That sounds right. The Republican party used to be the party of the upper classes, and they had an above-average education. Back in those days, even though there were only like five channels on TV, William Buckley actually had a weekly debate program. It looked like this: part 1 and part 2. Can anyone imagine this kind of thing now?
I do think you have a point here: Left-wingers (like me) don't want to see race-based comparative IQ research, because we don't want to find out that there are racial IQ differences. As somebody with a deep respect for science, I don't have the luxury of saying what some other posts have said and dismiss the idea a priori. While I would be surprised to find systematic race-based IQ differences, I'll admit that I've been surprised by science many times.
For me the better question is this: So what if there are race-based IQ differences? I mean, how should we change what we do if we were to discover them? Create a special "whities only" remedial class in every school (if it turns out that white people have a lower IQ)? Create a special job track for the lower-IQ races? Impose dictatorships on countries that consist predominantly of low-IQ races? Really, I can't imagine one sane thing we could do as individuals or as a society in reaction to finding out that human races have big IQ differences. I can imagine a million very stupid things we could and probably would do in response.
So yes, as a lover of science it hurts me to say this, but here is one rare case where I would rather we not know. If the truth is that there are race-based IQ differences, I can't handle the truth, and we as a society can't handle the truth. Of course, there probably aren't these differences. But I would rather not poke around in this field and risk finding out that there are. Absolutely no good and a lot of harm would come about from such a discovery.
Doing this with chips is barbaric. We must do this with cameras and biometrics, hopefully also we'll get drones involved somehow. That's the American way!
Ender's Game was written by a serious Mormon who worked hard to make it content-appropriate for Mormon children. I think he succeeded, and what's more, the book is just great. That somebody in the US could out-prude the Mormons... that's just depressing.
You're right, but don't forget also the children. Really, the biggest problem with education is parents, teachers and children. THREE biggest problems....
Among the issues that are destroying education are such diverse elements as: Parents. Teachers. Children, and and almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Do'h! Ok, let me come in again.
I'm a bit confused by the target market for these improvements. If you're buying one of these fancy chips for a desktop, you must have some reason to need all that power, and 90% of the people who have such a reason will also need their computer to have a discrete graphics card. If all you're doing in Facebook and photos, a cheap Core2 duo is more than you need. If you're gaming, you still can't do it without a discrete card. So now we hear that the only thing that really got improved in this generation is the integrated graphics, the one feature that just about no $250+ CPU buyer uses anyway. It would be one thing if the graphics portion could be repurposed to run some vector commands which the CPU could offload - but nothing like that appears to be in the works. So it seems to me that the graphics is just a waste of die space. I'd much rather see that used for CPU cache. Seriously, how hard would this be for Intel to do? It's not like a mask with extra cache instead of GPU would be all that hard for them to design!
I think I can find a compromise that should work for everyone: Why not just run the needlessly good 24 bit 192 hHz music file though a lossy compressor that does psychoacoustics well - something like AAC or maybe even OGG? Everyone agrees that the vast majority of the data in 24/192 can be thrown away with zero perceptible loss. Fine, let's do it. But let's do the bit discarding in some principled way, guided by a reasonable psychoacoustic model. Isn't that a lot better than indiscriminately downsampling to 16/44.1? By anyone's lights, a 16/44.1 FLAC at 1100 kbps will not sound better than a 24/192 OGG at 1100 kbps - or even 700 kbps, for that matter. The nice thing about this plan is that we have good models for the human threshhold of detection. Scientists claim that 16/44.1 is so good that any improvements on it will not be detected. Maybe, but what if they're wrong? Why not start with the data rich source and apply our acoustic models to throw out only the data that we know is FAR FAR FAR BEYOND our threshhold of detection? It would still be most of it, but at least we'd know we're throwing out the RIGHT data.
What you say makes sense. Maybe the Volt should have been marketed as a "beta test" car, and instead of projecting sales at 10,000, they should have declared "In the first year, we will only be able to accommodate ten thousand customer trials. Today you can put down a deposit to make sure you make the list." That would have had many advantages, not the least of which being that they could put off the official rollout for when the Volt is actually debugged.
Hybrids are one thing, but when it comes to all-electric cars, California is a much better place for them than Minnesota. Think about it: How much of your battery are you going to drain from running your electric heater? When there's actual combustion going on under the hood, you can blow the waste heat from this at the passengers. With a highly efficient electric motor, this is will basically do nothing.
Yeah, exactly! I don't know why they need a dedicated "box" for this, because the games that run on Steam have been developed from the start to run on a great diversity of hardware at varying levels of quality. In fact, a great investment in developer effort already went into doing this. Unlike in the case of game consoles, nobody really gains much from having an "official" box from which to run all this.
But I think the real promise behind the system, and something that the other living room competitors can't offer, is in the very adaptability of Steam games: They could license their software to every other company that's making living room convergence devices and wants to say "yeah, and this thing is a game console as well". For example, it's inevitable that AppleTV will have hardware that's strong enough for some gaming, and it will definitely be connected to the internet. So everyone would win if Steam abstracted their game catalog from from the hardware enough to make a Steam game app run on the AppleTV. It would add value to the device (Apple happy), and it would result in all kinds of extra revenue and mindshare for Steam. And they could make a deal like this with everyone else as well. The hard part of taking PC games into the living room is to work out all the pesky interface issues. Steam are apparently happy to take on this hard part. But porting (parts of) their library to run on ARM chips - that could be the move that gets Steam into normal peoples' living rooms.
If they're just making available their normal Windows games, does this mean that the interface will be a mouse and a keyboard? I'd be fine with this, but it's interesting that every major company that's making living room entertainment devices are really going out of their way to avoid using a keyboard and mouse. They must have some research backing up their decision.
What Rutherford did was that he recognized that atoms have heavy, tiny nuclei and a cloud of electrons that orbits them. He didn't "split atoms" in any interesting sense. I mean, we all remove electrons from atoms. That's called chemistry. I don't know who taught you "Rutherford split the atom" but you should really revisit that.
If this co-evolution story were actually true then yes, you would be on to something. The truth is, however, that the diet of the people alive today simply has no precedent in human history. Sure, it shares some components with ancient foods, but that doesn't count for much, when you consider how each common crop differs from its ancient ancestor in its nutritional profile. But more important, the distribution and balance of the foods we eat has nothing in common with the eating habits of our ancestors. So even without any GMO, we're basically flying blind as far as helpful co-evolution goes. If we came from a long Malthusian line of people who sat for 14 hours a day and fried most of their foods, we'd be evolutionarily prepared for our modern times. As it stands we're completely in nature-uncharted territory. It might very well be the case that even "natural" foods which benefit us in small quantities actually harm us in larger quantities. So I think you're getting a bit too carried away with the thought that our foods were somehow optimized by nature for our benefit. And once we realize that when it comes to food, basically everything is new, we get the right perspective on GMO, which is that it's yet another new thing that needs a thorough evaluation before we can judge it safe - but then again, so does every other thing we eat. None of it should be taken as "already tested well enough" because even if it's old, the context of our eating it has changed so much that its effects could now be completely different. What I'm saying is that from the perspective of food safety, GMO food shouldn't be singled out for extra suspicion while all the other crap we eat is "presumed safe". Let's be suspicious about everything and let science answer what's safe.
When you dam up a river, the water that flows through tends to be much colder than in the undammed river. For example, the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon is only 47F due to the Hoover Dam/Lake Mead. Maybe the local flora and fauna would actually benefit if we built some powerplants there and in the summer we heated it back up to the pre-dam summer temperatures, which were as high as 80F.
Exactly right. In the relevant sense, all these plants (nuclear, gas, coal, biomass, solar-thermal, geothermal, etc.) work on the same principle: They heat water, steam turns a turbine, steam is cooled/condensed, cycle restarts. If anything, nuclear plants tend to be better per megawatt generated because many use cooling towers, which dissipate lots of the extra heat into the air rather than into rivers. A summary like this betrays a complete ignorance about the basic functioning of power plants.
I hope you remember you said this ten years from now. You'll eat your words. Webb is by far the most science-rich mission that Nasa is doing, bar none. It's also very ambitious and hard. It's like the LHC's brother, and it's the thing which will generate at least two Nobel Prizes. Many assholes in both houses wanted to cancel it. Obama went to the mat for it, and I love him for doing this. This will be the most important telescope in history.
Rutherford had nothing to do with nuclear power (fission). That was done Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Germany in the 30's. Meitner is the first person to grasp the process of U235 fission, and I wish she got more credit.
I think that you're more right than wrong, but you too have to admit that the conclusion depends on the specifics of the case. When you have code that's an unsupportable mess and you want to bet your company on it, a rewrite may be unavoidable. But just because you rewrite doesn't mean that you have to scrap the old code immediately. You can do it like MS did with NT: Do a rewrite with the full intention of eventually transitioning everything to it, but let the code age for 10 years before you actually pull the trigger on the transition. Also, keeping old code is much easier when you wrote it in a modular way. If you didn't, a re-write might be worth it in the long run.
Google pays for extra search traffic because each marginal unit of that traffic makes them more money than whatever they paid for it. They're basically buying $10 bills for $8. I think that's a sustainable business model!
If some Microsoft people thought they were clever by making sure that Google overfunds Firefox, the joke is on them. In reality, the best thing that could happen for MS is that Firefox's oxygen is cut off. I can't think of a way that Google can invest money which is more harmful to MS than by funding Firefox. With two good browsers teaming up to take on MSIE, I don't really see any possibility for MS to dominate the internet like they once hoped. If anything, this situation guarantees that they will lose more users and more control. Imagine if US special forces cleverly managed to part the Taliban with a big chunk of money. Is that a win for the US? Not if that money was actually just diverted to Al Quaeda.
If this thing can compete on performance with ARM chips, it's only because Intel can make miracles happen in silicon. Of course, we might never know what would happen if Intel used their latest process technology to print ARM chips like Apple's A6 or whatever the next generation will be. But it would be very good.
This is an incredibly stupid idea, so much so that it's making me suspect that SETI people don't really care about science. The obvious problem is that we don't know what "alien footprints" look like. Therefore, the searchers are basically supposed to report anything which looks significant or weird to them.
Here is what I predict: We won't discover an alien capsule, but we'll definitely see formations where aliens arranged rocks to look like
1. some Egyptian heiroglyph,
2. an uncanny likeness of a human face,
3. the English word "Hi", possibly with an exclamation mark after it,
3. a strangely "perfect" hexagon,
4. a site that appears "flattened" in roughly a circular are, with a strange smudge in the exact center, and reminds us of a launching pad,
5. a large collection of "depictions of human shapes",
6. something that looks like the Virgin Mary or an angel or Jesus,
7. etc.
We might as well ask people to find traces of alien-made shapes in the clouds that float overhead. Yes, we would "find" a million such traces, because of how human perception works. There is a bunny! And then, we can easily use our creativity to weave a story about what aliens are trying to accomplish by making a bunny-shaped cloud. Well, multiply this by millions and take it to the moon, and you have the makings of a fiasco. Thousands of idiots will be printing the latest picture of a "weird-looking lunar thing" in newspaper, along with giant headlines like "Is this an ancient alien archeological dig on the moon?" In the article, various experts who said "Well, it seems highly unlikely, but we can't in principle rule out that it could be" will be quoted as saying "It could be!". Then the History Channel will do a special "Aliens on the Moon?" and soon and moon alien "truthers" will organize on the internet.
What I'm saying is that a great deal of harm to science will come of this. It's exactly the sort of project that will give a megaphone to the world's idiots (because they will be the ones saying something interesting) and will make real scientists seem even more like conspirers who try to deny some deep reality that "real people" want to believe in, because they will be saying true but unpleasant things about human pattern recognition, how our perception plays tricks on us, how big interstellar space is and how slow the speed limit of our universe is. People on slashdot might not appreciate the full extent of this, but there are many people in the world who want to take down science and replace it with superstition. Some are even quite savvy with PR. It will be that much easier to marginalize the sane voices because everyone will point out that after all the real scientists who asked us to start this search, namely SETI, are a legitimate organization. So far that's more or less true, but if they really want to undertake something this pointless and dangerous, I will take this back.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds right. The Republican party used to be the party of the upper classes, and they had an above-average education. Back in those days, even though there were only like five channels on TV, William Buckley actually had a weekly debate program. It looked like this: part 1 and part 2. Can anyone imagine this kind of thing now?
I do think you have a point here: Left-wingers (like me) don't want to see race-based comparative IQ research, because we don't want to find out that there are racial IQ differences. As somebody with a deep respect for science, I don't have the luxury of saying what some other posts have said and dismiss the idea a priori. While I would be surprised to find systematic race-based IQ differences, I'll admit that I've been surprised by science many times.
For me the better question is this: So what if there are race-based IQ differences? I mean, how should we change what we do if we were to discover them? Create a special "whities only" remedial class in every school (if it turns out that white people have a lower IQ)? Create a special job track for the lower-IQ races? Impose dictatorships on countries that consist predominantly of low-IQ races? Really, I can't imagine one sane thing we could do as individuals or as a society in reaction to finding out that human races have big IQ differences. I can imagine a million very stupid things we could and probably would do in response.
So yes, as a lover of science it hurts me to say this, but here is one rare case where I would rather we not know. If the truth is that there are race-based IQ differences, I can't handle the truth, and we as a society can't handle the truth. Of course, there probably aren't these differences. But I would rather not poke around in this field and risk finding out that there are. Absolutely no good and a lot of harm would come about from such a discovery.
Doing this with chips is barbaric. We must do this with cameras and biometrics, hopefully also we'll get drones involved somehow. That's the American way!
Ender's Game was written by a serious Mormon who worked hard to make it content-appropriate for Mormon children. I think he succeeded, and what's more, the book is just great. That somebody in the US could out-prude the Mormons ... that's just depressing.
Yeah, that correlation really is quite depressing. But again, maybe low school performance and poverty have some sort of common cause.
You're right, but don't forget also the children. Really, the biggest problem with education is parents, teachers and children. THREE biggest problems....
Among the issues that are destroying education are such diverse elements as: Parents. Teachers. Children, and and almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Do'h! Ok, let me come in again.
I'm a bit confused by the target market for these improvements. If you're buying one of these fancy chips for a desktop, you must have some reason to need all that power, and 90% of the people who have such a reason will also need their computer to have a discrete graphics card. If all you're doing in Facebook and photos, a cheap Core2 duo is more than you need. If you're gaming, you still can't do it without a discrete card. So now we hear that the only thing that really got improved in this generation is the integrated graphics, the one feature that just about no $250+ CPU buyer uses anyway. It would be one thing if the graphics portion could be repurposed to run some vector commands which the CPU could offload - but nothing like that appears to be in the works. So it seems to me that the graphics is just a waste of die space. I'd much rather see that used for CPU cache. Seriously, how hard would this be for Intel to do? It's not like a mask with extra cache instead of GPU would be all that hard for them to design!
I think I can find a compromise that should work for everyone: Why not just run the needlessly good 24 bit 192 hHz music file though a lossy compressor that does psychoacoustics well - something like AAC or maybe even OGG? Everyone agrees that the vast majority of the data in 24/192 can be thrown away with zero perceptible loss. Fine, let's do it. But let's do the bit discarding in some principled way, guided by a reasonable psychoacoustic model. Isn't that a lot better than indiscriminately downsampling to 16/44.1? By anyone's lights, a 16/44.1 FLAC at 1100 kbps will not sound better than a 24/192 OGG at 1100 kbps - or even 700 kbps, for that matter. The nice thing about this plan is that we have good models for the human threshhold of detection. Scientists claim that 16/44.1 is so good that any improvements on it will not be detected. Maybe, but what if they're wrong? Why not start with the data rich source and apply our acoustic models to throw out only the data that we know is FAR FAR FAR BEYOND our threshhold of detection? It would still be most of it, but at least we'd know we're throwing out the RIGHT data.
... considering another visit to Tokyo.
What you say makes sense. Maybe the Volt should have been marketed as a "beta test" car, and instead of projecting sales at 10,000, they should have declared "In the first year, we will only be able to accommodate ten thousand customer trials. Today you can put down a deposit to make sure you make the list." That would have had many advantages, not the least of which being that they could put off the official rollout for when the Volt is actually debugged.
Hybrids are one thing, but when it comes to all-electric cars, California is a much better place for them than Minnesota. Think about it: How much of your battery are you going to drain from running your electric heater? When there's actual combustion going on under the hood, you can blow the waste heat from this at the passengers. With a highly efficient electric motor, this is will basically do nothing.
Yeah, exactly! I don't know why they need a dedicated "box" for this, because the games that run on Steam have been developed from the start to run on a great diversity of hardware at varying levels of quality. In fact, a great investment in developer effort already went into doing this. Unlike in the case of game consoles, nobody really gains much from having an "official" box from which to run all this.
But I think the real promise behind the system, and something that the other living room competitors can't offer, is in the very adaptability of Steam games: They could license their software to every other company that's making living room convergence devices and wants to say "yeah, and this thing is a game console as well". For example, it's inevitable that AppleTV will have hardware that's strong enough for some gaming, and it will definitely be connected to the internet. So everyone would win if Steam abstracted their game catalog from from the hardware enough to make a Steam game app run on the AppleTV. It would add value to the device (Apple happy), and it would result in all kinds of extra revenue and mindshare for Steam. And they could make a deal like this with everyone else as well. The hard part of taking PC games into the living room is to work out all the pesky interface issues. Steam are apparently happy to take on this hard part. But porting (parts of) their library to run on ARM chips - that could be the move that gets Steam into normal peoples' living rooms.
If they're just making available their normal Windows games, does this mean that the interface will be a mouse and a keyboard? I'd be fine with this, but it's interesting that every major company that's making living room entertainment devices are really going out of their way to avoid using a keyboard and mouse. They must have some research backing up their decision.
What Rutherford did was that he recognized that atoms have heavy, tiny nuclei and a cloud of electrons that orbits them. He didn't "split atoms" in any interesting sense. I mean, we all remove electrons from atoms. That's called chemistry. I don't know who taught you "Rutherford split the atom" but you should really revisit that.
If this co-evolution story were actually true then yes, you would be on to something. The truth is, however, that the diet of the people alive today simply has no precedent in human history. Sure, it shares some components with ancient foods, but that doesn't count for much, when you consider how each common crop differs from its ancient ancestor in its nutritional profile. But more important, the distribution and balance of the foods we eat has nothing in common with the eating habits of our ancestors. So even without any GMO, we're basically flying blind as far as helpful co-evolution goes. If we came from a long Malthusian line of people who sat for 14 hours a day and fried most of their foods, we'd be evolutionarily prepared for our modern times. As it stands we're completely in nature-uncharted territory. It might very well be the case that even "natural" foods which benefit us in small quantities actually harm us in larger quantities. So I think you're getting a bit too carried away with the thought that our foods were somehow optimized by nature for our benefit. And once we realize that when it comes to food, basically everything is new, we get the right perspective on GMO, which is that it's yet another new thing that needs a thorough evaluation before we can judge it safe - but then again, so does every other thing we eat. None of it should be taken as "already tested well enough" because even if it's old, the context of our eating it has changed so much that its effects could now be completely different. What I'm saying is that from the perspective of food safety, GMO food shouldn't be singled out for extra suspicion while all the other crap we eat is "presumed safe". Let's be suspicious about everything and let science answer what's safe.
When you dam up a river, the water that flows through tends to be much colder than in the undammed river. For example, the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon is only 47F due to the Hoover Dam/Lake Mead. Maybe the local flora and fauna would actually benefit if we built some powerplants there and in the summer we heated it back up to the pre-dam summer temperatures, which were as high as 80F.
Exactly right. In the relevant sense, all these plants (nuclear, gas, coal, biomass, solar-thermal, geothermal, etc.) work on the same principle: They heat water, steam turns a turbine, steam is cooled/condensed, cycle restarts. If anything, nuclear plants tend to be better per megawatt generated because many use cooling towers, which dissipate lots of the extra heat into the air rather than into rivers. A summary like this betrays a complete ignorance about the basic functioning of power plants.
I hope you remember you said this ten years from now. You'll eat your words. Webb is by far the most science-rich mission that Nasa is doing, bar none. It's also very ambitious and hard. It's like the LHC's brother, and it's the thing which will generate at least two Nobel Prizes. Many assholes in both houses wanted to cancel it. Obama went to the mat for it, and I love him for doing this. This will be the most important telescope in history.
Rutherford had nothing to do with nuclear power (fission). That was done Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Germany in the 30's. Meitner is the first person to grasp the process of U235 fission, and I wish she got more credit.
I think that you're more right than wrong, but you too have to admit that the conclusion depends on the specifics of the case. When you have code that's an unsupportable mess and you want to bet your company on it, a rewrite may be unavoidable. But just because you rewrite doesn't mean that you have to scrap the old code immediately. You can do it like MS did with NT: Do a rewrite with the full intention of eventually transitioning everything to it, but let the code age for 10 years before you actually pull the trigger on the transition. Also, keeping old code is much easier when you wrote it in a modular way. If you didn't, a re-write might be worth it in the long run.
Google pays for extra search traffic because each marginal unit of that traffic makes them more money than whatever they paid for it. They're basically buying $10 bills for $8. I think that's a sustainable business model!
If some Microsoft people thought they were clever by making sure that Google overfunds Firefox, the joke is on them. In reality, the best thing that could happen for MS is that Firefox's oxygen is cut off. I can't think of a way that Google can invest money which is more harmful to MS than by funding Firefox. With two good browsers teaming up to take on MSIE, I don't really see any possibility for MS to dominate the internet like they once hoped. If anything, this situation guarantees that they will lose more users and more control. Imagine if US special forces cleverly managed to part the Taliban with a big chunk of money. Is that a win for the US? Not if that money was actually just diverted to Al Quaeda.
If this thing can compete on performance with ARM chips, it's only because Intel can make miracles happen in silicon. Of course, we might never know what would happen if Intel used their latest process technology to print ARM chips like Apple's A6 or whatever the next generation will be. But it would be very good.
This is an incredibly stupid idea, so much so that it's making me suspect that SETI people don't really care about science. The obvious problem is that we don't know what "alien footprints" look like. Therefore, the searchers are basically supposed to report anything which looks significant or weird to them.
Here is what I predict: We won't discover an alien capsule, but we'll definitely see formations where aliens arranged rocks to look like
1. some Egyptian heiroglyph, 2. an uncanny likeness of a human face, 3. the English word "Hi", possibly with an exclamation mark after it, 3. a strangely "perfect" hexagon, 4. a site that appears "flattened" in roughly a circular are, with a strange smudge in the exact center, and reminds us of a launching pad, 5. a large collection of "depictions of human shapes", 6. something that looks like the Virgin Mary or an angel or Jesus, 7. etc.We might as well ask people to find traces of alien-made shapes in the clouds that float overhead. Yes, we would "find" a million such traces, because of how human perception works. There is a bunny! And then, we can easily use our creativity to weave a story about what aliens are trying to accomplish by making a bunny-shaped cloud. Well, multiply this by millions and take it to the moon, and you have the makings of a fiasco. Thousands of idiots will be printing the latest picture of a "weird-looking lunar thing" in newspaper, along with giant headlines like "Is this an ancient alien archeological dig on the moon?" In the article, various experts who said "Well, it seems highly unlikely, but we can't in principle rule out that it could be" will be quoted as saying "It could be!". Then the History Channel will do a special "Aliens on the Moon?" and soon and moon alien "truthers" will organize on the internet.
What I'm saying is that a great deal of harm to science will come of this. It's exactly the sort of project that will give a megaphone to the world's idiots (because they will be the ones saying something interesting) and will make real scientists seem even more like conspirers who try to deny some deep reality that "real people" want to believe in, because they will be saying true but unpleasant things about human pattern recognition, how our perception plays tricks on us, how big interstellar space is and how slow the speed limit of our universe is. People on slashdot might not appreciate the full extent of this, but there are many people in the world who want to take down science and replace it with superstition. Some are even quite savvy with PR. It will be that much easier to marginalize the sane voices because everyone will point out that after all the real scientists who asked us to start this search, namely SETI, are a legitimate organization. So far that's more or less true, but if they really want to undertake something this pointless and dangerous, I will take this back.
"I'm sorry ma'am, but federal law requires that I incinerate this ebook!"
"But... WHY?"
"It's already been looked at 26 times."
?