Meanwhile, corporatocrats who don't want to change business practices because of environmental effects do everything they can to run an ad hominem campaign against the supporters of that very dangerous theory.
Whenever something's an issue, most sources are paranoid garbage. Sigh.
The article precedes the quotation with saying that Hawking urged for people to slow population growth. It looks to me like the line was intended as a naive projection to indicate the problem, and that the context got muddled.
The irony here is that if you were truly concerned about radioactive materials, than space would be the best place for them, far away from anyone who can get hurt.
It's fair to say the Renaissance doesn't mean much in terms of technology or learning. But doesn't it make sense to point to it as a fundamental change in the attitudes people had? Inasmuchas, the Medievalers thought of the present as being much the same as the past, whereas the Renaissancers thought they were in a whole new era. That sort of attitude impacts the way people approach all sorts of things... Or am I making a mistake?
Even the relatively metropolitan Byzantine Empire had little contact with outsiders beyond military encounters.
???
Didn't huge amounts of trade pass through Constantinople? I remember reading that you could see merchants from "all corners of the world" there, that it had considerably contact with the slavs, and that it was a popular destination for pilgrims. And that's just from a Eurocentric perspective. I do know that the silk route broke down (some Byzantine monks smuggled eggs out of China) and vaguely recall that there was a decline in trade after the big world empires broke up, but this should be nothing irreparable.
And, in any case, there was some innovation going on among the Byzantines and Arabs. Not much new, but then the Romans didn't come up with that many new things either...as far as technology is concerned, you can probably attribute the lack of development to the possession of slaves and Byzantine conservatism.
On the other hand, I remember hearing something about urban life declining in the Byzantine empire everywhere except Constantinople...if anyone has any good info on that, I would love to hear it.
And, btw, the renaissance is more than simply the rebirth of trade and learning. Otherwise, you could take the whole later middle ages and call it the renaissance picking up speed.
Re:This is NOT the Renaissance
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The Renaissance
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· Score: 1
I actually remember reading that the crusades have minimal responsibility for the rediscovering of Greco-Roman texts. The crusaders were just to intent on hacking infidels and their kingdom too ephemeral to play a major role. The reconquest of Islamic Spain deserves more credit.
You are right to point out this as a cause, though. In fact it is the main cause; the rennaissance was mostly through and people were moving on by the time the printing press came on the scene.
In any case, my point was that the term "rennaissance" to anything today is somewhat inappropriate. What we are doing now is new.
Re:This is NOT the Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
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· Score: 1
My point was that we have discovered things well beyond what the Romans had. I certainly didn't mean to imply they were in any way unsophisticated. The steam engines are a good example of ancient tech - although it is disappointing that nobody ever really did anything with them. Slaves are just a lot cheaper.:(
Re:This is NOT the Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
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· Score: 3
Even more importantly, renaissance refers to a rebirth of learning. At the time, most people felt they weren't doing anything new, just rediscovering what the ancients had (it took people a while to realize it once they started surpassing them). I don't think Rome had anything like the technology we have now...
Mathematically, given any sufficiently well-behaved object (eg fields), you can define non-trivial conserved quantities for each of the symmetries of the space they are in.
So so long as physical things are represented by sufficiently well-behaved objects, and the laws of physics are time-invariant, you will be able to define conserved energy.
This is a deductive conclusion from even better supported observations than conservation of energy itself. In fact, as you said, Newton's conservation law turned out to be false - but since the conditions still hold, you can patch it up with an improvement.
Note: actually, in relativity time-invariance and space-invariance go hand in hand; that's why momentum and energy pair up to form a single "momentenergy" vector.
Worse things have happened and will happen to the planet.
Now compare this to its parent:...highest extinction rate since the dinosaurs disappeared... (which is a well-known fact, btw).
Yeah, worse things have happened. Twice, maybe three times. The fact that world war II was awful doesn't mean wars aren't bad.
The comment wasn't that the war never happened, but that Oceania wasn't necessarily real itself. That's possible, of course, but the book never even hints at that, so speculation on the matter is quite useless. But in any case, I was more going for humor than contribution; won't happen again.
In fact, a similar thing happened in Return of the Jedi, where the emperor actually faked his own death. The whole death star thing was a actually a ploy by the imperial special services. That's why the stormtroopers can't shoot straight.
I mean, so long as we are speculating about what 'actually happened' in stories based on info that isn't there...
I think it's worth pointing out, just for the sake of accuracy, that it was vulgar latin - that of the masses - that splintered and developed into the various Romance tongues. The latin of the upper classes underwent fewer changes and stayed fairly universal, until it was displaced at the end of the Middle ages. And heck, some people still use it.
Uranus' moons are all Shakesperean, except for a few named after characters from Alex Pope. Other than that moons are always named from Greco-Roman mythology.
Little moons first get systematic names, of the form date-planet-number (ie 1999 J 1). They only get real names later, if at all; usually the discoverer has the priviledge, and the IAU clears it.
That seems a little bit extreme. If you look at the innermost moons of any of the gas giants, except Jupiter, and plot a size-to-orbit graph, you get a very clear trend. Something that would be hard to generate just through random capture.
Why couldn't moons form out of the protoplanetary discs, like the rings most likely did?
Lots of our moons are already captured asteroids. For Saturn, the best known is Phoebe, the outermost of the 'traditional' moons, but just a little asteroid that is clearly not native (retrograde orbit).
Triton is of course the most impressive, being a captured Pluto-sized Kuiper object. And captured recently, too, since its orbit is unstable.
He might have, but I came in after the researcher stuff. As the one who would know, I can honestly say I don't think it matters.
The universe is not under any obligation to provide definitions.
Things behave the way they behave, and it's us who label them as intelligent or not intelligent. So of course it would be up to us, and not the universe, to define it.
That said, I don't think we need or want a completely formal definition. But we should have some sort of criterion for telling when something is, indeed, intelligent - just to avoid the whole thing that happened when they found the new world.
The idea that intelligence can be evaluated on behavior is a pretty good one; I've successfully used it to conclude that my friends are, and sea slugs aren't. Maybe Turing's test formalized that a little too much, and so broke it somewhat, but the base concept is important.
As for Hobbes, well, I haven't read any of his works, so I can't speak on him. But a lot of great philosophers do make stuff up as they go.;)
This is a bit late for a reply on this thread, but I couldn't help but take the first sentence as a little bit ad hominem meum...
Evolution is just a theory. Scientists can show its effects in the lab, by say breeding fruit flies, but can't show that fruit flies themselves originally originated that way. All they have is indirect evidence.
Gravity is also just a theory. Scientists can show its effects in the lab, by say dropping things, but can't show that that is the same force that holds the solar system together. All they have is indirect evidence.
Indeed there is good evidence the solar system is geocentric - for instance, the unrealistically small parallaxes on stars. Noone has yet to succesfully explain those away.
The theory of evolution developed, historically, by looking at real-world data. The idea that it could have gained popular acceptance while false is absurd; noone wanted it to be true!
Who cares who you talked to? Talking to philosophers doesn't make you one, and even if it did, it wouldn't make your arguments true. The quality of an argument doesn't depend on who said it, just on what it is.
Turing made a good step by suggesting that we define intelligence as a behavioral trait (which is really metaphysics saying that metaphysics isn't needed). Noone has really had any better way of defining it...at least, you haven't suggested one yet.
And, really, in no way has anyone ever been able to "prove" the Church-Turing thesis: it was more like an emperical fact until quantum computing realized otherwise.
Quantum computing hasn't really changed anything: anything that can be determined by any sort of algorithm, can be determined by a Turing machine.
But more important is the idea of proof: it doesn't make any sense. In order to do that, you would have to formalize computability, and that is what a Turing machine is.
What lends credence to the idea is that there are many other formalizations that end up exactly the same. Just like ZF set theory (which is either incomplete or inconsistent, impossible to prove which, as a side note).
People don't perceive colors in the same way if you consider finer details. That is to say, if you look at the neural pathways activated by a given color, they will be different. That's why the same color can remind different people of different things.
On the other hand, people do perceive colors in the same way if you consider only the grosser details - namely, what color would they call it.
Basically, depending on how you define "perceive the same way", either everyone trivially does or everyone trivially doesn't. The question is ill-defined.
Just something the other comment didn't mention: you can only show the color space in a 2-D plane if you treat it trichromatically. Then it is a 3-D space, defined either by the three primaries or the axes of the plane plus saturation.
To properly represent colors treated tetrachromatically, you would need three dimensions (plus saturation), since yellow could no longer be represented as a linear combination of red, green, and blue.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever something's an issue, most sources are paranoid garbage. Sigh.
The article precedes the quotation with saying that Hawking urged for people to slow population growth. It looks to me like the line was intended as a naive projection to indicate the problem, and that the context got muddled.
The irony here is that if you were truly concerned about radioactive materials, than space would be the best place for them, far away from anyone who can get hurt.
It's fair to say the Renaissance doesn't mean much in terms of technology or learning. But doesn't it make sense to point to it as a fundamental change in the attitudes people had? Inasmuchas, the Medievalers thought of the present as being much the same as the past, whereas the Renaissancers thought they were in a whole new era. That sort of attitude impacts the way people approach all sorts of things...
Or am I making a mistake?
???
Didn't huge amounts of trade pass through Constantinople? I remember reading that you could see merchants from "all corners of the world" there, that it had considerably contact with the slavs, and that it was a popular destination for pilgrims. And that's just from a Eurocentric perspective. I do know that the silk route broke down (some Byzantine monks smuggled eggs out of China) and vaguely recall that there was a decline in trade after the big world empires broke up, but this should be nothing irreparable.
And, in any case, there was some innovation going on among the Byzantines and Arabs. Not much new, but then the Romans didn't come up with that many new things either...as far as technology is concerned, you can probably attribute the lack of development to the possession of slaves and Byzantine conservatism.
On the other hand, I remember hearing something about urban life declining in the Byzantine empire everywhere except Constantinople...if anyone has any good info on that, I would love to hear it.
And, btw, the renaissance is more than simply the rebirth of trade and learning. Otherwise, you could take the whole later middle ages and call it the renaissance picking up speed.
You are right to point out this as a cause, though. In fact it is the main cause; the rennaissance was mostly through and people were moving on by the time the printing press came on the scene.
In any case, my point was that the term "rennaissance" to anything today is somewhat inappropriate. What we are doing now is new.
My point was that we have discovered things well beyond what the Romans had. I certainly didn't mean to imply they were in any way unsophisticated. The steam engines are a good example of ancient tech - although it is disappointing that nobody ever really did anything with them. Slaves are just a lot cheaper. :(
Even more importantly, renaissance refers to a rebirth of learning. At the time, most people felt they weren't doing anything new, just rediscovering what the ancients had (it took people a while to realize it once they started surpassing them).
I don't think Rome had anything like the technology we have now...
So so long as physical things are represented by sufficiently well-behaved objects, and the laws of physics are time-invariant, you will be able to define conserved energy.
This is a deductive conclusion from even better supported observations than conservation of energy itself. In fact, as you said, Newton's conservation law turned out to be false - but since the conditions still hold, you can patch it up with an improvement.
Note: actually, in relativity time-invariance and space-invariance go hand in hand; that's why momentum and energy pair up to form a single "momentenergy" vector.
Worse things have happened and will happen to the planet. ...highest extinction rate since the dinosaurs disappeared... (which is a well-known fact, btw).
Now compare this to its parent:
Yeah, worse things have happened. Twice, maybe three times. The fact that world war II was awful doesn't mean wars aren't bad.
The comment wasn't that the war never happened, but that Oceania wasn't necessarily real itself. That's possible, of course, but the book never even hints at that, so speculation on the matter is quite useless. But in any case, I was more going for humor than contribution; won't happen again.
In fact, a similar thing happened in Return of the Jedi, where the emperor actually faked his own death. The whole death star thing was a actually a ploy by the imperial special services. That's why the stormtroopers can't shoot straight.
I mean, so long as we are speculating about what 'actually happened' in stories based on info that isn't there...
I think it's worth pointing out, just for the sake of accuracy, that it was vulgar latin - that of the masses - that splintered and developed into the various Romance tongues. The latin of the upper classes underwent fewer changes and stayed fairly universal, until it was displaced at the end of the Middle ages. And heck, some people still use it.
Little moons first get systematic names, of the form date-planet-number (ie 1999 J 1). They only get real names later, if at all; usually the discoverer has the priviledge, and the IAU clears it.
Why couldn't moons form out of the protoplanetary discs, like the rings most likely did?
Triton is of course the most impressive, being a captured Pluto-sized Kuiper object. And captured recently, too, since its orbit is unstable.
He might have, but I came in after the researcher stuff. As the one who would know, I can honestly say I don't think it matters.
The universe is not under any obligation to provide definitions.
Things behave the way they behave, and it's us who label them as intelligent or not intelligent. So of course it would be up to us, and not the universe, to define it.
That said, I don't think we need or want a completely formal definition. But we should have some sort of criterion for telling when something is, indeed, intelligent - just to avoid the whole thing that happened when they found the new world.
The idea that intelligence can be evaluated on behavior is a pretty good one; I've successfully used it to conclude that my friends are, and sea slugs aren't. Maybe Turing's test formalized that a little too much, and so broke it somewhat, but the base concept is important.
As for Hobbes, well, I haven't read any of his works, so I can't speak on him. But a lot of great philosophers do make stuff up as they go. ;)
This is a bit late for a reply on this thread, but I couldn't help but take the first sentence as a little bit ad hominem meum...
Gravity is also just a theory. Scientists can show its effects in the lab, by say dropping things, but can't show that that is the same force that holds the solar system together. All they have is indirect evidence.
Indeed there is good evidence the solar system is geocentric - for instance, the unrealistically small parallaxes on stars. Noone has yet to succesfully explain those away.
The theory of evolution developed, historically, by looking at real-world data. The idea that it could have gained popular acceptance while false is absurd; noone wanted it to be true!
Turing made a good step by suggesting that we define intelligence as a behavioral trait (which is really metaphysics saying that metaphysics isn't needed). Noone has really had any better way of defining it...at least, you haven't suggested one yet.
Quantum computing hasn't really changed anything: anything that can be determined by any sort of algorithm, can be determined by a Turing machine.
But more important is the idea of proof: it doesn't make any sense. In order to do that, you would have to formalize computability, and that is what a Turing machine is.
What lends credence to the idea is that there are many other formalizations that end up exactly the same. Just like ZF set theory (which is either incomplete or inconsistent, impossible to prove which, as a side note).
On the other hand, people do perceive colors in the same way if you consider only the grosser details - namely, what color would they call it.
Basically, depending on how you define "perceive the same way", either everyone trivially does or everyone trivially doesn't. The question is ill-defined.
To properly represent colors treated tetrachromatically, you would need three dimensions (plus saturation), since yellow could no longer be represented as a linear combination of red, green, and blue.
So, you're anti.pro?
What I want to know is, would it necessarily go to slashdot and write posts worrying that its successors would make it obsolete?
"I don't care who wins, so long as it isn't Bush..."
"I don't care who wins, so long as it ain't Gore..."
The party with the least negative score wins.