The psychologist Gag Halfrunt was established as being responsible for ordering the destruction of Earth in the radio series, which was broadcast in 1978; Battlefield Earth wasn't published until 1982. Scepticism of psychology was quite popular at the time because of the misuse of Behaviorism, and the tendency of such misuses to foster the kind of dysfunction normally only found in supremely awful bureaucracies.
It's another UI prototype about paper-thin hardware; in this case it bends when you touch it. It's not a finished product, though. "Prototypes" in this case means "we wired up a piece of cardboard and a projector to simulate what we think this one day might be like, maybe, just so we could explore interface design questions."
For the past several years HCI research has been pursuing various paper-thin interactions (another example, from my alma mater.) As a general rule they're very novel and creative ideas, but as far as I can tell there isn't a soul on the planet who would actually want to try and use such a horrible pseudo-skeumorphic mess. Paper's just too thin and delicate to use as a UI device.
But don't be too hard on the summary: they managed to avoid scarring your eyes forever with the prototypes' actual name, which is so horrible you'd think it was invented to market toys to six-year-olds.
Well, it's a coinage that's over a century old. (I found a 1908 paper that... ironically, debunks a long list of suspected cases of naturally-occurring luminous plants.) If you want something else to predict they'll get upset about, I highly recommend reading through here.
Different luciferins can produce a fairly wide spectrum in the wild, though, and now that I look it up, fireflies (which I was foolishly thinking of) can be anything from 550 nm to 620 nm, which is well within the yellowish area that typical chlorophyll won't absorb at all. I'm not exactly sure where in the spectrum the other kinds of luciferin fall, but anything below 480 nm (cyan) should at least react. Definitely discovering my plant biology is rustier than I thought.
Yes indeed. In fact it might actually screw the plants up and cause them to think it's daytime. Personally, I think it would be a better prospect to do this in a fungus. Some of them already glow a little.
Problem number one is that we're not merely electrical. Outside of the brain (and maybe spine?) all synapses (neuron junctions) require the transit of chemicals—neurotransmitters like acetylcholine and norepinephrine—to fire. Getting artificial skin to send sensory data in this way would be very tricky work, as these chemicals are released in very small quantities into very tiny enclosed cavities, and then re-absorbed so they can be reused.
Two, even if this has superior pressure resolution, consider that human skin has many different kinds of sensors in it (all of which have incompatible and different nerve types.) We have fine- and coarse-grained sensory resolution, we can detect certain forms of vibration, we can detect temperature change, and we can detect injury. Losing that would be a big disadvantage.
Three, it would be distracting. Having a coarse-grained sensory input that is higher-priority than fine-grained input makes it easier to ignore sensations until they are relevant. Many small, equally-weighted pressure sensors don't provide that opportunity.
Four, it can't heal or adjust to temperatures. Yet, anyway.
And five, yes, there's a limited amount of space to plug it in. The body has no way of multiplexing signals, so any time two sensory nerves feed into a single channel, the data is combined and you can't tell where the input came from. In order to maintain the resolution we have, our bodies have one wire for every sensory receptor, all the way up to the brain, unless we're combining inputs. To add new skin with different inputs, you'd need to rewire all of this and then figure out where to plug it in at the brain so it can be processed properly.
All in all, I'd file it in the "50-60 years" drawer.
Erk... as someone who's at least cursorily looked at genes related to intelligence, let me tidy that up for you.
Human intelligence depends on a lot of very strange mutations that are unique to humans. We know with certainty that these mutations happened very recently because all of the other animals have very similar genes in the same area. For the functionality to have been lost, it would have had to disappear every time we split from another animal, and vanish in the exact same way. Before you know it you've slit your own wrists with Occam's razor.
The protein product of the gene in question, TRNP1, determines how much and how quickly neural stem cells replicate. In the human brain, we have an unusual quirk that says they need to replicate excessively, which causes the final brain tissue to bunch up into its distinctive fold patterns. The brain's weird structure is just the product of stuffing it into too small a place. There are definitely other genes involved in exploiting this unusual shape, however, (like HAR1) so it's not the whole story.
Oh, no, I do—religion is a marvellous tool in its ability to transform individuals and societies. The invention and refinement of religions is perhaps the single most dramatic evolutionary adaptation that we have devised culturally, other than fundamental tool use and survival knowledge. It allows for the dissemination of pretty much any set of rules and any mentality; all you have to do is convince people of a few miracles and (more recently) that they'll spend eternity in an abandoned amusement park in New Jersey if they misbehave.
...but everyone knows that already. The believers know instinctively that their religion makes them happy—and are so dependent on it they wonder how anyone could live without it—and the non-believers simply fall back on the adage "ignorance is bliss." While the societal consequences (both cohesive and divisive) of religion may be discussed more often in formal, anthropological terms, the individual benefits are without a doubt the most obvious feature of any gnosticism.
I wouldn't say "shun controversy"—more typically people avoid the topics because there's no point in discussing them. It's not like a Slashdot argument is going to change anyone's beliefs. It's just an excuse to spew vitriol for an hour or two. Think of it as the final step in this.
Which means, yeah, it's a blatant example of the editors posting flame-fodder.
Of course, we all know the exact text of every single troll that will be posted here, so perhaps the real sport will be in seeing who's dumb enough to not roll their eyes and abstain.
Legally it's not quite that complex. In the EU, cephalopods are equivalent to vertebrates, and UK legislation specifically grants octopodes the same status. (As a result they have often been called "honourary" vertebrates.)
As for an actual hierarchy of "evolvedness," and not just a subjective ethical ranking based on what we know about animal intelligence, alternative splicing seems to be a good indicator of genetic complexity, but we only really have detailed analyses for vertebrates.
It should probably also be stressed at some point that anything that can be tested on a less sentient animal (generally rats and mice) is tested there extensively first. Primate testing is extremely expensive and the ethics guidelines are generally taken very seriously.
Actually—(a) they're just called "papers," the "white" part is a specific piece of IT jargon, and should be pronounced "scientific-sounding marketing material," as white papers are almost never rigorous or unbiased, and (b) there are plenty of books published at levels above the expected comprehension of a graduate course; these are usually bundles of papers and protocols (procedures). They're sometimes called "textbooks," but more properly "monographs."
And for what it's worth, graduate textbooks and monographs are cheaper than undergraduate textbooks because they involve fewer writers, as the material is more narrow and there are fewer experts available. Monographs in particular are exceptionally cheap because the idea of publishing a book generally comes up after the material has already been written.
Regarding the availability of content, however, the Internet is really not all that it seems when it comes to content for fourth-year undergrads and grad students. Textbooks targeted at such groups generally require combing a great deal of journal articles, which are generally available, but may not necessarily be in a consumable format. My favourite example is this paper, which outlines a method of constructing a solution to a problem (WJISP in polynomial time) and then completely fails to explain how the method works (It takes about half an hour to work out even when you know what they're talking about.)
This is where having a competently-written textbook becomes invaluable, and were it not for Wikipedia, many more topics would be completely unrepresented in any electronic secondary source.
Oh, I'm sorry! It definitely wasn't levelled as an attack at you. If anything I'm pointing out the perils of a lack of communication between members of such a diversified team, which it certainly seems isn't an issue in your case. I work in a predominantly computational lab myself, and we'd be nothing without a few dedicated wetlab people who can validate functional and association predictions. The rest of our staff come from all sorts of backgrounds, although sadly we don't have a dedicated mathematician.
The thing is, it could be worse than that. It could be much, much worse. Consider it a blessing that biologists are forced to take as much math as they are.
I was pondering that, too. I suspect Disney will at least take some inspiration from non-movie canon sources, though, to capitalize on their popularity and to save on creative investment. It's not like they're letting J. J. Abrams reboot (and by which I mean completely trash) the entire storyline.
"And then we discovered our data fit this unusual mound-shaped pattern, which I thought was pretty neat..."
"Isn't that a Gaussian distribution?"
"Oh, so you've read our paper!"
...the day when biology becomes lessintimately connected to stats is the day when there are no more problems to explore. Perhaps when you're studying insect behaviour like E. O. Wilson you care more about intuitively-recognizable patterns, but the team's statistician should be a supplement moreso than a replacement for developing your own understanding of statistical models.
...RTFAing or looking at some of the other replies might have revealed to you that the fertilizer plant was in West, Texas. I think you've just earned some kind of award.
Slashdot Mirror
I would bet good money that the NSA can get a permanent copy of all Snapchat data if they so choose.
The psychologist Gag Halfrunt was established as being responsible for ordering the destruction of Earth in the radio series, which was broadcast in 1978; Battlefield Earth wasn't published until 1982. Scepticism of psychology was quite popular at the time because of the misuse of Behaviorism, and the tendency of such misuses to foster the kind of dysfunction normally only found in supremely awful bureaucracies.
I feel oddly compelled to point out that self-destructing documents were one of the proposed uses of DRM.
Sure—XML. No programmer born before January 19, 2038 can adapt to it.
It's another UI prototype about paper-thin hardware; in this case it bends when you touch it. It's not a finished product, though. "Prototypes" in this case means "we wired up a piece of cardboard and a projector to simulate what we think this one day might be like, maybe, just so we could explore interface design questions."
For the past several years HCI research has been pursuing various paper-thin interactions (another example, from my alma mater.) As a general rule they're very novel and creative ideas, but as far as I can tell there isn't a soul on the planet who would actually want to try and use such a horrible pseudo-skeumorphic mess. Paper's just too thin and delicate to use as a UI device.
But don't be too hard on the summary: they managed to avoid scarring your eyes forever with the prototypes' actual name, which is so horrible you'd think it was invented to market toys to six-year-olds.
Well, it's a coinage that's over a century old. (I found a 1908 paper that... ironically, debunks a long list of suspected cases of naturally-occurring luminous plants.) If you want something else to predict they'll get upset about, I highly recommend reading through here.
Different luciferins can produce a fairly wide spectrum in the wild, though, and now that I look it up, fireflies (which I was foolishly thinking of) can be anything from 550 nm to 620 nm, which is well within the yellowish area that typical chlorophyll won't absorb at all. I'm not exactly sure where in the spectrum the other kinds of luciferin fall, but anything below 480 nm (cyan) should at least react. Definitely discovering my plant biology is rustier than I thought.
Yes indeed. In fact it might actually screw the plants up and cause them to think it's daytime. Personally, I think it would be a better prospect to do this in a fungus. Some of them already glow a little.
It brings light. It's a very deliberate and literal biblical reference. :)
Problem number one is that we're not merely electrical. Outside of the brain (and maybe spine?) all synapses (neuron junctions) require the transit of chemicals—neurotransmitters like acetylcholine and norepinephrine—to fire. Getting artificial skin to send sensory data in this way would be very tricky work, as these chemicals are released in very small quantities into very tiny enclosed cavities, and then re-absorbed so they can be reused.
Two, even if this has superior pressure resolution, consider that human skin has many different kinds of sensors in it (all of which have incompatible and different nerve types.) We have fine- and coarse-grained sensory resolution, we can detect certain forms of vibration, we can detect temperature change, and we can detect injury. Losing that would be a big disadvantage.
Three, it would be distracting. Having a coarse-grained sensory input that is higher-priority than fine-grained input makes it easier to ignore sensations until they are relevant. Many small, equally-weighted pressure sensors don't provide that opportunity.
Four, it can't heal or adjust to temperatures. Yet, anyway.
And five, yes, there's a limited amount of space to plug it in. The body has no way of multiplexing signals, so any time two sensory nerves feed into a single channel, the data is combined and you can't tell where the input came from. In order to maintain the resolution we have, our bodies have one wire for every sensory receptor, all the way up to the brain, unless we're combining inputs. To add new skin with different inputs, you'd need to rewire all of this and then figure out where to plug it in at the brain so it can be processed properly.
All in all, I'd file it in the "50-60 years" drawer.
Erk... as someone who's at least cursorily looked at genes related to intelligence, let me tidy that up for you.
Human intelligence depends on a lot of very strange mutations that are unique to humans. We know with certainty that these mutations happened very recently because all of the other animals have very similar genes in the same area. For the functionality to have been lost, it would have had to disappear every time we split from another animal, and vanish in the exact same way. Before you know it you've slit your own wrists with Occam's razor.
The protein product of the gene in question, TRNP1, determines how much and how quickly neural stem cells replicate. In the human brain, we have an unusual quirk that says they need to replicate excessively, which causes the final brain tissue to bunch up into its distinctive fold patterns. The brain's weird structure is just the product of stuffing it into too small a place. There are definitely other genes involved in exploiting this unusual shape, however, (like HAR1) so it's not the whole story.
Oh, no, I do—religion is a marvellous tool in its ability to transform individuals and societies. The invention and refinement of religions is perhaps the single most dramatic evolutionary adaptation that we have devised culturally, other than fundamental tool use and survival knowledge. It allows for the dissemination of pretty much any set of rules and any mentality; all you have to do is convince people of a few miracles and (more recently) that they'll spend eternity in an abandoned amusement park in New Jersey if they misbehave.
...but everyone knows that already. The believers know instinctively that their religion makes them happy—and are so dependent on it they wonder how anyone could live without it—and the non-believers simply fall back on the adage "ignorance is bliss." While the societal consequences (both cohesive and divisive) of religion may be discussed more often in formal, anthropological terms, the individual benefits are without a doubt the most obvious feature of any gnosticism.
I wouldn't say "shun controversy"—more typically people avoid the topics because there's no point in discussing them. It's not like a Slashdot argument is going to change anyone's beliefs. It's just an excuse to spew vitriol for an hour or two. Think of it as the final step in this.
Why, it's a science story, of course.
Which means, yeah, it's a blatant example of the editors posting flame-fodder.
Of course, we all know the exact text of every single troll that will be posted here, so perhaps the real sport will be in seeing who's dumb enough to not roll their eyes and abstain.
Legally it's not quite that complex. In the EU, cephalopods are equivalent to vertebrates, and UK legislation specifically grants octopodes the same status. (As a result they have often been called "honourary" vertebrates.)
As for an actual hierarchy of "evolvedness," and not just a subjective ethical ranking based on what we know about animal intelligence, alternative splicing seems to be a good indicator of genetic complexity, but we only really have detailed analyses for vertebrates.
It should probably also be stressed at some point that anything that can be tested on a less sentient animal (generally rats and mice) is tested there extensively first. Primate testing is extremely expensive and the ethics guidelines are generally taken very seriously.
Fortunately, Reichkanzler, civilization does not agree with you.
Going to have to go with tapi0 on this one. It's Tramiel, Tramiel all the way down!
Incorrect! Who do you think sold them BASIC for the Apple II?
...I'm kidding; they had their own.
Until 1979.
When Microsoft sold them a better one.
Actually—(a) they're just called "papers," the "white" part is a specific piece of IT jargon, and should be pronounced "scientific-sounding marketing material," as white papers are almost never rigorous or unbiased, and (b) there are plenty of books published at levels above the expected comprehension of a graduate course; these are usually bundles of papers and protocols (procedures). They're sometimes called "textbooks," but more properly "monographs."
And for what it's worth, graduate textbooks and monographs are cheaper than undergraduate textbooks because they involve fewer writers, as the material is more narrow and there are fewer experts available. Monographs in particular are exceptionally cheap because the idea of publishing a book generally comes up after the material has already been written.
Regarding the availability of content, however, the Internet is really not all that it seems when it comes to content for fourth-year undergrads and grad students. Textbooks targeted at such groups generally require combing a great deal of journal articles, which are generally available, but may not necessarily be in a consumable format. My favourite example is this paper, which outlines a method of constructing a solution to a problem (WJISP in polynomial time) and then completely fails to explain how the method works (It takes about half an hour to work out even when you know what they're talking about.)
This is where having a competently-written textbook becomes invaluable, and were it not for Wikipedia, many more topics would be completely unrepresented in any electronic secondary source.
Oh, I'm sorry! It definitely wasn't levelled as an attack at you. If anything I'm pointing out the perils of a lack of communication between members of such a diversified team, which it certainly seems isn't an issue in your case. I work in a predominantly computational lab myself, and we'd be nothing without a few dedicated wetlab people who can validate functional and association predictions. The rest of our staff come from all sorts of backgrounds, although sadly we don't have a dedicated mathematician.
The thing is, it could be worse than that. It could be much, much worse. Consider it a blessing that biologists are forced to take as much math as they are.
I was pondering that, too. I suspect Disney will at least take some inspiration from non-movie canon sources, though, to capitalize on their popularity and to save on creative investment. It's not like they're letting J. J. Abrams reboot (and by which I mean completely trash) the entire storyline.
I can see it now. At a conference:
"And then we discovered our data fit this unusual mound-shaped pattern, which I thought was pretty neat..."
"Isn't that a Gaussian distribution?"
"Oh, so you've read our paper!"
...the day when biology becomes lessintimately connected to stats is the day when there are no more problems to explore. Perhaps when you're studying insect behaviour like E. O. Wilson you care more about intuitively-recognizable patterns, but the team's statistician should be a supplement moreso than a replacement for developing your own understanding of statistical models.
...RTFAing or looking at some of the other replies might have revealed to you that the fertilizer plant was in West, Texas. I think you've just earned some kind of award.