The owner of the patent lives in Holland, Michigan! Hemos, why don't you find his address, smack him upside the head, and ask, "What were you thinking, man?!!"
Thanks, Rob. As usual, you have shown your basic decency, common sense, and unflagging committment to preserving free speech while keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high.
I do have a couple of criticisms. Actually, the first is not a criticism as such, but a question: Is there a way one can determine one's Karma? It would be nice if you would put that in the personal Slashbox.
The next issue is whether this elaborate scheme is really necessary, or whether you could just weed out denial-of-service posts by hand. I see an opportunity for unpopular opinions (e.g. pro-Windows ones) to get shot down by overzealous moderators, even if they are expressed in a civilized way. I tend to trust your judgment more than the collective judgment of everyone with moderator priveleges, especially since all those people could unite in a mass attack against minority opinions. Maybe we should create a "denial of service" moderation category and count only points in that category against someone's ability to post. I think this would help moderators be more conscientious, and also filter out honest instances of moderators downgrading a post because it is poorly written or thought-out.
O.K., here's my experience. I don't do science. I do write a lot of code. Before I started studying computer science, I was into Greek and Latin literature, and I tend to view programming as a linguistic activity.
I agree with your overall conclusion that hacking gives you more frequent but less intense positive feedback. However, I get most of my pleasure from writing code, not from making it work. I enjoy the aesthetic sensations of laying out data structures and algorithms, the craftsmanlike process of taking a plan and realizing it, bit by bit, in reality. I wish I had some experience in sculpture or music to compare to these feelings; I don't honestly know if I am experiencing art or mere craft. I don't even know if there's a difference. Once in a while I write poetry, and the feeling of inspiration is much stronger than the hacking impulse I get many times a day. Most of the time when I'm hacking, I feel not a sublime flush of inventiveness but a simple satisfaction in building something.
Does this mean poetry is a higher art than hacking, or does it just mean that I'm cut out for one and not the other? Professional writers bang out stories and poems in the same way that I bang out code. One famous example is Harlan Ellison, who once made good on a bet by setting up shop in a bookstore window, spontaneously writing yet another story on his typewriter. Does he feel something sublime that I miss? Or does he feel the same constant low-grade compulsion that draws me back to the console every morning?
I don't know. I know what it feels like to be a hacker, but I don't know what it feels like to be an artist, so I don't know if the feelings are the same. However, I can tell with no difficulty that my feelings are much different from yours. Clearly you, like many computer-literate people I know, do not enjoy programming for its own sake. You like to make things work. Your greatest joy comes when you can finally stop fiddling with things and get on with your scientific research. I, on the other hand, can't get enough of fiddling with things. It's my whole reason for hacking. If I had to make a sexual analogy, I would say I'm in it for the cuddling and playing, not for the orgasm. When I finish a program, I feel a sense of quiet satisfaction not unlike the post-coital peace. (But my apetite always returns.;) ) Only once in a long while I am worked up over some incredibly frustrating bug that I just can't find, and then I find it, and I have an orgasmic "eureka" experience like the one you describe.
I would really like to know how other people feel about coding, especially people with a background in the arts. I'm very curious as to whether what I feel is like the experience of painters and musicians or if it is belongs in some other realm.
Thanks for brooching the issue; it's an interesting one. I hope my response helps you understand your own experience.
At my university (Indiana University, duh), CS was in the College of Arts and Sciences. Then again, we don't have an engineering school; our state's engineering education all goes on at our other state college, Purdue.
I agree. Let's have a Slashdot poll on terms to replace "computer science" as a description for hacking: "software engineering"? "computer craft"? "computer programming"? "computer solutions manufacturing"? "thaumaturgy"?
I like "hacking" best, but we clearly need a more formal- sounding replacement.
In order to be accepted into the cs major(take 300+ level classes) we had to take 2 quarters of physics, 3 quarters of math, and 2 quarters of c++ programming.
I don't mean to insult physics, but what damn good is it to study physics in preparation for computer science, unless you're planning to program games?
I think you're mostly on-target, but I think it's very telling that you admit both that we live in a world where financial security is increasingly a do-it-yourself affair. and In the last twenty years, far too many people have enrolled in universities who really have no business being there and would benefit society better by pumping gas. . How are they supposed to make that decision when even people with mediocre grades and purely career-oriented degrees like business can get a much better job? They have to fend for themselves, and far too many choose to take mom and dad's money and slack off in college for four years to get a chance for some financial security.
But that's not the really sad thing. The really sad thing, to me, is that there are people out there who, because "financial security is increasingly a do-it-yourself affair", can't afford to go to college. The price of higher education in the U.S. is a scandal. The state university I graduated from costs $6000 a year for in-state tuition! In Europe, even private colleges don't cost that much. You can argue all you want about merit scholarships, but the damn fact is that some people still fall through the cracks because they can't scrape together the tuition and living expenses for college (or aren't willing to go deep in debt when their families are already shit-poor). There's no guarantee of financial support. Meanwhile, mediocre students with well-off parents go to college, waste four years, and come out ready for secretarial and middle-management jobs. Nowhere is this more evident than IU, which has one of the biggest business schools and (perhaps not coincidentally) the biggest infestations of kegger-throwing, BMW-driving frat pricks in the nation.
If things keep up this way, we Americans will be living in a two-tier society straight out of Virtual Light or Snow Crash. Next election, vote socialist!
The first problem is that so many people enter college with a minimal knowledge of math, and without the self-discipline to read a lot and work through a lot of problems. Blame the US educational system.
I think the real mistake is that they make math so boring. Why can't they show its evolution and its intimate connection with science? Why can't they teach it as the creative discipline it is, instead of as a canned set of hard-to-remember and harder-to- understand algorithms? Couldn't they at least prove the shit they teach you instead of just filling your head with formulas?
If you think you detect some bitterness in this post, you're right. I had a really bad experience with math in public school. I never did really get into it as I feel I could have, and now I know I missed out. There are things I'll probably never be able to do because of my lack of a math background. (I made it only as far as two-variable calculus).
What an enjoyable post. This article has generated an unusually high number of thoughtful, well-substantiated responses. (I have to write stuff like this, because I don't have moderator status.;) )
I have a friend who feels the same way you do: He digs chemistry, but he finds programming totally tedious. Even if he were given the choice of the most boring hacking and the most boring lab work, he would choose the latter--to him, it just wouldn't be as boring. (I would choose the former, because, to me, it wouldn't be as boring.)
Yes, these things are subjective. Hacking is a calling. Chemistry is a calling. I'm sure physics is yet another distinct calling. I'm just glad I've found the one for me.
It sucks, doesn't it? I don't understand why there are so few women in physics and computer science, and I really don't understand why the few there are so often drop out of the field. Surely they're not intimidated by nearly-all-male classes. There must be some other reason. Is anyone here in that position, so she can explain?
I'd be willing to pay a per-read or subscription charge in exchange for not having my reading tracked. I don't like the idea of someone being able to track my political proclivities.
the computer world is always changing, and that puts young people on an even footing with older people... Are you planning to stay young forever?
Yes, I am. As far as I'm concerned, if you're not changing and growing day to day, you might as well be dead. If I didn't learn a lot about something every day, I would go out of my skull with boredom. If I had to spend the rest of my life doing surveys and ANOVAs or fast Fourier transforms, I'd probably go postal and run down the street slapping people with a large trout.
That's odd. Almost all the engineers and computer scientists I know are in it for the joy of the hack. It's true that getting money is nice, but we have hacking so much in our blood that we'd be doing it as a hobby if we couldn't afford to do it for a living.
You know, he actually became fascinated with the idea that his music was being transmitted into his brain by an alien civilization. I'm not kidding. I read an article about Hendrix's science-fiction proclivities in this trendy British men's magazine a couple of years ago. I wish I could remember the name of the mag, but I can't.:(
It happens in neural networks, too. You can only get so much recursion out of a connectionist system; things become noisier and noisier and then break down.
I, for one, am damn glad my brain is not a Scheme interpreter.;)
Be warned, Penrose believes that strong AI is not valid. In other words, he doesn't think that machines can become sentient. The Emperor's New Mind is mostly devoted to disputing and deconstructing strong AI. If you're not sympathetic to this viewpoint, you probably won't enjoy the book at all. It won't change your mind, either, if you've thought at all about the subject before. The debate is essentially a religious one, and the arguments on both sides are few and fixed.
Great nick! You should check out Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It deals with this question extensively, relating it to the Goedel theorem and bringing in lots of other interesting subject matter relating to recursion. It's a fun read, because the non-fictional chapters are interspersed with weird Lewis Carrol-esque allegories starring a tortoise . . .
Well, I know enough about neuroscience to recognize and understand everything you wrote in your post, and I remember enough about the details of vision to know where in the occipital cortex different activities like edge detection, movement detection, and color perception go on, and where different "modes" of information like color and shape are integrated. I know that vision is the best-understood cognitive activity. In fact, I should have known better than to use vision as an example.;)
From your post, I guess that you are most familiar with the gross physiology of the brain. Back when I studied neuroscience actively, I was interested in computational accounts of cognition, which means that I was looking on a lower level, the level of individual connections among neurons and even of individual neurotransmitters.
I suspect that our disagreement arises from differing views of what level of detail is important. While it is well-established what areas of the brain are responsible for what gross functions--language, apetite, emotion, attention, short-term memory, vision, audition--it is not understood how individual actions of those types are carrired out. That's the reason the old "information processing" theorists' diagrams are so full of modular boxes with with lines connecting them. To me, all the important detail is either inside of the boxes or in the lines themselves, both of which areas most people glibly gloss over. The common attitude that those things don't matter is one thing that eventually soured me on cognitive science as a career. However, this wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that I wanted a rigorous computational account of the thing that really mattered to me--language--and I eventually became convinced that the problem was intractable. The categories at that level are too abstract, and the distance from stimuli too great, to admit of a rigorous study. You clearly concede that point in your post, writing that "interfacing directly with the cortex is probably technologically impossible for the reasons you state".
Anyway, to get back to the subject of vision mods, I believe that you do need to work at the level of individual axons to obtain useful effects. I realize that "useful effects" is in this case a hazy category, but I will leave it that way so it can be hammered out in further discussion. In looking back over my post, I realize I may have given you the impression that I thought the whole brain was an undifferentiated tangle, and that by "map all the myriad connections for your own brain" I really meant the whole brain. In fact, I meant the myriad connections of the occipital cortex--let's say the V4. I maintain that belief.
This is the real issue: can you manipulate vision at a gross level, or do you have to descend to the cell level? For the so-called higher functions, I can see that we agree in considering the interface problem intractable. In a relatively well-understood area like vision, there is more room for contention. Nonetheless, I believe you will find that no useful effects--again, I leave that category open--can be obtained at the gross level. Remember, arbitrarily functions is much harder than ablating them by lesion.
Good point! I guess the lesson is that, as in programming, you should usually use the most amenable interfaces--the ones that are exposed to you--instead of trying to hack the internals.
The problem with this idea is that people's brains differ. To get a vision mod, you would need to map all the myriad connections for your own brain and tailor a device specially to it. It's so much easier to mass-produce "prosthetics" like night-vision goggles that there would be no point in messing around with your brain (even if we had the faintest clue about how to do it, which we don't).
I don't like to rain on people's parades, but as a student of cognitive science I consider it my job in this case. Don't believe the hype.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you build it, they will come."
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I do have a couple of criticisms. Actually, the first is not a criticism as such, but a question: Is there a way one can determine one's Karma? It would be nice if you would put that in the personal Slashbox.
The next issue is whether this elaborate scheme is really necessary, or whether you could just weed out denial-of-service posts by hand. I see an opportunity for unpopular opinions (e.g. pro-Windows ones) to get shot down by overzealous moderators, even if they are expressed in a civilized way. I tend to trust your judgment more than the collective judgment of everyone with moderator priveleges, especially since all those people could unite in a mass attack against minority opinions. Maybe we should create a "denial of service" moderation category and count only points in that category against someone's ability to post. I think this would help moderators be more conscientious, and also filter out honest instances of moderators downgrading a post because it is poorly written or thought-out.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I agree with your overall conclusion that hacking gives you more frequent but less intense positive feedback. However, I get most of my pleasure from writing code, not from making it work. I enjoy the aesthetic sensations of laying out data structures and algorithms, the craftsmanlike process of taking a plan and realizing it, bit by bit, in reality. I wish I had some experience in sculpture or music to compare to these feelings; I don't honestly know if I am experiencing art or mere craft. I don't even know if there's a difference. Once in a while I write poetry, and the feeling of inspiration is much stronger than the hacking impulse I get many times a day. Most of the time when I'm hacking, I feel not a sublime flush of inventiveness but a simple satisfaction in building something.
Does this mean poetry is a higher art than hacking, or does it just mean that I'm cut out for one and not the other? Professional writers bang out stories and poems in the same way that I bang out code. One famous example is Harlan Ellison, who once made good on a bet by setting up shop in a bookstore window, spontaneously writing yet another story on his typewriter. Does he feel something sublime that I miss? Or does he feel the same constant low-grade compulsion that draws me back to the console every morning?
I don't know. I know what it feels like to be a hacker, but I don't know what it feels like to be an artist, so I don't know if the feelings are the same. However, I can tell with no difficulty that my feelings are much different from yours. Clearly you, like many computer-literate people I know, do not enjoy programming for its own sake. You like to make things work. Your greatest joy comes when you can finally stop fiddling with things and get on with your scientific research. I, on the other hand, can't get enough of fiddling with things. It's my whole reason for hacking. If I had to make a sexual analogy, I would say I'm in it for the cuddling and playing, not for the orgasm. When I finish a program, I feel a sense of quiet satisfaction not unlike the post-coital peace. (But my apetite always returns. ;) ) Only once in a long while I am worked up over some incredibly frustrating bug that I just can't find, and then I find it, and I have an orgasmic "eureka" experience like the one you describe.
I would really like to know how other people feel about coding, especially people with a background in the arts. I'm very curious as to whether what I feel is like the experience of painters and musicians or if it is belongs in some other realm.
Thanks for brooching the issue; it's an interesting one. I hope my response helps you understand your own experience.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I like "hacking" best, but we clearly need a more formal- sounding replacement.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I don't mean to insult physics, but what damn good is it to study physics in preparation for computer science, unless you're planning to program games?
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
But that's not the really sad thing. The really sad thing, to me, is that there are people out there who, because "financial security is increasingly a do-it-yourself affair", can't afford to go to college. The price of higher education in the U.S. is a scandal. The state university I graduated from costs $6000 a year for in-state tuition! In Europe, even private colleges don't cost that much. You can argue all you want about merit scholarships, but the damn fact is that some people still fall through the cracks because they can't scrape together the tuition and living expenses for college (or aren't willing to go deep in debt when their families are already shit-poor). There's no guarantee of financial support. Meanwhile, mediocre students with well-off parents go to college, waste four years, and come out ready for secretarial and middle-management jobs. Nowhere is this more evident than IU, which has one of the biggest business schools and (perhaps not coincidentally) the biggest infestations of kegger-throwing, BMW-driving frat pricks in the nation.
If things keep up this way, we Americans will be living in a two-tier society straight out of Virtual Light or Snow Crash. Next election, vote socialist!
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I think the real mistake is that they make math so boring. Why can't they show its evolution and its intimate connection with science? Why can't they teach it as the creative discipline it is, instead of as a canned set of hard-to-remember and harder-to- understand algorithms? Couldn't they at least prove the shit they teach you instead of just filling your head with formulas?
If you think you detect some bitterness in this post, you're right. I had a really bad experience with math in public school. I never did really get into it as I feel I could have, and now I know I missed out. There are things I'll probably never be able to do because of my lack of a math background. (I made it only as far as two-variable calculus).
I hope some of you had a better time of it.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I have a friend who feels the same way you do: He digs chemistry, but he finds programming totally tedious. Even if he were given the choice of the most boring hacking and the most boring lab work, he would choose the latter--to him, it just wouldn't be as boring. (I would choose the former, because, to me, it wouldn't be as boring.)
Yes, these things are subjective. Hacking is a calling. Chemistry is a calling. I'm sure physics is yet another distinct calling. I'm just glad I've found the one for me.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Yes, I am. As far as I'm concerned, if you're not changing and growing day to day, you might as well be dead. If I didn't learn a lot about something every day, I would go out of my skull with boredom. If I had to spend the rest of my life doing surveys and ANOVAs or fast Fourier transforms, I'd probably go postal and run down the street slapping people with a large trout.
"Hope I die before I get old." --Pete Townshend
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I, for one, am damn glad my brain is not a Scheme interpreter. ;)
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Great nick! You should check out Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It deals with this question extensively, relating it to the Goedel theorem and bringing in lots of other interesting subject matter relating to recursion. It's a fun read, because the non-fictional chapters are interspersed with weird Lewis Carrol-esque allegories starring a tortoise . . .
Five stars. Quinn Bob says, check it out.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
From your post, I guess that you are most familiar with the gross physiology of the brain. Back when I studied neuroscience actively, I was interested in computational accounts of cognition, which means that I was looking on a lower level, the level of individual connections among neurons and even of individual neurotransmitters.
I suspect that our disagreement arises from differing views of what level of detail is important. While it is well-established what areas of the brain are responsible for what gross functions--language, apetite, emotion, attention, short-term memory, vision, audition--it is not understood how individual actions of those types are carrired out. That's the reason the old "information processing" theorists' diagrams are so full of modular boxes with with lines connecting them. To me, all the important detail is either inside of the boxes or in the lines themselves, both of which areas most people glibly gloss over. The common attitude that those things don't matter is one thing that eventually soured me on cognitive science as a career. However, this wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that I wanted a rigorous computational account of the thing that really mattered to me--language--and I eventually became convinced that the problem was intractable. The categories at that level are too abstract, and the distance from stimuli too great, to admit of a rigorous study. You clearly concede that point in your post, writing that "interfacing directly with the cortex is probably technologically impossible for the reasons you state".
Anyway, to get back to the subject of vision mods, I believe that you do need to work at the level of individual axons to obtain useful effects. I realize that "useful effects" is in this case a hazy category, but I will leave it that way so it can be hammered out in further discussion. In looking back over my post, I realize I may have given you the impression that I thought the whole brain was an undifferentiated tangle, and that by "map all the myriad connections for your own brain" I really meant the whole brain. In fact, I meant the myriad connections of the occipital cortex--let's say the V4. I maintain that belief.
This is the real issue: can you manipulate vision at a gross level, or do you have to descend to the cell level? For the so-called higher functions, I can see that we agree in considering the interface problem intractable. In a relatively well-understood area like vision, there is more room for contention. Nonetheless, I believe you will find that no useful effects--again, I leave that category open--can be obtained at the gross level. Remember, arbitrarily functions is much harder than ablating them by lesion.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I don't like to rain on people's parades, but as a student of cognitive science I consider it my job in this case. Don't believe the hype.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product