any model that can even approximately account for these temperature fluctuations, or predict whether or not the temperature in a decade will be (on average) warmer or cooler. In the 60's it was so cold that equally alarmist climate scientists were publicly speculating about whether or not the Holocene was drawing to an end. But that too was silly, because we had no reliable climate models then either. For one thing, a reliable climate model has to start with a reliable model of solar dynamics, because Mr. Sun is the great source of all fairy farts, so to speak, and hey -- we don't have a reliable model of solar dynamics! We do know that what happens on the surface now was largely determined by the state of the fusion core around 100,000 years ago, and we have observational evidence that the Sun may well have a significant long term variability superimposed on top of its 22 year pole-switching cycle. We don't even know how much inductive heating of the atmosphere occurs when the Sun switches poles -- there is one single paper on it (published a century ago) that suggests that it is probably a significant fraction of the Earth's energy budget.
Then there is the fact that we don't have reliable data on global temperatures at all that is older than perhaps 30 to 40 years. Most of what we know comes from samples contaminated by urban island heating, extrapolated backwards by proxies that are sensitive to many confounding causes. There are all of the enormously simple experiments that could be done (or could have been done) to demonstrate the effect. Observing it in an urban setting is all but impossible -- there is damn well local warming of urban centers that can easily be measured by simply driving out into the country (and of course local warming of the airports, continuously blanketed by the CO_2 and water vapor given off by all of those jet engines and the expressways that feed them -- oh, wait, are those the same airports that are the primary sources of data used to demonstrate warming in the first place ?-- They are..). Not so easy in the country of temperate wet climates, because that pesky water vapor confounds the measurement by being several orders of magnitude stronger of a greenhouse gas on the one hand, and having the ability to come in with either sign -- warming at night and enormously cooling by day due to its visible light albedo. In boy scouts long, long ago I learned that cloudy nights are warm, it is the clear nigh
My only real problem with answering this post is that I generally charge $200 or so an hour for this sort of thing as well (not unlike spikevodka and others who responded). The problem is that if you don't already know the answers to the questions you post, you are (no offense intended) a poor choice for the person to put all of this together. I, like many others on the list, got the experience needed to answer it well and correctly and efficiently over 24 years of work as a sysadmin and general computer person. That means that I have enough experience to not to try to answer your questions based on the limited description you gave of the task. There are too many unanswered questions, and the answers to those questions make a huge difference to the best/cheapest most robust and scalable solution.
The biggest question isn't the services -- those are trivial to provide in many ways, most of them very inexpensively these days. It is the software. For starters is there any mission critical software package that only runs on architecture X that absolutely must be on everybody's desktop? For example, you mention many videos -- does this mean that you do things with graphical image editing and (perhaps) absolutely require some particular package that only runs on Windows clients or Mac clients? And so on.
As far as the services per se are concerned, my own inclination -- based on the limited description you've given -- would be to set up a small rackmount multiprocessor server stack -- probably (for only 20 employees) only two physical boxes. I would run Linux as the toplevel OS on those servers, and virtualize all other specific services both for failover and security reasons. If the software stack required for a typical desktop is just a browser, office suite, email client (that might also be the browser) and a few simple utilities I'd be very inclined to make the desktop clients boilerplate Linux boxes automagically installed via e.g. kickstart or any other automated tool, but once again one has decision forks when one considers the possibility that some people will want laptops (that have to be able to stand alone), other people will need desktops that are centrally managed and carefully defended, a few people may insist on Macs, others may whine if their system doesn't run Windoze of some sort..
Ultimately, as you can already see, working out the details of this sort of thing is where I very much earn at least midlevel consulting fees ($200/hour isn't really high end) when I do this professionally. I've got direct experience with all of this -- I've set up servers (virtualized and otherwise) since 1986, I've worked with many major architectures and made them play at least moderately happily together, I understand networking in quite a bit of detail and I understand network and computer security. How can I, how can anyone, tell you all of the questions to ask, all of the decision points you should consider? You'd have to become a chela and work under my supervision for a year or two before you even started to be competent to work through all of this on your own...
rgb
In it an amazing new computational method of producing a 3d image of all of the synaptic connections in a mouse brain from high resolution tomographic slices 70 nanometers thick was developed by a young graduate student named Busse. The entire process is stupendous with "heroic" achievements all around (the actual process of staining involved antibodies with colored dye fluorescent molecules attached -- it sure beats the old days, things like horseradish peroxidase and stains and looking at slices one at a time through a microscope to see perhaps a single set of mutually activated neural connections) and many of them are directly connected to young researchers like Busse.
Nearly every issue of Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, or what have you contains "heroic" work by young researchers. Entire game companies are founded by young geeks. Google was started by young geeks. SAS was founded by young geeks. Not all of them remain young, of course, but every generation produces its crop of new ones from the self-renewing resource of our University and research system. They're pretty easy to find in particular in the many articles posted on slashdot, so this is a great place to mine for them.
rgb
(blush) errr, umm, well yeah.
It could easily be a meteor crater or a sinkhole, or even an old quarry (depending on the quality of the rock). If it is a meteor crater that size, you really have hit the jackpot, because meteors are worth money. However, the people who buy them aren't idiots, so you won't make money pretending; you have to find out. If it was formed by a meteor, there would have been splatter in all directions, but more in one direction than the others. Get a metal detector and search not just inside but all around the periphery up to three or four hundred meters away. If it really is from a meteor, and nobody has "mined" out the many fragments it would have produced, and it was the right kind of meteor (many are nickel-iron, some are stony, nickel-iron are the ones you can find and identify with a metal detector) you will find some chunks that aren't just teensy bits, but are large, partially fused, chunks of mixed iron and rock. They are hard to miss -- their density is close to twice that of ordinary rock (specific gravity closer to five than three). As another poster pointed out, even stony meteors can usually be identified by sawing and polishing -- the origins of meteor rock are typically quite different from earthbound rocks and they have a characteristic structure. But limestone chunks are probably not going to be meteors...;-)
Anyway, if you have a real crater with lots of real meteorite fragments, bear in mind that they will sell for hundreds to thousands of dollars each, depending on size, composition, and provenance. Even tens of thousands for large bits. And yes, there are geology departments at Universities that would like very much to help you search for pieces and study the crater itself, and you should give them first dibs before making money out of it as knowledge is more important than money.
Good luck, but don't hold your breath. No matter where you are sitting, you are sitting on top of at least meteor dust as a contant rain of that drifts down from the sky every day, and fragments from tiny to small are rather commonplace. Larger fragments are increasingly rare, though, and really big impact craters (that have been identified as such) are very rare.
rgb
Gee, logging into slashdot to post, it is difficult not to observe that it is a straight low security non-SSL login. Oh no! I could be hot mutton at any minute! Perhaps, in fact, this isn't even me posting this reply (an interesting existential dilemma).
There are several fairly obvious solutions to the security problem. Obviously any solutions involving the setting of a common password are muttonheaded -- that's just like setting no password at all, sort of like the people who buy a WiFi and leave the default admin password set to "admin". MitM attacks become straightforward if nothing else. Requiring the registration of any open WiFi with a certificate authority and using SSL would work, but is expensive and relies on small cafe's and restaurants and bookstores having somebody who is not an idiot setting up their network, which is both expensive and unlikely. Solutions have to be idiot proof and robust, meaning that either one of the well-known robust solutions has to be implemented damn the expense by the access point provider (allowing idiot clients to connect safely) or a well-known robust solution has to be implemented by the client (allowing them to safely connect to an idiot provider). No solution exists to cover the part of the space where both the owner of the open access point and the connecting client are idiots, because you can't fix stupid (at least not without mandates from a higher level authority and greater expense, such as toplevel registration of all IP numbers in the web universe with a certificate authority so all web connections are secure by law, something that makes my head ache just to think about).
Solution one: Get organizations such as facebook and slashdot(!) to change their logins to https; "encourage" all social website providers to use encrypted connections as standard/best practice. Cost: moderate -- most social sites are text-mostly traffic, which means that the efficiency penalty of encryption is likely not so great that it will bring either servers or the network backbone to its knees -- graphics and movies and music are a different matter, but even there one can easily maintain a reasonably authenticated connection and pass large items (interceptible) out of band unencrypted. The good thing is this solution is idiot proof everywhere but at the level of the social network provider involved, and a social mechanism exists (inventing firesheep for example and then publicizing the ease of embarrassing the clients of the service) for forcing the desired change without the need for laws or regulations. The marketplace doth provide.
Solution two: SSL Proxies. Companies such as B&N and/or Starbucks can easily enough set up their networks (and often do) so that you have to pass through one of their SSL-authed servers to reach the internet. Or, use a (usually paid) SSL-based proxy provider. This has the dual advantage of encrypting your point to point traffic and hiding your IP number when you go snooping around top secret government installations or cruising for porn. Google, in its business plan of taking over the world, could offer this solution to pretty much everybody almost overnight and instantly close its already crushing fist on the gonads of Microsoft and its other competitors still further, and probably do it for free for those users. Cost: Typically an annual fee, although a really large core provider e.g. Google might be able to provide it for free on the user side and still make money in the process. It also requires that you trust the proxy provider not to be a honeypot or the FBI in disguise, and remember those lovely no-warrant wiretap provisions and court decisions post-"Patriot" act. Basically, you can't REALLY trust your provider (including Google) if you are engaging in illegal activity or the (any) government doesn't "like" you for some reason, but a commercial/corporate ssl proxy provider is still fairly robust once the not-a-complete-idiot user has it set up.
Solution three: Don't be a