My wife swears Trading Spaces is the only reason we have cable. So I'm essentially paying $40 a month for the Trading Spaces Channel!
That said, I enjoy the occasional episode. When things go poorly, it's fun to watch. Also, many of the female designers are hot in an undefinable way. You wouldn't look twice at them in a bar, but put 'em in a suburban setting surrounded by neutral tones and fat Americans and they're like water to a thirsty man.
As for sci-fi. Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling seem to carry on the tradition well.
I've read three or four of Sterling's novels. I found them all boring, and sold them. I do greatly enjoy his non-fiction. I wish he'd write more.
Allen Steel with this Moon backs a few years back were great as well.
Thanks for the tip! I'll check it out.
But I find more self on an ever increasing hunt for really good sc fi. How many Enders Game sequels can we have?
Amen, brother. Ender's Game was great. The first sequel, with those Portugese midgets, was so boring except for a few stretches around Ender. I couldn't read the others. I tried Ender's Shadow when it came out. Okay -- I'm constantly on the verge of selling it, but haven't yet. Couldn't bear the thought of reading the new one in this series.
Gibson needs to get off his ass and back to the Sprawl.
This one's too sensitive for me to touch still. I'm hoping that things will pick up now that he's done with the VL-I-ATP trilogy.
The guys that get the Nobel Literature Prize are supposed to be "top of the cream" - but they don't exactly sell a lot. (Can you even remember the names of the previous winners?)
Faulkner, maybe Kundera and Bertrand Russell. John Katz.
I believe that the press doesn't like the term "cracker" because the average reader would too easily confuse it with the small bread wafer of the same name.
Hackers are talented programmers of computers, often of Asian origin. Crackers are white people.
If you're really interested in finding the letter (which means you're either mentally ill or have a lot of free time on your hands), do a Google search for "A1C Michael Bragg". Ugh.
I'm confused. Are you pro-Google (given that you encouraged us to use it to find your letter) or are you anti-Google (because your words escaped into the wild)?
from now on, everyone should refer to x-box mod chips as "Replacement Wheels for Chocolate Bicycles"... this will ensure that MS prying eyes will be kept from our clandestine, x-box hacking activities. Viva La Revolucion!
Follow your own advice:
from now on, everyone should refer to x-box mod chips as "Replacement Wheels for Chocolate Bicycles"... this will ensure that MS prying eyes will be kept from our clandestine, REPLACEMENT WHEELS FOR CHOCOLATE BICYCLES activities. Viva La Revolucion!
But isn't this precisely why we have peer review? While one, two, or even ten scientists might delude themselves into seeing something that's not here, eventually someone is going to come around and see things for what they really are.
Oh definitely, peer review and especially replications done by other labs. (Although you'll recall that in the case if Blondot, there had been replications -- but by fellow French scientists who may have been swayed by nationalistic urgings.)
There are some genuine points of disagreement about the same datum between scientists of different theoretical schools. Consider the following:
"Let us consider Johannes Kepler: imagine him on a hill watching the dawn. With him is Tycho Brahe. Kepler regarded the sun as fixed: it was the earth that moved. But Tycho followed Ptolemy and Aristotle in this much at least: the earth was fixed and all other celestial bodies moved around it. Do Kepler and Tycho see the same thing in the east at dawn?" (p. 5 of Hanson, N. R. (1958). Patterns of discovery: An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
"For Hanson, part of what is involved in learning a particular science is learning to see the world in a particular way. Hanson proposes that the difference between the trained observer and the untrained observer is similar to the gestalt shifts that any of us can experience when we look at ambiguous figures." (p. 45, Bechtel, W. (1988). Philosophy of science: An overview for cognitive science. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.)
"In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds." (p. 150, Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. (2nd Ed.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.)
Of course, we know that Kepler was right and Brahe wrong, but there was a time when this was unclear, and two viable theories led their proponents to different interpretations of the same experiences/data/observations.
That's the great thing about science, unlike bible *cough* theory, is that it keeps evolving;-)
Agreed. "Creationist science" is science by no one's definition (except Feyerabend's, but that's another story). While scientific data might be theory-laden, but Creationism is not a scientific theory...
Here are some other fun quotes along these lines:
It is the theory which decides what we can observe. - Albert Einstein.
These are the opinions upon which I base my facts. - Adlai Stevenson.
Political structure determines language and language determines thought. - George Orwell.
I'm not quite sure that's true. For example, there are observations, which I would say are "facts". For example: "This table is brown". Of course, you could get very philosophical and start discussing what it means to be brown, and so forth, but at that point I think you're nitpicking.
Actually, there are some legitimate nitpicks here. Hanson (1958) and Kuhn (1962) argued that empirical observations are 'theory-laden' and that scientists see the world through paradigmatic world views, respectively. Which is to say that one's theory influences what one observes or interprets his or her observations. These philosophers were not just skeptics -- they were influenced by the gestalt and 'new look' psychological theories of visual perception.
Some of the best evidence for the subjectivity of even empirical observations comes from cases where seemingly sober scientists 'saw' things that their theories told them were there but which actually do not exist. Some quotes:
"During the seventeenth century, when their research was guided by one or another effluvium theory, electricians repeatedly saw chaff particles revound from, or fall off, the electrified bodies that had attracted them. At least that is what seventeenth-century observers said they saw, and we have no more reason to doubt their reports of perception than our own." (p. 117, Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. (3rd Ed.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.)
"In 1903 Rene Blondlot claimed to have discovered a new kind of ray, instances of which were recorded and investigated by a large number of eminent French scientists. Outside France interest in N-rays waned when it was reported by the American physicist R. W. Wood that during a visit to Blondlot's laboratory he surreptitiously removed from the apparatus an essential prism. Despite the secret sabotage of his equipment, Blondlot still reported seeing the effects of the N-rays." (p. 120 of Bird, A. (2000). Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.)
"There have been cases in the history of science in which skilled scientists of the highest repute have 'seen' or 'verified', through observation and experiment, the prediction of some hypothesis, even though this prediction subsequently turned out not to correspond to reality and could not be reproduced by other observers. For example, Sir William Herschel (1738-1822), discoverer of the planet Uranus, the father of John Herschel and the most famous astronomer of the eighteenth century, was able with the powerful telescopes he manufactured to resolve into individual stars several nebulae that had previously appeared to be milky luminous patches in the sky. In the mid 1780s, he conjectured that all nebulae were composed of individual stars so that none were made of a luminous fluid. In 1790 he did observe a nebula that he was forced to interpret as a central star surrounded by a cloud of luminous fluid. In the interim period, however, Herschel claimed to resolve into individual stars both the Orion and Andromeda nebulae. In fact, though, Orion is a gaseous cloud containing a continuous distribution of matter, not just individual stars, while Andromeda is a galaxy of stars." (p. 10 of Cushing, J. T. (1997). Philosophical concepts in physics: The historical relation between philosophy and scientific theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" contains similar anecdotes.
Let's hear your response to it then. Bearing in mind that over 100 papers were published in refereed journals on this very issue, I'm guessing that you must be pretty impressive to be able to dismiss Searle so entirely
Oooh, the argument from authority. Very compelling. Most of the papers I have read on the Chinese Room argument argue against Searle (e.g., Dennett's point that it's not actually an argument, but an 'intuition pump'). I'm guessing that you must be pretty impressive to be able to dismiss Dennett (and like-minded philosophers) so entirely
I find AI an interesting pursuit. I see no knock-down for or against it from philosophy. Philosophers have a history of making grand pronouncements about the possible scope of other fields that are roundly ignored by the people actually doing the work and seen later to be besides the point. (I say this as a cognitive scientist who likes philosophy, by the way.)
My take on Searle: The Chinese Room illustrates (for those who have forgotten) that in the traditional approach to computational formalisms, syntax and semantics are separate. You can't get semantics from syntax. The AI folks tend to forget this.
The problem is not AI. The problem is the traditional approach to computational formalisms. I think we need a conception of computational formalism where syntax and semantics are integral. Brian Smith has published the first in a series of books on his attempt at such a reformation. I think he's striving for the correct goal, although I find his approach unsatisfying. I see traces of the right answer in Christopher Alexander's work on pattern languages for architecture (inspired in part by Chomsky's work on natural language, which Alexander read while hanging aorund Harvard with pioneering cognitive scientists in the early 1960s); see especially Richard Gabriel's book on Alexander applied to software.
Most programmers know nothing of the formal semantic theories that underly their programming languages, yet use them in meaningful ways. Apparently denotational semantics and the like are beside the point. We need some cognitive psychologists and linguists to get in there and theorize about what/how programming languages mean. When this happens, Searle's 'intuition pump' will be seen to have reached the wrong conclusion, but in a noble way: by spurring clarification of the issues on which he (and many others) are confused.
Java relies heavily on dynamic binding. That's a double edged sword. It makes Java a great RAD tool, but a poor performer. Toy benchmarks aside, Java apps run slower than their C++ equivalents.
And Common Lisp delivers the best of both worlds. Dynamic binding during rapid prototyping and development. As hot-spots creep-up, simply add OPTIONAL declarations that inform the compiler of the types of critical variables, and the speed benefits of knowing variable types at compile time obtain.
Generic programming actually has a lot more in common with Lisp programming than the conventional way C and C++ have been applied.
Agreed.
The author's comment strikes me as just another case of blaming the tool when the problem is the user.
Perhaps what he's saying is that generic programming is simplicty itself in a dynamic programming language such as Common Lisp, and a syntactic nightmare in C++, where it runs head-first into the static bias of that language?
2. The CLR is just a collection of library code that developers can use or choose not to use. Think STL for many different languages. Already the CLR has support for many languages.
In particular, I was pleasantly surprised that it includes a primitive for making tail calls, and explicitly cites its necessity for beautiful-but-niche languages such as Scheme, ML, Haskell, (and Common Lisp). (See section 8.2 of the document.)
Slashdot Mirror
My wife swears Trading Spaces is the only reason we have cable. So I'm essentially paying $40 a month for the Trading Spaces Channel!
That said, I enjoy the occasional episode. When things go poorly, it's fun to watch. Also, many of the female designers are hot in an undefinable way. You wouldn't look twice at them in a bar, but put 'em in a suburban setting surrounded by neutral tones and fat Americans and they're like water to a thirsty man.
I hope that you'll reconsider you're campaign to destroy JavaScript.
The OP is not destroying Javascript -- Nefarious web site developers are. Disabling Javascript is a defensive, not offensive move.
As for sci-fi. Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling seem to carry on the tradition well.
I've read three or four of Sterling's novels. I found them all boring, and sold them. I do greatly enjoy his non-fiction. I wish he'd write more.
Allen Steel with this Moon backs a few years back were great as well.
Thanks for the tip! I'll check it out.
But I find more self on an ever increasing hunt for really good sc fi. How many Enders Game sequels can we have?
Amen, brother. Ender's Game was great. The first sequel, with those Portugese midgets, was so boring except for a few stretches around Ender. I couldn't read the others. I tried Ender's Shadow when it came out. Okay -- I'm constantly on the verge of selling it, but haven't yet. Couldn't bear the thought of reading the new one in this series.
Gibson needs to get off his ass and back to the Sprawl.
This one's too sensitive for me to touch still. I'm hoping that things will pick up now that he's done with the VL-I-ATP trilogy.
The guys that get the Nobel Literature Prize are supposed to be "top of the cream" - but they don't exactly sell a lot. (Can you even remember the names of the previous winners?)
Faulkner, maybe Kundera and Bertrand Russell. John Katz.
Point taken.
50 bucks says that Superbowl L will be called Superball 50 since the American public is way too stupid to associate the Roman numerial L to 50.
Yeah, knowledge of a pissant numeral scheme indicates intelligence in the 21st century.
> "It's unix. The X has to be there. It's like a law."
Ah, that whould explain why {Free|Net|...}BSD are "dead".
It's a silent, unwritten "X". Trust me -- it's a weird Unicode character.
I believe that the press doesn't like the term "cracker" because the average reader would too easily confuse it with the small bread wafer of the same name.
Hackers are talented programmers of computers, often of Asian origin.
Crackers are white people.
If you're really interested in finding the letter (which means you're either mentally ill or have a lot of free time on your hands), do a Google search for "A1C Michael Bragg". Ugh.
I'm confused. Are you pro-Google (given that you encouraged us to use it to find your letter) or are you anti-Google (because your words escaped into the wild)?
AOL is a dinosaur and their days are numbered.
IANAAOLer, but...people have been saying this for the past five years, if not longer. What's different this time?
1 box Kraft Deluxe Mac & "Cheese"
1 can light tunafish
1 packet onion soup (dried, you know)
1/2 bag frozen peas
Cook mac & cheese as normal. When adding cheese at final step, also add remaining ingredients. Mix thoroughly, serve and eat.
So the peas are still frozen, right? Crunchy!
from now on, everyone should refer to x-box mod chips as "Replacement Wheels for Chocolate Bicycles" ... this will ensure that MS prying eyes will be kept from our clandestine, x-box hacking activities. Viva La Revolucion!
... this will ensure that MS prying eyes will be kept from our clandestine, REPLACEMENT WHEELS FOR CHOCOLATE BICYCLES activities. Viva La Revolucion!
Follow your own advice:
from now on, everyone should refer to x-box mod chips as "Replacement Wheels for Chocolate Bicycles"
I don't know what for, but they'll be on you.
For having sex in a non-missionary position?
So Linux is being used at ILM. Could this be why The Phantom Menace and especially AOTC suck ass?
They need to go back to CP/M or whatever they used back in the day.
As is, HURD is an embarrassment to O/S purists. Its the "portable" O/S that can't even work well on ONE hardware architecture!
You're a glass-is-half-empty kind of person, aren't you? Here's how it looks from my perspective: HURD runs equally well on many architectures!
Why don't they write a book on Human-Human interaction for Computer Science students ;-)?
They have.
Nice Steele reference.
(Just thought you'd like to know a few sane people lurk here.)
But isn't this precisely why we have peer review? While one, two, or even ten scientists might delude themselves into seeing something that's not here, eventually someone is going to come around and see things for what they really are.
;-)
Oh definitely, peer review and especially replications done by other labs. (Although you'll recall that in the case if Blondot, there had been replications -- but by fellow French scientists who may have been swayed by nationalistic urgings.)
There are some genuine points of disagreement about the same datum between scientists of different theoretical schools. Consider the following:
"Let us consider Johannes Kepler: imagine him on a hill watching the dawn. With him is Tycho Brahe. Kepler regarded the sun as fixed: it was the earth that moved. But Tycho followed Ptolemy and Aristotle in this much at least: the earth was fixed and all other celestial bodies moved around it. Do Kepler and Tycho see the same thing in the east at dawn?" (p. 5 of Hanson, N. R. (1958). Patterns of discovery: An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
"For Hanson, part of what is involved in learning a particular science is learning to see the world in a particular way. Hanson proposes that the difference between the trained observer and the untrained observer is similar to the gestalt shifts that any of us can experience when we look at ambiguous figures." (p. 45, Bechtel, W. (1988). Philosophy of science: An overview for cognitive science. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.)
"In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds." (p. 150, Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. (2nd Ed.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.)
Of course, we know that Kepler was right and Brahe wrong, but there was a time when this was unclear, and two viable theories led their proponents to different interpretations of the same experiences/data/observations.
That's the great thing about science, unlike bible *cough* theory, is that it keeps evolving
Agreed. "Creationist science" is science by no one's definition (except Feyerabend's, but that's another story). While scientific data might be theory-laden, but Creationism is not a scientific theory...
Here are some other fun quotes along these lines:
It is the theory which decides what we can observe. - Albert Einstein.
These are the opinions upon which I base my facts. - Adlai Stevenson.
Political structure determines language and language determines thought. - George Orwell.
I'm not quite sure that's true. For example, there are observations, which I would say are "facts". For example: "This table is brown". Of course, you could get very philosophical and start discussing what it means to be brown, and so forth, but at that point I think you're nitpicking.
Actually, there are some legitimate nitpicks here. Hanson (1958) and Kuhn (1962) argued that empirical observations are 'theory-laden' and that scientists see the world through paradigmatic world views, respectively. Which is to say that one's theory influences what one observes or interprets his or her observations. These philosophers were not just skeptics -- they were influenced by the gestalt and 'new look' psychological theories of visual perception.
Some of the best evidence for the subjectivity of even empirical observations comes from cases where seemingly sober scientists 'saw' things that their theories told them were there but which actually do not exist. Some quotes:
"During the seventeenth century, when their research was guided by one or another effluvium theory, electricians repeatedly saw chaff particles revound from, or fall off, the electrified bodies that had attracted them. At least that is what seventeenth-century observers said they saw, and we have no more reason to doubt their reports of perception than our own." (p. 117, Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. (3rd Ed.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.)
"In 1903 Rene Blondlot claimed to have discovered a new kind of ray, instances of which were recorded and investigated by a large number of eminent French scientists. Outside France interest in N-rays waned when it was reported by the American physicist R. W. Wood that during a visit to Blondlot's laboratory he surreptitiously removed from the apparatus an essential prism. Despite the secret sabotage of his equipment, Blondlot still reported seeing the effects of the N-rays." (p. 120 of Bird, A. (2000). Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.)
"There have been cases in the history of science in which skilled scientists of the highest repute have 'seen' or 'verified', through observation and experiment, the prediction of some hypothesis, even though this prediction subsequently turned out not to correspond to reality and could not be reproduced by other observers. For example, Sir William Herschel (1738-1822), discoverer of the planet Uranus, the father of John Herschel and the most famous astronomer of the eighteenth century, was able with the powerful telescopes he manufactured to resolve into individual stars several nebulae that had previously appeared to be milky luminous patches in the sky. In the mid 1780s, he conjectured that all nebulae were composed of individual stars so that none were made of a luminous fluid. In 1790 he did observe a nebula that he was forced to interpret as a central star surrounded by a cloud of luminous fluid. In the interim period, however, Herschel claimed to resolve into individual stars both the Orion and Andromeda nebulae. In fact, though, Orion is a gaseous cloud containing a continuous distribution of matter, not just individual stars, while Andromeda is a galaxy of stars." (p. 10 of Cushing, J. T. (1997). Philosophical concepts in physics: The historical relation between philosophy and scientific theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" contains similar anecdotes.
Let's hear your response to it then. Bearing in mind that over 100 papers were published in refereed journals on this very issue, I'm guessing that you must be pretty impressive to be able to dismiss Searle so entirely
Oooh, the argument from authority. Very compelling. Most of the papers I have read on the Chinese Room argument argue against Searle (e.g., Dennett's point that it's not actually an argument, but an 'intuition pump'). I'm guessing that you must be pretty impressive to be able to dismiss Dennett (and like-minded philosophers) so entirely
I find AI an interesting pursuit. I see no knock-down for or against it from philosophy. Philosophers have a history of making grand pronouncements about the possible scope of other fields that are roundly ignored by the people actually doing the work and seen later to be besides the point. (I say this as a cognitive scientist who likes philosophy, by the way.)
My take on Searle: The Chinese Room illustrates (for those who have forgotten) that in the traditional approach to computational formalisms, syntax and semantics are separate. You can't get semantics from syntax. The AI folks tend to forget this.
The problem is not AI. The problem is the traditional approach to computational formalisms. I think we need a conception of computational formalism where syntax and semantics are integral. Brian Smith has published the first in a series of books on his attempt at such a reformation. I think he's striving for the correct goal, although I find his approach unsatisfying. I see traces of the right answer in Christopher Alexander's work on pattern languages for architecture (inspired in part by Chomsky's work on natural language, which Alexander read while hanging aorund Harvard with pioneering cognitive scientists in the early 1960s); see especially Richard Gabriel's book on Alexander applied to software.
Most programmers know nothing of the formal semantic theories that underly their programming languages, yet use them in meaningful ways. Apparently denotational semantics and the like are beside the point. We need some cognitive psychologists and linguists to get in there and theorize about what/how programming languages mean. When this happens, Searle's 'intuition pump' will be seen to have reached the wrong conclusion, but in a noble way: by spurring clarification of the issues on which he (and many others) are confused.
Java relies heavily on dynamic binding. That's a double edged sword. It makes Java a great RAD tool, but a poor performer. Toy benchmarks aside, Java apps run slower than their C++ equivalents.
And Common Lisp delivers the best of both worlds. Dynamic binding during rapid prototyping and development. As hot-spots creep-up, simply add OPTIONAL declarations that inform the compiler of the types of critical variables, and the speed benefits of knowing variable types at compile time obtain.
Generic programming actually has a lot more in common with Lisp programming than the conventional way C and C++ have been applied.
Agreed.
The author's comment strikes me as just another case of blaming the tool when the problem is the user.
Perhaps what he's saying is that generic programming is simplicty itself in a dynamic programming language such as Common Lisp, and a syntactic nightmare in C++, where it runs head-first into the static bias of that language?
I wish I could find that bleeding link again!
See Richard Fateman's home page, where you'll find, among other essays:
(1) Fast Floating-Point Processing in Common Lisp.
(2) Software Fault Prevention by Language Choice: Why C is Not my Favorite Language.
Or see Gerald Sussman's home page for a paper on the use of Lisp in performing astronomical calculations.
2. The CLR is just a collection of library code that developers can use or choose not to use. Think STL for many different languages. Already the CLR has support for many languages.
In particular, I was pleasantly surprised that it includes a primitive for making tail calls, and explicitly cites its necessity for beautiful-but-niche languages such as Scheme, ML, Haskell, (and Common Lisp). (See section 8.2 of the document.)
So Led Zeppelin was into LotR on their second album (your "Ramble On" quote) and their fourth album ("Misty Mountain Hop").
But the intervening third album contains their "Immigrant Song", with its references to Norse mythology.
Puzzling...
Is there an O'Reilly book on LotR? What's the cover organism -- Gollum???