We don't have the faintest idea what causes consciousness in humans, and we don't even know which other animals have it (if any). We don't have a *detector*, let alone understand the mechanism. Right now we're at the "I know it when I see it" stage.
People who think ever-faster computers are going to magically solve all this stuff "in 20 years" might as well cut out the middle man and put their faith in magic itself.
Also the text of every novel that will ever be written. Surely that could be true of an infinitely long purely random number, but not Pi, which is after all, the actual ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference; i.e. it's not random.
IANAMathematician, but IIRC the going conjecture is that long substrings of pi's digits have the properties of random sequences.
If so, you could use it for an RNG. Let the seed be the offset to where you want to start, and then take the digits (or bits) sequentially from there.
It's not exactly far-fetched to say the story was based on an actual city that sank into the sea (*cough* Akrotiri *cough*). After all, modern story-tellers use historical events to make political points all the damn time.
Perhaps it was, though if so it was more likely based on the famous circular harbor at Carthage than on Thera.
But Plato introduces it in a fictional account of a dinner party where one of the characters reports that a friend of a friend of... (insert 7-8 removes) heard it from an Egyptian priest. We know that these stories of Plato, called Dramatic Dialogues, are just fictions to let him insert his opinions into the mouth of Socrates. So maybe he did drop in some common (or esoteric) knowledge about an ancient city - he does mention real cities - but there's absolutely no reason to suppose that he was doing so in the case of Atlantis. And there certainly weren't any Athenians around 7000 years earlier to fight these hypothetical Atlanteans.
Face it: he made up a story to make a point, and one facet of the story has caught the popular imagination. But almost no one who fancies that facet has the least idea where it came from, nor what else was in the story, nor why it was being told. Belief in Atlantis is the triumph of ignorance and wishful thinking over education, comprehension, and the expectation that claims should be supported by evidence.
In fact, I've been told that our modern obsession with realism and literal truth is actually a fairly recent development; back then, people didn't care for "true stories", they liked them embellished far beyond the limits of reality.
An important key to understanding Greek and Roman literature is that when an author reports a speech by a famous person, they aren't making the least effort to recount what was actually said; rather, they are constructing what they thought the person ought to have said on the occasion.
I don't think that's actually true. We've always had lots of Roman references to the historical city of Ilium on the site (Roman version of Greek Ilion, source of the epic's title Iliad), with what was always thought to be Achilles' tomb nearby. We've always had references to the fact that Alexander visited the tomb during historical times and swapped his shield for the one on display there. And we have a Fifth Century CE (IIRC) travelogue where a guy reports visiting the site and being astonished to find that the Eternal Flame was still burning at the tomb - learning on investigation that it was maintained by the local Christian bishop.
Western Europe lost most of their contact with Greek and Roman literature for the better part of a millenium when germanic barbarians overran the western half of the empire, but the East Roman (Byzantine) empire wasn't squelched until 1453. And by then western Europe was starting to reacquaint itself with the literature.
Perhaps Schliemann faced skeptics, but we ought to make a distinction between a "lost" city and a city that was believed to have been mythical. We've found lots of cities in Western Asia that had been lost for several thousand years, but that doesn't mean nobody believed they existed. In fact, IIRC there are still a few that we know existed but haven't found yet.
Someone suggests its Atlantis. Atlantis never existed. It was a rhetorical device.
But it usually gets "discovered" every six months or so, and unless I haven't been following the news closely enough, we're overdue. So we may have to let this one in just to avoid a statistical fluke.
Maybe I'm wrong, but ISTM that a tsunami would only submerge a city temporarily. To stay under for 3000 years you need rising sea, sinking ground, or perhaps a sea breaking into a previously dry area below sea level.
"According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. "
The GOP has been at the forefront of making those issues into issues of denial and wishful thinking. Please.
That's because the GOP must take a populist approach to bring out the FOX News voting block. Without it they wouldn't be able to put their people in office.
I can understand why Mr. Inglis would be frustrated by the "populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking", but surprised that he didn't pause to ask himself how his party would ever win an election without it.
The scientist Ben Franklin (No, it wasn't Albert Einstein) said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Clearly he wasn't running Windows on his computer.
Slashdot Mirror
when everyone's afraid of being prosecuted for libel when they visit your country.
Reject the frikkin article.
'Cause the police can't maintain their integrity if they're not allowed to beat someone up now and then.
Sure, in Canada.
Well, now at least the *AA execs will know who to Blame It On.
More gimmicky consumer devices, less ownership, control, and privacy.
There's a lot of noise about "conciousness"
And it's just noise.
We don't have the faintest idea what causes consciousness in humans, and we don't even know which other animals have it (if any). We don't have a *detector*, let alone understand the mechanism. Right now we're at the "I know it when I see it" stage.
People who think ever-faster computers are going to magically solve all this stuff "in 20 years" might as well cut out the middle man and put their faith in magic itself.
Also the text of every novel that will ever be written.
Surely that could be true of an infinitely long purely random number, but not Pi, which is after all, the actual ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference; i.e. it's not random.
IANAMathematician, but IIRC the going conjecture is that long substrings of pi's digits have the properties of random sequences.
If so, you could use it for an RNG. Let the seed be the offset to where you want to start, and then take the digits (or bits) sequentially from there.
I am curious to know how much electricity was wasted on this apparently useless endeavour.
I think you're just suffering pi nos envy. He's obviously got way more pi nos than you do.
The big question is, does it turn out to contain the plans for a teleporting device?
Undoubtedly it does, embedded somewhere in the sequence.
Also the text of every novel that will ever be written.
Just got to figure out what the encoding is. And figure out where the relevant substring starts.
Which if you think about it is really strange for pi to not be a proper noun.
Stranger still that "proper noun" isn't a proper noun.
Or car batteries and goblin farts. Car batteries and pixie snot. Car batteries and invisible pink unicorn spunk. See where I'm going with this?
Thankfully, no.
It's driving force is a desire for equality, where equality means that you get free money from the government.
Or maybe it just means that rich people should have to pay their own way too.
From the website I found it's about solidarity, which seems like an awfully nebulous concept to be campaigning for...
Yeah, did nothing for Poland, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union.
Maybe they could capture the electrons from all the "Look Ma, I'm Getting Arrested" messages, and use them to power their systems.
The pro version will have a "You've Got Bail!" pop-up, with all the necessary transactions automated.
"Socialize risk, privatize profit" works well in the underworld too. If you're on the right end of the deal.
It's not exactly far-fetched to say the story was based on an actual city that sank into the sea (*cough* Akrotiri *cough*). After all, modern story-tellers use historical events to make political points all the damn time.
Perhaps it was, though if so it was more likely based on the famous circular harbor at Carthage than on Thera.
But Plato introduces it in a fictional account of a dinner party where one of the characters reports that a friend of a friend of ... (insert 7-8 removes) heard it from an Egyptian priest. We know that these stories of Plato, called Dramatic Dialogues, are just fictions to let him insert his opinions into the mouth of Socrates. So maybe he did drop in some common (or esoteric) knowledge about an ancient city - he does mention real cities - but there's absolutely no reason to suppose that he was doing so in the case of Atlantis. And there certainly weren't any Athenians around 7000 years earlier to fight these hypothetical Atlanteans.
Face it: he made up a story to make a point, and one facet of the story has caught the popular imagination. But almost no one who fancies that facet has the least idea where it came from, nor what else was in the story, nor why it was being told. Belief in Atlantis is the triumph of ignorance and wishful thinking over education, comprehension, and the expectation that claims should be supported by evidence.
In fact, I've been told that our modern obsession with realism and literal truth is actually a fairly recent development; back then, people didn't care for "true stories", they liked them embellished far beyond the limits of reality.
An important key to understanding Greek and Roman literature is that when an author reports a speech by a famous person, they aren't making the least effort to recount what was actually said; rather, they are constructing what they thought the person ought to have said on the occasion.
People used to think the same thing about Troy.
I don't think that's actually true. We've always had lots of Roman references to the historical city of Ilium on the site (Roman version of Greek Ilion, source of the epic's title Iliad), with what was always thought to be Achilles' tomb nearby. We've always had references to the fact that Alexander visited the tomb during historical times and swapped his shield for the one on display there. And we have a Fifth Century CE (IIRC) travelogue where a guy reports visiting the site and being astonished to find that the Eternal Flame was still burning at the tomb - learning on investigation that it was maintained by the local Christian bishop.
Western Europe lost most of their contact with Greek and Roman literature for the better part of a millenium when germanic barbarians overran the western half of the empire, but the East Roman (Byzantine) empire wasn't squelched until 1453. And by then western Europe was starting to reacquaint itself with the literature.
Perhaps Schliemann faced skeptics, but we ought to make a distinction between a "lost" city and a city that was believed to have been mythical. We've found lots of cities in Western Asia that had been lost for several thousand years, but that doesn't mean nobody believed they existed. In fact, IIRC there are still a few that we know existed but haven't found yet.
Someone suggests its Atlantis. Atlantis never existed. It was a rhetorical device.
But it usually gets "discovered" every six months or so, and unless I haven't been following the news closely enough, we're overdue. So we may have to let this one in just to avoid a statistical fluke.
Maybe I'm wrong, but ISTM that a tsunami would only submerge a city temporarily. To stay under for 3000 years you need rising sea, sinking ground, or perhaps a sea breaking into a previously dry area below sea level.
Too bad they can't give Alan Turing his life back.
Is there anything that the shameless left claims is not effected by climate change? What a racket!
I claim that a lot of people's minds aren't affected by climate change.
"According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. "
The GOP has been at the forefront of making those issues into issues of denial and wishful thinking. Please.
That's because the GOP must take a populist approach to bring out the FOX News voting block. Without it they wouldn't be able to put their people in office.
I can understand why Mr. Inglis would be frustrated by the "populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking", but surprised that he didn't pause to ask himself how his party would ever win an election without it.
The scientist Ben Franklin (No, it wasn't Albert Einstein) said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Clearly he wasn't running Windows on his computer.