For cellular automata to be relevant you'd have to assume the universe has a finite number of 'states'. Quantum physics currently is pretty certain it is not.
Really? Do your workmates think that the word "quantum" is just put in their for decoration?
there comes a point where the management can be accused of failing in their fiduciary duty to maximize total return to the stockholders
Yeh. Right. Do me one. You're going to try to take the stand and make the case that you know more about "maximising total return to the shareholders" than Bill Gates, is that right? Good luck.
Things can't be so good?!
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Things can't be all that rosy at the world's largest communications company
Things can't be so good at Slashdot if they're having to nickel-and-dime over $9.95 of expenses!
Works like Mein Kampf, perhaps? But that is the work of an enemy. Today, the Nazis are the enemy. Who tomorrow?
Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany for 57 years. Either provide an example of a non-Nazi point of view which has been banned during that period or admit that your slippery slope argument is without empirical foundation.
Given that my living room is rather larger than two square inches, and given that these chips apparently produce a hot side and a cool side, what is the point in saying that a two inch square panel could cool my living room? Surely the other side of this panel would be simultaneously heating my living room. Isn't the problem with all these sorts of coolers the means of getting the heat away from the hot side?
The reason your filtering is so easy is that the operation of addition is linear! Try a non-linear operation, then try tuning in Radio Luxembourg as its carrier is shifted chaotically.
You are quite wrong if you think it's impossible to filter out nonlinear distrubances.
Your example has no dynamics at all, so it hardly qualifies as a useful example of a non-linear dynamical system.
I think you're out of your depth here. I've described a system with non-linear distubances to a linear system. My whole point was that you can't argue from the local non-stability of the data to the conclusion that the whole system has nonlinear dynamics.
Furthermore, if your example is to be applied to weather/climate, you seem to be suggesting that weather is a small effect compared to long-term climate variation, but the daily fluctuations in temperature, not to mention the annual differences between summer and winter are *larger* or comparable to the long-term climate variations.
You completely misunderstand my point. I simply suggested that the effect of weather on the *average* climate might be small and non-persistent. For example, the daily and monthly fluctuations in the stock market are large compared to the long term return, but it's well known that stock returns are more predictable over long holding periods than short ones.
The longer-term secular trends are much smaller (a few degrees per century, say) compared to the chaotic portion (tens of degrees daily departure from "average")!
Yes, but, you fool, if you're concerned with melting icecaps, a change of a few degrees in the 100-year average temperature is much more important than ten degrees for a day.
But does any chaotic system exhibit such behavoir??`
Yes. In fact, any system which displays locally nonlinear disturbances in a globally linear function will do so.
The mere fact that climate is study of average weather is irrelevant to the system at hand.
No it isn't. It should immediately alert you to the possibility that climate might be more predictable than weather. Averages always have lower variance than the underlying data.
A chaotic system will by definition exhibit divergence either way with a slight change in initial conditions
This isn't a rigourous definition you're talking about here, and your definition doesn't prove your point. A chaotic system might exhibit divergent behaviour, but that doesn't necessarily require that the divergence be either permanent of large in relation to an underlying linear trend. For example, if I take the output of a nonlinear oscillator and add it to the signal for Radio Luxembourg, I can make a system which is "chaotic" in the sense that its local behaviour is divergent in a nonlinear way dependent on small variations in initial conditions. But I can still extract a useful signal from my system by applying the right filter.
Climate is not necessary chaotic if it is considered to be a moving average of weather. It is entirely possible and indeed quite likely that the non-linear fluctuations which make weather prediction so difficult to predict are in fact damped out over longer time periods. Or to put it in chaos terms, that the fractal dimension of the attractor for weather varies inversely with the sampling frequency.
Bzzt right back atcha. You can't "selectively enforce" patents, which is as near to a "defend or lose" as to make surprisingly little practical difference.
How does: "The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo" differ materially from "it was not possible to dismiss the results as chance"? I very carefully did not present the study as a "homepathic confirm", simply as evidence that the original poster's statement that there had been no double blind trials which provided any evidence for it.
And your selective quoting of "Our study has no major implications for clinical practice because we found little evidence of effectiveness of any single homeopathic approach on any single clinical condition." is positively Orwellian. This was a meta-study of 89 separate studies, most of which analysed the effects of homeopathy in different conditions. Given that, it is quite obvious that it would never find effectiveness of any single homeopathic approach, because that wasn't what it was looking for. You wouldn't find evidence of this kind for penicillin if you took a metastudy of its use in 89 different conditions.
Your statement is a lie. The September 1997 issue of the Lancet published a metastudy which summarised 89 double-blind trials of homeopathic medicine and concluded that it was not possible to dismiss the results as chance. Here are a few such references.
Furthermore, your reference to Avogadro's number is ignorant. We actually don't understand dilution very well, but we do know that the simplistic model you assume (one in which you simply divide the moles of active agent by moles of water) does not describe the results of multiple dilutions very well at all. In actual fact, molecules often "clump" together, with more or less unknown effects on their agency inside human beings.
The tragedy, and needless danger, is created by know-it-all types who dismiss anything they don't understand rather than acting like grown-up scientists and doing research.
Oh yeh, and
As one doctor said regarding the recent governmental report on "alternative" medicines (to paraphrase), "There are only two kinds of medicine -- that which works and that which doesn't. If something that's considered to be alternative is shown to work then it's adopted. If not, it is not."
If you believe this, why all that piss, wind and vinegar about homeopathy? In the treatment of allergies and osteoarthritis, homeopathic remedies have been widely adopted. Around 32% of French and 42% of English general practitioners regularly refer patients to homeopaths. Because, presumably, they care more about making people better than about looking good in front of the Science Police.
Nope, that is where you're wrong, at least when you start talking about "the end of days". Anything you say is entirely dependent on what you mean by "proof", and that is a concept which has been protean in its meaning since the start of the human activity known as Mathematics. It appears to be true for Church's concept of a proof, but since 1933 we've known that this proof-concept is not entirely satisfactory, because of Goedel's result. It is entirely possible that some future genius of mathematical logic will come up with a new concept of what it is to prove a mathematical statement which solves the questions of the Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice, and that this unimaginable future proof-concept will not have the properties you claim for mathematical proof.
I'm certainly not in favour of forcing clean room interpretations; just of accurate labelling of software releases. It clearly made sense for the Mozilla team to make what use they could of the Netscape code; but equally clearly, having done that, it is not right for them to adopt a numbering convention which implies that they did not do so.
Nevertheless, they rewrote Mozilla "from scratch" with access to the Netscape codebase; it was not a clean-room implementation and they did not start off with zero knowledge of the way Netscape had gone about things. It is therefore a valid criticism of early versions of Mozilla that they were so much worse than Netscape, and this is not a 1.0 release.
"4 years for a 1.0"!?! Do me one. This is not something written from the ground up. However much new code there is in there, Mozilla was based on the Netscape source release and is "1.0" in name only. They have taken 4 years to get back where they started.
Please be aware when reading this transcript that Stallman is a folkie. For this reason, his views on music are intrinsically screwed and cannot be used as a supporting premise for any other argument about anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
If the record companies have such incredibly favourable deals with the producers of their product, why don't they actually make all that much money?
I hate to break the news to you that making your computer draw pictures of naked women is not actually the same thing as getting laid.
Really? Do your workmates think that the word "quantum" is just put in their for decoration?
Yeh. Right. Do me one. You're going to try to take the stand and make the case that you know more about "maximising total return to the shareholders" than Bill Gates, is that right? Good luck.
Things can't be so good at Slashdot if they're having to nickel-and-dime over $9.95 of expenses!
Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany for 57 years. Either provide an example of a non-Nazi point of view which has been banned during that period or admit that your slippery slope argument is without empirical foundation.
Given that my living room is rather larger than two square inches, and given that these chips apparently produce a hot side and a cool side, what is the point in saying that a two inch square panel could cool my living room? Surely the other side of this panel would be simultaneously heating my living room. Isn't the problem with all these sorts of coolers the means of getting the heat away from the hot side?
You are quite wrong if you think it's impossible to filter out nonlinear distrubances.
Your example has no dynamics at all, so it hardly qualifies as a useful example of a non-linear dynamical system.
I think you're out of your depth here. I've described a system with non-linear distubances to a linear system. My whole point was that you can't argue from the local non-stability of the data to the conclusion that the whole system has nonlinear dynamics.
Furthermore, if your example is to be applied to weather/climate, you seem to be suggesting that weather is a small effect compared to long-term climate variation, but the daily fluctuations in temperature, not to mention the annual differences between summer and winter are *larger* or comparable to the long-term climate variations.
You completely misunderstand my point. I simply suggested that the effect of weather on the *average* climate might be small and non-persistent. For example, the daily and monthly fluctuations in the stock market are large compared to the long term return, but it's well known that stock returns are more predictable over long holding periods than short ones.
The longer-term secular trends are much smaller (a few degrees per century, say) compared to the chaotic portion (tens of degrees daily departure from "average")!
Yes, but, you fool, if you're concerned with melting icecaps, a change of a few degrees in the 100-year average temperature is much more important than ten degrees for a day.
Yes. In fact, any system which displays locally nonlinear disturbances in a globally linear function will do so.
The mere fact that climate is study of average weather is irrelevant to the system at hand.
No it isn't. It should immediately alert you to the possibility that climate might be more predictable than weather. Averages always have lower variance than the underlying data.
A chaotic system will by definition exhibit divergence either way with a slight change in initial conditions
This isn't a rigourous definition you're talking about here, and your definition doesn't prove your point. A chaotic system might exhibit divergent behaviour, but that doesn't necessarily require that the divergence be either permanent of large in relation to an underlying linear trend. For example, if I take the output of a nonlinear oscillator and add it to the signal for Radio Luxembourg, I can make a system which is "chaotic" in the sense that its local behaviour is divergent in a nonlinear way dependent on small variations in initial conditions. But I can still extract a useful signal from my system by applying the right filter.
Climate is not necessary chaotic if it is considered to be a moving average of weather. It is entirely possible and indeed quite likely that the non-linear fluctuations which make weather prediction so difficult to predict are in fact damped out over longer time periods. Or to put it in chaos terms, that the fractal dimension of the attractor for weather varies inversely with the sampling frequency.
Bzzt right back atcha. You can't "selectively enforce" patents, which is as near to a "defend or lose" as to make surprisingly little practical difference.
Would you by any chance be talking about niggers here? I think it would be more honest if you said what you meant.
Personalities like yours are another
Are you planning a visit to the planet Earth any time soon?
And your selective quoting of "Our study has no major implications for clinical practice because we found little evidence of effectiveness of any single homeopathic approach on any single clinical condition." is positively Orwellian. This was a meta-study of 89 separate studies, most of which analysed the effects of homeopathy in different conditions. Given that, it is quite obvious that it would never find effectiveness of any single homeopathic approach, because that wasn't what it was looking for. You wouldn't find evidence of this kind for penicillin if you took a metastudy of its use in 89 different conditions.
Furthermore, your reference to Avogadro's number is ignorant. We actually don't understand dilution very well, but we do know that the simplistic model you assume (one in which you simply divide the moles of active agent by moles of water) does not describe the results of multiple dilutions very well at all. In actual fact, molecules often "clump" together, with more or less unknown effects on their agency inside human beings.
The tragedy, and needless danger, is created by know-it-all types who dismiss anything they don't understand rather than acting like grown-up scientists and doing research.
Oh yeh, and
As one doctor said regarding the recent governmental report on "alternative" medicines (to paraphrase), "There are only two kinds of medicine -- that which works and that which doesn't. If something that's considered to be alternative is shown to work then it's adopted. If not, it is not."
If you believe this, why all that piss, wind and vinegar about homeopathy? In the treatment of allergies and osteoarthritis, homeopathic remedies have been widely adopted. Around 32% of French and 42% of English general practitioners regularly refer patients to homeopaths. Because, presumably, they care more about making people better than about looking good in front of the Science Police.
Nope, that is where you're wrong, at least when you start talking about "the end of days". Anything you say is entirely dependent on what you mean by "proof", and that is a concept which has been protean in its meaning since the start of the human activity known as Mathematics. It appears to be true for Church's concept of a proof, but since 1933 we've known that this proof-concept is not entirely satisfactory, because of Goedel's result. It is entirely possible that some future genius of mathematical logic will come up with a new concept of what it is to prove a mathematical statement which solves the questions of the Continuum Hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice, and that this unimaginable future proof-concept will not have the properties you claim for mathematical proof.
Strange how the proof of your existence causes me to immediately doubt the existence of "your girlfriend".
I'm certainly not in favour of forcing clean room interpretations; just of accurate labelling of software releases. It clearly made sense for the Mozilla team to make what use they could of the Netscape code; but equally clearly, having done that, it is not right for them to adopt a numbering convention which implies that they did not do so.
Nevertheless, they rewrote Mozilla "from scratch" with access to the Netscape codebase; it was not a clean-room implementation and they did not start off with zero knowledge of the way Netscape had gone about things. It is therefore a valid criticism of early versions of Mozilla that they were so much worse than Netscape, and this is not a 1.0 release.
"4 years for a 1.0"!?! Do me one. This is not something written from the ground up. However much new code there is in there, Mozilla was based on the Netscape source release and is "1.0" in name only. They have taken 4 years to get back where they started.
Please be aware when reading this transcript that Stallman is a folkie. For this reason, his views on music are intrinsically screwed and cannot be used as a supporting premise for any other argument about anything else.
Slim, and none
Do be aware, though, that drinking warm sake is for hicks and rubes; if you have decent quality sake, you should drink it cold.
Fantastic. You just spammed a spam story with an anti-spam policy. I'm breathless.