Most of the lab grounds are open access. I have photos of some of the same regions from hikes I took around the region. The "No Trespassing" signs that he took pictures of don't say "No Trespassing" because it's a top secret region, they say it because if you walk past them, you will plummet off a cliff to your immediate death. The fences are there for protection of hikers, not security. The REAL secured areas of the lab have high quality prison caliber barbed-wire fences, video surveillance entirely surrounding the area, armed guards in watch towers, and you aren't even permitted to slow down when driving past.
Basically, this reporter took a glorified hiking tour of the region, but missed most of the beautiful landscape of the area.
That doesn't work if The Powers that Be have decided on a solution ahead of time.
If "The Powers that Be" are doing the work of the people beneath them and choosing their favorite language rather than the right language, then already the wrong person has decided. Corporate managers are usually not in a master/apprentice relationship and shouldn't pretend that they are.
Somehow I don't picture solar energy working very well in the UK. I would think their high degree of cloud cover and rainy days would put a damper on such a project. Are there any existing (and reasonably efficient) solar plants in the UK?
Given their island nature, wind power might be reasonably useful. Current windmills in the UK seem to be bringing in 2MW per turbine. Of course, this is small in comparison to the 38GW that's currently being consumed by the UK. (Wh / hours_per_year)
Divide it out and they need only build 19,000 wind power turbines to power the country's electricity needs.
There is certainly value in installing as many affordable renewable energy sources as possible. However, for general purpose usage in all countries, the world's energy needs won't be solved before commercial fusion is available.
If we begin with the assumption that the digits of Pi are completely random, then the following analysis is much simpler and much more correct (or it had better be now that I said it was) than the one presented:
The probability of finding a particular single digit is 0.1, or of finding a particular sequence of two digits is 0.01 or 0.1^2. The probability of finding a particular sequence of n digits is 0.1^n.
Therefore, the expectation is that on average you will find a particular sequence of n digits once every 1/(0.1^n) digits, or 10^n digits.
The question then arises as to the efficiency of indexing this many digits to locate the sequence desired. The amount of storage required for the index is log base 10 (log_10) of the number of digits you need to look. If we assume the desired sequence will always occur in average or less digits, then the amount of storage required for the index is:
log_10 (10^n) = n (log_10 (10)) = n
Unfortunately, the assumption I slipped in above that the desired sequence will always occur in average or less digits only holds 50% of the time. Therefore, in order to have a good chance of finding the sequence, we need to include a longer search space, and thus the index needs to be just slightly more digits in length than the sequence being stored.
In essence, a very effective data expansion algorithm.
(Proofreading is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Personally, I think as soon as we're technologically able, we should move away from the whole biology thing. Being in a meat body sucks sledgehammers thru a garden hose.
Okay, build yourself your stainless steel body, go out into the wilderness, and fry a transistor, sizzle a magnet, or snap a connector. Then limp around for a few hours, days, or years waiting hopelessly for it to heal.
Organic bodies may have their hangups, but you're far more likely to survive on your own as an organic body than as any machine made by man.
Eventually, with extraordinary leaps in nanotechnology we might be able to make sufficiently self-repairing and resilient artificial machines, but by that point, we'd be getting pretty close to a biological system.
Re:Why so many different standards?
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 1
and I do not see any good reason why I should switch to this fake money.
Money is real if and only if people think it is worth something. Value is based entirely on perception. I only accept a check for work because I know that check can be exchanged for green paper, and I only accept that green paper because I know other people will accept it in exchange for toys, food, and services. If everybody around me agreed to take baseball trading cards in exchange for goods and services, I would use them too. The only important thing is that someone takes care of quantity control.
if you cant deduce that the 'button with the little picture of the printer on it' means print
It's not the button with the picture of the printer on it that's the problem, it's the button with the triangle, circle, and ruler on it, or all of the other asinine buttons with no immediately apparent purpose. This situation is complicated more when there are countless hoards of these buttons, and you know only that the thing you need to do should be possible to do with the current program but the trick is simply to find where the option is hidden and which button produces the proper menu to find that option. Usability of modern programs CAN be a nightmare, even for those of us who can hack kernels. The problem seems to show up because people who are intimately familiar with the programs are application and its features are deciding how the menus should be organized and what buttons should go where. You can have all the computer experience in the world, but if you have to search through a combinatorically explosive list of features to find what you want, it can be difficult to perform even mundane tasks.
People may want a more easy-to-use program that's more stable, but they don't know it... So what's the solution?
Simple. Allow software to be returnable and then people will be buying software on features they do want, rather than on features they think they want.
When buying a car people might think about power windows, power locks, maybe even remote keyless entry, but when it really comes down to it people sit in the car, test drive it, and see how it feels.
Gee, and here I thought that adding context data was trying to eliminate the linear projection by adding another dimension. Silly me.
Material understanding is not two-dimensional either. More information like you suggested can give you more insight into a person, but in general it does not give you good ranking criteria. The idea that numerical measurements of education are somehow scientific and thus sufficient selection criteria is flawed.
It might be more illuminating if university transcripts for courses also showed a distribution curve and where the student sits on it.
Then how do you interpret a transcript that shows many of the students getting low scores in a class? Does it mean the students were stupid, the professor was a poor teacher, the professor was a hard grader, the material covered was more advanced than other similarly named classes, or that there was a disjoint between class content and exam content?
The simple fact is that you don't know any of those things, and no set of numbers can effectively evaluate those things for you. There are too many pinheads out there who think intelligence, knowledge, and prediction of job performance can be linearized onto a number line. In reality, none of these things can be collapsed into anything close to a straight line.
Therefore any grading system or ranking that tries to evaluate people and put them in order is intrinsically broken and missing most of the information one would want to know.
when the computer recognizes faces better than you, plays soccer better than you, writes poetry better than you, steals your girlfriend, and passes the turing test, will you still think its just "following the rules"? your brain is just following the rules of physics too you know.
If someone ever designs a computer that can steal my girlfriend, I will certainly give that computer a little lesson in the laws of physics...
In order to be the chief architect of a new rocket... that person has to have the equivalent of a Ph.D.
Most people outside of computers would pick Bill Gates and Microsoft for the software end of things -not deeply understanding the real issues involved leads to poor choices being made.
The degree of expertise you mention in each field is not needed to be a good administrator in charge of such a project. What IS needed is a high level of organizational skill, wisdom, and the intelligence necessary to know how to choose the appropriate people to head each of those subdivisions. You don't choose Bill Gates to run the software end because you've heard of him, this is poor logic. Instead, you ask many respected academics in the field of computing who appropriate people to head a division would be.
You don't need to be an expert in everything, you just need to know how to find them. Such knowledge isn't spontaneously generated inside of experts, it travels by word of mouth.
Uhm, no, the property which keeps the Earth's axis oriented in the same direction is called angular momentum. The Earth's angular momentum is simply a consequence of the fact that the Earth is spinning about it's axis, and this has nothing to do with the moon orbitting around the Earth.
A planet which has one side face the sun all the time has achieved what's called "tidal lock". This occurs when tidal forces slow a planet's rotation to exactly one rotation per revolution about its sun. One example of tidal lock is the moon's orbit around the Earth. The moon rotates once for every revolution around the Earth, and thus the same side of the moon always faces us.
In July, however, Australian researchers showed that entropy can decrease over short time periods for small systems.
Actually, this has been known for a very long time. Entropy constancy or increase is only probabilistic, in that it happens for large systems with overwhelming likelihood, and thus is never observed to decrease for large systems since observing such is so overwhelmingly unlikely. But for sufficiently small systems, there is reasonable chance of observing fluctuations away from equilibrium.
This does not permit any violations of the second law, however, because as soon as you string several small systems together, you have a large system.
For more information, look up entropy and microstates.
If you use your real name, in just about any combination, spammers will find you. Someone has decided it is effective to simply spam all combinations of all names. I assume most dictionary words are also included in these lists of spam targets.
The bottom line is that for astronomers to do their jobs, they don't need any reformation of current classification systems. It doesn't matter what you call the bodies in question; whether you call Pluto a planet, an asteroid, or a Kuiperoid doesn't change anything about its inherent nature. It's worth pointing out that pioneering such reclassifications is restricted almost entirely to amateurs, for the simple fact that the professionals don't care.
You must be new to the greatest of all scientific strivings: funding.
I might add that Freeman Dyson has conjectured that the brain might work on quantum principals. It sounds strange but hey, he would know more about it than I do.
Classical computers can still compute quantum systems, it just takes an exponential performance hit. Quantum computers can handle such systems much more efficiently.
However the only reason you see so many people conjecturing that the brain might work on quantum principals is because humans are much more comfortable attributing the function of the brain to technology that is just at the fringe of their understanding. In fact, it's very unlikely that quantum principals play any more of a significance in the brain's function than they do in integrated circuits, and this is simply because of the size and temperature of the brain.
though Stephan Wolfram might have something to say about this.
Stephen Wolfram has announced in lectures that humans are no more computationally complex than a rock. I would disagree somewhat, and would instead say that humans are as computationally complex as most neural networks of the same size. I would also say that we can computationally simulate neural networks of that size (although it might be an expensive undertaking to simulate it close to human speed). And this still leaves the most difficult problem on the table, which is programming the neural network appropriately.
Actually actually, the 3-body isn't a deterministic system in a physical sense any more than it is in a computational sense. The inherent problem with the 3-body problem is that in general, solutions are unstable because they depend greatly on specific initial conditions, which can only be known so well.
Both neural networks and genetic algorithms (also genetic programming) can adapt to new situations and new problems. Humans are neural networks, and both neural networks and genetic algorithms can be programmed on a computer. The problem is simply that neural networks take a lot of processing power when using a single central processor (the way computers are typically designed), and work much more rapidly when done by a slower distributed neural network which does massive parallel processing (the human brain).
The computer is not at all limited. Any physical process can be computed by a Turing machine, which means by extension that any modern PC can compute anything. It is simply a question of time required to compute it. The brain is a physical system, and is thus Turing computable.
If there exists more to humanity than the physical, then computational theory does not claim that Turing machines can compute it. But the brain at least, and all of its adaptability to new situations and new problems, are computable.
For more information search for information on programming "neural networks" and "genetic algorithms".
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the lab grounds are open access. I have photos of some of the same regions from hikes I took around the region. The "No Trespassing" signs that he took pictures of don't say "No Trespassing" because it's a top secret region, they say it because if you walk past them, you will plummet off a cliff to your immediate death. The fences are there for protection of hikers, not security. The REAL secured areas of the lab have high quality prison caliber barbed-wire fences, video surveillance entirely surrounding the area, armed guards in watch towers, and you aren't even permitted to slow down when driving past.
Basically, this reporter took a glorified hiking tour of the region, but missed most of the beautiful landscape of the area.
That doesn't work if The Powers that Be have decided on a solution ahead of time.
If "The Powers that Be" are doing the work of the people beneath them and choosing their favorite language rather than the right language, then already the wrong person has decided. Corporate managers are usually not in a master/apprentice relationship and shouldn't pretend that they are.
Somehow I don't picture solar energy working very well in the UK. I would think their high degree of cloud cover and rainy days would put a damper on such a project. Are there any existing (and reasonably efficient) solar plants in the UK?
Given their island nature, wind power might be reasonably useful. Current windmills in the UK seem to be bringing in 2MW per turbine. Of course, this is small in comparison to the 38GW that's currently being consumed by the UK. (Wh / hours_per_year)
Divide it out and they need only build 19,000 wind power turbines to power the country's electricity needs.
There is certainly value in installing as many affordable renewable energy sources as possible. However, for general purpose usage in all countries, the world's energy needs won't be solved before commercial fusion is available.
If we begin with the assumption that the digits of Pi are completely random, then the following analysis is much simpler and much more correct (or it had better be now that I said it was) than the one presented:
The probability of finding a particular single digit is 0.1, or of finding a particular sequence of two digits is 0.01 or 0.1^2. The probability of finding a particular sequence of n digits is 0.1^n.
Therefore, the expectation is that on average you will find a particular sequence of n digits once every 1/(0.1^n) digits, or 10^n digits.
The question then arises as to the efficiency of indexing this many digits to locate the sequence desired. The amount of storage required for the index is log base 10 (log_10) of the number of digits you need to look. If we assume the desired sequence will always occur in average or less digits, then the amount of storage required for the index is:
log_10 (10^n) = n (log_10 (10)) = n
Unfortunately, the assumption I slipped in above that the desired sequence will always occur in average or less digits only holds 50% of the time. Therefore, in order to have a good chance of finding the sequence, we need to include a longer search space, and thus the index needs to be just slightly more digits in length than the sequence being stored.
In essence, a very effective data expansion algorithm.
(Proofreading is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Personally, I think as soon as we're technologically able, we should move away from the whole biology thing. Being in a meat body sucks sledgehammers thru a garden hose.
Okay, build yourself your stainless steel body, go out into the wilderness, and fry a transistor, sizzle a magnet, or snap a connector. Then limp around for a few hours, days, or years waiting hopelessly for it to heal.
Organic bodies may have their hangups, but you're far more likely to survive on your own as an organic body than as any machine made by man.
Eventually, with extraordinary leaps in nanotechnology we might be able to make sufficiently self-repairing and resilient artificial machines, but by that point, we'd be getting pretty close to a biological system.
and I do not see any good reason why I should switch to this fake money.
Money is real if and only if people think it is worth something. Value is based entirely on perception. I only accept a check for work because I know that check can be exchanged for green paper, and I only accept that green paper because I know other people will accept it in exchange for toys, food, and services. If everybody around me agreed to take baseball trading cards in exchange for goods and services, I would use them too. The only important thing is that someone takes care of quantity control.
I would think Ctrl-Alt-Backspace would work just as well in X. Is this user-trappable in any way? (assuming text login prompts are disabled)
Of course, for all I know, he didn't mean to be sarcastic in the first place.
:)
He did (and also thought it was obvious).
Even more obvious, maybe the UK parliament owns the domain because they ARE the UK parliament?
True. That's the same reason that the US Whitehouse owns www.whitehouse.com
if you cant deduce that the 'button with the little picture of the printer on it' means print
It's not the button with the picture of the printer on it that's the problem, it's the button with the triangle, circle, and ruler on it, or all of the other asinine buttons with no immediately apparent purpose. This situation is complicated more when there are countless hoards of these buttons, and you know only that the thing you need to do should be possible to do with the current program but the trick is simply to find where the option is hidden and which button produces the proper menu to find that option. Usability of modern programs CAN be a nightmare, even for those of us who can hack kernels. The problem seems to show up because people who are intimately familiar with the programs are application and its features are deciding how the menus should be organized and what buttons should go where. You can have all the computer experience in the world, but if you have to search through a combinatorically explosive list of features to find what you want, it can be difficult to perform even mundane tasks.
People may want a more easy-to-use program that's more stable, but they don't know it... So what's the solution?
Simple. Allow software to be returnable and then people will be buying software on features they do want, rather than on features they think they want.
When buying a car people might think about power windows, power locks, maybe even remote keyless entry, but when it really comes down to it people sit in the car, test drive it, and see how it feels.
So a computer that got infected and had access to the internal network would be enough to crash those reachable ATMs.
That's as poor of a design as Fort Knox would have if the gold vault had a cleaning closet with both an external and an internal plywood door.
Gee, and here I thought that adding context data was trying to eliminate the linear projection by adding another dimension. Silly me.
Material understanding is not two-dimensional either. More information like you suggested can give you more insight into a person, but in general it does not give you good ranking criteria. The idea that numerical measurements of education are somehow scientific and thus sufficient selection criteria is flawed.
It might be more illuminating if university transcripts for courses also showed a distribution curve and where the student sits on it.
Then how do you interpret a transcript that shows many of the students getting low scores in a class? Does it mean the students were stupid, the professor was a poor teacher, the professor was a hard grader, the material covered was more advanced than other similarly named classes, or that there was a disjoint between class content and exam content?
The simple fact is that you don't know any of those things, and no set of numbers can effectively evaluate those things for you. There are too many pinheads out there who think intelligence, knowledge, and prediction of job performance can be linearized onto a number line. In reality, none of these things can be collapsed into anything close to a straight line.
Therefore any grading system or ranking that tries to evaluate people and put them in order is intrinsically broken and missing most of the information one would want to know.
unfortunately, spammers are putting more and more (esp. disclaimers) in images, making it hard to filter.
So filter for remote-loaded images. If a person wants to send you an image they should attach it or send a link.
when the computer recognizes faces better than you, plays soccer better than you, writes poetry better than you, steals your girlfriend, and passes the turing test, will you still think its just "following the rules"? your brain is just following the rules of physics too you know.
If someone ever designs a computer that can steal my girlfriend, I will certainly give that computer a little lesson in the laws of physics...
In order to be the chief architect of a new rocket ... that person has to have the equivalent of a Ph.D.
Most people outside of computers would pick Bill Gates and Microsoft for the software end of things -not deeply understanding the real issues involved leads to poor choices being made.
The degree of expertise you mention in each field is not needed to be a good administrator in charge of such a project. What IS needed is a high level of organizational skill, wisdom, and the intelligence necessary to know how to choose the appropriate people to head each of those subdivisions. You don't choose Bill Gates to run the software end because you've heard of him, this is poor logic. Instead, you ask many respected academics in the field of computing who appropriate people to head a division would be.
You don't need to be an expert in everything, you just need to know how to find them. Such knowledge isn't spontaneously generated inside of experts, it travels by word of mouth.
Uhm, no, the property which keeps the Earth's axis oriented in the same direction is called angular momentum. The Earth's angular momentum is simply a consequence of the fact that the Earth is spinning about it's axis, and this has nothing to do with the moon orbitting around the Earth.
A planet which has one side face the sun all the time has achieved what's called "tidal lock". This occurs when tidal forces slow a planet's rotation to exactly one rotation per revolution about its sun. One example of tidal lock is the moon's orbit around the Earth. The moon rotates once for every revolution around the Earth, and thus the same side of the moon always faces us.
In July, however, Australian researchers showed that entropy can decrease over short time periods for small systems.
Actually, this has been known for a very long time. Entropy constancy or increase is only probabilistic, in that it happens for large systems with overwhelming likelihood, and thus is never observed to decrease for large systems since observing such is so overwhelmingly unlikely. But for sufficiently small systems, there is reasonable chance of observing fluctuations away from equilibrium.
This does not permit any violations of the second law, however, because as soon as you string several small systems together, you have a large system.
For more information, look up entropy and microstates.
Do you have really obvious email names?
If you use your real name, in just about any combination, spammers will find you. Someone has decided it is effective to simply spam all combinations of all names. I assume most dictionary words are also included in these lists of spam targets.
The bottom line is that for astronomers to do their jobs, they don't need any reformation of current classification systems. It doesn't matter what you call the bodies in question; whether you call Pluto a planet, an asteroid, or a Kuiperoid doesn't change anything about its inherent nature. It's worth pointing out that pioneering such reclassifications is restricted almost entirely to amateurs, for the simple fact that the professionals don't care.
You must be new to the greatest of all scientific strivings: funding.
I might add that Freeman Dyson has conjectured that the brain might work on quantum principals. It sounds strange but hey, he would know more about it than I do.
Classical computers can still compute quantum systems, it just takes an exponential performance hit. Quantum computers can handle such systems much more efficiently.
However the only reason you see so many people conjecturing that the brain might work on quantum principals is because humans are much more comfortable attributing the function of the brain to technology that is just at the fringe of their understanding. In fact, it's very unlikely that quantum principals play any more of a significance in the brain's function than they do in integrated circuits, and this is simply because of the size and temperature of the brain.
though Stephan Wolfram might have something to say about this.
Stephen Wolfram has announced in lectures that humans are no more computationally complex than a rock. I would disagree somewhat, and would instead say that humans are as computationally complex as most neural networks of the same size. I would also say that we can computationally simulate neural networks of that size (although it might be an expensive undertaking to simulate it close to human speed). And this still leaves the most difficult problem on the table, which is programming the neural network appropriately.
Actually actually, the 3-body isn't a deterministic system in a physical sense any more than it is in a computational sense. The inherent problem with the 3-body problem is that in general, solutions are unstable because they depend greatly on specific initial conditions, which can only be known so well.
That's ridiculous, Google will always be found at the same, trusted, reliable place: http://www.google.com
Both neural networks and genetic algorithms (also genetic programming) can adapt to new situations and new problems. Humans are neural networks, and both neural networks and genetic algorithms can be programmed on a computer. The problem is simply that neural networks take a lot of processing power when using a single central processor (the way computers are typically designed), and work much more rapidly when done by a slower distributed neural network which does massive parallel processing (the human brain).
The computer is not at all limited. Any physical process can be computed by a Turing machine, which means by extension that any modern PC can compute anything. It is simply a question of time required to compute it. The brain is a physical system, and is thus Turing computable.
If there exists more to humanity than the physical, then computational theory does not claim that Turing machines can compute it. But the brain at least, and all of its adaptability to new situations and new problems, are computable.
For more information search for information on programming "neural networks" and "genetic algorithms".