and what do you do about the old people? or do we simply kill them once they refuse to work? to give you a hint, once the single children get married and have their own kid, they will be two working people providing for seven eating people (four of their parents, two of them and one of the kid).
how many humans do you know who can run at that speed for more than a few minutes? the day someone escapes from jail and they'll send these toys after them, they will most likely be terrified... at the moment, they seem to still need an ombilical cord though, so I agree that they're not that scary.
for your second item: in the future, the head will be the end with the shark lasers attached to it.
what is the stuff you use daily, and how do you know that something is happening if you can't measure it? by the way, if the patient says they're feeling better, that's something you can measure (and you can write it down, like SecurityGuy told me above).
don't worry, I agree with you:) but I liked serviscope_minor's reply more. i.e. I think we should try to understand why placebo's work, and actively use them when it seems they have some effect; obviously, we should recognise them as placebos and not pay more than they're worth.
the problem with your argument is the definition of "better". if you're talking about something that can be objectively measured (i.e. "this patient has a temperature of N degrees, let's see if we can bring it down to N-1"), then it's all good. you test the sugar pill versus whatever treatment, and see which does better.
but if you're talking about reducing pain, then it gets complicated. objectively, you can see that a proposed treatment has the same result that a placebo does. does this mean that the treatment is worthless? well, if any fraction of people feel better after the "treatment", even though it's practically a placebo, then what is your argument against those people using the treatment?
don't worry, I know that the problem is with quacks lying about objectively measurable results.
but what do we do in the case of conditions where a "placebo" works very well for a significant fraction of people? shouldn't we fund some research into why the placebo works?
concerning agriculture, I saw a documentary on Discovery that made sense. once the population grows enough, hunter gatherers start fighting for resources. once that happens, the losers can get eaten or enslaved. and once you have slaves, you can concentrate on hunting and make them do the gathering. the slaves will come up with agriculture to make their lives easier, while the slave owners will keep all the hunted meat to themselves and become warriors/soldiers who protect the lands of slaves (because they like having more food over the winter).
First, when I say "intelligence" I'm talking about something that can generate inner models of their environment, evolve the inner models, and act based on the predictions. Note that I said "generate". If physics is NP hard, it means that a being moved from a smaller environment to a bigger environment has to solve an NP hard problem. In reality, a human child needs a very long time to learn how to walk, but they need less time afterwards to learn how to ride a bike. I can personally remember how much concentration I needed when I first learned how to ride a bike, but now I can do it without really thinking about it. What this means is that I "optimized the code". But the physical problem of riding the bike is still just as complicated as it was back then, so there are still considerable resources being used for that. The fact that I don't miss those resources means that, in practice, I have "a variable number of cpu cores". Furthermore, there was an initial effort of learning (i.e. generate the inner model). But if you look from the outside, the time needed for learning to ride the bike is smaller then the time needed to learn to walk. I think this would be different for a machine with the same fixed number of cpus allocated to each problem.
This is just a guess, so don't worry about offending me if you can provide a better picture.
the result is very useful. one example is that it can be used to determine some minimal characteristics of an intelligent system, if by intelligent you mean something that acts based on an inner model of its environment. i.e. you can't make an intelligent machine with a fixed number of "CPU cores" (unless P=NP).
you know, my aunt had a typing machine. in Romania, before the fall of communism. and everybody remembers that, in those days, you had to give the "fingerprint" of any typing machine to the authorities. as you might know, there are these tiny problems with each letter, and they can be traced back to the machine. so, in practice, the authorities could find out if a paper had been typed by your machine or not. in my experience, if you want a warranty for your printer, the store will need the serial number of your device. and if you pay with a credit card, they can link your contact information to the device. and if you try to google the way to change the serial number, you probably end up an watchlist of some sort. personally, I don't know if it's a good situation when it's impossible to be anonymous. but I am certain they should tell you about it when it does happen. your argument is that it doesn't affect normal users, and that you don't actively keep it a secret. well, you do keep it a secret, because a FOIA request had to be made to find it out. and it doesn't matter if it affects normal users or not, as long as they don't know.
I did mention that you should make it smart enough to avoid falling rocks on its own. I think that can already be done. as far as I know, there are tiny robots playing football, so they can do a lot of this fast reflex stuff on their own.
with the moon, it could probably work directly from Earth. make it smart enough to move around and avoid falling rocks etc, and have someone give it short term goals ("hammer that nail", "reorient that antenna", etc). even from orbit there would be some delay (you need to send everything through a satellite anyway since you're on the other side of the planet half the time), so just do it from Earth.
actually, rich people think like this: as long as my children are rich enough, then they won't be affected by climate change. if they're not rich enough, they might have problems of some sort no matter what the climate does. so to hell with the climate, and just get the kids rich.
For now I'm a postdoc, but I plan to teach someday. When I do that, I think it would be common sense to have a set of lecture notes, and I think it would be quite natural to turn these lecture notes into a book. It is my understanding that people usually do this when they teach a course on the problems they're researching. Thus I am already getting payed for writing the book (because I get payed as a teacher), and the book should be distributed freely once it's written.
The prize should not be an incentive to generate the book...
you didn't understand. these are things that were developed while studying exotic particles, for the study of exotic particles. anyway, if you have a lot of money, feel free to give it to the research you think matters, and let people decide in a hundred years if you were right or not.
in fact, electricity and gravity are identical, except that for gravity there is only one kind of "charge", and the force is only attractive. in electricity, there are two kinds of charges, and there is attraction only between opposed charges. in practice, if the moon was positively charged and the earth negatively charged, and there was no gravity, you could still obtain the same trajectory of the moon around the earth (provided that you have the correct charges). the force for gravity is (m1*m2)/(r^2), where "r" is the distance between the masses m1 and m2, and the force for electricity is (c1*c2)/(r^2) for the charges c1 and c2 (note that there are some other constant factors there, but they don't matter for the shape of the orbits).
anyway, the second (important) difference between electricity and gravity is the coupling constant. i.e. it turns out that the gravitational force between objects on our scale is negligible. in practice, this means that you could, in theory, see the same video where the gravitational force acts instead of the electric force, but it would take a much longer time to generate the video. the two forces are identical in the sense that an identical experiment can be made with gravity, but you would have to rescale the time to reproduce the exact video.
in the same way wind tunnels are used to find the drag coefficient for cars: you just have to rescale the force according to the size of the model, and you get it for the real thing.
if you write down the equations for the objects in the video, it doesn't really matter if you say it's electricity or gravity, the result is identical (as long as you ignore the drag --- by the way, you can't really ignore the drag since after a few orbits the droplets "fall" on the needle).
or maybe they're just being stupid. the fact is that you don't need to have a real industry in order to create software engineers, but you do need the industry for a high standard of living. hence india, china and former soviet countries can (and DO) generate entire generations of very good programmers. if the US chooses to concentrate on software and forget about creating tangible things, then they will soon discover that the chinese, indians and europeans don't really need US software, so the US can't export anything.
if you only drink pure water, and you only use pure water for cooking (with otherwise normal ingredients for a reasonably healthy diet), you will be perfectly fine. if you're talking about a specific scenario (i.e. running a marathon or something similar), I would have to ask a doctor, but you should also mention this in your post.
I agree with most of your points, except the one about life expectancy. if you move everyone to the countryside and forbid electricity, you also go back to at most medicine before the first world war. probably even before that. so life expectancy will decrease.
please take into account that set theory is not selfconsistent. furthermore, atheism is not a belief system in the same way as when the amish say "I don't have a TV set in my house". whoever modded you insightful is kind of stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
somewhere, in a basement, a lonely teenager is writing in his blog: "just like in 1947, the truth got out, but now the coverup begins".
and what do you do about the old people? or do we simply kill them once they refuse to work?
to give you a hint, once the single children get married and have their own kid, they will be two working people providing for seven eating people (four of their parents, two of them and one of the kid).
how many humans do you know who can run at that speed for more than a few minutes? the day someone escapes from jail and they'll send these toys after them, they will most likely be terrified...
at the moment, they seem to still need an ombilical cord though, so I agree that they're not that scary.
for your second item: in the future, the head will be the end with the shark lasers attached to it.
what is the stuff you use daily, and how do you know that something is happening if you can't measure it?
by the way, if the patient says they're feeling better, that's something you can measure (and you can write it down, like SecurityGuy told me above).
don't worry, I agree with you :)
but I liked serviscope_minor's reply more. i.e. I think we should try to understand why placebo's work, and actively use them when it seems they have some effect; obviously, we should recognise them as placebos and not pay more than they're worth.
the problem with your argument is the definition of "better".
if you're talking about something that can be objectively measured (i.e. "this patient has a temperature of N degrees, let's see if we can bring it down to N-1"), then it's all good. you test the sugar pill versus whatever treatment, and see which does better.
but if you're talking about reducing pain, then it gets complicated. objectively, you can see that a proposed treatment has the same result that a placebo does. does this mean that the treatment is worthless? well, if any fraction of people feel better after the "treatment", even though it's practically a placebo, then what is your argument against those people using the treatment?
don't worry, I know that the problem is with quacks lying about objectively measurable results.
but what do we do in the case of conditions where a "placebo" works very well for a significant fraction of people? shouldn't we fund some research into why the placebo works?
concerning agriculture, I saw a documentary on Discovery that made sense.
once the population grows enough, hunter gatherers start fighting for resources. once that happens, the losers can get eaten or enslaved. and once you have slaves, you can concentrate on hunting and make them do the gathering.
the slaves will come up with agriculture to make their lives easier, while the slave owners will keep all the hunted meat to themselves and become warriors/soldiers who protect the lands of slaves (because they like having more food over the winter).
what exactly do you mean, "nearly undetectable"? if it's faster than light, you won't know of it until the first gamma photon says hi.
First, when I say "intelligence" I'm talking about something that can generate inner models of their environment, evolve the inner models, and act based on the predictions. Note that I said "generate".
If physics is NP hard, it means that a being moved from a smaller environment to a bigger environment has to solve an NP hard problem. In reality, a human child needs a very long time to learn how to walk, but they need less time afterwards to learn how to ride a bike. I can personally remember how much concentration I needed when I first learned how to ride a bike, but now I can do it without really thinking about it. What this means is that I "optimized the code". But the physical problem of riding the bike is still just as complicated as it was back then, so there are still considerable resources being used for that. The fact that I don't miss those resources means that, in practice, I have "a variable number of cpu cores".
Furthermore, there was an initial effort of learning (i.e. generate the inner model). But if you look from the outside, the time needed for learning to ride the bike is smaller then the time needed to learn to walk. I think this would be different for a machine with the same fixed number of cpus allocated to each problem.
This is just a guess, so don't worry about offending me if you can provide a better picture.
the result is very useful.
one example is that it can be used to determine some minimal characteristics of an intelligent system, if by intelligent you mean something that acts based on an inner model of its environment.
i.e. you can't make an intelligent machine with a fixed number of "CPU cores" (unless P=NP).
you know, my aunt had a typing machine. in Romania, before the fall of communism. and everybody remembers that, in those days, you had to give the "fingerprint" of any typing machine to the authorities.
as you might know, there are these tiny problems with each letter, and they can be traced back to the machine. so, in practice, the authorities could find out if a paper had been typed by your machine or not.
in my experience, if you want a warranty for your printer, the store will need the serial number of your device. and if you pay with a credit card, they can link your contact information to the device. and if you try to google the way to change the serial number, you probably end up an watchlist of some sort.
personally, I don't know if it's a good situation when it's impossible to be anonymous. but I am certain they should tell you about it when it does happen.
your argument is that it doesn't affect normal users, and that you don't actively keep it a secret. well, you do keep it a secret, because a FOIA request had to be made to find it out. and it doesn't matter if it affects normal users or not, as long as they don't know.
I did mention that you should make it smart enough to avoid falling rocks on its own. I think that can already be done. as far as I know, there are tiny robots playing football, so they can do a lot of this fast reflex stuff on their own.
with the moon, it could probably work directly from Earth. make it smart enough to move around and avoid falling rocks etc, and have someone give it short term goals ("hammer that nail", "reorient that antenna", etc).
even from orbit there would be some delay (you need to send everything through a satellite anyway since you're on the other side of the planet half the time), so just do it from Earth.
actually, rich people think like this: as long as my children are rich enough, then they won't be affected by climate change. if they're not rich enough, they might have problems of some sort no matter what the climate does.
so to hell with the climate, and just get the kids rich.
I think you mean radially challanged
dear slashdot,
can we please have a +1 "sad but true" option?
For now I'm a postdoc, but I plan to teach someday. When I do that, I think it would be common sense to have a set of lecture notes, and I think it would be quite natural to turn these lecture notes into a book. It is my understanding that people usually do this when they teach a course on the problems they're researching. Thus I am already getting payed for writing the book (because I get payed as a teacher), and the book should be distributed freely once it's written.
The prize should not be an incentive to generate the book...
you didn't understand. these are things that were developed while studying exotic particles, for the study of exotic particles. anyway, if you have a lot of money, feel free to give it to the research you think matters, and let people decide in a hundred years if you were right or not.
in fact, electricity and gravity are identical, except that for gravity there is only one kind of "charge", and the force is only attractive. in electricity, there are two kinds of charges, and there is attraction only between opposed charges.
in practice, if the moon was positively charged and the earth negatively charged, and there was no gravity, you could still obtain the same trajectory of the moon around the earth (provided that you have the correct charges).
the force for gravity is (m1*m2)/(r^2), where "r" is the distance between the masses m1 and m2, and the force for electricity is (c1*c2)/(r^2) for the charges c1 and c2 (note that there are some other constant factors there, but they don't matter for the shape of the orbits).
anyway, the second (important) difference between electricity and gravity is the coupling constant. i.e. it turns out that the gravitational force between objects on our scale is negligible. in practice, this means that you could, in theory, see the same video where the gravitational force acts instead of the electric force, but it would take a much longer time to generate the video.
the two forces are identical in the sense that an identical experiment can be made with gravity, but you would have to rescale the time to reproduce the exact video.
in the same way wind tunnels are used to find the drag coefficient for cars: you just have to rescale the force according to the size of the model, and you get it for the real thing.
if you write down the equations for the objects in the video, it doesn't really matter if you say it's electricity or gravity, the result is identical (as long as you ignore the drag --- by the way, you can't really ignore the drag since after a few orbits the droplets "fall" on the needle).
or maybe they're just being stupid.
the fact is that you don't need to have a real industry in order to create software engineers, but you do need the industry for a high standard of living. hence india, china and former soviet countries can (and DO) generate entire generations of very good programmers. if the US chooses to concentrate on software and forget about creating tangible things, then they will soon discover that the chinese, indians and europeans don't really need US software, so the US can't export anything.
so (only) pure water is fine for marathons as well?
if you only drink pure water, and you only use pure water for cooking (with otherwise normal ingredients for a reasonably healthy diet), you will be perfectly fine.
if you're talking about a specific scenario (i.e. running a marathon or something similar), I would have to ask a doctor, but you should also mention this in your post.
kind of. to be honest, it might actually be something worth looking into.
I agree with most of your points, except the one about life expectancy. if you move everyone to the countryside and forbid electricity, you also go back to at most medicine before the first world war. probably even before that. so life expectancy will decrease.
please take into account that set theory is not selfconsistent.
furthermore, atheism is not a belief system in the same way as when the amish say "I don't have a TV set in my house". whoever modded you insightful is kind of stupid.