Percussive maintenance is also known as percussion therapy or a technical tap. It is a term used to describe the malediction of an ill-behaved device[citation needed] to make it work, that is to say, swear at it and hit it. The origins and practice of the term are unknown, although some suggest the act became commonplace with the introduction of vacuum tube electronics, or perhaps with the invention of the wheel[citation needed]. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussive_maintenance )
Of course you can. It would be trivial to write e.g. an extension for Firefox that blocks canvas tags unless you specifically allow them, a la NoScript. And you can already block content from ad servers with stuff like Adblock
However, I've yet to see a such a contest in which the successful entries used AI techniques rather than handcoded decision-making. My money says the winners of this will be handcoded and possibly tuned automatically, and not based on neural networks or genetic programming or whatever. I suspect this is true because these games are set up so that the game mechanics and the outlines of good strategy are very intuitive to humans, and so it's most efficient for the human programmer to encode that knowledge into the controller. Then if there's some minor detail that the programmer doesn't know how to optimize, like "what is the exact threshold from which I should switch from strategy X to strategy Y", then that can be found by running a lot of games automatically.
That's how I'll be working, at least; in any case, I don't think I could write a decent learning algorithm for something like this in a month (or probably even given a lot more time).
I hope this isn't considered spam, but those interested in this might like to know about some other programming games I've enjoyed: http://jrobots.sf.net/ (Java clone of CRobots) http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ (More complicated version of above) http://sillysoft.net/ (Risk game that accepts AI plugins)
Simply eating meat places an implicit upper bound on the value of an animal's life. Think about how many animal lives will be sacrificed over the course of your one life to put meat on your table. And this is just for taste; it's possible to eat a pretty healthy diet without meat. Thus I, and all other meat-eaters, have placed an extremely low value on animal lives. In fact, unless you feel a little bit guilty whenever you eat meat, you're valuing animals' lives at virtually zero.
Man, talk about excess hype: the aluminum passes extreme UV radiation, for 40 femtoseconds. Calling this "transparent" is one of the bigger exaggerations I've heard recently.
Establishing a viable colony in another start system would be an almost infinite payoff, in that the long-term prospects of the human race would be vastly improved.
That said, we aren't even close to being able to build a starship, let alone terraform an exoplanet.
To those whining about returning to an Apollo site instead of doing some new exploration/science:
This isn't a science mission, and the people doing it aren't scientists. The Lunar X Prize isn't trying to promote lunar science. It's about improving space technology. By returning to an Apollo site, the teams can generate lots of public interest that will help them make some money to cover their costs, and break even on the finances. If they went somewhere else these private teams would likely have to absorb millions of dollars in losses.
Plus, there's a bonus prize for photographing man-made objects on the moon. Don't you want to see the pictures?
the chances are that having teamed up with this company, their plans are to get the prize money, maybe develop, maybe not, and know for certain ahead of time it'll never leave the ground. They just want the money.
What? There's no prize money until you land on the Moon. From the prize website: "The first team to land on the Moon and complete the mission objectives will be awarded $20 million."
I heard Red Whittaker, the team leader, speak last summer; he said he does expect to make money off the project. Not from the prize, as the costs are several times the prize money, but from all the money that can be generated from the publicity of the landing. He wouldn't be doing the project if it was going to lose money; he's not in it for the science or the benefit to humanity. So yes, it is in large part a PR thing. But they definitely plan to launch; they've bought a launch rocket from NASA for several million dollars.
Personally, I'm all for it; I think the lander is unlikely to mess up the Apollo site more than the launch rockers of the return stage already have, and it's perhaps the only site that will generate a bunch of public interest. As someone who wasn't alive during Apollo, I'm excited to see the video.
In a world with no evidence for divine beings, taking a position that considers the presence and absence of divine beings equally likely is "[treating] the arbitrary as on a par with the rational."
In a world without evidence for monsters under your bed, the rational position is to believe that no such monsters exist. It is not rational to be "agnostic" about monsters under your bed, even though no amount of evidence will conclusive disprove their existence.
I read "people come to share and not to hide" as "privacy isn't that important in social networking."
If this is really expressing an attitude that I shouldn't really have an expectation of privacy on Facebook, that's stupid. I should be able to have such an expectation (which isn't to say that I do...).
It is interesting to speculate about the information density of memories.
Petabytes may impinge on our retinas but much less will make it to the brain and only a tiny fraction will make it into long-term storage: my memories, at least, are not 20,000x20,000 pixel video. They're more like crude reconstructions of small fragments of audio or video. As if the original data had been brutally compressed, then uncompressed and filled in by an artist applying a lot of guesswork. I would guess that we store surprisingly few bytes for each megabyte of input.
IIRC, the last time sunspots were at a minimum like this, earth was in the little ice age
No; during the little ice age there was ~50 years of almost no sunspots; we've only had ~2. There was a solar minimum earlier this century deeper than this one (unless this one goes on for a while yet).
For all your space weather needs
on
Sunspots Return
·
· Score: 1
Those interested in this kind of stuff may want to check out http://spaceweather.com/ -- it's like a weather site, for space!
I'm pretty sure everyone has at least some subconscious awareness of their environment based on echoes. I recall one time where I walked into a room in my house and stopped dead because the echoes of my footfalls were so strange; the room had been cleared of all the junk that normally cluttered it. If you pay attention you will notice how the sound of your steps or of your voice changes as you move about.
*Everyone* has the ability to do "real mathematics" as opposed to the empty stuff that seems to be taught in schools. And there's really no sort of prerequisite knowledge necessary to grasp any of the fundamental concepts of K-12 math. You can teach calculus to someone who merely knows arithmetic:
Some hills are steeper than others. What is this idea of "steepness"? Well, a hill is steep if the land goes up a lot within a short distance. So let's take the height of the hill and divide it by the width, and call that the steepness. OK, but what if a hill isn't just a straight ascent, but curvy, so it's got a different steepness in different parts. That's fine, we'll just concentrate on a small section at a time, so that within that small section the hill is pretty straight. Then we can get a steepness for every point on the hill. Bam! You have learned how to take derivatives. Of course, this lesson would be taught on an actual hillside.
OK, if you see a polynomial on a test you can't yet take the derivative. But you have comprehended the simple and elegant underlying concept. Contrast this with the way in which calculus is generally taught. First we introduce the concept of limits, which. While essential to the rigorous mathematical foundation of calculus, do not help anyone to understand what a derivative is. We practice taking limits for a while, and learn a rigorous definition of continuity that by rights belongs in a collegiate real analysis class. Anyone can tell whether a function is continuous, just graph it! No one cares about stupid trick functions like "(x-1)(x-3)/(x-1)". Anyway, we then get introduced to a particular arbitrary limit that defines the derivative, and take the derivative the hard way for a bit. This is again contributing little to our understanding. All this was comprehended in the idea of "looking at a small section of the hill", the mathematical rigor should be distinctly secondary to the communication of intuitive ideas. The fundamental theorem of calculus seems an arcane and mystical thing until you realize that it is simply saying that a steeper hill will be taller than a shallower hill of the same length.
Math should be taught in this intuitive manner in which mathematical concepts are tightly bound to real-world ideas. Why isn't math taught in such a way? For one thing, I believe, math teachers are generally underqualified. Many lack the intuitive understanding which ought to be the primary focus of their communication with their students (partially as a result of their own suboptimal math classes). Secondly, professional mathematics has *too much* influence on classroom mathematics, in some ways. A mature mathematical discipline logically procedes with basic axioms and definitions built into theorems. This is the *wrong* way to teach anything except perhaps geometry (the only point of teaching geometry is to demonstrate this process). As I discussed above, the rigorous progression from limits to derivatives is foreign to the human mind. Much better to start with familiar concepts like the slope of a hill and then procede slowly towards a quantity called the derivative, and then to how to calculate it, and then to the rigorous definition and proofs. Finally, if we wish, we may turn the whole thing around and see how to proceed from definitions to proofs to calculations to results that agree with intuition. The proofs will be much more transparent now that we have some sense of why they turn out the way they do.
Inclination may be harder to find, but because of the backwardness of mathematics teaching, students seem to dislike it even more than they dislike school in general. Teaching math in a more reasonable way would likely reduce the frustration that many students associate with the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
Just click on that link and you'll see.
Well, that was an amusing few hours.
percussive maintenance
Haha, an excellent phrase!
Percussive maintenance is also known as percussion therapy or a technical tap. It is a term used to describe the malediction of an ill-behaved device[citation needed] to make it work, that is to say, swear at it and hit it. The origins and practice of the term are unknown, although some suggest the act became commonplace with the introduction of vacuum tube electronics, or perhaps with the invention of the wheel[citation needed]. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussive_maintenance )
Of course you can. It would be trivial to write e.g. an extension for Firefox that blocks canvas tags unless you specifically allow them, a la NoScript. And you can already block content from ad servers with stuff like Adblock
Programming games are fun!
However, I've yet to see a such a contest in which the successful entries used AI techniques rather than handcoded decision-making. My money says the winners of this will be handcoded and possibly tuned automatically, and not based on neural networks or genetic programming or whatever. I suspect this is true because these games are set up so that the game mechanics and the outlines of good strategy are very intuitive to humans, and so it's most efficient for the human programmer to encode that knowledge into the controller. Then if there's some minor detail that the programmer doesn't know how to optimize, like "what is the exact threshold from which I should switch from strategy X to strategy Y", then that can be found by running a lot of games automatically.
That's how I'll be working, at least; in any case, I don't think I could write a decent learning algorithm for something like this in a month (or probably even given a lot more time).
I hope this isn't considered spam, but those interested in this might like to know about some other programming games I've enjoyed:
http://jrobots.sf.net/ (Java clone of CRobots)
http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ (More complicated version of above)
http://sillysoft.net/ (Risk game that accepts AI plugins)
Simply eating meat places an implicit upper bound on the value of an animal's life. Think about how many animal lives will be sacrificed over the course of your one life to put meat on your table. And this is just for taste; it's possible to eat a pretty healthy diet without meat. Thus I, and all other meat-eaters, have placed an extremely low value on animal lives. In fact, unless you feel a little bit guilty whenever you eat meat, you're valuing animals' lives at virtually zero.
Man, talk about excess hype: the aluminum passes extreme UV radiation, for 40 femtoseconds. Calling this "transparent" is one of the bigger exaggerations I've heard recently.
Intentional.
How the hell is this "insightful"?!
Very well said! This is the reason for pushing human spaceflight beyond what brings us immediate economic or scientific gains.
Establishing a viable colony in another start system would be an almost infinite payoff, in that the long-term prospects of the human race would be vastly improved. That said, we aren't even close to being able to build a starship, let alone terraform an exoplanet.
To those whining about returning to an Apollo site instead of doing some new exploration/science: This isn't a science mission, and the people doing it aren't scientists. The Lunar X Prize isn't trying to promote lunar science. It's about improving space technology. By returning to an Apollo site, the teams can generate lots of public interest that will help them make some money to cover their costs, and break even on the finances. If they went somewhere else these private teams would likely have to absorb millions of dollars in losses. Plus, there's a bonus prize for photographing man-made objects on the moon. Don't you want to see the pictures?
the chances are that having teamed up with this company, their plans are to get the prize money, maybe develop, maybe not, and know for certain ahead of time it'll never leave the ground. They just want the money.
What? There's no prize money until you land on the Moon. From the prize website: "The first team to land on the Moon and complete the mission objectives will be awarded $20 million."
I heard Red Whittaker, the team leader, speak last summer; he said he does expect to make money off the project. Not from the prize, as the costs are several times the prize money, but from all the money that can be generated from the publicity of the landing. He wouldn't be doing the project if it was going to lose money; he's not in it for the science or the benefit to humanity. So yes, it is in large part a PR thing. But they definitely plan to launch; they've bought a launch rocket from NASA for several million dollars. Personally, I'm all for it; I think the lander is unlikely to mess up the Apollo site more than the launch rockers of the return stage already have, and it's perhaps the only site that will generate a bunch of public interest. As someone who wasn't alive during Apollo, I'm excited to see the video.
In a world with no evidence for divine beings, taking a position that considers the presence and absence of divine beings equally likely is "[treating] the arbitrary as on a par with the rational." In a world without evidence for monsters under your bed, the rational position is to believe that no such monsters exist. It is not rational to be "agnostic" about monsters under your bed, even though no amount of evidence will conclusive disprove their existence.
I read "people come to share and not to hide" as "privacy isn't that important in social networking." If this is really expressing an attitude that I shouldn't really have an expectation of privacy on Facebook, that's stupid. I should be able to have such an expectation (which isn't to say that I do...).
That's what I thought; how do you "run out" of copies a sequence of bytes?
It is interesting to speculate about the information density of memories. Petabytes may impinge on our retinas but much less will make it to the brain and only a tiny fraction will make it into long-term storage: my memories, at least, are not 20,000x20,000 pixel video. They're more like crude reconstructions of small fragments of audio or video. As if the original data had been brutally compressed, then uncompressed and filled in by an artist applying a lot of guesswork. I would guess that we store surprisingly few bytes for each megabyte of input.
What are the units that measure "lighterness"?
Inverse kilograms.
IIRC, the last time sunspots were at a minimum like this, earth was in the little ice age
No; during the little ice age there was ~50 years of almost no sunspots; we've only had ~2. There was a solar minimum earlier this century deeper than this one (unless this one goes on for a while yet).
Those interested in this kind of stuff may want to check out http://spaceweather.com/ -- it's like a weather site, for space!
I'm pretty sure everyone has at least some subconscious awareness of their environment based on echoes. I recall one time where I walked into a room in my house and stopped dead because the echoes of my footfalls were so strange; the room had been cleared of all the junk that normally cluttered it. If you pay attention you will notice how the sound of your steps or of your voice changes as you move about.
*Everyone* has the ability to do "real mathematics" as opposed to the empty stuff that seems to be taught in schools. And there's really no sort of prerequisite knowledge necessary to grasp any of the fundamental concepts of K-12 math. You can teach calculus to someone who merely knows arithmetic:
Some hills are steeper than others. What is this idea of "steepness"? Well, a hill is steep if the land goes up a lot within a short distance. So let's take the height of the hill and divide it by the width, and call that the steepness. OK, but what if a hill isn't just a straight ascent, but curvy, so it's got a different steepness in different parts. That's fine, we'll just concentrate on a small section at a time, so that within that small section the hill is pretty straight. Then we can get a steepness for every point on the hill. Bam! You have learned how to take derivatives. Of course, this lesson would be taught on an actual hillside.
OK, if you see a polynomial on a test you can't yet take the derivative. But you have comprehended the simple and elegant underlying concept. Contrast this with the way in which calculus is generally taught. First we introduce the concept of limits, which. While essential to the rigorous mathematical foundation of calculus, do not help anyone to understand what a derivative is. We practice taking limits for a while, and learn a rigorous definition of continuity that by rights belongs in a collegiate real analysis class. Anyone can tell whether a function is continuous, just graph it! No one cares about stupid trick functions like "(x-1)(x-3)/(x-1)". Anyway, we then get introduced to a particular arbitrary limit that defines the derivative, and take the derivative the hard way for a bit. This is again contributing little to our understanding. All this was comprehended in the idea of "looking at a small section of the hill", the mathematical rigor should be distinctly secondary to the communication of intuitive ideas. The fundamental theorem of calculus seems an arcane and mystical thing until you realize that it is simply saying that a steeper hill will be taller than a shallower hill of the same length.
Math should be taught in this intuitive manner in which mathematical concepts are tightly bound to real-world ideas. Why isn't math taught in such a way? For one thing, I believe, math teachers are generally underqualified. Many lack the intuitive understanding which ought to be the primary focus of their communication with their students (partially as a result of their own suboptimal math classes). Secondly, professional mathematics has *too much* influence on classroom mathematics, in some ways. A mature mathematical discipline logically procedes with basic axioms and definitions built into theorems. This is the *wrong* way to teach anything except perhaps geometry (the only point of teaching geometry is to demonstrate this process). As I discussed above, the rigorous progression from limits to derivatives is foreign to the human mind. Much better to start with familiar concepts like the slope of a hill and then procede slowly towards a quantity called the derivative, and then to how to calculate it, and then to the rigorous definition and proofs. Finally, if we wish, we may turn the whole thing around and see how to proceed from definitions to proofs to calculations to results that agree with intuition. The proofs will be much more transparent now that we have some sense of why they turn out the way they do.
Inclination may be harder to find, but because of the backwardness of mathematics teaching, students seem to dislike it even more than they dislike school in general. Teaching math in a more reasonable way would likely reduce the frustration that many students associate with the subject.