The following three posts were brought to you by the Society for Socratic Dialogues. When there's a social issue, and it's contentious, and Slashdot users know about it, there's always some series of comments that exactly encapsulates the conflicting zeitgeists. For those of you just joining us, unaware of why people are so concerned about the gender balance in open source, or of what issues face women trying to enter the community, please read the above comment to get a handle on the situation, then go read TFA (if you haven't, like any true Slashdotter) just in case it suggests anything worth noting.
That's actually a symptom of the situation, not evidence of a fundamental difference. There are men for whom programming is just business as well; back in the seventies they were called data processors and fancied themselves big-wig business guys who just happened to program. Just try to leave out that population in your mental model and you'll see the core disparity: the common programmer story (you'll need to scroll down a bit) that led to the love in the first place.
Slowly this is improving (I got lucky, my parents were very liberal) and other die-hard programmers of both sexes whom I've known all attribute it to a childhood environment that promoted a love of computers and science. There's a large drag coefficient on Rosie the Riveter (and her descendants) simply because of cultural inertia.
There are plenty of men like that too, you might discover. The word you're looking for is "careerism." It's what you get when someone with few true intellectual loves in life discovers they have a talent for a given occupation (especially in the sciences or other white-collar work) at a later age, such as while they're entering college. When you discount careerists on both sides of the fence, you'll find the bared truth that cultural momentum from old stereotypes about gender roles is still responsible. We don't teach it formally any more, but it's still in the media and how older people expect younger people to act, and that's still creating substantial drag. Give it time, keep pushing, and you'll see the balance get asymptotically closer to egalitarian, permitting flex room for the unknowable portion of both men and women who are drawn towards other interests for all other imaginable reasons.
One: if our sun is part of some giant cosmic organism built out of stars, then its speed of operation must be on the scale of many years, or based on something outside of our observable physical universe that we'll probably never observe (i.e., you're making an unfalsifiable claim, like God.) Also, given that there are so many stars, it's not probable we're interfering with a very important part of it—there are billions of neurons in the human brain, after all, and many more stars in the heavens; there are hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy alone.
Two: if there is some incredibly advanced pure-energy-being civilization that uses stars or some element of our solar system somehow as a component of their... I dunno, crazy soul-jumping coffee shop, they'd obviously have the power to just avoid us. The worst possible crime we could have committed is equivalent to bombing a Starbucks.
Three: Earth-style biochemical life could not have arisen much earlier than it did on Earth because of a shortage of heavy-element-producing stars. Biological life demonstrably needs a great deal of carbon, a large host of transition metals, and at least half of the non-metals. No biochemical life could have arisen in the universe more than a billion or two billion years before us.
Four: as any astrobiologist will tell you, Earth-style biochemical life (yes, with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and all the rest) has a very high chance of arising in our universe because of how abundant those elements are and the ways in which they bond with each other. Chemistry is, furthermore, much more capable of remaining stable for a long period of time relative to the rate at which it can go through changes, making it ideal for complex patterns. Electrical and magnetic fields are constantly and dynamically changing (and often relatively short-lived), the hearts of stars are too uniform, and black holes have nothing going on in them whatsoever. Evolution requires traversable obstacles, and nothing else, that we know of, can provide them (except this one really boring example involving clay formations, which in itself is an interesting lesson in insufficiency.)
If there is something out there that has had enough time to go its merry way and transgress the technological singularity as you suggest, the only possible interest to them that we could ever be is a window into their unbelievably ancient past. If they ever let us become aware of their existence, then it will only be because we've caught up with them—but how could we ever do that if they've got such a long head start? Quite simply, unless they reach the ends of invention (which would require using up all of the resources in the universe in a not-so-subtle way because of the Halting problem), we can't. What you have produced, my friend, is another unfalsifiable hypothesis: it doesn't matter if they're out there, and it never will.
I fully believe that humanity will march forward into immortality eventually, however, and that there are other forms of life out there. As has been said: if there aren't, it's an awful big waste of space.
I actually did mean like observing it... there may be beings out there that depend on being able to be in multiple states... and by observing them we limit them to a single state.
Of course, it's more likely they're like the Dr. Who Angels:D
Which is to say both "completely implausible and illogical" and "we wouldn't want to meet them anyway." Regular ol' biochemical life like what we have most likely has a much higher chance of forming than anything not like us. There are a lot of cards stacked in our favour!
No, but you can patent misleading and irrelevant headlines! Did you know Google is going to patent having employees named "Martin Luther King", soon? What about customers with the same name? No? Slashdot can fix that!
Honestly, I'm surprised that there are still US bills that aren't like this yet. Don't your soldiers scream "FOR THE EMPRAH" already when they go into battle?
So all of those very specific claims about rogue planets destroying Earth are actually about public opinion being heard? Those false prophets sure do love to exaggerate things.
Re:Internet wins...
on
House Kills SOPA
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I may disagree with you 95% of the time (or more; who knows!), but if what you say is remotely true (and I have no reason to doubt that), then today I think we are all thankful for what has happened.
Yeah, I'm a bioinformatician too, not really a biologist, but I figured I should keep it obvious for my signature.:) And yeah, you raise a very good point about de novo techniques; velvet will go as short as 5 bp when it wants to really get something done, as I recall.
As I said in my journal, I think the gains from the Ion Torrent read length vs. the SOLiD read length (about 10x) don't do as much to probe the depths of repetitive regions as is necessary to be super-useful. Most of what's lost can be made up for with increased coverage. (Insert theoretical and inauthentic-sounding statement about combinatorial magnitude here.) Of course, it only takes one example of two genes a few hundred bp apart with a couple of SINEs in the middle to prove me wrong.:)
Sorry, yes; reading that comment again I have no idea why I would put up poor Carl to such a survivalist perspective. I think I was focusing on the bit about technology disparity, to the exclusion of the rest of Janek's post.
That being said, though, in addition to habitable space as Chemisor has said, intelligent labour is always a pretty popular resource. I mean, who doesn't want an ugly clumsy biped with only two workable clumsy manipulators as a slave?
Yeah, the scaling there isn't exactly an up-hill problem. (In fact, I knew about those plans before I posted.) Still, I'm a little unsure about how good that read length will be at capturing the big picture. It's not going to be exactly suitable for running de novo on mammals.
As for the homepage, it should be back up, and I'm planning on moving it to a colo within a week or two (primarily because I'm sick of the reverse VPN dying repeatedly.)
Slashdot Mirror
The following three posts were brought to you by the Society for Socratic Dialogues. When there's a social issue, and it's contentious, and Slashdot users know about it, there's always some series of comments that exactly encapsulates the conflicting zeitgeists. For those of you just joining us, unaware of why people are so concerned about the gender balance in open source, or of what issues face women trying to enter the community, please read the above comment to get a handle on the situation, then go read TFA (if you haven't, like any true Slashdotter) just in case it suggests anything worth noting.
That's actually a symptom of the situation, not evidence of a fundamental difference. There are men for whom programming is just business as well; back in the seventies they were called data processors and fancied themselves big-wig business guys who just happened to program. Just try to leave out that population in your mental model and you'll see the core disparity: the common programmer story (you'll need to scroll down a bit) that led to the love in the first place.
Slowly this is improving (I got lucky, my parents were very liberal) and other die-hard programmers of both sexes whom I've known all attribute it to a childhood environment that promoted a love of computers and science. There's a large drag coefficient on Rosie the Riveter (and her descendants) simply because of cultural inertia.
I think you've mixed Slashdot up with /b/—which, incidentally, has a better gender balance than this place.
There are plenty of men like that too, you might discover. The word you're looking for is "careerism." It's what you get when someone with few true intellectual loves in life discovers they have a talent for a given occupation (especially in the sciences or other white-collar work) at a later age, such as while they're entering college. When you discount careerists on both sides of the fence, you'll find the bared truth that cultural momentum from old stereotypes about gender roles is still responsible. We don't teach it formally any more, but it's still in the media and how older people expect younger people to act, and that's still creating substantial drag. Give it time, keep pushing, and you'll see the balance get asymptotically closer to egalitarian, permitting flex room for the unknowable portion of both men and women who are drawn towards other interests for all other imaginable reasons.
Ha! I have some things to catch you with here.
One: if our sun is part of some giant cosmic organism built out of stars, then its speed of operation must be on the scale of many years, or based on something outside of our observable physical universe that we'll probably never observe (i.e., you're making an unfalsifiable claim, like God.) Also, given that there are so many stars, it's not probable we're interfering with a very important part of it—there are billions of neurons in the human brain, after all, and many more stars in the heavens; there are hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy alone.
Two: if there is some incredibly advanced pure-energy-being civilization that uses stars or some element of our solar system somehow as a component of their... I dunno, crazy soul-jumping coffee shop, they'd obviously have the power to just avoid us. The worst possible crime we could have committed is equivalent to bombing a Starbucks.
Three: Earth-style biochemical life could not have arisen much earlier than it did on Earth because of a shortage of heavy-element-producing stars. Biological life demonstrably needs a great deal of carbon, a large host of transition metals, and at least half of the non-metals. No biochemical life could have arisen in the universe more than a billion or two billion years before us.
Four: as any astrobiologist will tell you, Earth-style biochemical life (yes, with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and all the rest) has a very high chance of arising in our universe because of how abundant those elements are and the ways in which they bond with each other. Chemistry is, furthermore, much more capable of remaining stable for a long period of time relative to the rate at which it can go through changes, making it ideal for complex patterns. Electrical and magnetic fields are constantly and dynamically changing (and often relatively short-lived), the hearts of stars are too uniform, and black holes have nothing going on in them whatsoever. Evolution requires traversable obstacles, and nothing else, that we know of, can provide them (except this one really boring example involving clay formations, which in itself is an interesting lesson in insufficiency.)
If there is something out there that has had enough time to go its merry way and transgress the technological singularity as you suggest, the only possible interest to them that we could ever be is a window into their unbelievably ancient past. If they ever let us become aware of their existence, then it will only be because we've caught up with them—but how could we ever do that if they've got such a long head start? Quite simply, unless they reach the ends of invention (which would require using up all of the resources in the universe in a not-so-subtle way because of the Halting problem), we can't. What you have produced, my friend, is another unfalsifiable hypothesis: it doesn't matter if they're out there, and it never will.
I fully believe that humanity will march forward into immortality eventually, however, and that there are other forms of life out there. As has been said: if there aren't, it's an awful big waste of space.
I actually did mean like observing it... there may be beings out there that depend on being able to be in multiple states... and by observing them we limit them to a single state.
Of course, it's more likely they're like the Dr. Who Angels :D
Which is to say both "completely implausible and illogical" and "we wouldn't want to meet them anyway." Regular ol' biochemical life like what we have most likely has a much higher chance of forming than anything not like us. There are a lot of cards stacked in our favour!
You tell that to them there terrists.
No, but you can patent misleading and irrelevant headlines! Did you know Google is going to patent having employees named "Martin Luther King", soon? What about customers with the same name? No? Slashdot can fix that!
Ironically, most software developers that I've met have more professional integrity than that. (Obviously more than can be said for most politicians.)
That's not an anagram. But these are!
Honestly, I'm surprised that there are still US bills that aren't like this yet. Don't your soldiers scream "FOR THE EMPRAH" already when they go into battle?
So all of those very specific claims about rogue planets destroying Earth are actually about public opinion being heard? Those false prophets sure do love to exaggerate things.
I may disagree with you 95% of the time (or more; who knows!), but if what you say is remotely true (and I have no reason to doubt that), then today I think we are all thankful for what has happened.
Glad I could help. :)
Yeah, I'm a bioinformatician too, not really a biologist, but I figured I should keep it obvious for my signature. :) And yeah, you raise a very good point about de novo techniques; velvet will go as short as 5 bp when it wants to really get something done, as I recall.
You know a joke is obvious when you get to the comments section only to discover three people have already made it. Alas!
Unrelatedly, TED has a lot to say on the topic of ageing, much of it accessible. The general gist seems to be "as long as food is plentiful, it's in our best interest to reproduce fast and die young, so eating conservatively makes our bodies think they need to survive longer."
That one's a keeper. :)
A related quip is that MCSE stands for "Minesweeper Champion, Solitaire Expert".
As I said in my journal, I think the gains from the Ion Torrent read length vs. the SOLiD read length (about 10x) don't do as much to probe the depths of repetitive regions as is necessary to be super-useful. Most of what's lost can be made up for with increased coverage. (Insert theoretical and inauthentic-sounding statement about combinatorial magnitude here.) Of course, it only takes one example of two genes a few hundred bp apart with a couple of SINEs in the middle to prove me wrong. :)
Au contraire; that tactic doesn't exactly yield a coherent supply of intelligent conversation.
Sorry, yes; reading that comment again I have no idea why I would put up poor Carl to such a survivalist perspective. I think I was focusing on the bit about technology disparity, to the exclusion of the rest of Janek's post.
That being said, though, in addition to habitable space as Chemisor has said, intelligent labour is always a pretty popular resource. I mean, who doesn't want an ugly clumsy biped with only two workable clumsy manipulators as a slave?
Yeah, the scaling there isn't exactly an up-hill problem. (In fact, I knew about those plans before I posted.) Still, I'm a little unsure about how good that read length will be at capturing the big picture. It's not going to be exactly suitable for running de novo on mammals.
Close enough.
'fraid so—wasn't active then. Although the second one mentions Reshma; I'm pretty sure I've e-mailed her before, if that lends any credibility. :)
...then again, you probably already knew half of that. It is such a pain to keep track of who knows what in this place!
I'd like to think so.
As for the homepage, it should be back up, and I'm planning on moving it to a colo within a week or two (primarily because I'm sick of the reverse VPN dying repeatedly.)