You say that they "can't" as though they should. That's like saying that physicists can't get past physics. The fact that their project and yours are different is no criticism of their project.
Actually, the first major modern, post- Special Relativity, article on the subject was published by deBray in Nature, 1931. There's been a fair bit of activity in the area, and reviews incorporating almost 200 observations over a period of more than 300 years have been conducted by multiple independent groups. Knee-jerk skepticism is a comical thing, but that slashdot moderators find your insipid laziness and willful ignorance to be +5 insightful is a sad, pathetic comment.
Cogent, thanks. I think it's also worthwhile to point out that the original WaPo article is just wrong when it says that DNA contains "all of the instructions" necessary to construct a living organism. The proteome contains the "instructions", the program. The DNA is mere "data" which the proteome operates upon. The proteome is the interpretive mechanism for constructing a living device from the DNA blueprint, and contains all of the "intelligence" in the analogy to a -> house construction process.
I mod DNA -1 overrated. GNA is +1 interesting. Proteome is +1 insightful. FWIW.
Although I understand your point, I do not accept that the link you provided refers to factual information: In none of my tests have any of the browsers tested actually used MathML to represent mathematics on Wikipedia pages, despite the installation of STIX fonts. All have in fact delivered bitmap graphics. Which really does suck, as I expect you would allow.
Merely to describe it. That's the essence of a description logic. It is uses a minimalistic set of constructions for the purpose of defining structural relationships. One can define well-formedness in the metalanguage, but one cannot conduct proofs in the subject language using that metalanguage.
That's why I said you can "generate an isomorphism". To define an algorithm which deterministically selects exactly one proof for each provable statement would be to define a canonical proof, which would be to define an isomorphism.
In practice, the function of Wikipedia has been to exclude all but the least common denominator of self-selected highly motivated public opinion. Views without a motivated representation in the administration can be and typically are effectively shut out, regardless of whether they are widely held or narrowly held, true or false. It is a post-modern institution in its essence.
This is a misunderstanding of mathematics. In a fundamental sense there are maps from provable mathematical statements to proofs, and from proofs to provable statements. From these maps one can generate an "isomorphism", an equivalence. To a first order approximation, you can say that a statement is interchangable with a proof of that statement. The proof merely explains more of the structure, i.e., makes more facts explicit.
rdf-schema doesn't imply ZFC-FOL. any adequate ontology for mathematics should admit ZFC-FOL, and intuitionistic logics, and New Foundations, and categorical foundations, and any other foundations. All that matters is that the description logic is
1) adequate for the present case
2) extensible to future cases.
The description logic is a metalanguage, and does not need to be consistent with the subject language. It only needs to be self-consistent.
Wikipedia isn't the place for it, though. Wikipedia doesn't want it. I wish it did, but the history of Wikipedia proves otherwise.
We need a semantic wiki for scientific and mathematical information, which can be used by computers as well as people, that offers many views, suitable to the interests of the reader, for the same underlying data. Proofs, both user-supplied and automatically derived, would be part of that data, visible to those with an interest in them, and in modern browsers, not as bitmap graphics, but using real fonts.
That's precisely the problem: In wikipedia, everything is political. The content is driven purely by politics. There is a strongly empowered set of vested interests, there are vast astroturfing armadas from various constituencies, petty cabals that lay claim to tracts of information space in order to control the track of public discourse and groupthink on a given topic, for whatever reason, economic, political, etc., in the real world or other.
Among these political factions is a major movement called deletionism, which advocates cleansing wikipedia of material which is not suitable to a general purpose encyclopedia, a la Britannica. Personally, I find this viewpoint absurd, and think that simply restructuring the articles so that people could read to a level of depth appropriate to their interest would meet all valid objections to the incorporation of accurate but trivial information. Deletionists might argue otherwise, that the sheer volume of questionable material overwhelms the important material, and detracts from the ability to maintain the quality of the important content. Deletionists pretty much rule the roost over at Wikipedia.
Almost nobody will read proofs. Britannica has no proofs. I think proofs at Wikipedia are doomed. But we need something that supports proofs. It should not be in the form of bitmap graphics, like wikipedia. It should be semantic web content, which can be automatically verified, and used by theorem proving programs as well as by human readers.
The math is generally well-done in the sense that it is accurate, as far as it goes. It usually doesn't go very far, for the technically inclined, and it is usually far too abstract and technical for the general reader. It's sort of the worst of both worlds, really: It's impossibly shallow for the serious student, and impossibly jargon-rich for the layman. There are exceptions to both pessimialities, clearly, cases in which a given article is well-suited to one or the other audience, but in those cases, it has just lost one of its major audiences -- and really, the specialists are a major audience for wikipedia math articles, simply because there is nothing fulfilling that function for the serious student and professional right now, so that wikipedia math articles get more attention from this audience than they would, if such a facility existed. The result is that most of the articles become unusable for the general reader very quickly, but can never really satisfy the needs of the specialist audience.
There are several reasons why mathematical proofs don't belong on Wikipedia:
1) They are not easily twisted to support a political ideology
2) They don't appear in standard general purpose encyclopediae
3) General readers cannot understand them
The world desperately needs a global rdf-schema wiki for mathematical and scientific information, which allows the description of experimental data, explanatory inference, hypothesis, and proof. Wikipedia is not that.
If the same semigroup textual diff algebra used in darcs were applied to an appropriate rdf:s ontology, once could produce a killer application for this puropose, in which each diff arc was auto-revertible on the basis of the karmic load of the map chain of peer reviews. The hardest part would be to come up with a usable plan for evolving the ontology over time to account for new requirements in application domains outside the original development domain, e.g. extensions for chemistry, engineering, social sciences, economics, etc. would all have substantial new requirements and constraints, and much of the value of the semantic web approach would be lost to friction if the ontologies were not trivially reconcilable.
That would be wrong, though. A basic KDE 3.5 desktop environment uses mid-way between what a Gnome 2.14 and an XFCE 4.2.2 will use. This suggests that a 4.0 desktop may consume less than XFCE does now.
The truth is brutal. It's more comforting to believe in the official myths of the bogeyman, and the all-protecting momma state that envelopes you in love. I'm sorry, but that's a very short-sighted folly. Those who will not deal with reality will be dealt with by reality.
Facts are disturbing. Why would I want to bother my beautiful mind with facts, when I can get more toys by blithely burning my conscience to the ground?
Here's a sweet little factoid that you probably won't hear about on Fox news: On September 10th, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate and explained that the Pentagon had "misplaced" 2.3 *trillion* dollars. I guess it was a busy news day the next day, because it sort of got lost thereafter.
2.3 trillion dollars. End-to-end from the sun to Jupiter. End global malnutrition for a decade. Woops, misplaced it. Next day -- pfft. Memory hole.
You're probably not counting the 15,000 or so suicides among U.S. troops in the past 2 years alone. I'm sure as hell you're not counting the million-odd dead Iraqis, but then you might be considering them all terrorists. Enemy combatants. Like the American citizens kept safe by their own extrajudicial executions. They were enemy combatants too.
The wealth of the US is being systematically removed, and the natural resources of the world are being systematically repurposed. "War on terror" is really a war on the boogeyman, used to play the suckers into selling their children into perpetual servitude. That's treason and a crime against humanity that makes the Nazi crimes pale in comparison. Really. Pol Pot never had that kind of ambition.
Shadowy cabals are unlikely? Come on. Wake up. What do you think a political party is? What is Skull and Bones? What is the CIA? What is a state secret? Shadowy cabals fill the freaking news every freaking day. What is a board of directors? Why don't they publish their minutes? Because they are a shadowy freaking cabal, Norman. Even if they're not commiting any criminal conspiracies, they are a cabal by definition, and operating in secrecy makes you shadowy. Criminey. Take one cluestick and call me in the morning.
If you think that believing that the U.S. government exists makes me a conspiracy theorist, well... Okay, I admit it. I believe the U.S. government exists. Call me crazy.
And I think that photos of someones slashed up penis or videos of children being sodomized or people being electrocuted are pretty darn good evidence of torture. In fact, the CIA guy appearing on ABC saying he was torturing people and felt pretty darn good about it, because they told him what he wanted to hear (duh) seems pretty credible to me too. Call me a whacko if you wish.
That's one of the most absurd statements I've ever read. Why would they give a flying fig about "getting caught"? They admit torturing people. They don't care what you think.
Slashdot Mirror
You say that they "can't" as though they should. That's like saying that physicists can't get past physics. The fact that their project and yours are different is no criticism of their project.
Actually, the first major modern, post- Special Relativity, article on the subject was published by deBray in Nature, 1931. There's been a fair bit of activity in the area, and reviews incorporating almost 200 observations over a period of more than 300 years have been conducted by multiple independent groups. Knee-jerk skepticism is a comical thing, but that slashdot moderators find your insipid laziness and willful ignorance to be +5 insightful is a sad, pathetic comment.
Cogent, thanks. I think it's also worthwhile to point out that the original WaPo article is just wrong when it says that DNA contains "all of the instructions" necessary to construct a living organism. The proteome contains the "instructions", the program. The DNA is mere "data" which the proteome operates upon. The proteome is the interpretive mechanism for constructing a living device from the DNA blueprint, and contains all of the "intelligence" in the analogy to a -> house construction process.
I mod DNA -1 overrated. GNA is +1 interesting. Proteome is +1 insightful. FWIW.
That is my point. You are violently agreeing with me. Wikipedia is disagreeing with me, and I'm recognizing the trend. That's realism.
Although I understand your point, I do not accept that the link you provided refers to factual information: In none of my tests have any of the browsers tested actually used MathML to represent mathematics on Wikipedia pages, despite the installation of STIX fonts. All have in fact delivered bitmap graphics. Which really does suck, as I expect you would allow.
Merely to describe it. That's the essence of a description logic. It is uses a minimalistic set of constructions for the purpose of defining structural relationships. One can define well-formedness in the metalanguage, but one cannot conduct proofs in the subject language using that metalanguage.
That's why I said you can "generate an isomorphism". To define an algorithm which deterministically selects exactly one proof for each provable statement would be to define a canonical proof, which would be to define an isomorphism.
The main, unending, source of crackpot theories on Wikipedia is the consensus.
In practice, the function of Wikipedia has been to exclude all but the least common denominator of self-selected highly motivated public opinion. Views without a motivated representation in the administration can be and typically are effectively shut out, regardless of whether they are widely held or narrowly held, true or false. It is a post-modern institution in its essence.
This is a misunderstanding of mathematics. In a fundamental sense there are maps from provable mathematical statements to proofs, and from proofs to provable statements. From these maps one can generate an "isomorphism", an equivalence. To a first order approximation, you can say that a statement is interchangable with a proof of that statement. The proof merely explains more of the structure, i.e., makes more facts explicit.
rdf-schema doesn't imply ZFC-FOL. any adequate ontology for mathematics should admit ZFC-FOL, and intuitionistic logics, and New Foundations, and categorical foundations, and any other foundations. All that matters is that the description logic is
1) adequate for the present case
2) extensible to future cases.
The description logic is a metalanguage, and does not need to be consistent with the subject language. It only needs to be self-consistent.
Wikipedia isn't the place for it, though. Wikipedia doesn't want it. I wish it did, but the history of Wikipedia proves otherwise.
We need a semantic wiki for scientific and mathematical information, which can be used by computers as well as people, that offers many views, suitable to the interests of the reader, for the same underlying data. Proofs, both user-supplied and automatically derived, would be part of that data, visible to those with an interest in them, and in modern browsers, not as bitmap graphics, but using real fonts.
That's precisely the problem: In wikipedia, everything is political. The content is driven purely by politics. There is a strongly empowered set of vested interests, there are vast astroturfing armadas from various constituencies, petty cabals that lay claim to tracts of information space in order to control the track of public discourse and groupthink on a given topic, for whatever reason, economic, political, etc., in the real world or other.
Among these political factions is a major movement called deletionism, which advocates cleansing wikipedia of material which is not suitable to a general purpose encyclopedia, a la Britannica. Personally, I find this viewpoint absurd, and think that simply restructuring the articles so that people could read to a level of depth appropriate to their interest would meet all valid objections to the incorporation of accurate but trivial information. Deletionists might argue otherwise, that the sheer volume of questionable material overwhelms the important material, and detracts from the ability to maintain the quality of the important content. Deletionists pretty much rule the roost over at Wikipedia.
Almost nobody will read proofs. Britannica has no proofs. I think proofs at Wikipedia are doomed. But we need something that supports proofs. It should not be in the form of bitmap graphics, like wikipedia. It should be semantic web content, which can be automatically verified, and used by theorem proving programs as well as by human readers.
The math is generally well-done in the sense that it is accurate, as far as it goes. It usually doesn't go very far, for the technically inclined, and it is usually far too abstract and technical for the general reader. It's sort of the worst of both worlds, really: It's impossibly shallow for the serious student, and impossibly jargon-rich for the layman. There are exceptions to both pessimialities, clearly, cases in which a given article is well-suited to one or the other audience, but in those cases, it has just lost one of its major audiences -- and really, the specialists are a major audience for wikipedia math articles, simply because there is nothing fulfilling that function for the serious student and professional right now, so that wikipedia math articles get more attention from this audience than they would, if such a facility existed. The result is that most of the articles become unusable for the general reader very quickly, but can never really satisfy the needs of the specialist audience.
Sticking math in a web page as bitmap graphics just sucks. We have fonts for that.
There are several reasons why mathematical proofs don't belong on Wikipedia:
1) They are not easily twisted to support a political ideology
2) They don't appear in standard general purpose encyclopediae
3) General readers cannot understand them
The world desperately needs a global rdf-schema wiki for mathematical and scientific information, which allows the description of experimental data, explanatory inference, hypothesis, and proof. Wikipedia is not that.
If the same semigroup textual diff algebra used in darcs were applied to an appropriate rdf:s ontology, once could produce a killer application for this puropose, in which each diff arc was auto-revertible on the basis of the karmic load of the map chain of peer reviews. The hardest part would be to come up with a usable plan for evolving the ontology over time to account for new requirements in application domains outside the original development domain, e.g. extensions for chemistry, engineering, social sciences, economics, etc. would all have substantial new requirements and constraints, and much of the value of the semantic web approach would be lost to friction if the ontologies were not trivially reconcilable.
I think you may have hit upon a novel concept: A desktop memory manager. Click-to-swap? Cut-and-paste garbage collection? Call a patent attorney!
That would be wrong, though. A basic KDE 3.5 desktop environment uses mid-way between what a Gnome 2.14 and an XFCE 4.2.2 will use. This suggests that a 4.0 desktop may consume less than XFCE does now.
The truth is brutal. It's more comforting to believe in the official myths of the bogeyman, and the all-protecting momma state that envelopes you in love. I'm sorry, but that's a very short-sighted folly. Those who will not deal with reality will be dealt with by reality.
Facts are disturbing. Why would I want to bother my beautiful mind with facts, when I can get more toys by blithely burning my conscience to the ground?
Here's a sweet little factoid that you probably won't hear about on Fox news: On September 10th, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate and explained that the Pentagon had "misplaced" 2.3 *trillion* dollars. I guess it was a busy news day the next day, because it sort of got lost thereafter.
2.3 trillion dollars. End-to-end from the sun to Jupiter. End global malnutrition for a decade. Woops, misplaced it. Next day -- pfft. Memory hole.
You're probably not counting the 15,000 or so suicides among U.S. troops in the past 2 years alone. I'm sure as hell you're not counting the million-odd dead Iraqis, but then you might be considering them all terrorists. Enemy combatants. Like the American citizens kept safe by their own extrajudicial executions. They were enemy combatants too.
The wealth of the US is being systematically removed, and the natural resources of the world are being systematically repurposed. "War on terror" is really a war on the boogeyman, used to play the suckers into selling their children into perpetual servitude. That's treason and a crime against humanity that makes the Nazi crimes pale in comparison. Really. Pol Pot never had that kind of ambition.
Shadowy cabals are unlikely? Come on. Wake up. What do you think a political party is? What is Skull and Bones? What is the CIA? What is a state secret? Shadowy cabals fill the freaking news every freaking day. What is a board of directors? Why don't they publish their minutes? Because they are a shadowy freaking cabal, Norman. Even if they're not commiting any criminal conspiracies, they are a cabal by definition, and operating in secrecy makes you shadowy. Criminey. Take one cluestick and call me in the morning.
If you think that believing that the U.S. government exists makes me a conspiracy theorist, well...
Okay, I admit it. I believe the U.S. government exists. Call me crazy.
And I think that photos of someones slashed up penis or videos of children being sodomized or people being electrocuted are pretty darn good evidence of torture. In fact, the CIA guy appearing on ABC saying he was torturing people and felt pretty darn good about it, because they told him what he wanted to hear (duh) seems pretty credible to me too. Call me a whacko if you wish.
That's one of the most absurd statements I've ever read. Why would they give a flying fig about "getting caught"? They admit torturing people. They don't care what you think.