Exports from Canada to the EU are small, and imports from the EU to Canada are also economically insignificant; nearly 80% of Canada's exports go to the US.. The EU doesn't "need" Canada. But the EU could make life pretty unpleasant for Canadians in principle if it starts cancelling other agreements: travel, currency exchange, access to markets, landing rights, port privileges, etc. If Europe and Canada stop cooperating, Canada will degenerate into an appendage of the US even more so than it already is. For Europe, it would simply mean the loss of a fairly small trading partner. Big deal.
It's not sufficient to understand the nature of the data, you also need to understand the idiosyncracies of the database. Something that works very fast on one database may be a dog on another.
But why should programmers do this at all? As a programmer, I know how to build efficient data structures in memory and on disk; that's what I'm trained to do. I'm not trained to second-guess performance issues in some bloated commercial software package that was probably not even remotely designed for the kinds of problems I'm working with.
In my experience, Europe, sadly, is more strongly in corporate hands than the US. The EU effectively hands out many billions in subsidies to corporations. (That's in addition to all the agricultural subsidies, which are an evil that is as prevalent in the EU as it is in the US.)
OK, so which OODBMS do you recommend? I know of Ozon and db4o, both for languages that I rarely use. What about an OODBMS that I can access from C++, Perl, Python, and C? How widely used are they? How good is the support?
It's easy to hit intrinsic performance limits with SQL databases even on small apps. And for people who aren't database experts, it's even easier since they don't know the hoops to jump through to make their SQL databases perform well. For the average programmer, it's easier to get good performance out of no-SQL databases.
Using SQL databases programmatically is a fairly silly notion to begin with: SQL was originally intended as an easy-to-use query language for non-experts because people were having trouble with navigating data structures. But programmers are excellent at navigating data structures and designing efficient data structures. SQL is solving a problem that most programmers don't have, and you're paying a big performance penalty for that.
Sometimes an SQL database is the right thing to use, sometimes it isn't. People really need to use their head instead of blindly picking one or the other solution.
Internal in the sense of the actual subjective experience.
Subjective experience is quantifiable: you ask lots of question like "which of these two colors is the third color more similar to" and "which of these words do you associate more with this color" etc.
The only way to know that is to just transplant it in your own brain somehow and experience it for ourselves.
Well, for monochromatic vision, you can do just that.
but has kilo never meant 10^3 for computer programmers
Not quite; see above. And programmers don't seem to be very good at setting and following standards, so maybe it's good that some other people step in.
I know what qualia are (supposed to be). I'm saying none of the specific points he raises are qualia because they all have good scientific answers.
Two people can agree on a color, and point to the same color by the same name, but is it internally also the same?
It uses the same pathways, activates the same brain areas and cells, is processed in the same way, and interacts with other perceptions in the same way. What other sense of "internal" do you want?
You can't determine it experimentally any more than you can measure what someone "hears" when they read a book.
That can and has been determined (it varies from person to person, depending also on skill and writing system).
He's trying to imagine what it would be like to see four colors instead of three,
Even that isn't so hard to experience; you can put yourself into a bichromatic environment for a while and then see what you perceive if you go into a normal environment.
Ultimately, i'd guess "not only an extra color, but a whole extra bunch of combinations of colors
Human beings can distinguish thousands of colors with trichromatic vision. With quadrichromatic vision, you'd probably not see any more colors; the "new colors" would mean that you lose the ability to distinguish colors that you previously could distinguish. The total number of colors you can see is a limitation of your brain size, not your eyes.
No, it means that they can probably only see one colour.
Color perception is defined as the ability to distinguish light of equal lightness based on wavelength alone. If you don't have that, you don't perceive colors (i.e., everything is "one color").
Which doesn't necessarily tell you anything about how an animal that didn't evolve colour vision perceives similar signals.
If humans and animals were just black boxes, it might not tell you a lot. But higher animals that don't have color vision mostly got that way by just using their night vision, so human night vision is a nearly perfect analog. Also, color vision is separate in the brain from other vision, so it doesn't interact much with anything else.
I think you missed the point. There's no way to determine if, for example, you experience the color red in the same way I do.
That's not Twinbee said. He talked about what "colors map to in the brain" or whether people "see a new color [...] or just have extra depth". Those can be determined experimentally.
If you have any other meaning for the word "experience", then we can see whether we can determine that experimentally as well.
It's an epistemoligical problem.
It's actually not a problem at all; qualia are meaningless.
It's reasonable to produce scientific measurements of this and that. But what colours (or saturation) they *map* to inside the brain is another matter.
That can be determined experimentally as well, both by sticking electrodes into brains, and by performing clever experiments.
For example, some creatures are monochromats, which means they can probably only see one colour.
No, it doesn't mean "probably", it means they can actually only see one color.
But what that colour actually is, is anyone's guess.
Just lower the lights until your night vision kicks in. Voila, you have monochromatic vision too.
Apparently, some people have four colour cones instead of three. Do they see a new colour competely outside our range, or just have extra 'depth' to distinguish our current range more easily?
That's not a question of qualia; it's easy to determine experimentally.
Washinton State's problem is that they don't have an income tax. If they had one, then Microsoft activity in the state would naturally pay its fair share, as part of the income tax of its employees.
when I offhandedly remarked that [fructose] is metabolized similarly to [glucose]
But even that isn't strictly speaking true, because used without qualification, the word "metabolism" refers to the organism, not to the pathway or individual cells.
In any case, fructolysis in the liver yields glycolysis intermediates, which in a normal meal from a person not suffering from starvation would then be likely to undergo gluconeogensis and be either stored as glycogen or released into circulation as glucose, or incorporated into fatty acid synthesis.
When consumed as HFCS, fructose will lead almost exclusively to glycogenesis and fatty acid synthesis because glucose levels in the blood and liver are already high.
I never said it was [relevant] or that I did.
Well, I hope once you're a doctor, you won't treat patients who come in with medical problems resulting from obesity to a half hour lecture about how fructose happens to share a pathway with glucose.
You keep repeating textbook knowledge about biochemical pathways. Yes, the pathways are "very similar". You have not explained why you believe that to be relevant to this study or nutrition.
Come on, go read the reference I pointed to. Your statement that fructose is "rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose" is just wrong when we look at humans as a whole; fructose is metabolized primarily in the liver, while glucose passes through the liver and is metabolized throughout the body. The fact that they two pathways are closely linked in those cells that have all the necessary enzymes doesn't change that.
What are you trying to say anyway? There is an experimental difference. Are you trying to argue that the experiment is wrong based on pathways? Or are you just trying to show off marginally relevant knowledge about metabolic pathways?
Biochemically [fructose] can enter the glycolytic cycle and is rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose.
Fructose is only metabolized when there is fructokinase available, and that exists only in the liver (well, and in sperm). Glucose, on the other hand, can be metabolized by just about every cell in the body. This has big implications for obesity and health. In addition, fructose seems to affect appetite differently from glucose. See the links below.
Yeah. Like half a second. So basically no time at all, and then you have free fructose to be absorbed.
That's not correct once you consume large amounts of sugar. The rate of conversion is limited by enzyme and transport processes. Gulping down a drink with 50g of sucrose leads to rather different time profiles of glucose/fructose than gulping down an equivalent amount of HFCS.
Almost right. In HFCS, a 1:1 mixture of glucose and fructose, both sugars are rapidly absorbed. However, pure fructose turns out to be absorbed much less readily. And sucrose needs to be broken down first. That makes HFCS worse than either pure fructose or sucrose.
Fructose is the culprit. But there are differences. Pure fructose is hard to absorb. Fructose in fruit is released only slowly. Both are probably OK. Fructose in sucrose needs to be split off before being absorbed, which seems to limit its rate; at normal sucrose concentrations, the fructose is also absorbed more slowly than the glucose.
HFCS is the worst of the bunch: it doesn't need to be split, and the 1:1 fructose/glucose ratio is ideal for rapid absorption, and both sugars peak simultaneously, putting a large load on the liver.
So, you're fine with moderate sucrose consumption (disaccharides) and eating fruit till you burst (fructose+fiber). Pure fructose is iffy. And HFCS is a no-no.
It has the same number of calories as Sugar. It breaks-down in the body the same way (fructose and glucose). There's no real difference.
With carbohydrates, it's all in the timing--the slower they are delivered, the better. HFCS is a mixture of monosaccharides, which can be absorbed directly, so anything you consume goes directly into the bloodstream. Sucrose needs to be broken down first, and that can only happen at a limited rate.
Yes, Blender and Gimp are really powerful, as is the ability to script both of them in Python. With Python, you also get access to a huge number of additional image processing plugins and libraries.
I find Photoshop and all that other Windows/Mac software rather painful in comparison.
How hard will it be for them to stop it running of they havent signed the digital cert?
Technically? Easy. Legally and from a business point of view? Nearly impossible. They'd lose a huge amount of software for their platform, among other things because such software licensing is incompatible with the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Exports from Canada to the EU are small, and imports from the EU to Canada are also economically insignificant; nearly 80% of Canada's exports go to the US.. The EU doesn't "need" Canada. But the EU could make life pretty unpleasant for Canadians in principle if it starts cancelling other agreements: travel, currency exchange, access to markets, landing rights, port privileges, etc. If Europe and Canada stop cooperating, Canada will degenerate into an appendage of the US even more so than it already is. For Europe, it would simply mean the loss of a fairly small trading partner. Big deal.
It's not sufficient to understand the nature of the data, you also need to understand the idiosyncracies of the database. Something that works very fast on one database may be a dog on another.
But why should programmers do this at all? As a programmer, I know how to build efficient data structures in memory and on disk; that's what I'm trained to do. I'm not trained to second-guess performance issues in some bloated
commercial software package that was probably not even remotely designed for the kinds of problems I'm working with.
In my experience, Europe, sadly, is more strongly in corporate hands than the US. The EU effectively hands out many billions in subsidies to corporations. (That's in addition to all the agricultural subsidies, which are an evil that is as prevalent in the EU as it is in the US.)
OK, so which OODBMS do you recommend? I know of Ozon and db4o, both for languages that I rarely use. What about an OODBMS that I can access from C++, Perl, Python, and C? How widely used are they? How good is the support?
It's easy to hit intrinsic performance limits with SQL databases even on small apps. And for people who aren't database experts, it's even easier since they don't know the hoops to jump through to make their SQL databases perform well. For the average programmer, it's easier to get good performance out of no-SQL databases.
Using SQL databases programmatically is a fairly silly notion to begin with: SQL was originally intended as an easy-to-use query language for non-experts because people were having trouble with navigating data structures. But programmers are excellent at navigating data structures and designing efficient data structures. SQL is solving a problem that most programmers don't have, and you're paying a big performance penalty for that.
Sometimes an SQL database is the right thing to use, sometimes it isn't. People really need to use their head instead of blindly picking one or the other solution.
Internal in the sense of the actual subjective experience.
Subjective experience is quantifiable: you ask lots of question like "which of these two colors is the third color more similar to" and "which of these words do you associate more with this color" etc.
The only way to know that is to just transplant it in your own brain somehow and experience it for ourselves.
Well, for monochromatic vision, you can do just that.
It is not appropriate to group base 2 numbers using a base 10 units.
And that's why there continue to be units that are powers of two, they're just getting a different and clearly distinguishable name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
but has kilo never meant 10^3 for computer programmers
Not quite; see above. And programmers don't seem to be very good at setting and following standards, so maybe it's good that some other people step in.
No, he's talking about a philosophical matter
I know what qualia are (supposed to be). I'm saying none of the specific points he raises are qualia because they all have good scientific answers.
Two people can agree on a color, and point to the same color by the same name, but is it internally also the same?
It uses the same pathways, activates the same brain areas and cells, is processed in the same way, and interacts with other perceptions in the same way. What other sense of "internal" do you want?
You can't determine it experimentally any more than you can measure what someone "hears" when they read a book.
That can and has been determined (it varies from person to person, depending also on skill and writing system).
He's trying to imagine what it would be like to see four colors instead of three,
Even that isn't so hard to experience; you can put yourself into a bichromatic environment for a while and then see what you perceive if you go into a normal environment.
Ultimately, i'd guess "not only an extra color, but a whole extra bunch of combinations of colors
Human beings can distinguish thousands of colors with trichromatic vision. With quadrichromatic vision, you'd probably not see any more colors; the "new colors" would mean that you lose the ability to distinguish colors that you previously could distinguish. The total number of colors you can see is a limitation of your brain size, not your eyes.
No, it means that they can probably only see one colour.
Color perception is defined as the ability to distinguish light of equal lightness based on wavelength alone. If you don't have that, you don't perceive colors (i.e., everything is "one color").
Which doesn't necessarily tell you anything about how an animal that didn't evolve colour vision perceives similar signals.
If humans and animals were just black boxes, it might not tell you a lot. But higher animals that don't have color vision mostly got that way by just using their night vision, so human night vision is a nearly perfect analog. Also, color vision is separate in the brain from other vision, so it doesn't interact much with anything else.
I think you missed the point. There's no way to determine if, for example, you experience the color red in the same way I do.
That's not Twinbee said. He talked about what "colors map to in the brain" or whether people "see a new color [...] or just have extra depth". Those can be determined experimentally.
If you have any other meaning for the word "experience", then we can see whether we can determine that experimentally as well.
It's an epistemoligical problem.
It's actually not a problem at all; qualia are meaningless.
It's reasonable to produce scientific measurements of this and that. But what colours (or saturation) they *map* to inside the brain is another matter.
That can be determined experimentally as well, both by sticking electrodes into brains, and by performing clever experiments.
For example, some creatures are monochromats, which means they can probably only see one colour.
No, it doesn't mean "probably", it means they can actually only see one color.
But what that colour actually is, is anyone's guess.
Just lower the lights until your night vision kicks in. Voila, you have monochromatic vision too.
Apparently, some people have four colour cones instead of three. Do they see a new colour competely outside our range, or just have extra 'depth' to distinguish our current range more easily?
That's not a question of qualia; it's easy to determine experimentally.
Washinton State's problem is that they don't have an income tax. If they had one, then Microsoft activity in the state would naturally pay its fair share, as part of the income tax of its employees.
when I offhandedly remarked that [fructose] is metabolized similarly to [glucose]
But even that isn't strictly speaking true, because used without qualification, the word "metabolism" refers to the organism, not to the pathway or individual cells.
In any case, fructolysis in the liver yields glycolysis intermediates, which in a normal meal from a person not suffering from starvation would then be likely to undergo gluconeogensis and be either stored as glycogen or released into circulation as glucose, or incorporated into fatty acid synthesis.
When consumed as HFCS, fructose will lead almost exclusively to glycogenesis and fatty acid synthesis because glucose levels in the blood and liver are already high.
I never said it was [relevant] or that I did.
Well, I hope once you're a doctor, you won't treat patients who come in with medical problems resulting from obesity to a half hour lecture about how fructose happens to share a pathway with glucose.
You keep repeating textbook knowledge about biochemical pathways. Yes, the pathways are "very similar". You have not explained why you believe that to be relevant to this study or nutrition.
Come on, go read the reference I pointed to. Your statement that fructose is "rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose" is just wrong when we look at humans as a whole; fructose is metabolized primarily in the liver, while glucose passes through the liver and is metabolized throughout the body. The fact that they two pathways are closely linked in those cells that have all the necessary enzymes doesn't change that.
What are you trying to say anyway? There is an experimental difference. Are you trying to argue that the experiment is wrong based on pathways? Or are you just trying to show off marginally relevant knowledge about metabolic pathways?
Parent is about 50% factually incorrect. See the earlier med student's response for the true metabolic process.
Bullshit. Go read up on the facts yourself before you start mouthing off:
http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/carbohydrate_metabolism.htm
Biochemically [fructose] can enter the glycolytic cycle and is rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose.
Fructose is only metabolized when there is fructokinase available, and that exists only in the liver (well, and in sperm). Glucose, on the other hand, can be metabolized by just about every cell in the body. This has big implications for obesity and health. In addition, fructose seems to affect appetite differently from glucose. See the links below.
http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/carbohydrate_metabolism.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090325091811.htm
Yeah. Like half a second. So basically no time at all, and then you have free fructose to be absorbed.
That's not correct once you consume large amounts of sugar. The rate of conversion is limited by enzyme and transport processes. Gulping down a drink with 50g of sucrose leads to rather different time profiles of glucose/fructose than gulping down an equivalent amount of HFCS.
Almost right. In HFCS, a 1:1 mixture of glucose and fructose, both sugars are rapidly absorbed. However, pure fructose turns out to be absorbed much less readily. And sucrose needs to be broken down first. That makes HFCS worse than either pure fructose or sucrose.
Fructose is the culprit. But there are differences. Pure fructose is hard to absorb. Fructose in fruit is released only slowly. Both are probably OK. Fructose in sucrose needs to be split off before being absorbed, which seems to limit its rate; at normal sucrose concentrations, the fructose is also absorbed more slowly than the glucose.
HFCS is the worst of the bunch: it doesn't need to be split, and the 1:1 fructose/glucose ratio is ideal for rapid absorption, and both sugars peak simultaneously, putting a large load on the liver.
So, you're fine with moderate sucrose consumption (disaccharides) and eating fruit till you burst (fructose+fiber). Pure fructose is iffy. And HFCS is a no-no.
It has the same number of calories as Sugar. It breaks-down in the body the same way (fructose and glucose). There's no real difference.
With carbohydrates, it's all in the timing--the slower they are delivered, the better. HFCS is a mixture of monosaccharides, which can be absorbed directly, so anything you consume goes directly into the bloodstream. Sucrose needs to be broken down first, and that can only happen at a limited rate.
Another useful "advanced" plugin is LiquidRescale:
http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/
It implements seam carving. It's not yet available as an Ubuntu package, but hopefully someone will package it up.
Yes, Blender and Gimp are really powerful, as is the ability to script both of them in Python. With Python, you also get access to a huge number of additional image processing plugins and libraries.
I find Photoshop and all that other Windows/Mac software rather painful in comparison.
I take it you didn't watch the video then?
I did watch the video. Content-aware fill does roughly much what Resynth does. All the examples in that video work in Resynth.
How hard will it be for them to stop it running of they havent signed the digital cert?
Technically? Easy. Legally and from a business point of view? Nearly impossible. They'd lose a huge amount of software for their platform, among other things because such software licensing is incompatible with the GPL.