It's not implausible that a fast virulent virus or bacterial infection in the brain could cause a behavioral change that makes sufferers go completely off the hook. Not undead, but uncontrollable rage or desire for human contact. Infact a bacteria that produced a toxin that was mind altering.
So what do we need for a real-world scientifically plausible zombie invasion?
1) A virulent infection, preferably airborne and rapidly spreading (cold, flu, ebola)
2) Sufficient incubation time to spread through population nationally/globally (flu)
3) Virus symptoms causes delerium, rage, demented violent behaviour, insatiable need to contact humans (no need to bite), reduced if not wiped out inhibitions (perhaps even a touch of horniness... lol).
4) Symptoms last long enough to spread the infection effectively before killing the host or being fought off by the hosts immune system.
5) For coolness factor, the host slips into a deep death-like coma before waking up and going mental.
iPhone users in Oz will just jailbreak and pirate. (Android users just need to tick a box in a menu, then pirate) This has far wider impact on Apple's App Store business model than just a few devs who abandon the Aussie market.
Autism in a mild form may been an evolutionary advantage, which is why it's seems to have a genetic component. It's when this mechanism it goes too far these individuals then are disadvantaged in society.
We've probably had people who register in the Autism spectrum with obsessive interests going way back into prehistory.
Certainly if ASDs are largely genetic, there would have been early humans eidetic memory, and other unusual mental abilities. They could have been encyclopedias of knowledge about what plants are safe to eat, as well as mentally mapping terrain. They may have even been responsible for the origins of language, mathematics, writing -- because sure as hell many of them are making a huge contribution to the human endeavour in modern times through science, engineering and technology. Why not further back in history too?
Every neuron can have 50,000 connections. So to acurately map all this you need a neuron to store 50,000 addresses of other neurons.
So right there you might have 10 quadrillion bytes were you to have a 8-bit value for the weighting of each connection.
But this is raw data, and very lazy. You could do away with alot of it -- only a few of those connections are frequently used. Apply compression, perhaps, lossy compression to much more of it and you are probably quite close to a few bytes per neuron. A number of structures in the brain may not need be simulated in too finer detail either, you could redistribute resources according to how finer grained the simulation needs to be. Then there's stuff we can replace with conventional computing, like the retina/optic nerve etc.
For some time now I have strongly suspected you could simulate the humain brain with less computing resources than the brain it self has.
Singularity is used in physics to hide our ignorance about what happens when our currently understood model of everything breaks down at the centre of a black hole. It is more the results of calculations widely suspected to be inadequate than anything predicted to be real. I believe this is quite close to the usage fo this term by Kurzweil et al. Singularity covers for how we loose the ability to make meaningful predictions with our current predictive methods.
Show me a current credentialed and respected AI researcher who is or has reccently been actively publishing peer reviewed literature, who thinks Kurweil is a crackpot.
They'd call him an optimist, sure, but admit the numbers are a good estimate. This kind of debate gets a bit silly, like climate science. I'd only respect the opinion who's actively researching in the field.
IANMOFWF (I am not much of a whisky afficcionado) but I was worried for a minute there. The headline is misleading. They are turning byproducts of the whisky making process into biofuel and not the whisky itself, which would be a travesty indeed.
Me too. Developers are not good designers, designers are not good developers. While there is always the exception to the rule, generally as a developer you so intimately understand how your creation works and is supposed to, you really cannot consider the position of someone who has never seen your product before and has to decode how it works and what it is capable without reading the source code and only what information you choose to present.
Thus we reveal the importance of good industrial design, and the need to keep designers and engineers at arms length, to do what each does well. This is why Apple won't die and this is also why this will not be the year of desktop linux any decade soon without a paradigm shift in thinking.
Symptoms are a match for a Sick Building Syndrome, one cause is believed to be nasties growing in air conditioning or in damp-exposed building materials, and general poor indoor air quality.
OFTOMH around 25% of individuals are genetically pre-disposed to be sensitive to mold, provoking asthma and other immune disorders. Something in this school is provoking these reactions in these kids, first guess should be air quality.
At risk of being redundant others have pointed out here symptoms are also a match for stress and anxiety. So we're probably looking at a basket of different causes for physiological symptoms at school.
All these things have a scientifically valid basis and a are pretty demonstrable out in the real world, whereas Wi-Fi electro-sensitivity does not.
Stacks 2,3,4 or more layers deep you are talking about nanometers deep. Now I'm not sure what the thermal conductivity of a chip is, but that is a very short distance for heat to conduct through. I really don't see how there could be too much of a problem conducting the heat out of lower layers.
Of course the issue is the power density, watts per square cm, goes way up as you start stacking. The problem is not in the chip so much, but in the cooling attached to it. Although I think heatpipe technology has the chops to deal with it here.
... I really think that money would be better spent helping all of you coders out there in creating a language/compiler programing paradigm that can use 12 threads efficiently for something beyond rendering GTA.
The entirety of programming is we know it is stuck in a single threaded paradigm and making the shift to massively parallel computing requires a huge shift in thinking.
This is so hard because our technique, languages and compilers all have their roots in a world that barely even multi-tasked let alone considered doing anything in parallel for performance.
Every coder that ever learnt to code, coded for kicks or money, learnt this way, and they still do.
We've come all this way without ever having to think in parallel. I stopped developing in 2003, having never had to really consider parallelism.
Even in 2010, as kids today start learning programming linearly still, and you go a long way before having to consider a second thread.
I think calling it a whole new paradigm is not doing the change required justice. It's about re-learning and re-thinking everything.
Frankly every day I think it's a fucking miracle that software as a whole performs as well as it does, and that our civilizations infrastructure can be use this technology, and that Moore's law hasn't stopped it's inexorable march yet.
It all works result of a brute force of millions of smart people problem solving line by line, getting it to compile, run and work without crashing too often. Software development now sees teams of hundreds of developers, open source projects can have thousands. One should be forgiven for thinking programming itself hasn't improved terrifically. Advances in software are still largely coming with throwing human resources at problems.
Clearly then, the deficiencies are in software, not hardware.
I won't shed a tear when Intel can no longer make progress with it's enormous investment in producing silicon based chips, and may have to consider graphene et al. But it's far from the end of the story. Silicon is only one element on the periodic table after all.
If your hunting and camping you absolutely DO NOT want to be using a aging recycled Android phone with map software. These gadgets are part fragile designer fashion accessories for meterosexuals and part built-to-a-price planned obsolence. They are not intended for use too far from civilization, or for anything more wild and treacherous than a shirt pocket. Add to that they really don't go more than a day without charge and will run themselves flat trying to find a cell signal.
Your life could depend on your GPS, so it's wise to fork out for something suited to the task.
That said I've used a aging HTC Magic (G2) for exactly this, because I had it, and I didn't really have a need for a full blown GPS unit yet. I tend to stick to a old school paper topographic map.
I use it more for driving, where it can charge of a 12VDC->USB adapter. It works very well in this instance and there is a pre-pay sim with some credit should I need it.
You sure you were in high school in the 90s?:) I recall floppy disks and later CD-Rs were traded abundantly amongst gamers. I'd guess that was common in most schools? The difference was, back then you could fit about 20-30 full version games on a CD-R.
Interestingly, there was no copy protection back then, everyone had a collection of pirated games, and the industry was still under going crazy growth.
I suspect regional bias in data. In New Zealand we pay equivelent of $4.50-5.00* per gallon of petrol (what 'gasoline' is properly called everywhere outside United States)... re-run the numbers and suddenly all those hybrids are well worth while. We have cheaper running costs than Japan and most of Europe.
(*Yet we choose cars and drive them like juice is cheap and then complain at the pump.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not implausible that a fast virulent virus or bacterial infection in the brain could cause a behavioral change that makes sufferers go completely off the hook. Not undead, but uncontrollable rage or desire for human contact. Infact a bacteria that produced a toxin that was mind altering.
So what do we need for a real-world scientifically plausible zombie invasion?
1) A virulent infection, preferably airborne and rapidly spreading (cold, flu, ebola)
2) Sufficient incubation time to spread through population nationally/globally (flu)
3) Virus symptoms causes delerium, rage, demented violent behaviour, insatiable need to contact humans (no need to bite), reduced if not wiped out inhibitions (perhaps even a touch of horniness... lol).
4) Symptoms last long enough to spread the infection effectively before killing the host or being fought off by the hosts immune system.
5) For coolness factor, the host slips into a deep death-like coma before waking up and going mental.
Undead not required.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimboe
Real-life zombies are probably more subtle
In fact most all of the world has been replaced with Zimboes, and there are very few of us real people left, examples being myself, and Cory Doctorow.
Reminds me of the infamous $500 'ethernet' audio cable from Denon
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/22/amazon-reader-review.html
iPhone users in Oz will just jailbreak and pirate. (Android users just need to tick a box in a menu, then pirate) This has far wider impact on Apple's App Store business model than just a few devs who abandon the Aussie market.
Autism in a mild form may been an evolutionary advantage, which is why it's seems to have a genetic component. It's when this mechanism it goes too far these individuals then are disadvantaged in society.
We've probably had people who register in the Autism spectrum with obsessive interests going way back into prehistory.
Certainly if ASDs are largely genetic, there would have been early humans eidetic memory, and other unusual mental abilities. They could have been encyclopedias of knowledge about what plants are safe to eat, as well as mentally mapping terrain. They may have even been responsible for the origins of language, mathematics, writing -- because sure as hell many of them are making a huge contribution to the human endeavour in modern times through science, engineering and technology. Why not further back in history too?
Damn, missed first post. I was too busy counting the words in the summary.
So whats cause of your wildfires, failing crops and wider global climate chaos?
1) The whopping 40% (forteh-freakin-per-cent!) increase in greenhouse gases over pre-industrial levels due to human activity.
2) HAARP, a few kilowatts of output into the Ionsphere, which has not been shown to have jacks hit to do with weather.
Yeah 2) obviously!
The ultimate doomsday weapon: Coal-powered SUV.
I think other countries keep their conspiracy nuts at arms length.
Every neuron can have 50,000 connections. So to acurately map all this you need a neuron to store 50,000 addresses of other neurons.
So right there you might have 10 quadrillion bytes were you to have a 8-bit value for the weighting of each connection.
But this is raw data, and very lazy. You could do away with alot of it -- only a few of those connections are frequently used. Apply compression, perhaps, lossy compression to much more of it and you are probably quite close to a few bytes per neuron. A number of structures in the brain may not need be simulated in too finer detail either, you could redistribute resources according to how finer grained the simulation needs to be. Then there's stuff we can replace with conventional computing, like the retina/optic nerve etc.
For some time now I have strongly suspected you could simulate the humain brain with less computing resources than the brain it self has.
Singularity is used in physics to hide our ignorance about what happens when our currently understood model of everything breaks down at the centre of a black hole. It is more the results of calculations widely suspected to be inadequate than anything predicted to be real. I believe this is quite close to the usage fo this term by Kurzweil et al. Singularity covers for how we loose the ability to make meaningful predictions with our current predictive methods.
Show me a current credentialed and respected AI researcher who is or has reccently been actively publishing peer reviewed literature, who thinks Kurweil is a crackpot.
They'd call him an optimist, sure, but admit the numbers are a good estimate. This kind of debate gets a bit silly, like climate science. I'd only respect the opinion who's actively researching in the field.
IANMOFWF (I am not much of a whisky afficcionado) but I was worried for a minute there. The headline is misleading. They are turning byproducts of the whisky making process into biofuel and not the whisky itself, which would be a travesty indeed.
Me too. Developers are not good designers, designers are not good developers. While there is always the exception to the rule, generally as a developer you so intimately understand how your creation works and is supposed to, you really cannot consider the position of someone who has never seen your product before and has to decode how it works and what it is capable without reading the source code and only what information you choose to present.
Thus we reveal the importance of good industrial design, and the need to keep designers and engineers at arms length, to do what each does well. This is why Apple won't die and this is also why this will not be the year of desktop linux any decade soon without a paradigm shift in thinking.
Symptoms are a match for a Sick Building Syndrome, one cause is believed to be nasties growing in air conditioning or in damp-exposed building materials, and general poor indoor air quality.
OFTOMH around 25% of individuals are genetically pre-disposed to be sensitive to mold, provoking asthma and other immune disorders. Something in this school is provoking these reactions in these kids, first guess should be air quality.
At risk of being redundant others have pointed out here symptoms are also a match for stress and anxiety. So we're probably looking at a basket of different causes for physiological symptoms at school.
All these things have a scientifically valid basis and a are pretty demonstrable out in the real world, whereas Wi-Fi electro-sensitivity does not.
their encouragement being the electromagnetic force in the railgun which propelled you forward
Geekier words were never spoken.. well Lorentz effect would have been geekier ...
Is there actually still a pig under that large blob of lipstick?
Stacks 2,3,4 or more layers deep you are talking about nanometers deep. Now I'm not sure what the thermal conductivity of a chip is, but that is a very short distance for heat to conduct through. I really don't see how there could be too much of a problem conducting the heat out of lower layers.
Of course the issue is the power density, watts per square cm, goes way up as you start stacking. The problem is not in the chip so much, but in the cooling attached to it. Although I think heatpipe technology has the chops to deal with it here.
... I really think that money would be better spent helping all of you coders out there in creating a language/compiler programing paradigm that can use 12 threads efficiently for something beyond rendering GTA.
The entirety of programming is we know it is stuck in a single threaded paradigm and making the shift to massively parallel computing requires a huge shift in thinking.
This is so hard because our technique, languages and compilers all have their roots in a world that barely even multi-tasked let alone considered doing anything in parallel for performance.
Every coder that ever learnt to code, coded for kicks or money, learnt this way, and they still do.
We've come all this way without ever having to think in parallel. I stopped developing in 2003, having never had to really consider parallelism.
Even in 2010, as kids today start learning programming linearly still, and you go a long way before having to consider a second thread.
I think calling it a whole new paradigm is not doing the change required justice. It's about re-learning and re-thinking everything.
Frankly every day I think it's a fucking miracle that software as a whole performs as well as it does, and that our civilizations infrastructure can be use this technology, and that Moore's law hasn't stopped it's inexorable march yet.
It all works result of a brute force of millions of smart people problem solving line by line, getting it to compile, run and work without crashing too often. Software development now sees teams of hundreds of developers, open source projects can have thousands. One should be forgiven for thinking programming itself hasn't improved terrifically. Advances in software are still largely coming with throwing human resources at problems.
Clearly then, the deficiencies are in software, not hardware.
I won't shed a tear when Intel can no longer make progress with it's enormous investment in producing silicon based chips, and may have to consider graphene et al. But it's far from the end of the story. Silicon is only one element on the periodic table after all.
If your hunting and camping you absolutely DO NOT want to be using a aging recycled Android phone with map software. These gadgets are part fragile designer fashion accessories for meterosexuals and part built-to-a-price planned obsolence. They are not intended for use too far from civilization, or for anything more wild and treacherous than a shirt pocket. Add to that they really don't go more than a day without charge and will run themselves flat trying to find a cell signal.
Your life could depend on your GPS, so it's wise to fork out for something suited to the task.
That said I've used a aging HTC Magic (G2) for exactly this, because I had it, and I didn't really have a need for a full blown GPS unit yet. I tend to stick to a old school paper topographic map.
I use it more for driving, where it can charge of a 12VDC->USB adapter. It works very well in this instance and there is a pre-pay sim with some credit should I need it.
Although talking about moving the entire ISS, not part of it.
http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/07/15/1852231.shtml
I'm trying to find a link to the study that showed homoexual men have more partners and less long term relationships.
You sure you were in high school in the 90s? :) I recall floppy disks and later CD-Rs were traded abundantly amongst gamers. I'd guess that was common in most schools? The difference was, back then you could fit about 20-30 full version games on a CD-R.
Interestingly, there was no copy protection back then, everyone had a collection of pirated games, and the industry was still under going crazy growth.
He missed the BFG 9000! Along with many other landmark innovations in Doom that set the benchmark for FPSes ever since.
Winds me up as much as noobs who think film started with Tarantino.
I suspect regional bias in data. In New Zealand we pay equivelent of $4.50-5.00* per gallon of petrol (what 'gasoline' is properly called everywhere outside United States)... re-run the numbers and suddenly all those hybrids are well worth while. We have cheaper running costs than Japan and most of Europe.
(*Yet we choose cars and drive them like juice is cheap and then complain at the pump.)