So, life on earth was created as a data back-up for an alien civilization, not bad, and, let's see, the alien IT workers appear to us as mice...
But seriously (if that is allowed here). The view that DNA is simply syntax may be wrong, the idea that it may contain semantics, i.e. a message is worth exploring.
Maybe all the "junk" DNA is really a message from an alien civilization? Maybe SETI should be decoding it instead of the Biologists? If we can do it, so can someone else...
Well that sounds 'bout as skientifik and bigoted as the rantings of any 3 rate preecher ah ever heerd. U proved it, well ahhll be damned, never saw the paper "proving" anythin in my evolootionary biologee courses.
I was coming back from a conference wearing a hat with a promenent penguin on it, when our in-flight system crashed. As it was re-booting it was obvious to some of the more tech-minded passengers that it was running through the Linux boot sequence. I started hearing calls of "lynch the guy with the penguin hat", from the seats behind me...
There has been work going on in this direction in the "mathematically" oriented community. Usually called "skeletons". The trouble is, none of this will work with current imperative languages and synchronization systems such as pthreads. To put it bluntly, "mutexes don't compose", which means you cannot write general libraries with standard synchronization primitives. You at the very least need a language that uses higher-level functions and forbids access to globals, use of pointers ect. It's not as easy as just "giving people an appropriate metaphor". The human mind works in parallel but thinks in serial. I so no reason why the "programmer-of-the-future" should need to deal with these issues when they can be solved by the compiler/meta-compiler. But, I'm a lone voice shouting in the wilderness, the rest of the world is busy supplying new "parallel" languages with which to build the next generations rat nest of code!
For all the buzzz. OpenMP is a nice hack to add branch and join parallelism to loops in existing sequential code. An application needing higher granularity (task level) parallelism, streaming parallelism, or control over parallel processes, won't have much to do with it. Keep looking, the answers aren't there yet, nor in Fortress.
I hope you enjoy you're wait, it's likely to be a long one. "Automatic Parallelization" in any but the most trivial circumstances will go the way of AI, that is, become a marketing/academic buzzword. Here's the approach that I think WILL work. 2 languages, one a purely sequential language designed from the ground up to be "parallizable". Notice, I don't say "parallel". And a second meta-language that a parallelization expert can use to parallelize the sequential code FOR A SPECIFIC HARDWARE PLATFORM. We aren't going to raise a generation of "parallel programmers" the way we did with "object oriented" programmers. Object oriented programming was designed to make programming easier. PP is something NOBODY WOULD EVER DO if processors were fast enough.
I agree the Exxon "bribe" is a problem. But your argument can cut both ways. A scientist in "academia" has a choice of publishing a politically correct paper about global warming which will get him continued funding or publishing a paper with "inconvenient facts" which will get him black listed from the academic community. Science, wherever it is done, is dependent on politics and money. The only way to eliminate a bias is to be aware of it, and, as some posters have said, "stick to the facts".
Please give us some references to back up your contention that ethanol is not energy negative. If you can back this up, its a serious hole in the articles argument.
Yes you're right, thanks for the info. I wasn't meaning to imply that models are useless, I was reacting to the over-awed and trusting tone of the previous entry when he cited "THE COMPUTER" as primary evidence. I suspect the modeling will improve rapidly over the next 10 years but will still be unable to tell me whether it will rain next week...
Give me a break on the "physical modeling" stuff. I've been attending the major super-computing conferences for several years now. The creators of the global climate models themselves say they still have not reached the level where they have any predictive value. They are hoping peta-scale (10^15 mega-flop) computers will allow them to solve this and have presented global climate modeling as one of the "grand challenges" for the next generation of super-computers. The map is not the territory, if you haven't figured that out you're just another "born-again" scientist! If you a-priori ban "arguments against it", you can be sure there will be none!
Thoughtful reply. You're right you owe them nothing but common human decency. As for myself I try to tactfully give them suggestions that will help them in their career, not in their next interview, I am after all, looking for a coder not an expert interviewee.
and don't get it. Why would I want a message on my TV telling me to do a laundry. When I do laundry, I do laundry, I put it in and press "start", messy, labour intensive, but the TV really can't help me with this. Until the "home connectivity" people can answer basic questions of "why", they will continue to fail.
Your missing something. The resolution of "reality" is orders of magnitude greater than "virtuality". It's like getting all your nutrition from Wonder Bread. It's not just imagination, it's imagination + high-resolution interaction that counts.
I was also disgusted by my sons "computer education" which involved learning how to use microsoft products. They weren't even taught what an "Operating System" is or the concept of a "Program" or a "File". His generation think that a computer is something that runs "Windows" and "Word" is short for word processor. With that in mind I started a series of tutorials with him: We designed our own computer chip, with registers, busses, etc. We never built it, but now he knows how a cpu works. BTW he's 10.
I went very well. The standards committee decided on windows/ C++/Java/Tcl. And now everyone is developing in c++/java/tcl/python/pearl/bash/Qt on windows/Linux/solaris. welcome to the real world!
Gee, now we know everything, I guess it's impossible to come up with any other mysteries that haven't been solved by our allmighty and divinely inspired scientists. Now at least there will be no more debates over the limits of knowledge and possible explanations for how DNA evolved the ability to evolve, all is known
I'm not up to date, but 6 years ago when I read the then current GMS spec. SMS data was sub-band data, that is, absolutely limited bandwidth that is always there. It couldn't possibly interfere with phone calls, since it simply get's piggy-backed on existing phone call data.
This is a handly little pattern, I used it successfully at Apple Computers in a battle over whether a project would go in the box or not. I encountered extreme opposition to my project until I thanked the oppositiion publicy and placed their names in the about box as "contributors", the opposition tried up magikally.
They don't even know how global warming works, or even if its caused by human intervention, and they already wan't to solve a problem they can't understand with a solution that is even more uncertain? Get real guys, first let's get a petascale computer that can predict the weather and then we can talk about messing around with it.
Hydrogen is a way of storing energy taken from and actual energy source, e.g. Nuclear, Oil, sun, water ect. You should make this clear when you write, a lot of people get the wrong idea and talk about "energy from water" and other fuelishness
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So, life on earth was created as a data back-up for an alien civilization, not bad, and, let's see, the alien IT workers appear to us as mice...
But seriously (if that is allowed here). The view that DNA is simply syntax may be wrong, the idea that it may contain semantics, i.e. a message is worth exploring.
Maybe all the "junk" DNA is really a message from an alien civilization? Maybe SETI should be decoding it instead of the Biologists? If we can do it, so can someone else...
Well that sounds 'bout as skientifik and bigoted as the rantings of any 3 rate preecher ah ever heerd. U proved it, well ahhll be damned, never saw the paper "proving" anythin in my evolootionary biologee courses.
I was coming back from a conference wearing a hat with a promenent penguin on it, when our in-flight system crashed. As it was re-booting it was obvious to some of the more tech-minded passengers that it was running through the Linux boot sequence. I started hearing calls of "lynch the guy with the penguin hat", from the seats behind me...
There has been work going on in this direction in the "mathematically" oriented community. Usually called "skeletons". The trouble is, none of this will work with current imperative languages and synchronization systems such as pthreads. To put it bluntly, "mutexes don't compose", which means you cannot write general libraries with standard synchronization primitives. You at the very least need a language that uses higher-level functions and forbids access to globals, use of pointers ect. It's not as easy as just "giving people an appropriate metaphor". The human mind works in parallel but thinks in serial. I so no reason why the "programmer-of-the-future" should need to deal with these issues when they can be solved by the compiler/meta-compiler. But, I'm a lone voice shouting in the wilderness, the rest of the world is busy supplying new "parallel" languages with which to build the next generations rat nest of code!
For all the buzzz. OpenMP is a nice hack to add branch and join parallelism to loops in existing sequential code. An application needing higher granularity (task level) parallelism, streaming parallelism, or control over parallel processes, won't have much to do with it. Keep looking, the answers aren't there yet, nor in Fortress.
I hope you enjoy you're wait, it's likely to be a long one. "Automatic Parallelization" in any but the most trivial circumstances will go the way of AI, that is, become a marketing/academic buzzword. Here's the approach that I think WILL work. 2 languages, one a purely sequential language designed from the ground up to be "parallizable". Notice, I don't say "parallel". And a second meta-language that a parallelization expert can use to parallelize the sequential code FOR A SPECIFIC HARDWARE PLATFORM. We aren't going to raise a generation of "parallel programmers" the way we did with "object oriented" programmers. Object oriented programming was designed to make programming easier. PP is something NOBODY WOULD EVER DO if processors were fast enough.
I agree the Exxon "bribe" is a problem. But your argument can cut both ways. A scientist in "academia" has a choice of publishing a politically correct paper about global warming which will get him continued funding or publishing a paper with "inconvenient facts" which will get him black listed from the academic community. Science, wherever it is done, is dependent on politics and money. The only way to eliminate a bias is to be aware of it, and, as some posters have said, "stick to the facts".
Please give us some references to back up your contention that ethanol is not energy negative. If you can back this up, its a serious hole in the articles argument.
Yes you're right, thanks for the info. I wasn't meaning to imply that models are useless, I was reacting to the over-awed and trusting tone of the previous entry when he cited "THE COMPUTER" as primary evidence. I suspect the modeling will improve rapidly over the next 10 years but will still be unable to tell me whether it will rain next week...
Give me a break on the "physical modeling" stuff. I've been attending the major super-computing conferences for several years now. The creators of the global climate models themselves say they still have not reached the level where they have any predictive value. They are hoping peta-scale (10^15 mega-flop) computers will allow them to solve this and have presented global climate modeling as one of the "grand challenges" for the next generation of super-computers. The map is not the territory, if you haven't figured that out you're just another "born-again" scientist! If you a-priori ban "arguments against it", you can be sure there will be none!
Thoughtful reply. You're right you owe them nothing but common human decency. As for myself I try to tactfully give them suggestions that will help them in their career, not in their next interview, I am after all, looking for a coder not an expert interviewee.
and don't get it. Why would I want a message on my TV telling me to do a laundry. When I do laundry, I do laundry, I put it in and press "start", messy, labour intensive, but the TV really can't help me with this. Until the "home connectivity" people can answer basic questions of "why", they will continue to fail.
Your missing something. The resolution of "reality" is orders of magnitude greater than "virtuality". It's like getting all your nutrition from Wonder Bread. It's not just imagination, it's imagination + high-resolution interaction that counts.
The CO2 levels in the Martian atmosphere make earth look tame!
I was also disgusted by my sons "computer education" which involved learning how to use microsoft products. They weren't even taught what an "Operating System" is or the concept of a "Program" or a "File". His generation think that a computer is something that runs "Windows" and "Word" is short for word processor. With that in mind I started a series of tutorials with him: We designed our own computer chip, with registers, busses, etc. We never built it, but now he knows how a cpu works. BTW he's 10.
I went very well. The standards committee decided on windows/ C++/Java/Tcl. And now everyone is developing in c++/java/tcl/python/pearl/bash/Qt on windows/Linux/solaris. welcome to the real world!
Gee, now we know everything, I guess it's impossible to come up with any other mysteries that haven't been solved by our allmighty and divinely inspired scientists. Now at least there will be no more debates over the limits of knowledge and possible explanations for how DNA evolved the ability to evolve, all is known
I'm not up to date, but 6 years ago when I read the then current GMS spec. SMS data was sub-band data, that is, absolutely limited bandwidth that is always there. It couldn't possibly interfere with phone calls, since it simply get's piggy-backed on existing phone call data.
This is a handly little pattern, I used it successfully at Apple Computers in a battle over whether a project would go in the box or not. I encountered extreme opposition to my project until I thanked the oppositiion publicy and placed their names in the about box as "contributors", the opposition tried up magikally.
From what I understand, those sites were a good source of information on Al-Quida activieties.
They don't even know how global warming works, or even if its caused by human intervention, and they already wan't to solve a problem they can't understand with a solution that is even more uncertain? Get real guys, first let's get a petascale computer that can predict the weather and then we can talk about messing around with it.
Hydrogen is a way of storing energy taken from and actual energy source, e.g. Nuclear, Oil, sun, water ect. You should make this clear when you write, a lot of people get the wrong idea and talk about "energy from water" and other fuelishness
www.silverwebltd.com is one such business.
In fact they did, it turns out that the ascii number for the character 's' appears one of Maddonna's cd'd.