Exactly. Even as sophisticated as they are, computer models can only be as good as our understanding of the phenomenon being modeled. It's the climate models that are showing catastrophic positive feedbacks for temperature with an increase in "greenhouse gases". But those catastrophic positive feedback scenarios present in the computer model may or may not exist in the real world, because of interactions that are not accounted for in the model because they're presently not known or not well characterized.
The comparison to modeling the macroeconomy is well taken. Both are complex nonlinear systems in which the validity of computer models are highly dependent upon detailed knowledge of the initial conditions, and in which the information content of the phenomenon being modeled cannot reasonably be captured except in a highly simplified fashion. The same information problem that plagues macroeconomic models (you can't really gather all the information necessary to know the initial state, because there's far too much information required, and even if you could gather it, by the time you've gathered the information, the system's state has changed) to some degree applies to modeling climate, particularly where there are direct interactions between human actions and the system.
Paleoclimate data appears to show we're on the downward side of the peak of the current interglacial, with the amplitude of short term warm periods actually decreasing over the last few thousand years. And the current computer models didn't predict the "pause" in increased global mean surface temperature observed since about the turn of the millennium. The models simply aren't good enough to restructure the basis of the entire global energy economy on.
I see a G4 iMac
and want to paint it black
no colors anymore
I want it to turn black
Then it would just look like
my halogen desk lamp
Paint it, paint it, paint it
paint it black...
> I also recently visited China, spent two weeks there this October (traveled thru Beijing-Jinan-TaiAn-Suzhou-Shanghai).
> Internet Cafe's were indeed everywhere in the medium-to-largish cities. What was especially interesting was that while all of the cafe's had to operate thru China's firewall, in a few of the Cafe's I went to they allowed me unrestricted access being a foreigner, I just had to show my passport and could then get to any website under the sun.
When I was in China this spring, it was easy to access foriegn news sources (without showing a passport) in an internet cafe, despite the fact that some of them apparently weren't in DNS. I didn't try to get to anything illegal (porn), but the news was there, even if "secured" through obscurity. The "Great Firewall of China" is full of holes, in my experience...
> Also, China was (contrary to all of the propagandizing I've received in the States) far from repressive. It was a flourishing capitalist boom-town. In the last five years they have[...]
They're tearing down the old, ugly PRC as fast as they can, or hiding it behind colorful billboards. Advertising is everywhere, with phone numbers stuck to nearly all available surfaces. That's what made it feel like capitalism had taken root to me, like flowers breaking through asphalt.
> --Have been passing radical sweeping environmental cleanup laws, this is not your 50's grey and dingy country anymore. Shanghai was far cleaner than LA or New York at twice the population! [...]
I beg to differ. You must have either had recent rainstorms in the cities you visited (which washed most of the grey crap out of the air), or be traveling in places (like Shanghai) spruced-up for the Olympic bid, or other foreign investors.;)
That having been said, I could see past the billboards occasionally to catch a glimpse of the old gray "Communist blocks", and I think things must have improved dramatically. And I marvel at the fact that, for the most part, you can actually breathe air that you can't see through...
> --Everywhere was optimism, optimism, optimism as well as a love for their new progressive administration from the people.
Optimism from the folks with jobs, making money. The tough part is for, as in Russia, the folks working in state-run factories that can't compete. But as in Russia, there's a price to be paid for catching up with the 21st Century.
> Most in China will secretly tell you that their government sucks, but they are too afraid to do anything about it.
In some ways, the long history of China, full of authoritarian rule, makes people fatalistically complacent. I've heard it described by some Chinese that they feel like they're currently living in the "Communist Dynasty" which will one day be replaced by the next dynasty, as has happened for thousands of years.
Interesting historical fact: This "Communist dynasty" idea might have literally come true in China (as it has in North Korea with Kim Jong Il succeeding Kim Il Sung), except for the fact that Mao Zedong's heir apparent, Mao Anying, was killed in action during the Korean War by a U.S. bomber strike.
>Cloning research is necessary to let us figure out how to grow a "heart in a jar." >Imagine: you get sick, they take a blood sample, 3 weeks later they have a new heart >for you. If we can nail that, then there won't be any need to clone whole bodies, >and most of the moral opposition to cloning vanishes.
Way off topic, but...
Supposing as a result of the embryonic stem
cell/cloning debate (and yes, I realize they're
two different technologies) we go ahead with the research and find out that embryonic cells really are"better" than adult derived stem cells for treating the diseases we now think they might be good for.
We've then created a market for growing and shredding human embryos in order to obtain biotech raw materials without first giving any serious thought to whether this is a moral endeavor.
What makes this relevant is that it may well not be possible to grow the "heart in a jar" from pluripotent embryonic stem cells without the complex chemical signaling environment which takes place in fetal development. If that's true, then it would likely be easier to "harvest" fetal organs and grow them in culture after they're already differentiated.
This is a technology with much greater near term possibility, IMO, than nanotech replicators. But again, is such research something that ethically we ought to pursue?
Or is it a high-tech equivalent of cannibalism?
-- LaoK
Re:But did Kubrick write the meta-science?
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
> This is true (about Kubrick devising the 2000 years later bit), but let's be honest, > he would have done it differently and more enigmatically. > I think one of the worst moments in the film is when David answers the door > in the fake house, lets in the advanced AI, and we cut to them sitting on a bed, >legs crossed, discussing this awful new-agey science crap that reminded me > a little too much of metachloreans. What's with that garbage about space/time, >not being able to clone for more than one day, etc. hooey? > >Couldn't they clone her every day? It's not like they had her memories anyway.
Spielberg writes the space/time mumbo-jumbo to explain how the advanced AI culture can resurrect David's long-lost Mommy using some new (to them) discovery about quantum nonlocality to reconstruct her soul and unite it with the body they've derived from a DNA sample of her hair. Evidently, this discovery is so new that
the future AIs haven't been able to make it work for longer than a day. As I've seen discussed elsewhere, this ending hints at the quasi-religious possibility that the future AIs will eventually be able to rescue humanity (or at least their souls) from extinction.
[Quantum nonlocality, BTW, is the idea that (as poet Francis Thompson put it)
All things by immortal power Near or far, Hiddenly To each other linked are, That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star
Or less poetically, every change in any part of the Universe propagates into the overall state of the Universe.]
This is O.K., so far as it goes, given that the future AIs get the benefit of "Clarke's law" [any sufficiently advanced technology is indistingushable from magic], but at first this seemed to me an unsatisfying ending, since David's resurrected Mommy doesn't have the expected human reaction to this situation. She's very uncurious about why there are no other members of the family around, for instance. As I've thought about it, though, the reason for this is that David's Mommy is having a dream. She's reacting in a hypnotic, almost drugged way, the way one sometimes reacts while in a dream, blithely accepting all sorts of bizarre events that would seem irrational to the conscious mind.
And to follow the logical conclusion of this symbolism, it is when David falls asleep to dream at the end, he too is united with humanity in death, becoming mortal (although this is purposefully left ambiguous).
Fortunately, I haven't seen Mission To Mars, but these future AIs are confusingly Eloi-like or like the "gray" ETs familiar to UFO believers. This design has obviously confused some viewers, but their humanoid appearance is probably intended to be ambiguous, since it's not clear (unless I missed something) whether humanity has simply gone extinct or has merged with "mecha" (though it's probably the former,judging from Gigolo Joe's "too smart, too fast, too many" forecast).
Even if the shares don't make money, you still get the album. The possibility of profit from their "share" only provides an incentive for fans not to be giving the material away for free.
With digital recording available, once a recording exists, there's otherwise little incentive to keep it from being copied. Under a shareholder scheme, the artist gets his "advance" from the audience to produce new art, and the shareholding audience has an incentive not to dilute the potential value of their stake in the work by giving it away.
Sure, you may be about as likely to turn a profit from your share in a mediocre band's debut album as you are to win the lottery, but the possibility exists that some new talent will hit it big, and if you could own a stake in that, it would at least provide some economic counterweight to discourage digital bootlegging.
I think an new economic model for the music
industry is in order.
Artists can sell shares in an upcoming album to raise the money to produce and promote it, with the shareholders (subscribing fans) getting the release a few weeks ahead of the general public. Shareholders obviously wouldn't want to be swapping the MP3's of the album if they stood to get a cut of the profits from the wider release.
Then once the album's promo effort gets the radio and video airplay going, the album gets released through usual channels (CDs, streaming, downloads). The artist keeps all the profits from touring (building the brand).
This is kind of a "distributed patronage" model, much like artists had historically been supported by wealthy fans before the advent of recorded sound, but now we can take it corporate. And I think artists would generally rather split the profits with their fan base than with the "suits" (record company weasels).
> Ignoring the creationsists for a minute, data from the genome map will require > rethinking of some of our earlier conclusions, not least of all those about > the basic functioning of genes - with only 30,000, synergy and emergent > properties are will become radically more important, and related branches > of mathematics will probably see new interest. > > Where's Buckminster Fuller when you need him?
As another post mentioned, it seems that reuse of code is another trick built into the workings of life that human programmers are only now catching up with. The discovery that the instructions for building a human are so much more economical than was at first naively assumed raises the possibility that cellular automata are not too far off the mark as a model for life itself, and that multicellularity is an object-oriented three-dimensional implementation.
>[...] who decided that the standard paper size in North America should be 8.5x11" (was it a person or a committee)?
According to a story on NPR's "Morning Edition" within the past couple of weeks, the size of a standard sheet of paper in the U.S. (8 1/2" x 11"), as well as the file folders, filing cabinets, etc. to support it was determined by the Remington Typewriter Company's decision on what width to make the platen of their typewriters...
SpryGuy writes:
>[...] I favor Gore's approach... reserve some of the surplus (that no one is even sure will materialize anyway) > rather than give it all away up front, and pay down debt asap to help releive some of the interest burden.
> Even though I'm not into all of Gore's spending plans, having looked at both, I feel that Gore's approach > is more fiscally conservative, more fiscally sound, and addresses current needs more directly while leaving >'slack' to help buffer any unexpected shocks to the economy. >
> That's just my take on it, though.
And another thing... For a guy that's so concerned with not helping that "top 1%," who does Gore think finances the government debt which he would retire? (By the way, G. W. Bush's plan retires the national debt too, only slightly less quickly than Gore's. And Bush is not "giving it all away up front," since both candidates' plans are phased in over a period of years longer indeed than either of them will be President.)
Who buys most of the T-bonds and T-bills, "middle class families" or "institutional investors"?
Looks like even under Gore's plan, the "top 1%" who invested in government debt get a big payoff. Retiring the debt is certainly a priority, but it's not urgent, except for someone like Gore who'd rather spend the money the government now pays out in interest, and even then not reduce tax rates.
One thing's for certain, if the projected surpluses stay in Washington, it's all gonna get spent!
And, sadly, that's true whether it's Republicans or Democrats in control of Congress.
> What about the shocking idea of not over-stimulating a robust economy with a HUGE tax cut that will only lead to a raising of interest rates and/or inflation?
So could you explain to the "undecided voter" how the money passing through the government "lockbox" magically loses its inflationary effect?
Seems to me that a dollar paid in taxes and spent/wasted by the government is still a dollar spent, excepting that the person whose income/wealth that the dollar was once a part of doesn't get the benefit of deciding what to do with it directly.
In just the same way, the dollar not taken from the capitalist plutocrat's bank account in taxes (because of a "HUGE tax cut for the wealthy") doesn't evaporate into thin air, either. Whether Scrooge McDuck decides to spend that dollar, or "hoard" it in a savings account, or invest directly in the capital markets, or have his private foundation spend it to avoid taxes, that unit of wealth still gets put to productive use.
If McDuck spends it, he provides wages to the employees of the firm whose product or service he buys, and profits to its shareholders. If he "hoards" it, he provides lending capital to a financial institution, who makes loans and invests using the "hoarded" wealth as collateral, and he gets some of the interest. If he invests directly in the capital markets, he'll assume some of the risk of ownership in a company in exchange for capital gains and/or dividends, or provide some expansion capital in exchange for interest. Even if his private foundation spends the money, it'll still go to pay for goods and services in the economy.
Where, other than Keynesian economics, did you get the idea that when an ordinary person spends a dollar it's inflationary, but when government spends that same dollar, it's all to the good?
Also, it's wishful thinking to assume that our "robust economy" won't be in need of a stimulus next year after the Fed's increased interest rates collide with an unanticipated oil shock/war in the Middle East. Whether it's Dubya or Algore that gets the job, the President might well have to deal with an impending recession.
When most of the grocery stores in my area started using those "shopper loyalty" cards, at first I thought of just shopping elsewhere.
But as they proliferated, I realized that the best solution is to corrupt the databases.
Right now, I use a Kroger card that isn't tied to a form that I filled out. I just happened to "pick one up off the counter"one day. As an alternative, just provide an alias name and non-existent address (or the store's address), and fill out as many "shopper loyalty" cards as you can, and encourage your friends to do the same.
I note with some pleasure that the chain that initiated these stupid cards (Jitney-Jungle) has pulled out of the local market, and that everybody's getting beat these days by Wal-Mart, who doesn't require a stupid card.
Re:Genetic design is still a *long* way off...
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
> I don't think it will take anywhere near the entire next century to gain a reasonably full understanding of the genome and how to use it.
Techniques already exist for finding out what particular genes do, but it's a slow process, and will be even slower for those few genes that make humans distinct from other animals.
The usual way for finding what a gene does, and how important it is, involves engineering an animal model in which that gene is disabled, and seeing what effect it has on the animal's development. Mice are most often used as the model, and the engineered mice are called "knockout" mice. If the gene is very important, the animal's development is spontaneously halted at an embyronic stage, a "compile time" error, so to speak. Other genes, perhaps those involved in more subtle, but equally deadly, genetic diseases which strike at children and adults, may permit the construction of animal models of those diseases, with the hope of understanding how to cure them. These might be considered "runtime" errors, in a computer science sense.
But due to the length of the "generation time" of the lab mouse (how long it takes mice to mature to reproductive age), and the necessity of knocking out both copies of the gene (chromosomes contaning the genes occur in pairs, providing a degree of systemwide redundancy) in the mice to produce a true "knockout," the process can take months. Several such experiments can be performed in parallel to speed the research up, though.
But for those genes which are "uniquely human," there is no similar way to test their effects, except perhaps to introduce a set of human genes into an animal model, which could be as ethically prohibited as the notion of creating human embryo "knockouts". The most likely way for such research to ethically progress is in treating naturally occurring genetic disease, in which nature has done the gene "knockout" for us, and the researcher attempts to "rescue" the patient from their disease, through gene therapy, and applying the knowledge gained by studying animal models of the disease.
We have much of the undocumented "source code" to human life now, and can begin the commenting, and more importantly, the debugging. Until there is some breakthrough in modeling biological systems in all their complexity in silico however, animal research will continue to be essential to the progress of medicine. And the Frankensteinian prospects of "hacking the genome" to produce "designer children" will have to wait. It's utter hubris, and certainly premature, to conclude that technology that can't yet fix all that is broken, could be put to use "improving" upon the capabilities that humans possess.
> Knowing the amino acid sequences is a big key to being able to figure out how things work. Some examples:
Minor nit: the genome is the nucleic acid sequence, not the amino acid sequence. Amino acids are what proteins are made of.
> You want to know what part of the genome makes us uniquely human rather than, say, a mouse. You will soon be able to compare the whole human genome to the whole mouse genome (which will be out in a couple of years) and see where they're similar and where they're different.
Also it should provide new insights into the molecular basis of evolution, if you can compare the sequences of the same gene in different organisms to see which ones are more similar (i.e. more closely related).
> You want to know what things are really important for making organisms tick at a basic level. You can compare the whole genome of humans, mice, yeast, bacteria, etc. and find what genes in all of them are very similar. If it's close to the same in humans and bacteria, chances are it's really, really important.
Or, in molecular evolution jargon, these important genes are "highly conserved," and don't get changed much by mutations over evolutionary time, or else the organism won't function. This set of genes might be considered the "kernel" or "core OS" of biology. Except in this case, the code actually builds the hardware...;)
> You find a protein that's implicated in some disease or other. You correlate data generated from the unknown protein with the sequences for all human proteins to identify it. There's an excellent chance that you'll be able to figure out what it does by comparing it to known genes in other organisms.
And with the "gene chip" technology like that produced by companies like Affymetrix, you could presumably determine which genes are expressed differently in different disease states, and then work on medications that return the system to a healthy state.
> You don't know what the protein above does. You can do experiments to see which other proteins it associates with (there are several ways of doing this) and that will often give you excellent information about what it does.
> Coming soon You have identified a protein but can't figure out what it does. Using its sequence, you will soon be able to predict its 3-D structure, which can give you clues about what it does.
These last two points are related and important. Using the protein sequence information which can be derived from the genome, it may make easier the task of those who are trying to solve the computationally difficult problem of predicting protein structure from sequence, the "protein folding" problem. Once that's solved, you would have the ability to design proteins de novo, a potentially powerful technique for implementing molecular nanotechnology.
I've done a little bit of work in DNA computing, and my impression of the state of the art is that we're only at the point where we're wiring the vacuum tubes together in order to program (if that).
It's kind of a "Nanotech-Complete" problem, in many respects. The repertoire of available enzymes is limited to those that are otherwise useful in molecular biology (endonucleases, ligases, methylases, etc.), but for some applications, "designer enzymes" are needed, and the technology to produce arbitrary enzymes is just not here yet (though a solution to the "protein folding" problem might be possible, given sufficient conventional computational power, e.g. something like distributed.net, or seti@home).
The biggest problem with DNA computers is I/O, primarily input, or what's called the "encoding problem". Representing arbitrary information as DNA sequences is a computationally hard problem in itself, since one must ensure that the encodings are unique enough to only interact with each other in the desired ways which contribute to the solution of the problem, and most importantly, produce a true solution (i.e. do not corrupt the data).
The output can be handled in a variety of ways, perhaps the most promising of which involves DNA microarrays (a.k.a. "gene chips"), which could potentially serve as an interface between DNA-based computers and conventional silicon-based computers.
But I'm afraid we're a long way from having a general-purpose DNA (or more broadly) molecular biology-based computer. And by the time we have the technology to build one, I suspect the other applications of nanotechnology may have rendered the point moot.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hi-fi"larious!
A flux capacitor? Of course, discharging one has some temporal side effects.
Exactly. Even as sophisticated as they are, computer models can only be as good as our understanding of the phenomenon being modeled. It's the climate models that are showing catastrophic positive feedbacks for temperature with an increase in "greenhouse gases". But those catastrophic positive feedback scenarios present in the computer model may or may not exist in the real world, because of interactions that are not accounted for in the model because they're presently not known or not well characterized.
The comparison to modeling the macroeconomy is well taken. Both are complex nonlinear systems in which the validity of computer models are highly dependent upon detailed knowledge of the initial conditions, and in which the information content of the phenomenon being modeled cannot reasonably be captured except in a highly simplified fashion. The same information problem that plagues macroeconomic models (you can't really gather all the information necessary to know the initial state, because there's far too much information required, and even if you could gather it, by the time you've gathered the information, the system's state has changed) to some degree applies to modeling climate, particularly where there are direct interactions between human actions and the system.
Paleoclimate data appears to show we're on the downward side of the peak of the current interglacial, with the amplitude of short term warm periods actually decreasing over the last few thousand years. And the current computer models didn't predict the "pause" in increased global mean surface temperature observed since about the turn of the millennium. The models simply aren't good enough to restructure the basis of the entire global energy economy on.
On-demand streaming is the future of TV. The cable and satellite companies are going the way of bookstores and newspapers.
And here I thought Arkansas was supposed to be The Natural State...
Maybe Utah is the Big Natural State.
I demand an investigation!
And since I'm from the Volunteer State, I volunteer!
I see a G4 iMac
and want to paint it black
no colors anymore
I want it to turn black
Then it would just look like
my halogen desk lamp
Paint it, paint it, paint it
paint it black...
--
LaoK
> "Gargoyle" writes:
> I also recently visited China, spent two weeks there this October (traveled thru Beijing-Jinan-TaiAn-Suzhou-Shanghai).
> Internet Cafe's were indeed everywhere in the medium-to-largish cities. What was especially interesting was that while all of the cafe's had to operate thru China's firewall, in a few of the Cafe's I went to they allowed me unrestricted access being a foreigner, I just had to show my passport and could then get to any website under the sun.
When I was in China this spring, it was easy to access foriegn news sources (without showing a passport) in an internet cafe, despite the fact that some of them apparently weren't in DNS. I didn't try to get to anything illegal (porn), but the news was there, even if "secured" through obscurity. The "Great Firewall of China" is full of holes, in my experience...
> Also, China was (contrary to all of the propagandizing I've received in the States) far from repressive. It was a flourishing capitalist boom-town. In the last five years they have[...]
They're tearing down the old, ugly PRC as fast as they can, or hiding it behind colorful billboards. Advertising is everywhere, with phone numbers stuck to nearly all available surfaces. That's what made it feel like capitalism had taken root to me, like flowers breaking through asphalt.
> --Have been passing radical sweeping environmental cleanup laws, this is not your 50's grey and dingy country anymore. Shanghai was far cleaner than LA or New York at twice the population! [...]
I beg to differ. You must have either had recent rainstorms in the cities you visited (which washed most of the grey crap out of the air), or be traveling in places (like Shanghai) spruced-up for the Olympic bid, or other foreign investors. ;)
That having been said, I could see past the billboards occasionally to catch a glimpse of the old gray "Communist blocks", and I think things must have improved dramatically. And I marvel at the fact that, for the most part, you can actually breathe air that you can't see through...
> --Everywhere was optimism, optimism, optimism as well as a love for their new progressive administration from the people.
Optimism from the folks with jobs, making money. The tough part is for, as in Russia, the folks working in state-run factories that can't compete. But as in Russia, there's a price to be paid for catching up with the 21st Century.
--
LaoK
> Most in China will secretly tell you that their government sucks, but they are too afraid to do anything about it.
In some ways, the long history of China, full of authoritarian rule, makes people fatalistically complacent. I've heard it described by some Chinese that they feel like they're currently living in the "Communist Dynasty" which will one day be replaced by the next dynasty, as has happened for thousands of years.
Interesting historical fact: This "Communist dynasty" idea might have literally come true in China (as it has in North Korea with Kim Jong Il succeeding Kim Il Sung), except for the fact that Mao Zedong's heir apparent, Mao Anying, was killed in action during the Korean War by a U.S. bomber strike.
--
LaoK
Sh@home was responsible for most of my Code Red port scan traffic too! Good riddance...
>Cloning research is necessary to let us figure out how to grow a "heart in a jar."
>Imagine: you get sick, they take a blood sample, 3 weeks later they have a new heart
>for you. If we can nail that, then there won't be any need to clone whole bodies,
>and most of the moral opposition to cloning vanishes.
Way off topic, but...
Supposing as a result of the embryonic stem cell/cloning debate (and yes, I realize
they're two different technologies) we go ahead with the research and find out that
embryonic cells really are"better" than adult derived stem cells for treating the diseases
we now think they might be good for.
We've then created a market for growing and shredding human embryos in order
to obtain biotech raw materials without first giving any serious thought to whether
this is a moral endeavor.
What makes this relevant is that it may well not be possible to grow the "heart in a jar"
from pluripotent embryonic stem cells without the complex chemical signaling environment
which takes place in fetal development. If that's true, then it would likely be easier to "harvest"
fetal organs and grow them in culture after they're already differentiated.
This is a technology with much greater near term possibility, IMO, than nanotech replicators.
But again, is such research something that ethically we ought to pursue?
Or is it a high-tech equivalent of cannibalism?
--
LaoK
> This is true (about Kubrick devising the 2000 years later bit), but let's be honest,
> he would have done it differently and more enigmatically.
> I think one of the worst moments in the film is when David answers the door
> in the fake house, lets in the advanced AI, and we cut to them sitting on a bed,
>legs crossed, discussing this awful new-agey science crap that reminded me
> a little too much of metachloreans. What's with that garbage about space/time,
>not being able to clone for more than one day, etc. hooey?
>
>Couldn't they clone her every day? It's not like they had her memories anyway.
Spielberg writes the space/time mumbo-jumbo to explain how the advanced AI culture
can resurrect David's long-lost Mommy using some new (to them) discovery about
quantum nonlocality to reconstruct her soul and unite it with the body they've derived
from a DNA sample of her hair. Evidently, this discovery is so new that the future AIs
haven't been able to make it work for longer than a day. As I've seen discussed elsewhere,
this ending hints at the quasi-religious possibility that the future AIs will eventually
be able to rescue humanity (or at least their souls) from extinction.
[Quantum nonlocality, BTW, is the idea that (as poet Francis Thompson put it)
All things by immortal power
Near or far, Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star
Or less poetically, every change in any part of the Universe propagates into the overall
state of the Universe.]
This is O.K., so far as it goes, given that the future AIs get the benefit of "Clarke's law"
[any sufficiently advanced technology is indistingushable from magic], but at first
this seemed to me an unsatisfying ending, since David's resurrected Mommy doesn't
have the expected human reaction to this situation. She's very uncurious about why
there are no other members of the family around, for instance. As I've thought about it,
though, the reason for this is that David's Mommy is having a dream. She's reacting in
a hypnotic, almost drugged way, the way one sometimes reacts while in a dream,
blithely accepting all sorts of bizarre events that would seem irrational to the conscious mind.
And to follow the logical conclusion of this symbolism, it is when David falls asleep to dream
at the end, he too is united with humanity in death, becoming mortal (although this is
purposefully left ambiguous).
Fortunately, I haven't seen Mission To Mars, but these future AIs are confusingly Eloi-like
or like the "gray" ETs familiar to UFO believers. This design has obviously confused some
viewers, but their humanoid appearance is probably intended to be ambiguous, since it's
not clear (unless I missed something) whether humanity has simply gone extinct or has
merged with "mecha" (though it's probably the former,judging from Gigolo Joe's
"too smart, too fast, too many" forecast).
How about using an agreed-upon text (for example, the text of the DMCA) as an encryption pad for the titles?
LaoK
Even if the shares don't make money, you still get the album. The possibility of profit from their "share" only provides an incentive for fans not to be giving the material away for free.
With digital recording available, once a recording exists, there's otherwise little incentive to keep it from being copied. Under a shareholder scheme, the artist gets his "advance" from the audience to produce new art, and the shareholding audience has an incentive not to dilute the potential value of their stake in the work by giving it away.
Sure, you may be about as likely to turn a profit from your share in a mediocre band's debut album as you are to win the lottery, but the possibility exists that some new talent will hit it big, and if you could own a stake in that, it would at least provide some economic counterweight to discourage digital bootlegging.
LaoK
I think an new economic model for the music industry is in order.
Artists can sell shares in an upcoming album to raise the money to produce and promote it, with the shareholders (subscribing fans) getting the release a few weeks ahead of the general public. Shareholders obviously wouldn't want to be swapping the MP3's of the album if they stood to get a cut of the profits from the wider release.
Then once the album's promo effort gets the radio and video airplay going, the album gets released through usual channels (CDs, streaming, downloads). The artist keeps all the profits from touring (building the brand).
This is kind of a "distributed patronage" model, much like artists had historically been supported by wealthy fans before the advent of recorded sound, but now we can take it corporate. And I think artists would generally rather split the profits with their fan base than with the "suits" (record company weasels).
LaoK
> Ignoring the creationsists for a minute, data from the genome map will require
> rethinking of some of our earlier conclusions, not least of all those about
> the basic functioning of genes - with only 30,000, synergy and emergent
> properties are will become radically more important, and related branches
> of mathematics will probably see new interest.
>
> Where's Buckminster Fuller when you need him?
As another post mentioned, it seems that reuse of code is another trick built into the workings of life that human programmers are only now catching up with. The discovery that the instructions for building a human are so much more economical than was at first naively assumed raises the possibility that cellular automata are not too far off the mark as a model for life itself, and that multicellularity is an object-oriented three-dimensional implementation.
Conway and Darwin were both right!
LaoK
>[...] who decided that the standard paper size in North America should be 8.5x11" (was it a person or a committee)?
According to a story on NPR's "Morning Edition" within the past couple of weeks, the size of a standard sheet of paper in the U.S. (8 1/2" x 11"), as well as the file folders, filing cabinets, etc. to support it was determined by the Remington Typewriter Company's decision on what width to make the platen of their typewriters...
LaoK
SpryGuy writes:
>[...] I favor Gore's approach... reserve some of the surplus (that no one is even sure will materialize anyway)
> rather than give it all away up front, and pay down debt asap to help releive some of the interest burden.
> Even though I'm not into all of Gore's spending plans, having looked at both, I feel that Gore's approach
> is more fiscally conservative, more fiscally sound, and addresses current needs more directly while leaving
>'slack' to help buffer any unexpected shocks to the economy.
>
> That's just my take on it, though.
And another thing... For a guy that's so concerned with not helping that "top 1%," who does Gore think finances the government debt which he would retire? (By the way, G. W. Bush's plan retires the national debt too, only slightly less quickly than Gore's. And Bush is not "giving it all away up front," since both candidates' plans are phased in over a period of years longer indeed than either of them will be President.)
Who buys most of the T-bonds and T-bills, "middle class families" or "institutional investors"?
Looks like even under Gore's plan, the "top 1%" who invested in government debt get a big payoff. Retiring the debt is certainly a priority, but it's not urgent, except for someone like Gore who'd rather spend the money the government now pays out in interest, and even then not reduce tax rates.
One thing's for certain, if the projected surpluses stay in Washington, it's all gonna get spent!
And, sadly, that's true whether it's Republicans or Democrats in control of Congress.
--
LaoK
> What about the shocking idea of not over-stimulating a robust economy with a HUGE tax cut that will only lead to a raising of interest rates and/or inflation?
So could you explain to the "undecided voter" how the money passing through the government "lockbox" magically loses its inflationary effect?
Seems to me that a dollar paid in taxes and spent/wasted by the government is still a dollar spent, excepting that the person whose income/wealth that the dollar was once a part of doesn't get the benefit of deciding what to do with it directly.
In just the same way, the dollar not taken from the capitalist plutocrat's bank account in taxes (because of a "HUGE tax cut for the wealthy") doesn't evaporate into thin air, either. Whether Scrooge McDuck decides to spend that dollar, or "hoard" it in a savings account, or invest directly in the capital markets, or have his private foundation spend it to avoid taxes, that unit of wealth still gets put to productive use.
If McDuck spends it, he provides wages to the employees of the firm whose product or service he buys, and profits to its shareholders. If he "hoards" it, he provides lending capital to a financial institution, who makes loans and invests using the "hoarded" wealth as collateral, and he gets some of the interest. If he invests directly in the capital markets, he'll assume some of the risk of ownership in a company in exchange for capital gains and/or dividends, or provide some expansion capital in exchange for interest. Even if his private foundation spends the money, it'll still go to pay for goods and services in the economy.
Where, other than Keynesian economics, did you get the idea that when an ordinary person spends a dollar it's inflationary, but when government spends that same dollar, it's all to the good?
Also, it's wishful thinking to assume that our "robust economy" won't be in need of a stimulus next year after the Fed's increased interest rates collide with an unanticipated oil shock/war in the Middle East. Whether it's Dubya or Algore that gets the job, the President might well have to deal with an impending recession.
--
LaoK
When most of the grocery stores in my area started using those "shopper loyalty" cards, at first I thought of just shopping elsewhere.
But as they proliferated, I realized that the best solution is to corrupt the databases.
Right now, I use a Kroger card that isn't tied to a form that I filled out. I just happened to "pick one up off the counter"one day. As an alternative, just provide an alias name and non-existent address (or the store's address), and fill out as many "shopper loyalty" cards as you can, and encourage your friends to do the same.
I note with some pleasure that the chain that initiated these stupid cards (Jitney-Jungle) has pulled out of the local market, and that everybody's getting beat these days by Wal-Mart, who doesn't require a stupid card.
> I don't think it will take anywhere near the entire next century to gain a reasonably full understanding of the genome and how to use it.
Techniques already exist for finding out what particular genes do, but it's a slow process, and will be even slower for those few genes that make humans distinct from other animals.
The usual way for finding what a gene does, and how important it is, involves engineering an animal model in which that gene is disabled, and seeing what effect it has on the animal's development. Mice are most often used as the model, and the engineered mice are called "knockout" mice. If the gene is very important, the animal's development is spontaneously halted at an embyronic stage, a "compile time" error, so to speak. Other genes, perhaps those involved in more subtle, but equally deadly, genetic diseases which strike at children and adults, may permit the construction of animal models of those diseases, with the hope of understanding how to cure them. These might be considered "runtime" errors, in a computer science sense.
But due to the length of the "generation time" of the lab mouse (how long it takes mice to mature to reproductive age), and the necessity of knocking out both copies of the gene (chromosomes contaning the genes occur in pairs, providing a degree of systemwide redundancy) in the mice to produce a true "knockout," the process can take months. Several such experiments can be performed in parallel to speed the research up, though.
But for those genes which are "uniquely human," there is no similar way to test their effects, except perhaps to introduce a set of human genes into an animal model, which could be as ethically prohibited as the notion of creating human embryo "knockouts". The most likely way for such research to ethically progress is in treating naturally occurring genetic disease, in which nature has done the gene "knockout" for us, and the researcher attempts to "rescue" the patient from their disease, through gene therapy, and applying the knowledge gained by studying animal models of the disease.
We have much of the undocumented "source code" to human life now, and can begin the commenting, and more importantly, the debugging. Until there is some breakthrough in modeling biological systems in all their complexity in silico however, animal research will continue to be essential to the progress of medicine. And the Frankensteinian prospects of "hacking the genome" to produce "designer children" will have to wait. It's utter hubris, and certainly premature, to conclude that technology that can't yet fix all that is broken, could be put to use "improving" upon the capabilities that humans possess.
LaoK
> I wonder if it will prove to be easier than reverse engineering microsoft file formats.
Of course it's easier. MS file formats aren't conserved from one generation to the next... :)
LaoK
> Knowing the amino acid sequences is a big key to being able to figure out how things work. Some examples:
Minor nit: the genome is the nucleic acid sequence, not the amino acid sequence. Amino acids are what proteins are made of.
> You want to know what part of the genome makes us uniquely human rather than, say, a mouse. You will soon be able to compare the whole human genome to the whole mouse genome (which will be out in a couple of years) and see where they're similar and where they're different.
Also it should provide new insights into the molecular basis of evolution, if you can compare the sequences of the same gene in different organisms to see which ones are more similar (i.e. more closely related).
> You want to know what things are really important for making organisms tick at a basic level. You can compare the whole genome of humans, mice, yeast, bacteria, etc. and find what genes in all of them are very similar. If it's close to the same in humans and bacteria, chances are it's really, really important.Or, in molecular evolution jargon, these important genes are "highly conserved," and don't get changed much by mutations over evolutionary time, or else the organism won't function. This set of genes might be considered the "kernel" or "core OS" of biology. Except in this case, the code actually builds the hardware... ;)
> You find a protein that's implicated in some disease or other. You correlate data generated from the unknown protein with the sequences for all human proteins to identify it. There's an excellent chance that you'll be able to figure out what it does by comparing it to known genes in other organisms.
And with the "gene chip" technology like that produced by companies like Affymetrix, you could presumably determine which genes are expressed differently in different disease states, and then work on medications that return the system to a healthy state.
> You don't know what the protein above does. You can do experiments to see which other proteins it associates with (there are several ways of doing this) and that will often give you excellent information about what it does.
> Coming soon You have identified a protein but can't figure out what it does. Using its sequence, you will soon be able to predict its 3-D structure, which can give you clues about what it does.
These last two points are related and important. Using the protein sequence information which can be derived from the genome, it may make easier the task of those who are trying to solve the computationally difficult problem of predicting protein structure from sequence, the "protein folding" problem. Once that's solved, you would have the ability to design proteins de novo, a potentially powerful technique for implementing molecular nanotechnology.
Now the real weirdness begins...
LaoK
"Silver Spoon Boy"? You mean the Senator's son who grew up in Washington D.C. (before he helped invent the Internet)?
Oh, yeah, I forgot... first he grew up to be a tobacco farmer, then he invented the Internet...
LaoK
"It's 'controlling legal authority' time!"--Judge Thomas P. Jackson
New TLDs will make possible to port some classic Usenet groups to the Web:
http://www.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork/
http://www.wesley.crusher.die.die.die/
LaoK
I've done a little bit of work in DNA computing, and my impression of the state of the art is that we're only at the point where we're wiring the vacuum tubes together in order to program (if that).
It's kind of a "Nanotech-Complete" problem, in many respects. The repertoire of available enzymes is limited to those that are otherwise useful in molecular biology (endonucleases, ligases, methylases, etc.), but for some applications, "designer enzymes" are needed, and the technology to produce arbitrary enzymes is just not here yet (though a solution to the "protein folding" problem might be possible, given sufficient conventional computational power, e.g. something like distributed.net, or seti@home).
The biggest problem with DNA computers is I/O, primarily input, or what's called the "encoding problem". Representing arbitrary information as DNA sequences is a computationally hard problem in itself, since one must ensure that the encodings are unique enough to only interact with each other in the desired ways which contribute to the solution of the problem, and most importantly, produce a true solution (i.e. do not corrupt the data).
The output can be handled in a variety of ways, perhaps the most promising of which involves DNA microarrays (a.k.a. "gene chips"), which could potentially serve as an interface between DNA-based computers and conventional silicon-based computers.
But I'm afraid we're a long way from having a general-purpose DNA (or more broadly) molecular biology-based computer. And by the time we have the technology to build one, I suspect the other applications of nanotechnology may have rendered the point moot.
LaoK