Yeah, but you have to spend all that time learning (shudder) calculus... and for what? So you can solve the problem efficiently and in a way which explicitly makes use of structure in the problem statement, instead of ZOMG TEH MAGIC GENETIC BLINDWATCHMAKER DARWIN C0DE?!
Like seriously, why would anyone learn all that hard math just so they can make their project sound less 'leet? I mean which of these sounds more badass: "genetic programming" or "regularized energy minimization"?
fMRI doesn't require radioactive tracers; it differentiates between oxygenated and non-oxygenated hemoglobin by putting you in an external magnetic field. Oxygenated hemoglobin resists the field (diamagnetic), while non-oxygen carrying will line up like "normal" (paramagnetic). Although there are reports of this causing effects of sensation, no lasting effects have been shown after a lot of trials.
fMRI is a small miracle of technology, and extremely safe unless of course you have an implant or piercing.
This is all neither here nor there; we could certainly make more logical choices than we are now, even without full neurological understanding. (Although yes, it'd be a worthwhile avenue for continued research.) I mean, what would you do now about alcohol and cigarettes? You either ban them completely until we have an Exhaustive Neurological Catalogue of Effects, which seems to be a non-starter; or, we keep the current system which as you point out is illogical; or we would liberalize those drugs which we currently believe to have a harm-profile similar to alcohol and tobacco (i.e., cannabis).
Maybe the correct comparison isn't to moonshiners (who are after all providing no service but tax-dodging), but microbreweries which today are plentiful in number and variety. Hell, sometimes it seems that I know more people who are homebrewing beer and wine, than aren't. Although tellingly, very few of them consider it economically wise; they do it for the love of the craft and/or epicurean pursuits.
`I... started sawing back and forth. But I didn't even break the skin. I couldn't even cut the hair off of my arm, the knife was so dull.'
Wednesday he punctured the skin but realized he couldn't cut through the bone... Ralston realized he would have to break his arm.
`I was able to first snap the radius and then within a few minutes snap the ulna at the wrist and from there I had the knife out and applied the tourniquet and went to task. It was a process that took about an hour.'
Yes, we don't need it, but this doesn't mean that we can't get a little bit of a kick by doing it occasionally. Your argument isn't entirely satisfying in this respect.
I think what's best is a "radical" alternative: completely ban government from active interventions, but establish a reasonable system whereby (possibly after a nascent period of 5 or 10 years for new technology) an open definition has to be hashed out, generating competition on implementations instead of obfuscation.
I think the antitrust trial against Microsoft was ridiculous. I also think it's ridiculous that a private company literally gets to effectively define (and at the same time obfuscate) what a text document is. The public can agree that a text document is ODF, and Microsoft can compete like everyone else on the interface to that format. Don't tell me that "government shouldn't intervene" in this, as it already does in a grossly asymmetric way: Microsoft has over 5000 patents (read: state-enforced monopolies).
Likewise, let's not try to enforce net neutrality, but instead define the internet as what it is now. A company can then try to optimize by trimming-down and redistributing costs, but they wouldn't be allowed to call their product "internet service", because it isn't. (AOL effectively did this, and still does for a niche.)
If the recycler had to recompensate the buyer for the loss (when the law enforcement recovers an equivalent mass of copper), they would not be so hasty to buy stolen copper. This assumes that they can tell the difference but usually don't bother; even if they didn't, seller records would teach them pretty fast who was a crook and who wasn't.
For someone ready to face this fact, Christopher Bishop's _Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition_ is a nice read, and Hastie/Tibshirani's _Elements of Statistical Learning_ is a modern classic.
Bishop also has a newer more accessible book called _Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning_. I haven't read it, but it looks a bit like Duda/Hart's book.
Another genius of computer science, Knuth, put it well: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." I think applying this to human beings is a good principle to live by.
Look at it from the luser's (ok, neophyte's) point of view. For loops require effort X to write; if statements take X/10. If the array is smaller than 10, then sure why not use if statements? Well, if you don't ever get the "difficult coefficient" on for loops down, you'll never be any good. But better to churn out shitty if-statement code, than nothing, if the rest works.
It's happening to me right now; I have an optimization problem which came up unexpectedly (the space is just a little too rough for my naive stochastic sampler, and I have to seed it at the optimum). I have to be done by tomorrow morning. The right solution is dynamic programming, but it'd take too much effort. The shittiest solution is prepackaged non-gradient simplex-method, which is just too slow. So what I'm going to do with my skillset is re-derive the problem to be soluble with iterative re-weighted least squares, and throw the quadratic optimizer at it a few times. A nice compromise.
What is the difference between my situation and the if/for guy's? Absolutely nothing in a way - settling for a "less than perfect" solution is a (learnable!) skill in-and-of-itself; orthogonal and complementary to whatever subject-specific mastery and expertise you may (or may not) possess.
I suppose one could model the arrival of a Nazi comparison as some kind of Poisson process and then do various statistical diagnostics for overdispersion; stationarity; explanatory variables; &c. My point is that for Godwin to approach the status of a "law" to me, would require some sort of model beyond "almost surely happens".
I still have trouble calling it a law; similarly with the biological sciences. They're not "laws", they are facts, tendencies and "principles" albeit highly effective ones which you can often generalize when they are not effective.
Maybe, but at the very least you have to spend very long hours tolerating or even "collaborating with" arrogant jerks, many of whom are not more intelligent than you, but more attuned to the pandering and self-promotion game.
Don't tell me that the "real world" is the same; I've been there too. Over all the atmosphere was much more tolerant; my co-workers were much more honest; and we nonetheless still got work done. I agree with William Buckley on one thing: "Academia is so cutthroat because the stakes are so small."
It's not a scientific law either. It cannot be falsified, since it would require an infinitely long thread which does not mention Nazis as a comparison.
No, you're not the only one. I enjoyed the hell out of it, cheezy soundtrack and all (I've never played the original game, so I don't know if that's intentional or not). I'm an ex-vegan; I think I'd have enjoyed it even when I was one.
I don't know if this game really helps their "mission"; maybe if you've not been exposed to their leaflets yet and you actually watch the videos/"bonuses" it has a different effect.
Thank you for your concise explanation. This thing is wasteful hogwash just from a thermodynamic viewpoint. I hadn't even thought of non-microbial contaminants.
Uhh... am I missing something, or is it just a dehumidifer with a UV light (and maybe some antimicrobial plastic)? Here's a hint: if you are so desperate for water as to need this, there's probably very little moisture in the air anyway.
The target market for this is the ecologically-posturing super-yuppie who doesn't like bottled water but wouldn't be caught dead using (horrors!) water from the plebeian tap.
I considered that myself. I'm not sure myself whether the intent of the message was to troll, since I've known a few people who kept themselves going in dark times by similar methods. At any rate it wasn't a successful troll:
A successful troll invokes not just a reply, but an irrational and emotional one indicating a "wound". This is not the case here.
Keep in mind, that psychosis tends to diminish your effective mental ability. If you actually want to keep your job and perform well, the first thing you'd do is try to drop this irrational suicide-complex. (After that, you might want to consider that you don't actually care that much about your performance, and that you are living an act of collectivist desperation.)
Something you might want to consider is that you are engaging in the oldest and most inefficient form of collectivism: self-debasement to a figure of power, wrapped up in a mystical sheath of righteousness and "power".
Get psychological help while you're still drawing breath and a salary.
Less than 5% of all mathematics is done by mathematicians. (Although very strong opinions exist about how important that 5% is, relative to the rest...;-) "Mathematics" these days doesn't just mean "novel abstract results"; even getting a job on Wall Street can involve Ph.D.-level knowledge (though not necessarily Ph.D.-level depth...).
Physicists love mma, whether you want to look at that as a crutch, or a tool (but keep in mind, before mma, it was a worn copy of Gradshtein and Ryzhik... not everyone is a Feynman)
I do some work on inverse problems and signal processing in my spare time; it's definitely not science, but I'd say it's math, even though no Mathematician would ever sully themselves by touching it (in public at least). In this capacity, I would love to try out their new image-filtering stuff, and compare it against matlab (and open source C libraries, and R, and...) in terms of user interface; expressive depth; algorithmic efficiency; &c. The $2500 price tag is more than a bit off-putting though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but you have to spend all that time learning (shudder) calculus... and for what? So you can solve the problem efficiently and in a way which explicitly makes use of structure in the problem statement, instead of ZOMG TEH MAGIC GENETIC BLINDWATCHMAKER DARWIN C0DE?!
Like seriously, why would anyone learn all that hard math just so they can make their project sound less 'leet? I mean which of these sounds more badass: "genetic programming" or "regularized energy minimization"?
Oh, they've solved that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-cigarette
No second-hand smoke; safer for the user as well; and it'd work just the same to replace marijuana.
fMRI doesn't require radioactive tracers; it differentiates between oxygenated and non-oxygenated hemoglobin by putting you in an external magnetic field. Oxygenated hemoglobin resists the field (diamagnetic), while non-oxygen carrying will line up like "normal" (paramagnetic). Although there are reports of this causing effects of sensation, no lasting effects have been shown after a lot of trials.
fMRI is a small miracle of technology, and extremely safe unless of course you have an implant or piercing.
This is all neither here nor there; we could certainly make more logical choices than we are now, even without full neurological understanding. (Although yes, it'd be a worthwhile avenue for continued research.) I mean, what would you do now about alcohol and cigarettes? You either ban them completely until we have an Exhaustive Neurological Catalogue of Effects, which seems to be a non-starter; or, we keep the current system which as you point out is illogical; or we would liberalize those drugs which we currently believe to have a harm-profile similar to alcohol and tobacco (i.e., cannabis).
Maybe the correct comparison isn't to moonshiners (who are after all providing no service but tax-dodging), but microbreweries which today are plentiful in number and variety. Hell, sometimes it seems that I know more people who are homebrewing beer and wine, than aren't. Although tellingly, very few of them consider it economically wise; they do it for the love of the craft and/or epicurean pursuits.
It's also the only option available. In any industry.
This is a good clip about it; Harlan Ellison discusses the science fiction scene and L. Ron in particular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9AGVARpqdk
That occurred to me too; but if so, then it's equally impressive as a scam:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/08/0830_040830_aronralston.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/04/04/cnn25.tan.ralston/index.html
http://www.cmu.edu/magazine/03fall/aralston.html
Maybe it was once true, and they kept the ban under the same auspices mostly for confidentiality and sanity.
http://www.thehardway.com/stories/survival.htm
Yes, we don't need it, but this doesn't mean that we can't get a little bit of a kick by doing it occasionally. Your argument isn't entirely satisfying in this respect.
I think what's best is a "radical" alternative: completely ban government from active interventions, but establish a reasonable system whereby (possibly after a nascent period of 5 or 10 years for new technology) an open definition has to be hashed out, generating competition on implementations instead of obfuscation.
I think the antitrust trial against Microsoft was ridiculous. I also think it's ridiculous that a private company literally gets to effectively define (and at the same time obfuscate) what a text document is. The public can agree that a text document is ODF, and Microsoft can compete like everyone else on the interface to that format. Don't tell me that "government shouldn't intervene" in this, as it already does in a grossly asymmetric way: Microsoft has over 5000 patents (read: state-enforced monopolies).
Likewise, let's not try to enforce net neutrality, but instead define the internet as what it is now. A company can then try to optimize by trimming-down and redistributing costs, but they wouldn't be allowed to call their product "internet service", because it isn't. (AOL effectively did this, and still does for a niche.)
If the recycler had to recompensate the buyer for the loss (when the law enforcement recovers an equivalent mass of copper), they would not be so hasty to buy stolen copper. This assumes that they can tell the difference but usually don't bother; even if they didn't, seller records would teach them pretty fast who was a crook and who wasn't.
I have read that book, and implemented/hacked with AVIDA-type stuff.
I think it's even more off-topic than it sounds, even if artificial life is neato-keen (but generally useless).
Too true.
For someone ready to face this fact, Christopher Bishop's _Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition_ is a nice read, and Hastie/Tibshirani's _Elements of Statistical Learning_ is a modern classic.
Bishop also has a newer more accessible book called _Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning_. I haven't read it, but it looks a bit like Duda/Hart's book.
Another genius of computer science, Knuth, put it well: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." I think applying this to human beings is a good principle to live by.
Look at it from the luser's (ok, neophyte's) point of view. For loops require effort X to write; if statements take X/10. If the array is smaller than 10, then sure why not use if statements? Well, if you don't ever get the "difficult coefficient" on for loops down, you'll never be any good. But better to churn out shitty if-statement code, than nothing, if the rest works.
It's happening to me right now; I have an optimization problem which came up unexpectedly (the space is just a little too rough for my naive stochastic sampler, and I have to seed it at the optimum). I have to be done by tomorrow morning. The right solution is dynamic programming, but it'd take too much effort. The shittiest solution is prepackaged non-gradient simplex-method, which is just too slow. So what I'm going to do with my skillset is re-derive the problem to be soluble with iterative re-weighted least squares, and throw the quadratic optimizer at it a few times. A nice compromise.
What is the difference between my situation and the if/for guy's? Absolutely nothing in a way - settling for a "less than perfect" solution is a (learnable!) skill in-and-of-itself; orthogonal and complementary to whatever subject-specific mastery and expertise you may (or may not) possess.
Now to go derive my reweighting scheme. Yipes!
I suppose one could model the arrival of a Nazi comparison as some kind of Poisson process and then do various statistical diagnostics for overdispersion; stationarity; explanatory variables; &c. My point is that for Godwin to approach the status of a "law" to me, would require some sort of model beyond "almost surely happens".
I still have trouble calling it a law; similarly with the biological sciences. They're not "laws", they are facts, tendencies and "principles" albeit highly effective ones which you can often generalize when they are not effective.
Maybe, but at the very least you have to spend very long hours tolerating or even "collaborating with" arrogant jerks, many of whom are not more intelligent than you, but more attuned to the pandering and self-promotion game.
Don't tell me that the "real world" is the same; I've been there too. Over all the atmosphere was much more tolerant; my co-workers were much more honest; and we nonetheless still got work done. I agree with William Buckley on one thing: "Academia is so cutthroat because the stakes are so small."
It's not a scientific law either. It cannot be falsified, since it would require an infinitely long thread which does not mention Nazis as a comparison.
It don't know — did anyone read Swift, who had earlier in their life raised a child for food?
No, you're not the only one. I enjoyed the hell out of it, cheezy soundtrack and all (I've never played the original game, so I don't know if that's intentional or not). I'm an ex-vegan; I think I'd have enjoyed it even when I was one.
I don't know if this game really helps their "mission"; maybe if you've not been exposed to their leaflets yet and you actually watch the videos/"bonuses" it has a different effect.
Thank you for your concise explanation. This thing is wasteful hogwash just from a thermodynamic viewpoint. I hadn't even thought of non-microbial contaminants.
Uhh... am I missing something, or is it just a dehumidifer with a UV light (and maybe some antimicrobial plastic)? Here's a hint: if you are so desperate for water as to need this, there's probably very little moisture in the air anyway.
The target market for this is the ecologically-posturing super-yuppie who doesn't like bottled water but wouldn't be caught dead using (horrors!) water from the plebeian tap.
I considered that myself. I'm not sure myself whether the intent of the message was to troll, since I've known a few people who kept themselves going in dark times by similar methods. At any rate it wasn't a successful troll:
A successful troll invokes not just a reply, but an irrational and emotional one indicating a "wound". This is not the case here.
Keep in mind, that psychosis tends to diminish your effective mental ability. If you actually want to keep your job and perform well, the first thing you'd do is try to drop this irrational suicide-complex. (After that, you might want to consider that you don't actually care that much about your performance, and that you are living an act of collectivist desperation.)
Something you might want to consider is that you are engaging in the oldest and most inefficient form of collectivism: self-debasement to a figure of power, wrapped up in a mystical sheath of righteousness and "power".
Get psychological help while you're still drawing breath and a salary.
Less than 5% of all mathematics is done by mathematicians. (Although very strong opinions exist about how important that 5% is, relative to the rest... ;-) "Mathematics" these days doesn't just mean "novel abstract results"; even getting a job on Wall Street can involve Ph.D.-level knowledge (though not necessarily Ph.D.-level depth...).
Physicists love mma, whether you want to look at that as a crutch, or a tool (but keep in mind, before mma, it was a worn copy of Gradshtein and Ryzhik... not everyone is a Feynman)
I do some work on inverse problems and signal processing in my spare time; it's definitely not science, but I'd say it's math, even though no Mathematician would ever sully themselves by touching it (in public at least). In this capacity, I would love to try out their new image-filtering stuff, and compare it against matlab (and open source C libraries, and R, and ...) in terms of user interface; expressive depth; algorithmic efficiency; &c. The $2500 price tag is more than a bit off-putting though.
Didn't you mean Führer?