Are we really both talking about the same Intelligent Design here, or do you continue to pretend to misunderstand me?
Yes, I get your joke about "Intelligent Design" having another meaning. Ha, ha, ha. Totally hillarious. Great joke. I got it last time, too. You've made the same joke twice, though, and it's time to move on. Now let's go back to the real topic of discussion: Intelligent Design as promoted by the Discovery Institute.
Do you insist that I give you the benefit of the doubt and take what you said at face value, and play along that you really mean that you and Picard support the Discovery Institute's version of Intelligent Design?
Publically and of her own free will, Picard signed the Anti-Evolution petition that many ID supporters cite as evidence that they're not fucked in the head. Do you agree that those people are out of their minds for wanting to teach ID in school, or not?
Let's establish some common ground, or find where we disagree. Do you or don't you and Picard agree with the position and techniques of the Discovery Institute? Do you really think that version of Intelligent Design should be taught in schools?
What is it about the theory of Evolution that troubles you so? How is that more troubling to you than the so-called "theory" of Intelligent Design, and the intellectually dishonest tactics of the Discovery Institute? Why do you publically support and cling to Intelligent Design, yet reject evolution? Are you so obsessed with your religion that you allow it to distort your logical deductive process, and reject the scientific process? Why won't you hold ID up to the same scientific rigor as Evolution? What kind of scientist are you, anyway?
Why are you and Picard so afraid of answering questions directly? If Picard is so embarassed about her irrational religious beliefs that she refuses to stand up for them, then she shouldn't have made them a public issue. Don't blame me for the Anti-Evolution petition and the NY Times article. That cat's out of the bag.
Nice job at avoiding the question I asked by pretending to misunderstand the words and answering a different question. I'll try again, being more specific this time:
So what's YOUR position on intelligent design, as defined by this wikipedia article? I ask again: Do you support teaching Creationism, as defined in this wikipedia article, in science classes? Or are you one of the people who denies that Intelligent Design has anything to do with God or Creationism or teaching religion in schools, and tries to weasel out of answering these questions directly?
Can you please answer the question I asked, instead of trying to divert the conversation by pretending to misunderstand? When you pretend that I meant something else when I ask about Intelligent Design and Creationism, you're using one of the Discovery Institute's intellectually dishonest tactics youself.
Again, now that we're both on the same page: Do you know what Rosalind Picard's position is on teaching Intelligent Design in schools? Do you agree with her? Does Picard really support the Discovery Institute, or will she denounce the way they've used her name to promote Intelligent Design?
Come on now, what's wrong with answering the question directly?
So what's YOUR position on intelligent design, Moulton? Do you support teaching Creationism in science classes? Or are you one of the people who denies that Intelligent Design has anything to do with God or Creationism or teaching religion in schools?
Do you know what Rosalind Picard's position is on teaching Intelligent Design in schools? Do you agree with her? Does Picard really support the Discovery Institute, or will she denounce the way they've used her name to promote Intelligent Design?
I always thought they believed in hell just for the hope that we would burn there. What's the fun in making up fantastic myths about sadistic punishments (and actually carrying it out during the Crusades), if not to threaten your enemies with eternal damnation? No wonder Muslims get nervous when Bush talks about Crusades and Infinite Justice.
Rosalind Picard knows quite well that her name is being used to support creationism, and about the New York Times article that mentioned her by name. It was totally her own decision to make her religious beliefs a public issue, and to drag MIT's name into the Intelligent Design debate. But she has so far failed to made any statements denouncing the Discovery Institute, so it can only be assumed that she supports the intellectually dishonest anti-science charlatans at the Discovery Institute.
That petition was sponsored by the Discovery Institute, whose mission is to promote Intelligent Design. They are fundamentally dishonest because they say one thing in front of evangelical audiences, and another thing entirely in public.
The idea that the Intelligent Design and the Anti-Evolution Petition isn't about God and Creationism and teaching religion in schools is a ridiculous fraud -- that's exactly what they're about. The wording of the petition is meaningless because they're just the code-words of the Center for Science and Culture's "Wedge Strategy", to dress up the wolf in sheep's clothing. If they said what they really believed in public, they'd be a laughing stock, because they know damn well their position is totally religiously motivated, and anti-science. These people actually believe that Fred Flinstone's town of Bedrock is closer to reality than Darwin's theory of evolution.
To find the real meaning of those words, just look at how the petition is being (mis)used:
The New York Times wrote that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers".
Alongside the allegation that the Center intentionally misrepresents facts, critics also note that there is a noticeable conflict between what the CSC tells the public through the media and what they say before conservative Christian audiences. They allege that this is a studied and deliberate attempt at the obfuscation advocated by Wedge strategy author Phillip E. Johnson.[13] When speaking to a mainstream audience and to the media, the Institute portrays ID as a secular, scientific theory, that the teaching the controversy campaign does not promote ID, and that their agenda is not religiously motivated. But when speaking to what the Wedge document calls their "natural constituency, namely (conservative) Christians," the Institute's officers express themselves in unambiguously religious language that contradicts these statements. This in the belief that they cannot afford to alienate their constituency and major funding sources, virtually all of which are conservative religious organizations and individuals such as Howard Ahmanson, Jr.
If you think that the Anti-Evolution petition has nothing to do with advocating Intelligent Design and Creationism, then you're either extremely gullible, or you're intellectually dishonest yourself.
Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including "Rosalind W. Picard, director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".
Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?
The Templeton Foundation, who provided grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, later asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.
The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.
I'm not asking you to fix the problem, I'm just pointing out that you should be aware of it, so you're not surprized when things start breaking for no obvious reason, when you try to do anything less than trivial with AJAX.
As the person evaluating frameworks, you should be aware of the limitations that the frameworks have. If you're using a framework that depends on "prototype.js", it should certainly concern you, because that means you're going to have trouble integrating other JavaScript code with it. Unless what you're doing is trivially simple and you're absolutely sure it will never grow in complexity, then you should keep the limitations of "prototype.js" in mind when you're evaluating Ruby on Rails, unless it provides an alternative.
Sony should take a page from Lem's book, and write movie reviews for movies that don't even exist. That would save them the trouble of making those horrible movies, that they have to forge reviews to get anyone to see. Just cut out the expensive part! Lem was simply being efficient.
It's Coulter's 5 O'Clock Shadow, and talking and thinking like no self respecting woman would, that gives him away. It's ironic that so many gay hating Republicans just love Ann Coulter and Matt Drudge, who are both great buddies and hang out together.
-Don
Why I Don't Use The prototype.js JavaScript Lib.
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Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Here's an article from James Mc Parlane's Blog that describes the horrible problem with prototype.js and its ilk that define methods in Object.prototype and Array.prototype.
When it comes to JavaScript there is one issue for which there seems to be two polarised camps, and that is the question of extending the inbuilt JavaScript Array and Object types via the prototype object. There are those who do, and those who don't.
I am most definitely one of those in the "Don't, because it 'would be bad'" camp.
Now, thanks to the Web2.0/Ruby On Rails/Nuevo Bubble phenomena there is a widely used library that makes great use of the prototype object and that is Sam Stephenson's prototype.js library.
I ran into an issue 6 months ago and decided I would never ever use prototype.js, despite the fact, and I don't say this often, that after an examination of the code, prototype.js is an inspired work of art.
What I and manymanyothers have discovered is that using the prototype object on the Array and Object inbuilt types increases the chances that your code will conflict with existing or external code. It makes your code not play well with others, so once you start using prototype.js, you have to keep using prototype's paradigm because by extending Array and Object via the prototype object it secretly modifies some of JavaScripts default behavior.
It's the crack cocaine of JavaScript.
This can be a good thing. If you don't want to waste time writing your own JavaScript libraries and learning how everything really works, then using prototype.js and the libraries that extend it (e.g. Open Rico) is a very good way of developing. You will save time and money and all you need to learn is "the way of prototype.js".
Now the entire tasty raisin for the MetaWrap JavaScript libraries is to allow others to easily remix MetaWrap applications via a client side API that can be invoked via XML. The result is that CSS, HTML and JavaScript can be injected into the application, or XML and HTML at any point in the rendering pipeline of the application.
So I simply had to reject prototype.js because, out of the box, the very first time I tried to use it - it snuck out and cut the throat of the JavaScript I was using that relied on performing a for(x in object) on the contents of an Array.
In JavaScript, value types are subdivided into primitives and objects. Objects are entities that have an identity (they are only equal to themselves) and that map primitive properties to other value types, ("slots" in prototype-based programming terminology) - see these testcase #5 - #7. Because of this behavior JavaScript objects are often mistakenly described as associative arrays or hash tables, while functionally they behave like an associative array/hash table, technically this is not their true nature.
Despite this the JavaScript programming world has come to rely on these objects behaving as predictable associative array/hash tables - and prototype.js breaks this.
There is no object more galactically useful than a good associative array/hashtable. There is no problem that can't be solved with a large enough hash table. In highly granular interpreted languages like JavaScript it provides a way to dip into pure native brute force computing power mostly unhindered by the language interpreter.
As someone who's evaluated various JavaScript frameworks, what do you think of "prototype.js", the AJAX library that Ruby uses?
Does the new version of Ruby continue to use "prototype.js" or has it switched to a better designed and documented JavaScript framework?
How is the documentation of "prototype.js"? Does it have a rigorous test suite? How does "prototype.js"'s documentation and test suite compare with, say, MochiKit?
Does "prototype.js" continue to define additional methods on Object.prototype? How does it deal with the issue that defining extra methods on Object.prototype causes "for (key in obj)" to return those method names for every object, totally breaking a fundamental JavaScript language construct, and making it extremely difficult to integrate other JavaScript libraries and code modules without suffering mysterious bugs and crashes?
A JavaScript framework should NEVER define methods on Object.prototype or Array.prototype, because doing that breaks all JavaScript code that iterates over the keys of objecs or arrays, which is certainly not very friendly nor modular. Why did Ruby choose to use an AJAX framework that makes such a huge mistake? Have the maintainers of "prototype.js" gotten around to cleaning up that mess, and why did they make such a horrible mistake in the first place? Weren't they aware of this horrible JavaScript quirk, and why didn't they work around it in the first place? Isn't that supposed to be why we use JavaScript frameworks: to avoid such problems?
That kind of paranoid conspiracy crap sounds like a Philip K Dick novel. Oh wait, we ARE discussing Philip K Dick's writings -- to the FBI! Not a novel exactly, but certainly one of his more interesting short stories.
The ranting anonymous cowards seems to have a few good points about The Party running things here in the United States... Until he gets to the part about blaming Michael Moore for the fact that we're losing our constitutionally protected freedoms and going to war based on lies...
Iraq is degererating into a civil war, more and more Republicans are being prosecuted for corruption, Bush's approval numbers are at 34%, and you're still blaming Michael Moore??! This is exactly what Frank Zappa was talking about when he said "Speed turns you into your parents." So does Fox News's brand of political pornography.
This anonymous coward has been beating off to Ann Coulter for too long. I have news for you sucker: She's a man, baby! Just look at that bobbing Adam's apple! And her attitude and argumentation style -- DEFINITELY a DUDE. And yes, beating off to Ann Coulter DOES make you a GAY REPUBLICAN.
SimFaux is an Interactive Faux News Simulation Game, a parody of Fox News, now online and FauxCasting from the Huffington Post Contagious Festival!
SimFaux is like a cross between The Sims and Mystery Science Theater, that lets you sit back and channel surf, or take control and create your own Faux News TV programs! It's pronounced "Sim Foe", of course!
I just posted the latest version of SimFaux, which currently has:
8 Simulated Characters with graphics and sound bites:
1) Arianna Huffington
2) Dick Cheney
3) George W Bush
4) Frank Zappa
5) Ann Coulter
6) Al Franken
7) Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
8) Bill O'Reilly
Channel Surfing (8 different channels with many different programs)
Create your own TV program:
Select any character, video feed to other information to display in each frame.
Invite any character onto your show.
Tell characters to talk, shut up, go away.
WebCam Support:
Put yourself on-screen and interview and argue with the characters!
Streaming Video Clips with keyword triggers.
Video backgrounds and overlays.
Keyword driven AI simulation:
All content is tagged and triggered with keywords,
used by simulation to decide which video clips and sound bites to play.
Keyword display:
See active keywords, hide and focus on keywords to drive simulation
Meaningless graphs and chart-junk.
Interactive surveys with loaded questions and ballot box stuffing.
Teleprompter talking points with reference links so you can really decide for yourself.
Faux Chat simulated Internet chat room:
All character sound bites go into chat.
Amusing chat logs with keyword triggers that effect simulation.
Type text and keywords into chat to reply to characters and effect simulation.
SimFaux is written in OpenLaszlo, which is an Open Source XML/JavaScript based programming language for rich zero-install AJAX web applications:
SimFaux is a constantly evolving open-ended simulation game, which makes it easy to drop in new content (movies, characters, sound bites, text talking points, chat transcripts) all tagged up with keywords, so they play off of each other!
I want to enable other people to start FauxCasting their own stuff! So I will soon publish the source code for SimFaux as Open Source, to serve as an OpenLaszlo programming example, and so other people can modify it an add their own content, videos, characters, sound bites, games, etc! Please check the site http://www.simfaux.com/ for more information.
I am continuously adding more late breaking content and up-to-the-minute news, so please check back again later, and tell your friends about SimFaux!
(Personetics): A "world" for personoid "inhabitants" can be prepared in a couple of hours... A specific personoid activity serves as a triggering mechanism, setting in motion a production process that will gradually augment and define itself; in other words, the world surrounding these beings takes on an unequivocalness only in accordance with their own behavior... From four to seven personoids are optimal, at least for the development of speech and typical exploratory activity, and also for 'culturization'... It is possible to 'accommodate' up to one thousand personoids... Many different philosophies (ontologies and epistemologies) have arisen among them... I can enlarge their world or reduce it, speed up its time or slow it down, alter the mode and means of their perception; I can liquidate them, divide them, multiply them, transform the very ontological foundation of their existence...
On the lighter side of personetics... I'm developing an open source "Personetics" system called "SimFaux", which I've applied to parody Fox News, so it currently includes simulations of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Frank Zappa, Arianna Huffington, Al Franken and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
I've published the SimFaux source code and content as Free Open Source, so you can make your own characters, experiment with the existing ones, transform the very ontological foundation of their existence, see how the keyword based simulation works, extend it with your own rules and content, learn how to build interactive interfaces and simulations with streaming video in OpenLaszlo, etc.
Chronocurrent exformatics is based on the existence of ISOTHEMES (q.v.). An ISOTHEME is a line in SEMANTIC SPACE (q.v.) passing through all thematically identical publications...
Lem predicted Wikipedia (an encyclopedia so up-to-date, it can predict the future):
In an extreme instance, in which there is a Propervirt of less than 0.9%, the TEXT OF THE PRESENT PROSPECTUS may likewise undergo an ABRUPT change. If, while you are reading these sentences, the words begin to jump about, and the letters quiver and blur, please interrupt your reading for ten or twenty seconds to wipe your glasses, adjust your clothing, or the like, and then start reading AGAIN from the beginning, and NOT JUST from the place where your reading was interrupted, since such a TRANSFORMATION indicates that a correction of DEFICIENCIES is now taking place.
What really blows my mind is that Lem presumably wrote that poem in Polish, and Michael Kandel translated it (and other poems and stories) to English.
It's astounding how well Kandel translated the poetry, so it still rhymes, scans well, and makes perfect sense (unlike most other poetry). Kandel also translated a lot of Lem's other stuff ABOUT words and language, in Cyberiad and other books.
On September 2, 1974 Philip K. Dick sent the following letter to the FBI (Please keep in mind Mr. Dick was most probably suffering from schizophrenia):
Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974
I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.
What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).
It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.
SimCity was inspired by one of the stories in Cyberiad (about the despot for whom the constructors made a si mulated kingdom for him to rule over, that broke out of the box and took over). Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least. In memory of Stanislaw Lem, here are some of my favorite poems composed by the Electronic Bard from Cyberiad:
Klapaucius witnessed the first trial run of Trurl's poetry machine, the Elecronic Bard. Here are the some of the wonderful poems it instantly composed to Klapaucius's specifications:
This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:
The Petty and the Small
Are overcome with gall
When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
Klapaucius too, I ween,
Will turn the deepest green
To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.
This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!
A poem all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the Headless... (the description and the poem are unfinished, thanks to the quick intervention of Trurl.)
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!
Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including "Rosalind W. Picard, director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".
Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?
The Templeton Foundation, who provided grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, later asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.
The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.
-Don
SimFaux: An Interactive Faux News Simulator
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Netroots Politics
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· Score: 1
"SimFaux is an interactive Faux News TV simulation, which I just published on the Huffingtonpost Contagious Festival. It's written entirely in OpenLaszlo, and features simulated characters (Dick Cheney, George W Bush, Arianna Huffington, Bill O'Reilly, and more to come), streaming video, sound bites, talking points, slanted surveys, meaningless graphs, dynamic keywords, pie menus, and several channels with different split screen layouts. All the content is tagged with keywords, which it uses to decide what to play next. There's an "About" channel that explains more.
Technically, it's an open-ended data-driven AJAXian web application written in OpenLaszlo (JavaScript + XML that runs in Flash), so it's easy to add more content and plug in new behaviors. (I plan to add some mini-games like Tick-Tack-Faux and Hangman!) I'm regularly adding more characters, video, talking points, sound bites, surveys, etc. So please check back again later for the latest breaking news and propoganda!
The way "any number of points" are sent to the software is through a video image. I'm sorry, "any number of points" is an exageration: let's just say 640x480=312,000 points per frame. It's not rocket science (any more).
Slashdot Mirror
Are we really both talking about the same Intelligent Design here, or do you continue to pretend to misunderstand me?
Yes, I get your joke about "Intelligent Design" having another meaning. Ha, ha, ha. Totally hillarious. Great joke. I got it last time, too. You've made the same joke twice, though, and it's time to move on. Now let's go back to the real topic of discussion: Intelligent Design as promoted by the Discovery Institute.
Do you insist that I give you the benefit of the doubt and take what you said at face value, and play along that you really mean that you and Picard support the Discovery Institute's version of Intelligent Design?
Publically and of her own free will, Picard signed the Anti-Evolution petition that many ID supporters cite as evidence that they're not fucked in the head. Do you agree that those people are out of their minds for wanting to teach ID in school, or not?
Let's establish some common ground, or find where we disagree. Do you or don't you and Picard agree with the position and techniques of the Discovery Institute? Do you really think that version of Intelligent Design should be taught in schools?
What is it about the theory of Evolution that troubles you so? How is that more troubling to you than the so-called "theory" of Intelligent Design, and the intellectually dishonest tactics of the Discovery Institute? Why do you publically support and cling to Intelligent Design, yet reject evolution? Are you so obsessed with your religion that you allow it to distort your logical deductive process, and reject the scientific process? Why won't you hold ID up to the same scientific rigor as Evolution? What kind of scientist are you, anyway?
Why are you and Picard so afraid of answering questions directly? If Picard is so embarassed about her irrational religious beliefs that she refuses to stand up for them, then she shouldn't have made them a public issue. Don't blame me for the Anti-Evolution petition and the NY Times article. That cat's out of the bag.
-Don
Nice job at avoiding the question I asked by pretending to misunderstand the words and answering a different question. I'll try again, being more specific this time:
So what's YOUR position on intelligent design, as defined by this wikipedia article? I ask again: Do you support teaching Creationism, as defined in this wikipedia article, in science classes? Or are you one of the people who denies that Intelligent Design has anything to do with God or Creationism or teaching religion in schools, and tries to weasel out of answering these questions directly?
Can you please answer the question I asked, instead of trying to divert the conversation by pretending to misunderstand? When you pretend that I meant something else when I ask about Intelligent Design and Creationism, you're using one of the Discovery Institute's intellectually dishonest tactics youself.
Again, now that we're both on the same page: Do you know what Rosalind Picard's position is on teaching Intelligent Design in schools? Do you agree with her? Does Picard really support the Discovery Institute, or will she denounce the way they've used her name to promote Intelligent Design?
Come on now, what's wrong with answering the question directly?
-Don
So what's YOUR position on intelligent design, Moulton? Do you support teaching Creationism in science classes? Or are you one of the people who denies that Intelligent Design has anything to do with God or Creationism or teaching religion in schools?
Do you know what Rosalind Picard's position is on teaching Intelligent Design in schools? Do you agree with her? Does Picard really support the Discovery Institute, or will she denounce the way they've used her name to promote Intelligent Design?
-Don
I always thought they believed in hell just for the hope that we would burn there. What's the fun in making up fantastic myths about sadistic punishments (and actually carrying it out during the Crusades), if not to threaten your enemies with eternal damnation? No wonder Muslims get nervous when Bush talks about Crusades and Infinite Justice.
Rosalind Picard knows quite well that her name is being used to support creationism, and about the New York Times article that mentioned her by name. It was totally her own decision to make her religious beliefs a public issue, and to drag MIT's name into the Intelligent Design debate. But she has so far failed to made any statements denouncing the Discovery Institute, so it can only be assumed that she supports the intellectually dishonest anti-science charlatans at the Discovery Institute.
-Don
That petition was sponsored by the Discovery Institute, whose mission is to promote Intelligent Design. They are fundamentally dishonest because they say one thing in front of evangelical audiences, and another thing entirely in public.
The idea that the Intelligent Design and the Anti-Evolution Petition isn't about God and Creationism and teaching religion in schools is a ridiculous fraud -- that's exactly what they're about. The wording of the petition is meaningless because they're just the code-words of the Center for Science and Culture's "Wedge Strategy", to dress up the wolf in sheep's clothing. If they said what they really believed in public, they'd be a laughing stock, because they know damn well their position is totally religiously motivated, and anti-science. These people actually believe that Fred Flinstone's town of Bedrock is closer to reality than Darwin's theory of evolution.
To find the real meaning of those words, just look at how the petition is being (mis)used: The New York Times wrote that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers".
Wikipedi article on the Center for Science and Culture:
If you think that the Anti-Evolution petition has nothing to do with advocating Intelligent Design and Creationism, then you're either extremely gullible, or you're intellectually dishonest yourself.
-Don
Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".
Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?
Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:
The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.
-Don
Of COURSE they tell you NEVER to put aluminum foil in the microwave -- that's how THEY get their POWER!
-Don
Bloosqr writes:
The term "ad hominem" makes the assumption that Stallman is human. Are you sure about that? (Speaking of cheap shots...)
-Don
I'm not asking you to fix the problem, I'm just pointing out that you should be aware of it, so you're not surprized when things start breaking for no obvious reason, when you try to do anything less than trivial with AJAX.
As the person evaluating frameworks, you should be aware of the limitations that the frameworks have. If you're using a framework that depends on "prototype.js", it should certainly concern you, because that means you're going to have trouble integrating other JavaScript code with it. Unless what you're doing is trivially simple and you're absolutely sure it will never grow in complexity, then you should keep the limitations of "prototype.js" in mind when you're evaluating Ruby on Rails, unless it provides an alternative.
-Don
Sony should take a page from Lem's book, and write movie reviews for movies that don't even exist. That would save them the trouble of making those horrible movies, that they have to forge reviews to get anyone to see. Just cut out the expensive part! Lem was simply being efficient.
-Don
It's Coulter's 5 O'Clock Shadow, and talking and thinking like no self respecting woman would, that gives him away. It's ironic that so many gay hating Republicans just love Ann Coulter and Matt Drudge, who are both great buddies and hang out together.
-Don
Here's an article from James Mc Parlane's Blog that describes the horrible problem with prototype.js and its ilk that define methods in Object.prototype and Array.prototype.
-Don
James Mc Parlane's Blog
Why I Don't Use The prototype.js JavaScript Library
When it comes to JavaScript there is one issue for which there seems to be two polarised camps, and that is the question of extending the inbuilt JavaScript Array and Object types via the prototype object. There are those who do, and those who don't.
I am most definitely one of those in the "Don't, because it 'would be bad'" camp.
Now, thanks to the Web2.0/Ruby On Rails/Nuevo Bubble phenomena there is a widely used library that makes great use of the prototype object and that is Sam Stephenson's prototype.js library.
I ran into an issue 6 months ago and decided I would never ever use prototype.js, despite the fact, and I don't say this often, that after an examination of the code, prototype.js is an inspired work of art.
What I and many many others have discovered is that using the prototype object on the Array and Object inbuilt types increases the chances that your code will conflict with existing or external code. It makes your code not play well with others, so once you start using prototype.js, you have to keep using prototype's paradigm because by extending Array and Object via the prototype object it secretly modifies some of JavaScripts default behavior.
It's the crack cocaine of JavaScript.
This can be a good thing. If you don't want to waste time writing your own JavaScript libraries and learning how everything really works, then using prototype.js and the libraries that extend it (e.g. Open Rico) is a very good way of developing. You will save time and money and all you need to learn is "the way of prototype.js".
Now the entire tasty raisin for the MetaWrap JavaScript libraries is to allow others to easily remix MetaWrap applications via a client side API that can be invoked via XML. The result is that CSS, HTML and JavaScript can be injected into the application, or XML and HTML at any point in the rendering pipeline of the application.
So I simply had to reject prototype.js because, out of the box, the very first time I tried to use it - it snuck out and cut the throat of the JavaScript I was using that relied on performing a for(x in object) on the contents of an Array.
In JavaScript, value types are subdivided into primitives and objects. Objects are entities that have an identity (they are only equal to themselves) and that map primitive properties to other value types, ("slots" in prototype-based programming terminology) - see these testcase #5 - #7. Because of this behavior JavaScript objects are often mistakenly described as associative arrays or hash tables, while functionally they behave like an associative array/hash table, technically this is not their true nature.
Despite this the JavaScript programming world has come to rely on these objects behaving as predictable associative array/hash tables - and prototype.js breaks this.
There is no object more galactically useful than a good associative array/hashtable. There is no problem that can't be solved with a large enough hash table. In highly granular interpreted languages like JavaScript it provides a way to dip into pure native brute force computing power mostly unhindered by the language interpreter.
As someone who's evaluated various JavaScript frameworks, what do you think of "prototype.js", the AJAX library that Ruby uses?
Does the new version of Ruby continue to use "prototype.js" or has it switched to a better designed and documented JavaScript framework?
How is the documentation of "prototype.js"? Does it have a rigorous test suite? How does "prototype.js"'s documentation and test suite compare with, say, MochiKit?
Does "prototype.js" continue to define additional methods on Object.prototype? How does it deal with the issue that defining extra methods on Object.prototype causes "for (key in obj)" to return those method names for every object, totally breaking a fundamental JavaScript language construct, and making it extremely difficult to integrate other JavaScript libraries and code modules without suffering mysterious bugs and crashes?
A JavaScript framework should NEVER define methods on Object.prototype or Array.prototype, because doing that breaks all JavaScript code that iterates over the keys of objecs or arrays, which is certainly not very friendly nor modular. Why did Ruby choose to use an AJAX framework that makes such a huge mistake? Have the maintainers of "prototype.js" gotten around to cleaning up that mess, and why did they make such a horrible mistake in the first place? Weren't they aware of this horrible JavaScript quirk, and why didn't they work around it in the first place? Isn't that supposed to be why we use JavaScript frameworks: to avoid such problems?
-Don
PKD must have had confused Stanislaw Lem with the collective communist conspiracy that is AntiORP.
-Don
I think you may have confused Lem's book "Solaris" with an operating system named "Slowlaris". They are totally different.
-Don
That kind of paranoid conspiracy crap sounds like a Philip K Dick novel. Oh wait, we ARE discussing Philip K Dick's writings -- to the FBI! Not a novel exactly, but certainly one of his more interesting short stories.
The ranting anonymous cowards seems to have a few good points about The Party running things here in the United States... Until he gets to the part about blaming Michael Moore for the fact that we're losing our constitutionally protected freedoms and going to war based on lies...
Iraq is degererating into a civil war, more and more Republicans are being prosecuted for corruption, Bush's approval numbers are at 34%, and you're still blaming Michael Moore??! This is exactly what Frank Zappa was talking about when he said "Speed turns you into your parents." So does Fox News's brand of political pornography.
This anonymous coward has been beating off to Ann Coulter for too long. I have news for you sucker: She's a man, baby! Just look at that bobbing Adam's apple! And her attitude and argumentation style -- DEFINITELY a DUDE. And yes, beating off to Ann Coulter DOES make you a GAY REPUBLICAN.
-Don
Note: Open Source SimFaux OpenLaszlo Code Now Available via Subversion, so you can add your own characters and content!
SimFaux is an Interactive Faux News Simulation Game, a parody of Fox News, now online and FauxCasting from the Huffington Post Contagious Festival!
SimFaux is like a cross between The Sims and Mystery Science Theater, that lets you sit back and channel surf, or take control and create your own Faux News TV programs! It's pronounced "Sim Foe", of course!
Free live interactive SimFaux Simualtion Game (requires Flash, preferably version 8): http://simfaux.cf.huffingtonpost.com/
Screencast and demo video: http://www.simfaux.com/
I just posted the latest version of SimFaux, which currently has:
8 Simulated Characters with graphics and sound bites:
1) Arianna Huffington
2) Dick Cheney
3) George W Bush
4) Frank Zappa
5) Ann Coulter
6) Al Franken
7) Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
8) Bill O'Reilly
Channel Surfing (8 different channels with many different programs)
Create your own TV program:
Select any character, video feed to other information to display in each frame.
Invite any character onto your show.
Tell characters to talk, shut up, go away.
WebCam Support:
Put yourself on-screen and interview and argue with the characters!
Streaming Video Clips with keyword triggers.
Video backgrounds and overlays.
Keyword driven AI simulation:
All content is tagged and triggered with keywords, used by simulation to decide which video clips and sound bites to play.
Keyword display:
See active keywords, hide and focus on keywords to drive simulation
Meaningless graphs and chart-junk.
Interactive surveys with loaded questions and ballot box stuffing.
Teleprompter talking points with reference links so you can really decide for yourself.
Faux Chat simulated Internet chat room:
All character sound bites go into chat.
Amusing chat logs with keyword triggers that effect simulation.
Type text and keywords into chat to reply to characters and effect simulation.
SimFaux is written in OpenLaszlo, which is an Open Source XML/JavaScript based programming language for rich zero-install AJAX web applications:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/
SimFaux is a constantly evolving open-ended simulation game, which makes it easy to drop in new content (movies, characters, sound bites, text talking points, chat transcripts) all tagged up with keywords, so they play off of each other!
I want to enable other people to start FauxCasting their own stuff! So I will soon publish the source code for SimFaux as Open Source, to serve as an OpenLaszlo programming example, and so other people can modify it an add their own content, videos, characters, sound bites, games, etc! Please check the site http://www.simfaux.com/ for more information.
I am continuously adding more late breaking content and up-to-the-minute news, so please check back again later, and tell your friends about SimFaux!
-Don Hopkins (dhopkins@DonHopkins.com)
From Stanislaw Lem's "Non-Serviam" (1971):
On the lighter side of personetics... I'm developing an open source "Personetics" system called "SimFaux", which I've applied to parody Fox News, so it currently includes simulations of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Frank Zappa, Arianna Huffington, Al Franken and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
I've published the SimFaux source code and content as Free Open Source, so you can make your own characters, experiment with the existing ones, transform the very ontological foundation of their existence, see how the keyword based simulation works, extend it with your own rules and content, learn how to build interactive interfaces and simulations with streaming video in OpenLaszlo, etc.
-Don
Lem defined Isothemes:
Lem predicted Wikipedia (an encyclopedia so up-to-date, it can predict the future):
What really blows my mind is that Lem presumably wrote that poem in Polish, and Michael Kandel translated it (and other poems and stories) to English.
It's astounding how well Kandel translated the poetry, so it still rhymes, scans well, and makes perfect sense (unlike most other poetry). Kandel also translated a lot of Lem's other stuff ABOUT words and language, in Cyberiad and other books.
If by "greatly admired" you mean "reported to the FBI"...
"Speed: It will turn you into your parents." -Frank Zappa
And the admiration was mutual: read "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case - with Exceptions" and "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans", from Microworlds.
From Stanislaw Lem's web site:
On September 2, 1974 Philip K. Dick sent the following letter to the FBI (Please keep in mind Mr. Dick was most probably suffering from schizophrenia):
Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974
I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.
What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).
It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.
Lem was my favorite writer, and I'm sad to hear he's gone.
SimCity was inspired by one of the stories in Cyberiad (about the despot for whom the constructors made a si mulated kingdom for him to rule over, that broke out of the box and took over). Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least. In memory of Stanislaw Lem, here are some of my favorite poems composed by the Electronic Bard from Cyberiad:
Klapaucius witnessed the first trial run of Trurl's poetry machine, the Elecronic Bard. Here are the some of the wonderful poems it instantly composed to Klapaucius's specifications:
This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:
This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!
A poem all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the Headless ... (the description and the poem are unfinished, thanks to the quick intervention of Trurl.)
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
Femfatalatron 1.0 Product
Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".
Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?
Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:
The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.
-Don
"SimFaux is an interactive Faux News TV simulation, which I just published on the Huffingtonpost Contagious Festival. It's written entirely in OpenLaszlo, and features simulated characters (Dick Cheney, George W Bush, Arianna Huffington, Bill O'Reilly, and more to come), streaming video, sound bites, talking points, slanted surveys, meaningless graphs, dynamic keywords, pie menus, and several channels with different split screen layouts. All the content is tagged with keywords, which it uses to decide what to play next. There's an "About" channel that explains more.
Technically, it's an open-ended data-driven AJAXian web application written in OpenLaszlo (JavaScript + XML that runs in Flash), so it's easy to add more content and plug in new behaviors. (I plan to add some mini-games like Tick-Tack-Faux and Hangman!) I'm regularly adding more characters, video, talking points, sound bites, surveys, etc. So please check back again later for the latest breaking news and propoganda!
-Don
The way "any number of points" are sent to the software is through a video image. I'm sorry, "any number of points" is an exageration: let's just say 640x480=312,000 points per frame. It's not rocket science (any more).
-Don