Not if the school is any good. School should not be about grades, it should be about learning how to learn. It should be where you hone and develop your research skills, boost your mental flexibility and practice the application of these skills. The subject itself is almost secondary - if you've learned how to learn, any specific skill picked up at school becomes immaterial. It'll also largely be out-of-date. Research skills never date.
Working to "get ahead" is useful if you keep in mind that school is entirely foundational work. You can't build without a good foundation, but you also can't build if you don't have the raw building materials. School ONLY supplies the foundation, working to get ahead is where you get the materials to then actually build with.
Worst possible path. Discipline is the enemy of creativity. Think of it in terms of engineering. If you want to build a bridge, reliably, with very specific parameters, according to a pre-existing template, then discipline is essential. The Romans were brilliant at discipline, which is why they could engineer structures of fixed design in no time flat. There's a surfeit of such engineers - India and Asia are packed with them. The world doesn't need any more regimented engineers.
If you want to build something new, something that never existed before, to solve a problem for which pre-existing templates are inadequate or useless, then you do NOT want discipline. You want childlike creativity, something that military training WILL kill.
This is especially true if you want to be in the scientific computing field, where all the Really Interesting Work takes place.
Agreed that we may be moving away from "Plain Old Books", but despite many attempts to put Arthur Ransome's work in other formats, they've essentially all failed. I'm inclined to say that some stories are just too difficult to do well in any form other than books.
(I didn't list Ransome's superb series earlier because although they are brilliant, the language is starting to get dated. That's not always a problem - Enid Blyton's books are in an even older form of English but are regaining popularity today - but there are... unfortunate... changes in language that may cause problems with Ransome's books with kids if they're at just the wrong stage.)
Weirdstone of Brisingamon and Moon of Gomrath have plenty of action and are every bit in the same spirit as Tolkien.
For sci-fi, at that age I was into Citizen of the Galaxy, Spaceship Medic and other lighter stuff. However, I would strongly suggest Pratchett's "Only You Can Save Mankind".
Given the notoriety of the Bible Belt, I'm inclined to think that they're not strong on believing they'll be punished. Others might, but they won't, so effectively they don't believe in hell as pertains to them.
The Buddhists* don't strictly believe in heaven OR hell, but do believe that you're either cycling endlessly in futility or step off the hamster wheel of incarnation. If phrased in Judeo-Christian terms, this would be a heaven without a hell.
*Ok, some Buddhist sects believe in a hell, but they also believe that those within it can be ransomed out (via the "Hungry Ghosts" ceremony) or will get pardoned eventually as a result of several Buddhist deities holding a protest camp outside. But this isn't a hell in the Judeo-Christian sense for that very reason, it's not permanent**.
**But, then, some Gnostic Judeo-Christian texts talk of Jesus' "three days in Hell" as being one of a major revolution in which Hell is emptied out and closed down, permanently, so there were Judeo-Christians who believed there had BEEN a Hell but wasn't one now. That can complicate questionnaires like this, so I suppose the researchers are kinda glad most of the Gnostics got burned at the stake by various Holy Roman Emperors.
AES is probably secure, but it DOES make use of ideas that have been found to have -potential- weaknesses, which means AES may in turn have potential weaknesses (although that's not guaranteed to be the case). Time to brute-force is only important if you have to brute-force. AES was entered into a contest that looked at security for the next 20-or-so year. I think AES will last the expected lifespan, but it won't last even one solar lifespan, let alone a galaxy's.
Trivial rule of thumb: Any encryption method, to not be considered excessively weak now, must not be considered excessively weak (expected lifespan of method + time information to remain sealed afterwards) years into the future, even after Moore's Law is taken into consideration.
Thus, if you've a cypher that you expect to use for the next 20 years to protect data that will be under a 100 year rule before disclosure, it has to be resilient to attack for 120 years. Chip performance roughly doubles every 18 months, so you've 80 rounds of doubling within the secure lifetime of the data. (I'm going to ignore the increasing use of botnets and distributed computing, and say that these will simply compensate for the physical limitations of what can be done on the silicon itself.)
2^80 is crudely 10^24. That's definitely more than a few powers of ten!
I would consider this to be the absolute minimum safe bufferzone against brute-force attacks. Why? After all, most data isn't under a hundred year rule. Because civil servants are LAZY BASTARDS!!! You HAVE to assume that they will use cheap, widely-available tools, not suitable ones. This means you HAVE to assume that the level of security necessary is capable of withstanding the absolutely-guaranteed abuse the cypher will suffer.
The handprints, perhaps, but the pictures of fish were somewhat more stylized and were definitely not stencil-based. I'd consider those abstractions and therefore art at its most simplistic. Much more crucially, though, it's stuff with a totally different intent.
If you're saying the Neanderthal pictures were extremely simplistic and lacked any obvious "thought"* - they were depictions at a very mechanical level - then I'd totally agree. If you're saying the French pictures showed enormous thought and mindfulness - even in the kiddy training area (there was a section set aside to train kids on painting) - then again I'd totally agree. There was an incredible level of sentience involved.
If we go apples-to-apples, there were sections of the French caves that had hand paintings. But they showed awareness and no small amount of ingenuity. Several would have required platforms to be set up, for example. Not easy in such a confined space.
And, yes, if IQ is generalized as the ration of what a person can think/know vs what you'd expect of them, we can get a feel for their IQ. I'd consider proto-flipbook animation, haziness to depict motion, and relief to convey stereoscopic images to be well above the 48% above the average person of the time, and an IQ of 148 is all MENSA requires. So if you want to call the French painters geniuses I'd have to agree.
*Given that Neanderthals diverged from homo sapiens so far back, it is possible that their thought processes are too alien for modern humans to comprehend, that we're looking for the wrong signals, the wrong visual cues. It is possible. Unlikely, though, but possible. Doesn't really alter the conclusion, though, which is that it wasn't a Homo Sapien mindset. Whatever it was or wasn't, it wasn't that. This raises an intriguing side-question, though - how WOULD we recognize art from an alien mind?
There is also very little in common between the earliest cave art attributed to Homo Sapiens and any of the cave art attributed to Neanderthals - very different styles, very different formats, very different in nature all round.
The paintings in France also include proto-writing next to the paintings, but no such symbols exist here.
Most important of all, the paintings attributed to Neanderthals include fish that Neanderthals ate at the time and Homo Sapiens did not.
So if Neanderthals are present and Homo Sapiens are not, we've opportunity taken care of. Neanderthals had been mucking around with ochre at the time, Homo Sapiens didn't utilize it for a long time after, so that's means. The pictures show Neanderthal food not Homo Sapien food, which gives motive. No proto-writing and no utilization of the 3D nature of the rock surface means no continuity with the French cave paintings, so Homo Sapiens are sans continuity.
Agreed. What you would need to do is get music from all points of time and all cultures. Anything common to all is fundamental, anything common to a given genre (without geographical limitations) is fundamental only to that genre, anything common to a given culture (without genre limitations) is fundamental only to that culture.
The data collected is thus not random and will fail statistical tests used to determine the validity of the data set.
Load FreeCiv into a virtual machine, define a really really large map and a very large number of initial civilizations, and leave running for 20 years.
For added fun, hack the code to allow a civilization to split (as per the Roman Empire) if unhappiness levels get too great, where the scion AIs use slightly modified parameters a-la genetic coding.
I would absolutely agree. It's not made any simpler when you consider that a given human cell has two distinct types of DNA (and maybe once had many more), that nucleic DNA contains retroviruses and other non-human DNA components, and that there's something like 5,000 non-human species in the body, comprising 10x as many cells as there are human cells.
When you start examining thousands of distinct forms of DNA, any of which may have epigenetic components, you're looking at a system of mindblowing proportions. I can sympathize with the "core" folks to a degree -- von Neumann constructed a brilliant model in the form of the Universal Constructor, where it would require only one machine and one blueprint to be able to build absolutely anything, and a lot of early DNA work essentially looked at DNA as just such a machine. It's just not easy to extend the von Neumann model, though, to clusters of tightly-coupled-but-distinct Universal Constructors that are sometimes symbiotic (but not always), where the epigenetics mean your code is data-driven and where the retrotranspons mean your actual instructions are self-modifying.
It was a serviceable first approximation. Ok, second since the pea study was quite a bit earlier!:) But it's time to move on. Rejecting the same thing repeatedly gets old. I want to know what biochemical function the self-modifications serve. Brains seem to be the area with the most changes, so are the proteins that encode memory on the synapses themselves being coded into the neurons? Or is it a specialization technique, since different regions have to have different performance characteristics. How does all this alter what we know about the biochemical pathways of the human body, since epigenetics not only controls those pathways but is also controlled by them? Why is a mouse when it spins?
Journal: Nature Title: Somatic retrotransposition alters the genetic landscape of the human brain Published: 30 October 2011 Authors: J. Kenneth Baille, et al
As we age, the core of our biological being — the sequence of our DNA, which makes up our genes — remains the same.
This was falsified several years ago when it was shown that retrotranspons alter the sequence of DNA in each cell dynamically continuously. Not only that, but cells are altered differently, so a person's cells diverge as they age. The paper is usually paywalled but I have a copy thanks to the generosity of the authors, if anyone wants a copy.
Sorry, but as a matter of principle I automatically reject any claim that has as its central tenant a theory that has already been falsified. Keep up or keep the hell out.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if the school is any good. School should not be about grades, it should be about learning how to learn. It should be where you hone and develop your research skills, boost your mental flexibility and practice the application of these skills. The subject itself is almost secondary - if you've learned how to learn, any specific skill picked up at school becomes immaterial. It'll also largely be out-of-date. Research skills never date.
Working to "get ahead" is useful if you keep in mind that school is entirely foundational work. You can't build without a good foundation, but you also can't build if you don't have the raw building materials. School ONLY supplies the foundation, working to get ahead is where you get the materials to then actually build with.
Worst possible path. Discipline is the enemy of creativity. Think of it in terms of engineering. If you want to build a bridge, reliably, with very specific parameters, according to a pre-existing template, then discipline is essential. The Romans were brilliant at discipline, which is why they could engineer structures of fixed design in no time flat. There's a surfeit of such engineers - India and Asia are packed with them. The world doesn't need any more regimented engineers.
If you want to build something new, something that never existed before, to solve a problem for which pre-existing templates are inadequate or useless, then you do NOT want discipline. You want childlike creativity, something that military training WILL kill.
This is especially true if you want to be in the scientific computing field, where all the Really Interesting Work takes place.
Agreed that we may be moving away from "Plain Old Books", but despite many attempts to put Arthur Ransome's work in other formats, they've essentially all failed. I'm inclined to say that some stories are just too difficult to do well in any form other than books.
(I didn't list Ransome's superb series earlier because although they are brilliant, the language is starting to get dated. That's not always a problem - Enid Blyton's books are in an even older form of English but are regaining popularity today - but there are... unfortunate... changes in language that may cause problems with Ransome's books with kids if they're at just the wrong stage.)
Weirdstone of Brisingamon and Moon of Gomrath have plenty of action and are every bit in the same spirit as Tolkien.
For sci-fi, at that age I was into Citizen of the Galaxy, Spaceship Medic and other lighter stuff. However, I would strongly suggest Pratchett's "Only You Can Save Mankind".
They were going to include Jedi, but after some hand-waving they "forgot" to.
Depends.
Given the notoriety of the Bible Belt, I'm inclined to think that they're not strong on believing they'll be punished. Others might, but they won't, so effectively they don't believe in hell as pertains to them.
The Buddhists* don't strictly believe in heaven OR hell, but do believe that you're either cycling endlessly in futility or step off the hamster wheel of incarnation. If phrased in Judeo-Christian terms, this would be a heaven without a hell.
*Ok, some Buddhist sects believe in a hell, but they also believe that those within it can be ransomed out (via the "Hungry Ghosts" ceremony) or will get pardoned eventually as a result of several Buddhist deities holding a protest camp outside. But this isn't a hell in the Judeo-Christian sense for that very reason, it's not permanent**.
**But, then, some Gnostic Judeo-Christian texts talk of Jesus' "three days in Hell" as being one of a major revolution in which Hell is emptied out and closed down, permanently, so there were Judeo-Christians who believed there had BEEN a Hell but wasn't one now. That can complicate questionnaires like this, so I suppose the researchers are kinda glad most of the Gnostics got burned at the stake by various Holy Roman Emperors.
Oi! Hel is the name of a Nordic giantess, thank you very much!
What a silly question - 3. The other 234 know what's good for them.
Exactly. A test should be a measure of one's ability TO think, thinking should not be relegated to a measure of one's ability to take tests.
Since practice is the main element of committing to memory, and practice can be monitored, there is actually no value in having distinct tests at all.
But do they weigh the same as a duck?
AES is probably secure, but it DOES make use of ideas that have been found to have -potential- weaknesses, which means AES may in turn have potential weaknesses (although that's not guaranteed to be the case). Time to brute-force is only important if you have to brute-force. AES was entered into a contest that looked at security for the next 20-or-so year. I think AES will last the expected lifespan, but it won't last even one solar lifespan, let alone a galaxy's.
Trivial rule of thumb: Any encryption method, to not be considered excessively weak now, must not be considered excessively weak (expected lifespan of method + time information to remain sealed afterwards) years into the future, even after Moore's Law is taken into consideration.
Thus, if you've a cypher that you expect to use for the next 20 years to protect data that will be under a 100 year rule before disclosure, it has to be resilient to attack for 120 years. Chip performance roughly doubles every 18 months, so you've 80 rounds of doubling within the secure lifetime of the data. (I'm going to ignore the increasing use of botnets and distributed computing, and say that these will simply compensate for the physical limitations of what can be done on the silicon itself.)
2^80 is crudely 10^24. That's definitely more than a few powers of ten!
I would consider this to be the absolute minimum safe bufferzone against brute-force attacks. Why? After all, most data isn't under a hundred year rule. Because civil servants are LAZY BASTARDS!!! You HAVE to assume that they will use cheap, widely-available tools, not suitable ones. This means you HAVE to assume that the level of security necessary is capable of withstanding the absolutely-guaranteed abuse the cypher will suffer.
The handprints, perhaps, but the pictures of fish were somewhat more stylized and were definitely not stencil-based. I'd consider those abstractions and therefore art at its most simplistic. Much more crucially, though, it's stuff with a totally different intent.
If you're saying the Neanderthal pictures were extremely simplistic and lacked any obvious "thought"* - they were depictions at a very mechanical level - then I'd totally agree. If you're saying the French pictures showed enormous thought and mindfulness - even in the kiddy training area (there was a section set aside to train kids on painting) - then again I'd totally agree. There was an incredible level of sentience involved.
If we go apples-to-apples, there were sections of the French caves that had hand paintings. But they showed awareness and no small amount of ingenuity. Several would have required platforms to be set up, for example. Not easy in such a confined space.
And, yes, if IQ is generalized as the ration of what a person can think/know vs what you'd expect of them, we can get a feel for their IQ. I'd consider proto-flipbook animation, haziness to depict motion, and relief to convey stereoscopic images to be well above the 48% above the average person of the time, and an IQ of 148 is all MENSA requires. So if you want to call the French painters geniuses I'd have to agree.
*Given that Neanderthals diverged from homo sapiens so far back, it is possible that their thought processes are too alien for modern humans to comprehend, that we're looking for the wrong signals, the wrong visual cues. It is possible. Unlikely, though, but possible. Doesn't really alter the conclusion, though, which is that it wasn't a Homo Sapien mindset. Whatever it was or wasn't, it wasn't that. This raises an intriguing side-question, though - how WOULD we recognize art from an alien mind?
There is also very little in common between the earliest cave art attributed to Homo Sapiens and any of the cave art attributed to Neanderthals - very different styles, very different formats, very different in nature all round.
The paintings in France also include proto-writing next to the paintings, but no such symbols exist here.
Most important of all, the paintings attributed to Neanderthals include fish that Neanderthals ate at the time and Homo Sapiens did not.
So if Neanderthals are present and Homo Sapiens are not, we've opportunity taken care of.
Neanderthals had been mucking around with ochre at the time, Homo Sapiens didn't utilize it for a long time after, so that's means.
The pictures show Neanderthal food not Homo Sapien food, which gives motive.
No proto-writing and no utilization of the 3D nature of the rock surface means no continuity with the French cave paintings, so Homo Sapiens are sans continuity.
I'd say that nails it.
They also invented (or co-invented) music, were willing to explore the possibilities Europe had to offer, and ate grains with their meat.
Mdash may be the name of the artist.
Agreed. What you would need to do is get music from all points of time and all cultures. Anything common to all is fundamental, anything common to a given genre (without geographical limitations) is fundamental only to that genre, anything common to a given culture (without genre limitations) is fundamental only to that culture.
The data collected is thus not random and will fail statistical tests used to determine the validity of the data set.
NP. I'd have preferred to have given a proper reference, but Slashdot doesn't import BibTeX. :)
Not really, do you have a Global Thermonuclear War option?
Load FreeCiv into a virtual machine, define a really really large map and a very large number of initial civilizations, and leave running for 20 years.
For added fun, hack the code to allow a civilization to split (as per the Roman Empire) if unhappiness levels get too great, where the scion AIs use slightly modified parameters a-la genetic coding.
I would absolutely agree. It's not made any simpler when you consider that a given human cell has two distinct types of DNA (and maybe once had many more), that nucleic DNA contains retroviruses and other non-human DNA components, and that there's something like 5,000 non-human species in the body, comprising 10x as many cells as there are human cells.
When you start examining thousands of distinct forms of DNA, any of which may have epigenetic components, you're looking at a system of mindblowing proportions. I can sympathize with the "core" folks to a degree -- von Neumann constructed a brilliant model in the form of the Universal Constructor, where it would require only one machine and one blueprint to be able to build absolutely anything, and a lot of early DNA work essentially looked at DNA as just such a machine. It's just not easy to extend the von Neumann model, though, to clusters of tightly-coupled-but-distinct Universal Constructors that are sometimes symbiotic (but not always), where the epigenetics mean your code is data-driven and where the retrotranspons mean your actual instructions are self-modifying.
It was a serviceable first approximation. Ok, second since the pea study was quite a bit earlier! :) But it's time to move on. Rejecting the same thing repeatedly gets old. I want to know what biochemical function the self-modifications serve. Brains seem to be the area with the most changes, so are the proteins that encode memory on the synapses themselves being coded into the neurons? Or is it a specialization technique, since different regions have to have different performance characteristics. How does all this alter what we know about the biochemical pathways of the human body, since epigenetics not only controls those pathways but is also controlled by them? Why is a mouse when it spins?
Journal: Nature
Title: Somatic retrotransposition alters the genetic landscape of the human brain
Published: 30 October 2011
Authors: J. Kenneth Baille, et al
This was falsified several years ago when it was shown that retrotranspons alter the sequence of DNA in each cell dynamically continuously. Not only that, but cells are altered differently, so a person's cells diverge as they age. The paper is usually paywalled but I have a copy thanks to the generosity of the authors, if anyone wants a copy.
Sorry, but as a matter of principle I automatically reject any claim that has as its central tenant a theory that has already been falsified. Keep up or keep the hell out.
Mistakes: See "Repeating Patterns"
Repeating Patterns: See "Mistakes"