Evolutionary fitness is constantly changing. What is fit today may be unfit tomorrow. That is why evolution is not a process of species getting "better" or even more complex. Evolution is more than just change. It isn't completely random. It is change, and selection. Selection driven by ever changing fitness criteria.
All kinds of changes happen to genes. some good, some bad, many just neutral. These changes are being combined and recombined in different ways in the population. Maybe a change in a gene makes an organism secrete a weak poison to which it is not immune. It's negative, but not negative enough to be extinguished from the population completely. Now, another mutation might come along, a protein gets made a different way. It's neutral, unless the organism has the poison mutation, in which case it is very bad: the poison is very strong and kills the organism. But here's a third mutation. This one happens to be slightly good, it helps the creature digest things better. But it also provides immunity to that poison. Now, if all three changes make their way into the same creature, it gets a very big fitness boost from what was a negative, neutral, and only mildly advantageous mutation.
But as soon as its prey evolves a resistance to that poison, that poison no longer provides a fitness boost. Maybe this year, in this particular valley, being small and fast does. Or maybe its big and thick skinned. Or smart, who knows? It's always changing.
This process is happening among billions and billions of individuals. It is more massively parallel than any of us can possibly comprehend. Our minds don't intuit numbers that big.
You may want to read the wikipedia page on alleles. It sure looks like there are mathematical laws involved.
Hey, in my book you don't need any justification for "You can't tell me what to do" other than "it doesn't fucking effect you!" which you have demonstrated through your overall energy usage.
I go to sleep. I wake up. The world is still there. I die. I don't wake up. I can only assume the world will still be there. There is definitely something after death. Too bad I won't be around to see it.
Being dead is easy. After all, we spent about 14 billion years before this being dead. Remember that? It wasn't so bad, was it? Time flies when you're dead.
It's not called change because it's not just change. There is obviously more to it than that. Although change in the frequency of alleles in a given population is evolution, it is only one step. What happens next is that these changes combine in novel ways in actual individuals who then deal with their environment, which is also changing. Some of those combinations of changes will be beneficial, some not, and based on that, certain individuals will have an easier time in their (slightly) changed environment.
So what is happening all the time is that species change, and the environment culls based on fitness criteria which are also changing. Today's hideous mutation that makes a bird easier to catch is tomorrow's peacock tail. It may make it harder to survive, but because peahens find it sexy, it actually makes the bird more fit in terms of passing on genes, not less.
CFLs create light from phosphors, each of which emits a very narrow band of light. Mixing three very narrow bands of light to give "white" is not the same thing as having a continuous spectrum. For instance, a direct beam of pure yellow light hitting your eye may look exactly the same as a mix of pure red and pure green light. But shine those beams against a yellow background and you will see the difference. The yellow pigment absorbs all but yellow wavelengths and reflects those. Trouble is, there are no yellow wavelengths in the mix of red and green light. The red and green are absorbed, and the yellow pigment looks like dark gray, not yellow.
You can get CFLs in any color temperature, but a warm CFL is not the same as a warm incandescent. Incandescents give off a black-body spectrum.
Unfortunately, adding more phosphors to make CFLs emit a more balanced light makes them much less efficient.
There absolutely is a downside. Many people won't notice the difference, but some will, and if people are willing to pay a fair premium to offset the cost of their energy inefficiency, they should be able to. And they WILL be able to, thanks to the wonders of the free (black) market.
Ubuntu Dupe has me marked as a foe but I don't really care. He's right. He has a good plan that will actually work and a very valid reason for not wanting to use CFLs.
P.S. a little research on the web shows the best CFLs have a CRI of 94 and use six phosphors, not just three. The best possible CRI is 100, from full spectrum incandescent bulbs or the sun. 94 is pretty damn good, so now I am now thinking UbuntuDupe's major beef is more along the lines of "You can't tell me what to do!"
I don't know if there is a universal law of contentment, but I can say from experience that contentment is the default state, and that discontent comes from placing moral or emotional judgments on individual moments, for example "I want this sensations in this moment to continue," or "This is a bad experience." These moral or emotional judgments are forms of attachments, which lead to discontent. One can certainly experience pleasure or pain without feeling attached to it continuing or ceasing.
Satisfaction does not depend on the individual, because there is no individual. Where do you think your thoughts come from, before you are aware of them? When does a sensation go from being "outside" to being "inside?" You are not a little man inside your head, looking out your eyes, listening through your ears and making thoughts. There is not a movie screen of the mind, and a little self experiencing it. The sense of self is just that, another sense, but like thoughts, it appears as if you have privileged access to that sense.
Do you understand what I mean? There is no self watching and acting on the universe. Where did you get the criteria by which you measure and judge the universe? Did you make them up all by yourself? Did they all arise from your genetics? Is genetics even something internal to you? A sense of self may be necessary, but it is important to remember that it is only a sense, just like all the others.
I mean unitary as opposed to dualistic. Perhaps it's not the right term. Dualistic thinking is subject/object thinking. It assumes an actor, an action, an object and a stage. In reality, all distinctions between these things are arbitrary and only apply under certain conditions.
Perhaps I have not clarified my use of external and internal in relation to reality. If something interacts with reality at all, it can not possibly be external in my definition. A scale or ruler that was completely external to reality would not interact with reality in any way and would thus be completely useless as a scale or ruler. Conversely, anything that interacts with reality must be a part of that reality. An external force isn't really external, it is only external to the paradigm you are currently using. It isn't external to the thing it is influencing, or it couldn't influence it. As soon as it interacts in any way, it is part of a larger system.
If something can interact with something else, it can be changed by that thing. If a soul exists that can interact with reality, then it can be changed by reality. If reality can change and can change a soul, given infinite time and space, one of two things will happen: reality will change to the point that the soul is no longer relevant, or is no longer playing the same role or doing the same things, or the soul itself will change to the point that the definition "soul" no longer fits. Or time and space themselves will change to the point that the phrase "eternal" becomes meaningless.
Perhaps faith is a decent word to use for these ideas, but the faith I have in them is conditional, i.e. they make sense to me now, given the evidence I have in my life. If the evidence changes, the ideas will change. I call them a theory because these ideas will either make sense to you given the evidence of your life, or not. That is the only test. You do not have to accept them on my or anyone else's authority, and you are free to modify them to your heart's content.
To me, faith that is conditional is not faith at all. Faith must be unconditional to be called faith. Otherwise, it's just a supposition, isn't it?
This "local variant" technique is not a solution. Depending on how the libraries are set up, it causes problems that are even harder to track down because it depends on what order you start programs in. If a needed library is already loaded, a dynamically linked program will use the loaded version even if it is different from the one in its local directory. So, program A & B both need library Z. A depends on version 4.75, B depends on version 4.9 or earlier. Load A first, and B fails, but not vice versa.
If you do not feel separate from the universe, you know that your experience is not separate from all experience. You do not fear death, because your personal death is not the end of experience, and your experience is not separate from all experience. You do not fear pain or suffering because you place no emotional attachment on the lack of pain and suffering. You do not see pain and suffering as personal. They are a universal part of experience, and nothing to be feared. You do not fear a lack of justice, mercy, or love. They are irrelevant. There is no justice, mercy, love, or lack thereof if there is only one experience. These concepts apply to one thing in relation to another.
Let's look at the claims I make in the second paragraph. Nothing is or can be out of balance, ever. This comes from the unitary nature of reality. There is no "outside" of reality. A scale or ruler is either external to reality or it is generated by particular conditions inside reality. If it is really external, it is meaningless because no communication can take place between it and reality. If it is inside, it is not universal, but dependent on conditions in a particular part of reality.
So, while things can look out of balance by any arbitrary measure, reality being infinite, there is always a larger scale in which things look balanced.
To be eternal, a thing must not depend on the existence or configuration of anything that is not eternal. The problem with the existence of an eternal and separate soul is the interface between the eternal and the ephemeral. If the eternal can be touched and changed by the ephemeral, it can not really be eternal. Either it will be changed beyond recognition or it will lose all relevance.
It is not just the soul, but everything that depends on the conditions that create and sustain it. Because all is one, every separate thing we see arises from the self-interaction of the one. When the conditions that sustain it disappear, the thing also disappears. There is no separation between subject and object, it is like the illusion of the face and the vases. Look at it one way, you see subject. Look at it another, you see object. But they are the same thing.
I could give further arguments, but my workstation crashed badly on Friday. I still need to load all the applications, and I have a lot of work to get done trying to get a full 64 bit tool-chain (COBOL, Sybase, ODBC, ODBC Sybase Driver, ESQL preprocessor) installed on one of our blades. So I will refer you to the wikipedia page with some good information about the fundamentals of the Buddhist doctrine of Anatta or "non-self."
The user interface should drive the design decisions, and the coding should be as separate from both as is possible. Brenda Laurel's book The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design is a priceless resource for good interface design principles that transcend any particular interface paradigm. She analyzes human-computer interaction in terms of Aristotelian Poetics. Hey, if it applies to every other art-form since the beginning of human history, it's probably good enough for interface design.
You are right, as it stands today violence or the threat thereof enforces the law. And there really isn't anyplace to go where that's not the case. It's a less than ideal situation. What do you propose as a solution?
The origins of algebra can be traced to the ancient Babylonians,[3] who developed an advanced arithmetical system with which they were able to do calculations in an algebraic fashion. With the use of this system they were able to apply formulas and calculate solutions for unknown values for a class of problems typically solved today by using linear equations, quadratic equations, and indeterminate linear equations.
Web designers will be called in sooner or later to fix the artistic abortions that coders create. And then user-interface designers will be called in to fix the usability mistakes of both.
I've got this great commercial post blocker software. It will block not just dada21, but dada1-20 as well! $19.99, but for the first 100 slashbots to order, it's only $9.99! Just mention the code "IMADUFUS" for your special deal.
Dude, did I say anything about mathematics in general? I said algebra was originally developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Care to refute that, or were you just assuming that I was disrespecting India's contribution to mathematics because I had never heard of them inventing algebra? Because the link you give does not back up the claim that algebra started in India.
India has made plenty of contributions to math, science, art, music and world culture in general. There is no need to claim they invented something they did not.
Did I mention that I think Indian food is delicious and Indian people are generally quite attractive? I'm not prejudiced against India or the Indian people, I promise. I just don't think they invented algebra.
Care to define magnetodynamics, then? All wikipedia has is "magnetodynamic force" but that redirects to "pondermotive force." I know, But saying that a computer program could in any way make use of magnetodynamics to increase it's ability to recover data is pseudo-science. Remember, it has to operate through mutiple levels of abstraction: the OS, the drivers, the cache and the firmware. Care to explain how anything having to do with magnetodynamics could be used in a data recovery program that is meant to work across many different kinds of drives?
It would be like me saying that my disk recovery program makes use of the Van der Waals force. There really is such a force, of course, but it would have nothing to do with data recovery.
Most places these days, you're forced to join a homeowners association and they may not have guns, but there will still be consequences if you put up some big honking piece of art they don't like. You signed the contract, so you can't even complain. With the government, you signed a social contract by being a part of society and using roads, police, etc. Just like when you go into a restaurant and order food, you are agreeing to a social contract to pay for it. If you don't like being a part of society, go someplace where you don't have to be. But any society is free to deny you the benefits of membership if you don't play by their rules. All the guys with guns are there for is to keep you from breaking the rules. In our society, you even have a mechanism for changing rules you don't like.
I'm sorry, but the "men with guns" argument is old and tired. Put it to rest.
He obviously knows more about psychology than I do. What I know I picked up from being the son of a psychologist, so my knowledge is that of an interested layperson, not an expert.
Your boss just called. We're having a breakout session at lunch to determine what to do about all this brain atrophy. There will be lettuce and cheese sandwiches with generic food-service chips. See you there!
Slashdot Mirror
Evolutionary fitness is constantly changing. What is fit today may be unfit tomorrow. That is why evolution is not a process of species getting "better" or even more complex. Evolution is more than just change. It isn't completely random. It is change, and selection. Selection driven by ever changing fitness criteria.
All kinds of changes happen to genes. some good, some bad, many just neutral. These changes are being combined and recombined in different ways in the population. Maybe a change in a gene makes an organism secrete a weak poison to which it is not immune. It's negative, but not negative enough to be extinguished from the population completely. Now, another mutation might come along, a protein gets made a different way. It's neutral, unless the organism has the poison mutation, in which case it is very bad: the poison is very strong and kills the organism. But here's a third mutation. This one happens to be slightly good, it helps the creature digest things better. But it also provides immunity to that poison. Now, if all three changes make their way into the same creature, it gets a very big fitness boost from what was a negative, neutral, and only mildly advantageous mutation.
But as soon as its prey evolves a resistance to that poison, that poison no longer provides a fitness boost. Maybe this year, in this particular valley, being small and fast does. Or maybe its big and thick skinned. Or smart, who knows? It's always changing.
This process is happening among billions and billions of individuals. It is more massively parallel than any of us can possibly comprehend. Our minds don't intuit numbers that big.
You may want to read the wikipedia page on alleles. It sure looks like there are mathematical laws involved.
Hey, in my book you don't need any justification for "You can't tell me what to do" other than "it doesn't fucking effect you!" which you have demonstrated through your overall energy usage.
I go to sleep. I wake up. The world is still there. I die. I don't wake up. I can only assume the world will still be there. There is definitely something after death. Too bad I won't be around to see it.
Being dead is easy. After all, we spent about 14 billion years before this being dead. Remember that? It wasn't so bad, was it? Time flies when you're dead.
It's not called change because it's not just change. There is obviously more to it than that. Although change in the frequency of alleles in a given population is evolution, it is only one step. What happens next is that these changes combine in novel ways in actual individuals who then deal with their environment, which is also changing. Some of those combinations of changes will be beneficial, some not, and based on that, certain individuals will have an easier time in their (slightly) changed environment.
So what is happening all the time is that species change, and the environment culls based on fitness criteria which are also changing. Today's hideous mutation that makes a bird easier to catch is tomorrow's peacock tail. It may make it harder to survive, but because peahens find it sexy, it actually makes the bird more fit in terms of passing on genes, not less.
We need more chilling effects! Haven't you guys ever heard of global warming?
CFLs create light from phosphors, each of which emits a very narrow band of light. Mixing three very narrow bands of light to give "white" is not the same thing as having a continuous spectrum. For instance, a direct beam of pure yellow light hitting your eye may look exactly the same as a mix of pure red and pure green light. But shine those beams against a yellow background and you will see the difference. The yellow pigment absorbs all but yellow wavelengths and reflects those. Trouble is, there are no yellow wavelengths in the mix of red and green light. The red and green are absorbed, and the yellow pigment looks like dark gray, not yellow.
You can get CFLs in any color temperature, but a warm CFL is not the same as a warm incandescent. Incandescents give off a black-body spectrum.
Unfortunately, adding more phosphors to make CFLs emit a more balanced light makes them much less efficient.
There absolutely is a downside. Many people won't notice the difference, but some will, and if people are willing to pay a fair premium to offset the cost of their energy inefficiency, they should be able to. And they WILL be able to, thanks to the wonders of the free (black) market.
Ubuntu Dupe has me marked as a foe but I don't really care. He's right. He has a good plan that will actually work and a very valid reason for not wanting to use CFLs.
P.S. a little research on the web shows the best CFLs have a CRI of 94 and use six phosphors, not just three. The best possible CRI is 100, from full spectrum incandescent bulbs or the sun. 94 is pretty damn good, so now I am now thinking UbuntuDupe's major beef is more along the lines of "You can't tell me what to do!"
I don't know if there is a universal law of contentment, but I can say from experience that contentment is the default state, and that discontent comes from placing moral or emotional judgments on individual moments, for example "I want this sensations in this moment to continue," or "This is a bad experience." These moral or emotional judgments are forms of attachments, which lead to discontent. One can certainly experience pleasure or pain without feeling attached to it continuing or ceasing.
Satisfaction does not depend on the individual, because there is no individual. Where do you think your thoughts come from, before you are aware of them? When does a sensation go from being "outside" to being "inside?" You are not a little man inside your head, looking out your eyes, listening through your ears and making thoughts. There is not a movie screen of the mind, and a little self experiencing it. The sense of self is just that, another sense, but like thoughts, it appears as if you have privileged access to that sense.
Do you understand what I mean? There is no self watching and acting on the universe. Where did you get the criteria by which you measure and judge the universe? Did you make them up all by yourself? Did they all arise from your genetics? Is genetics even something internal to you? A sense of self may be necessary, but it is important to remember that it is only a sense, just like all the others.
I mean unitary as opposed to dualistic. Perhaps it's not the right term. Dualistic thinking is subject/object thinking. It assumes an actor, an action, an object and a stage. In reality, all distinctions between these things are arbitrary and only apply under certain conditions.
Perhaps I have not clarified my use of external and internal in relation to reality. If something interacts with reality at all, it can not possibly be external in my definition. A scale or ruler that was completely external to reality would not interact with reality in any way and would thus be completely useless as a scale or ruler. Conversely, anything that interacts with reality must be a part of that reality. An external force isn't really external, it is only external to the paradigm you are currently using. It isn't external to the thing it is influencing, or it couldn't influence it. As soon as it interacts in any way, it is part of a larger system.
If something can interact with something else, it can be changed by that thing. If a soul exists that can interact with reality, then it can be changed by reality. If reality can change and can change a soul, given infinite time and space, one of two things will happen: reality will change to the point that the soul is no longer relevant, or is no longer playing the same role or doing the same things, or the soul itself will change to the point that the definition "soul" no longer fits. Or time and space themselves will change to the point that the phrase "eternal" becomes meaningless.
Perhaps faith is a decent word to use for these ideas, but the faith I have in them is conditional, i.e. they make sense to me now, given the evidence I have in my life. If the evidence changes, the ideas will change. I call them a theory because these ideas will either make sense to you given the evidence of your life, or not. That is the only test. You do not have to accept them on my or anyone else's authority, and you are free to modify them to your heart's content.
To me, faith that is conditional is not faith at all. Faith must be unconditional to be called faith. Otherwise, it's just a supposition, isn't it?
I thought it must be something like that. Thanks for the response.
Any clue, anyone? The press release is awfully skimpy on the details, and a quick search of GEs site reveals no additional documentation.
Why, that's almost as good as PC Manufacturers Create Incomprehensible Acronyms.
This "local variant" technique is not a solution. Depending on how the libraries are set up, it causes problems that are even harder to track down because it depends on what order you start programs in. If a needed library is already loaded, a dynamically linked program will use the loaded version even if it is different from the one in its local directory. So, program A & B both need library Z. A depends on version 4.75, B depends on version 4.9 or earlier. Load A first, and B fails, but not vice versa.
If you do not feel separate from the universe, you know that your experience is not separate from all experience. You do not fear death, because your personal death is not the end of experience, and your experience is not separate from all experience. You do not fear pain or suffering because you place no emotional attachment on the lack of pain and suffering. You do not see pain and suffering as personal. They are a universal part of experience, and nothing to be feared. You do not fear a lack of justice, mercy, or love. They are irrelevant. There is no justice, mercy, love, or lack thereof if there is only one experience. These concepts apply to one thing in relation to another.
Let's look at the claims I make in the second paragraph. Nothing is or can be out of balance, ever. This comes from the unitary nature of reality. There is no "outside" of reality. A scale or ruler is either external to reality or it is generated by particular conditions inside reality. If it is really external, it is meaningless because no communication can take place between it and reality. If it is inside, it is not universal, but dependent on conditions in a particular part of reality.
So, while things can look out of balance by any arbitrary measure, reality being infinite, there is always a larger scale in which things look balanced.
To be eternal, a thing must not depend on the existence or configuration of anything that is not eternal. The problem with the existence of an eternal and separate soul is the interface between the eternal and the ephemeral. If the eternal can be touched and changed by the ephemeral, it can not really be eternal. Either it will be changed beyond recognition or it will lose all relevance.
It is not just the soul, but everything that depends on the conditions that create and sustain it. Because all is one, every separate thing we see arises from the self-interaction of the one. When the conditions that sustain it disappear, the thing also disappears. There is no separation between subject and object, it is like the illusion of the face and the vases. Look at it one way, you see subject. Look at it another, you see object. But they are the same thing.
I could give further arguments, but my workstation crashed badly on Friday. I still need to load all the applications, and I have a lot of work to get done trying to get a full 64 bit tool-chain (COBOL, Sybase, ODBC, ODBC Sybase Driver, ESQL preprocessor) installed on one of our blades. So I will refer you to the wikipedia page with some good information about the fundamentals of the Buddhist doctrine of Anatta or "non-self."
The user interface should drive the design decisions, and the coding should be as separate from both as is possible. Brenda Laurel's book The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design is a priceless resource for good interface design principles that transcend any particular interface paradigm. She analyzes human-computer interaction in terms of Aristotelian Poetics. Hey, if it applies to every other art-form since the beginning of human history, it's probably good enough for interface design.
Yeah, well, we have, um, wait, let me think, ah, all the movie stars?
Go ahead and kill all us liberals. Who will entertain you then, hmm, smart guy?
What's that? All the action stars are right wing, and that's all you care about anyway? Drat and blast!
You are right, as it stands today violence or the threat thereof enforces the law. And there really isn't anyplace to go where that's not the case. It's a less than ideal situation. What do you propose as a solution?
You just know what's gonna get posted soon...
But hey, it's wikipedia, it could be wrong.
Web designers will be called in sooner or later to fix the artistic abortions that coders create. And then user-interface designers will be called in to fix the usability mistakes of both.
I've got this great commercial post blocker software. It will block not just dada21, but dada1-20 as well! $19.99, but for the first 100 slashbots to order, it's only $9.99! Just mention the code "IMADUFUS" for your special deal.
A way to waste time? Dork herd behavior? What happens when you get a bunch of pontificating windbags all on the same message board?
Slashdot is a great example of something, that's for sure.
I keed, I keed...
Dude, did I say anything about mathematics in general? I said algebra was originally developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Care to refute that, or were you just assuming that I was disrespecting India's contribution to mathematics because I had never heard of them inventing algebra? Because the link you give does not back up the claim that algebra started in India.
India has made plenty of contributions to math, science, art, music and world culture in general. There is no need to claim they invented something they did not.
Did I mention that I think Indian food is delicious and Indian people are generally quite attractive? I'm not prejudiced against India or the Indian people, I promise. I just don't think they invented algebra.
Care to define magnetodynamics, then? All wikipedia has is "magnetodynamic force" but that redirects to "pondermotive force." I know, But saying that a computer program could in any way make use of magnetodynamics to increase it's ability to recover data is pseudo-science. Remember, it has to operate through mutiple levels of abstraction: the OS, the drivers, the cache and the firmware. Care to explain how anything having to do with magnetodynamics could be used in a data recovery program that is meant to work across many different kinds of drives?
It would be like me saying that my disk recovery program makes use of the Van der Waals force. There really is such a force, of course, but it would have nothing to do with data recovery.
Most places these days, you're forced to join a homeowners association and they may not have guns, but there will still be consequences if you put up some big honking piece of art they don't like. You signed the contract, so you can't even complain. With the government, you signed a social contract by being a part of society and using roads, police, etc. Just like when you go into a restaurant and order food, you are agreeing to a social contract to pay for it. If you don't like being a part of society, go someplace where you don't have to be. But any society is free to deny you the benefits of membership if you don't play by their rules. All the guys with guns are there for is to keep you from breaking the rules. In our society, you even have a mechanism for changing rules you don't like.
I'm sorry, but the "men with guns" argument is old and tired. Put it to rest.
He obviously knows more about psychology than I do. What I know I picked up from being the son of a psychologist, so my knowledge is that of an interested layperson, not an expert.
Your boss just called. We're having a breakout session at lunch to determine what to do about all this brain atrophy. There will be lettuce and cheese sandwiches with generic food-service chips. See you there!