"Paradoxically, metal or ceramic implants meant to prevent bone breaks can sometimes cause them. Current implants are significantly harder than the bone that surrounds them. Natural bone can flex slightly. In fact, stress helps build stronger bones. However, the harder implants can apply so much stress to a particular area that the bone snaps. Softer wooden implants might cause fewer bone breaks."
The author noted that insurance companies, finding a weak wall, would often over-retrofit it. Then the building collapses, becase the weight that would have been born by the wall is displaced onto the other walls.
He also wrote about the cult of metal. The only reason engines are made of metal, he explained, is because they have to contain very high temperatures. If it were not for that, they could be made far more efficiently with hoses and bladders. He challenged the readers to come up with ways to make things that are presently made out of metal out of other materials -- such as wood and bird feathers.
Did anyone play Rivers of Light in the the Adventure Construction Set?Stuart Smith based it in Gilgamesh. It's been so long since I played it, I hardly remember what the game was like, but I do remember being thoroughly entranced by it, and countless hours spent in the ACS game editor.
Nothing wrong with that; Immortality is a central pillar in the world's religions, reflecting a deep human concern and valuing of life.
"Together with the question of the existence of God, (immortality) forms the most momentous issue with which philosophy has to deal." -- Immortality, in the Catholic Encyclopedia
There needs to be some good reasoning behind a belief, not mere "well, I can make this fit the data."
I disagree that "somebody who exhibits sloppy thinking is probably a sloppy thinker" -- Roxton should study "bounded rationality." But beyond that, right on.
I have not really spoken of a "God" as a constructed or constructing entity. (If there were such a thing, not knowing anything more, I would call it a Demiurge, rather than a God.) A child may make a safe haven for ants, and the child may even be a good person. But maybe not: The mere fact of being a powerful creator does not necessarily confer Godliness. But a homeless man may selflessly think to save someone's life.
I think that God must necessarily be both complex and simple. It must be complex enough to understand and wrangle past philosophical, logical, and material error. But it must be simple enough to retain the guidance of the heart.
I think we can't conceive of the life of the intellect that can see past what we, limited by human intellect, cannot. But I believe we can talk about what direction we believe it would be in.
As a metaphor for comparison, consider Science: Science seeks Reality.
I have not met many scientists who seriously believed that they really know everything that there is to know, about "what's really real." (Perhaps there's a simulation running on a computer "underneath" it all, for example.)
But to say that they don't have an idea of a direction to walk in, would be wrong. There is the Scientific Method, for example.
And to say that we don't know anything, would also be wrong. There is what Science has discovered so far, for example.
Similarly, the Heart seeks Virtue (or whatever name you would put to it.)
We can't conceive of virtue the way that super-complex beings will conceive of virtue.
But to say that we don't have any idea of a direction to walk in, is wrong. There is following our hearts, for example.
And to say that we don't know anything, would also be wrong. There are the developed moral reasonings & philosophies, for example.
Reality, (or "The Universe") -- Carl Sagan's aforementioned "God."
Beingness -- admittedly, "weak beer..."
"The End-Point of all Reasoning" -- Teilhard's "Omega Point," if you think there is such a thing,
"The Highest Possible Ideal Imaginable"
(Not necessarily that these are things that naturalists must label "God," but that these are things that naturalists could label "God.")
The Noosphere (the world of reflection, consideration, feeling, thought, consciousness, etc., etc.,.) has clearly arisen. It exists in a world of reasoning, thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, etc.,.
It is not at all clear to me that more complex beings would somehow discard emotion, motivation, and so on. If anything, I would think that they would have more complex experiences of reasoning, and accompanying deeper emotions. That is, I don't think that more complex beings would simply be (I'll call them) "aggressive cybernetic plants." I don't think that the end-point of life is really just more sophisticated murder-and-reproduce machines. (And I think if we did see something like that, our human nature, which lives substantially in the Noosphere, would require that we expunge the beast, destroy it, resist it, etc., etc.,. -- How many movies have just this theme?)
We will judge alien species and/or our own creations with our hearts, which seem to have emerged with the Noosphere, though I don't rule out the possibility that dogs and cats experience "heart" as we do, as well.
If cats and dogs experience "heart," and if to some degree even smaller / less brain animals experience "heart," then it is possible that "heart" is a fundamental reality of the Universe, and we have a sound bridge of identification between Heart & Reality. That is, the "Reality" and "Beingness" Gods are then not very far off from the "Ultimate Ideal" or "Eventual Reality" Gods.
What I mean to say is, to the extend that anything is experienced, by naturalistic commitments, this experience arises completely and thoroughly out of the Universe. So then feelings of complex thought, emotion, commitments, imaginings, faith, and so on-- all these things that make up "heart," are part of the Universe.
My own personal, perfectly naturalistic faith, a faith that is becoming understanding and knowledge to me, is that this is the case.
I think that this is a stronger statement than Carl Sagan ever made: Carl Sagan looks at the Universe and experiences wonder. Reveling in Wonder is one thing, then you choose what to do on your own afterward, basically disconnected from that experience. What I'm saying is that I think that the Universe may be fundamentally religiously oriented towards the development of the Heart and Virtues. This is because the Noosphere actually is Universe (or "Universe-stuff",) rather than disconnected from it. "Who's to say what has heart?", is a legitimate question. But I don't think that we can doubt that we have heart, and I think most of us (perhaps all of us) are operating with distinct respect for heart, whatever we understand it to be.
I don't have time to do this by asynchronous email conversation. If you are genuinely interested in the questions relating to individuals and societies interacting, I'm happy to talk with you; Please call me, my cell # is 206.427.2545. I'm on Pacific time.
Very briefly: In a church, even if you present your opinions calmly and fairly, they will still throw you out.
(Spoken as one who has been thrown out of a great many churches..!)
It argues Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's vision: that we should learn how to grow plants in Space first, and stay the hell away from all gravity sinks (such as moons, such as planets,) for a very long time.
That said, if we can grow plants on the moon, that's great!
In my experience, my artist friends (painters, writers,) are ambivalent about Open Source ideas; They see a culture of free (as in cost) information as being completely destructive to their chances at making a living.
Re:Comics as real literature
on
Reading Comics
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps there's something relatively simple we can do, to add rings around our moon. Like shooting a missle at an asteroid in the asteroid belt, *just so,* or perhaps the next time a comet comes by.
More than just simulations -- if you look at the SDSS data, you can clearly see the filaments. Mitaka is a good way to see a summary of the data on a PC; Switch to launch mode, and then zoom all the way out. You'll see the filament form as you get closer to the present (the center,) and see things more homogeneous at the edges (in the past.)
Is he seriously suggesting that the puzzle games market has taken a beating?
It's a freakin' whole genre of video games.
I mean, Harvest Moon has even been converted into a commercial puzzle game. Where will the madness end?
I can only wish that FOSS had destroyed the commercial puzzlers of the world. Can we destroy Sudoku, as well? Every time I see people paying for Sudoku games, I get that same nasty feeling I see, like wherever I see bottled water sold for a dollar.
The classical notion of a religion is, "What describes how the universe works."
Science has cleared away past ignorances, and forced clarification: Religion is not about "how the universe works," (physics, chemistry,) rather, it is about how the universe, manifest through the heart, (psychology, sociology, day-to-day life) works.
From this perspective, it is only right and natural that the answers come from (are "made up by") the heart, since it can only be truly known through self-expression.
And yes: George Lucas is (in fact) a prophet, at least to those who resonate with his vision. And indeed, the Gods do have senses of humor -- Religions of the world (especially animist and polytheist) have long recognized this fact.:)
I'm actually taking this as an interesting intellectual challenge now:
"What useful software can you put into a text editor, such as to make it consume 8 gigabytes, and consume at least a full gigahertz of computing power?"
Some ideas:
A text editor that constantly and continuously compiles code, to provide intelligence to the editor.
A 2d vector graphics program (Inkscape, say,) that can operate *like* a text editor (efficient manipulations over text,) but also support diagrammatic / graphic operations.
Or, a 3d environment, that can show all 2,500 pages of source code *at once,* and allow for mass operations / arrangements of text,...
A text editor that comes "batteries included," with modes for every language known in existence for which there is support.
A text editor distribution that includes every single person's public-enabled extensions,.emacs files, etc., for browsing, linking, connecting with, experimentation,...
But the same people (presumably) have also rushed off to edit Wikipedia! (I see a half dozen edits this morning, to add in the "new" thickness.) That's the part that I find incredible. And people really take Wikipedia seriously?
I just checked, and it was saying 1,000 ly thick average, 12,000 ly at core.
Personally, since I know there's a bustle of activity here, I'll just wait until time sorts it out.
This reminds me of the scientific process; Your criticism could be applied to the scientific process as well: "Look at how wild and varied scientific thought is around (currently under investigation subject X.) And people really take scientists seriously?"
Perhaps Wikipedia is well understood as a public version of science: over time, its explanations are pretty good.
Amber & I both remember with great fondness when we first found her, running around in Wind Waker, fully competent, attacking goblins with a sword. Just the day before, she was bonking into walls. 24 hours later, she's running around gleefully, cheering, hacking up monsters. We are so proud!
Presently, she's six, and we're playing Okami tag-team. Soon, she will be 7, which means Shichi-go-san... We take our video games and literature very seriously.:D
I have read about people who have written IPC mechanisms that rely on nothing but the presence of another programming running on the same computer. No sockets, no shared memory; Just: "Run on the same computer as I am."
The way it worked, I understand, is that one process would gum up the kernel, by making a bunch of kernel-intensive requests. The other process would "listen," by timing how long it took requests to be fulfilled.
Similar but different: People wrote code to make old tape disk containers sing or dance, by playing tape forward quickly, or then yanking it backwards quickly, in patterns that caused sound or resonant motion.
In a given simulation, there is often some exposure of the simulator itself. If the simulated environment is complex, and let's say-- Turing complete, then I think there's a case that the simulator itself is almost always visible, in some way.
Regardless of the probabilities: This is how you can test it. It could come up positive, in which case, you very likely know. Or it could turn up negative, in which case -- well, we still don't know.
Put a lot of very complex activity in a very small space. Look for weird statistical deviations. Try to identify the "system calls," by timing different interactions. Look for non-local effects that shouldn't be. Look for boundary places. Do machines break anywhere? Do we find bizarre "bugs" anywhere, places where the laws of physics are not simple and elegant, not at all?
Seems simple enough to me; Just "go out and look." (Though, just because it's simple, it certainly doesn't mean it's cheap. The nearest evidence might only be found in some small cubic centimeter within the Bootes void, or something like that...)
Slashdot Mirror
"Paradoxically, metal or ceramic implants meant to prevent bone breaks can sometimes cause them. Current implants are significantly harder than the bone that surrounds them. Natural bone can flex slightly. In fact, stress helps build stronger bones. However, the harder implants can apply so much stress to a particular area that the bone snaps. Softer wooden implants might cause fewer bone breaks."
Hm, this is like what I learned in Structures: or Why Things Don't Fall Down.
The author noted that insurance companies, finding a weak wall, would often over-retrofit it. Then the building collapses, becase the weight that would have been born by the wall is displaced onto the other walls.
He also wrote about the cult of metal. The only reason engines are made of metal, he explained, is because they have to contain very high temperatures. If it were not for that, they could be made far more efficiently with hoses and bladders. He challenged the readers to come up with ways to make things that are presently made out of metal out of other materials -- such as wood and bird feathers.
Did anyone play Rivers of Light in the the Adventure Construction Set? Stuart Smith based it in Gilgamesh. It's been so long since I played it, I hardly remember what the game was like, but I do remember being thoroughly entranced by it, and countless hours spent in the ACS game editor.
Nothing wrong with that; Immortality is a central pillar in the world's religions, reflecting a deep human concern and valuing of life.
There needs to be some good reasoning behind a belief, not mere "well, I can make this fit the data."
I disagree that "somebody who exhibits sloppy thinking is probably a sloppy thinker" -- Roxton should study "bounded rationality." But beyond that, right on.
I have not really spoken of a "God" as a constructed or constructing entity. (If there were such a thing, not knowing anything more, I would call it a Demiurge, rather than a God.) A child may make a safe haven for ants, and the child may even be a good person. But maybe not: The mere fact of being a powerful creator does not necessarily confer Godliness. But a homeless man may selflessly think to save someone's life.
I think that God must necessarily be both complex and simple. It must be complex enough to understand and wrangle past philosophical, logical, and material error. But it must be simple enough to retain the guidance of the heart.
I think we can't conceive of the life of the intellect that can see past what we, limited by human intellect, cannot. But I believe we can talk about what direction we believe it would be in.
As a metaphor for comparison, consider Science: Science seeks Reality.
I have not met many scientists who seriously believed that they really know everything that there is to know, about "what's really real." (Perhaps there's a simulation running on a computer "underneath" it all, for example.)
But to say that they don't have an idea of a direction to walk in, would be wrong. There is the Scientific Method, for example.
And to say that we don't know anything, would also be wrong. There is what Science has discovered so far, for example.
Similarly, the Heart seeks Virtue (or whatever name you would put to it.)
We can't conceive of virtue the way that super-complex beings will conceive of virtue.
But to say that we don't have any idea of a direction to walk in, is wrong. There is following our hearts, for example.
And to say that we don't know anything, would also be wrong. There are the developed moral reasonings & philosophies, for example.
There are four Gods that I can recognize, while maintaining purely naturalistic commitments:
(Not necessarily that these are things that naturalists must label "God," but that these are things that naturalists could label "God.")
The Noosphere (the world of reflection, consideration, feeling, thought, consciousness, etc., etc.,.) has clearly arisen. It exists in a world of reasoning, thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, etc.,.
It is not at all clear to me that more complex beings would somehow discard emotion, motivation, and so on. If anything, I would think that they would have more complex experiences of reasoning, and accompanying deeper emotions. That is, I don't think that more complex beings would simply be (I'll call them) "aggressive cybernetic plants." I don't think that the end-point of life is really just more sophisticated murder-and-reproduce machines. (And I think if we did see something like that, our human nature, which lives substantially in the Noosphere, would require that we expunge the beast, destroy it, resist it, etc., etc.,. -- How many movies have just this theme?)
We will judge alien species and/or our own creations with our hearts, which seem to have emerged with the Noosphere, though I don't rule out the possibility that dogs and cats experience "heart" as we do, as well.
If cats and dogs experience "heart," and if to some degree even smaller / less brain animals experience "heart," then it is possible that "heart" is a fundamental reality of the Universe, and we have a sound bridge of identification between Heart & Reality. That is, the "Reality" and "Beingness" Gods are then not very far off from the "Ultimate Ideal" or "Eventual Reality" Gods.
What I mean to say is, to the extend that anything is experienced, by naturalistic commitments, this experience arises completely and thoroughly out of the Universe. So then feelings of complex thought, emotion, commitments, imaginings, faith, and so on-- all these things that make up "heart," are part of the Universe.
My own personal, perfectly naturalistic faith, a faith that is becoming understanding and knowledge to me, is that this is the case.
I think that this is a stronger statement than Carl Sagan ever made: Carl Sagan looks at the Universe and experiences wonder. Reveling in Wonder is one thing, then you choose what to do on your own afterward, basically disconnected from that experience. What I'm saying is that I think that the Universe may be fundamentally religiously oriented towards the development of the Heart and Virtues. This is because the Noosphere actually is Universe (or "Universe-stuff",) rather than disconnected from it. "Who's to say what has heart?", is a legitimate question. But I don't think that we can doubt that we have heart, and I think most of us (perhaps all of us) are operating with distinct respect for heart, whatever we understand it to be.
I don't have time to do this by asynchronous email conversation. If you are genuinely interested in the questions relating to individuals and societies interacting, I'm happy to talk with you; Please call me, my cell # is 206.427.2545. I'm on Pacific time.
Very briefly: In a church, even if you present your opinions calmly and fairly, they will still throw you out.
(Spoken as one who has been thrown out of a great many churches..!)
A man walks into a church, and starts saying things contrary to the church to everyone present.
He protests & complains, as members of the church show him to the door.
If you'd earnestly like to understand these things better, I recommend reading: Passages of Perspective and Selectively Open Minded. And if you read these, please drop me a line letting me know what you think; I eat these kinds of questions for breakfast.
Perhaps put the same data in multiple forms: CD, DVD, Blue-Ray, USB key, hard disk, ...
Perhaps even include a complete bootable computer that starts into a web server, serving the images.
And then as the last resort, print-outs of the images.
Here's what I've found so far:
And, the original article: The Death of Google's Patents?
...the sun never sets, on the British Empire.
I always like to point to this article: Terraforming: Human Destiny or Hubris
It argues Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's vision: that we should learn how to grow plants in Space first, and stay the hell away from all gravity sinks (such as moons, such as planets,) for a very long time.
That said, if we can grow plants on the moon, that's great!
(older article)
In my experience, my artist friends (painters, writers,) are ambivalent about Open Source ideas; They see a culture of free (as in cost) information as being completely destructive to their chances at making a living.
Please consider Osamu Tezuka no mikoto.
Perhaps there's something relatively simple we can do, to add rings around our moon. Like shooting a missle at an asteroid in the asteroid belt, *just so,* or perhaps the next time a comet comes by.
It'd be a really nice decoration.
More than just simulations -- if you look at the SDSS data, you can clearly see the filaments. Mitaka is a good way to see a summary of the data on a PC; Switch to launch mode, and then zoom all the way out. You'll see the filament form as you get closer to the present (the center,) and see things more homogeneous at the edges (in the past.)
Is he seriously suggesting that the puzzle games market has taken a beating?
It's a freakin' whole genre of video games.
I mean, Harvest Moon has even been converted into a commercial puzzle game. Where will the madness end?
I can only wish that FOSS had destroyed the commercial puzzlers of the world. Can we destroy Sudoku, as well? Every time I see people paying for Sudoku games, I get that same nasty feeling I see, like wherever I see bottled water sold for a dollar.
The classical notion of a religion is, "What describes how the universe works."
:)
Science has cleared away past ignorances, and forced clarification: Religion is not about "how the universe works," (physics, chemistry,) rather, it is about how the universe, manifest through the heart, (psychology, sociology, day-to-day life) works.
From this perspective, it is only right and natural that the answers come from (are "made up by") the heart, since it can only be truly known through self-expression.
And yes: George Lucas is (in fact) a prophet, at least to those who resonate with his vision. And indeed, the Gods do have senses of humor -- Religions of the world (especially animist and polytheist) have long recognized this fact.
"What useful software can you put into a text editor, such as to make it consume 8 gigabytes, and consume at least a full gigahertz of computing power?"
Some ideas:
Hmm..!
Contrarian thought:
... ... well, that's what a religion is: a story.
I think Star Wars is actually religion for a lot of people.
"It's just a movie" = "It's just a story" =
But the same people (presumably) have also rushed off to edit Wikipedia! (I see a half dozen edits this morning, to add in the "new" thickness.) That's the part that I find incredible. And people really take Wikipedia seriously?
I just checked, and it was saying 1,000 ly thick average, 12,000 ly at core.
Personally, since I know there's a bustle of activity here, I'll just wait until time sorts it out.
This reminds me of the scientific process; Your criticism could be applied to the scientific process as well: "Look at how wild and varied scientific thought is around (currently under investigation subject X.) And people really take scientists seriously?"
Perhaps Wikipedia is well understood as a public version of science: over time, its explanations are pretty good.
Here here.
:D
Playing video games, while holding a tiny baby in the lap -- same here.
She first started playing Starcraft when she was 4, I am proud to say, and yet she was playing Wind Waker before that.
Amber & I both remember with great fondness when we first found her, running around in Wind Waker, fully competent, attacking goblins with a sword. Just the day before, she was bonking into walls. 24 hours later, she's running around gleefully, cheering, hacking up monsters. We are so proud!
Presently, she's six, and we're playing Okami tag-team. Soon, she will be 7, which means Shichi-go-san... We take our video games and literature very seriously.
I have read about people who have written IPC mechanisms that rely on nothing but the presence of another programming running on the same computer. No sockets, no shared memory; Just: "Run on the same computer as I am."
The way it worked, I understand, is that one process would gum up the kernel, by making a bunch of kernel-intensive requests. The other process would "listen," by timing how long it took requests to be fulfilled.
Similar but different: People wrote code to make old tape disk containers sing or dance, by playing tape forward quickly, or then yanking it backwards quickly, in patterns that caused sound or resonant motion.
In a given simulation, there is often some exposure of the simulator itself. If the simulated environment is complex, and let's say-- Turing complete, then I think there's a case that the simulator itself is almost always visible, in some way.
Regardless of the probabilities: This is how you can test it. It could come up positive, in which case, you very likely know. Or it could turn up negative, in which case -- well, we still don't know.
Here's a few, off the top of my head:
Try to tweak out the computer the system runs on.
Put a lot of very complex activity in a very small space. Look for weird statistical deviations. Try to identify the "system calls," by timing different interactions. Look for non-local effects that shouldn't be. Look for boundary places. Do machines break anywhere? Do we find bizarre "bugs" anywhere, places where the laws of physics are not simple and elegant, not at all?
Seems simple enough to me; Just "go out and look." (Though, just because it's simple, it certainly doesn't mean it's cheap. The nearest evidence might only be found in some small cubic centimeter within the Bootes void, or something like that...)
Does this have any implications for long-term scenarios, such as the "Great Rip" ..?