Living on the Gulf Coast, the threat of strong storms has always been one of my reasons for being reluctant to plunk down a large investment on Solar Panels.
How well did existing Solar Panels fair in New York after Sandy?
Everyone seems to be envisioning a robotic battle.
Although we've made tremendous progress in getting spacecraft and other vehicles to act autonomously, we usually keep them on a pretty tight leash, and have thought out beforehand most of the situations we expect these automonous vehicles to negotiate.
It wouldn't surprise me to find humans still have a place in a hypothetical space battlefield, especially considering each opponent would strive to inject appropriate "fog of war" to confuse the robotic elements.
Either that, or well find a way to manufacture robots that are equivilant and/or superior to humans.
It seems like Darwin is under similar pressures to maintain backwards compatibility for gills that we no longer use as Intel and AMD are under pressure to maintain backwards compatibility for the x86 processors.
We can't get rid of that legacy reflex to exercise our gills because there's too much software written on top of it.
Over the past two years, I've spent a great deal of time working with postgresql with relation to an online game I've been helping to develop (Open Merchant Empires).
We've been able to get good performance out of postgresql as long as we don't expect 24/7/365 availability. They've made great progress in making the VACUUMs less intrusive, but we've always ran into trouble if we don't impose on the database availability with a regular maintenance schedule (very regular partial vacuums which slow the database down considerably, semi-regular full vacuums which lock up the database, and occasional full rebuilds).
I'd love to learn how they achieve the high availability I'd expect you'd need for a TLD database server.
The validity of a scientific theory is measured by its ability to predict a behavior of the system under observation. The family of scientific theories that describe chemistry have excellent predicitve ability over a wide range of behaviors; however, these theories offer very little predicitve powers when it comes to predicting behavior for systems that spontaneously increase in organization (such as biological systems). 'Chemistry' can explain a great deal about the behavior of biological systems, but it doesn't offer much for describing that peculiar ability of biological systems to grow and increase in complexity.
I assume that is the 'big picture' referred to in the post.
Pollution in space is STILL Polution!
on
On Asteroid Mining
·
· Score: 1
I find this idea that we can pollute space without any consideration for the consequences ridiculous. We are constantly running into sites polluted many years ago. Your arguments for moving our pollution to space sounds too similar to the mindset that created all these polluted hazardous waste areas that we are now spending so much money to clean up.
Scientific American had an interesting article titled "Is Space Finite?" which discusses the the possibility of the universe being quite small. They assert that it is theoretically possible that we are looking at echos of ourselves when we look way back into the past with our telescopes.
I see your arguments as being similar to some of the supporting arguments for Hawking Radiation: If we take a hard disk full of Stephen Hawking's favorite MP3s, and throw them into a black hole, it represents a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for those MP3s to disappear forever behind the event horizon. This is because 'information = order' in the context of entropy and the Second Law. For this black hole to so jealously constrain Stephen's MP3s represents an increase in order (decrease in entropy) for the black hole. This seems to represent a violation of the Second Law because the localized concentration of information decreases the probability of a system.
So, even though the information is only being concentrated locally in the black hole while the entropy of the Universe increases, it contradicts the Second Law because the Second Law is all about the probability of things becoming more and more likely. The Second Law is not satisfied merely with the entropy of the Universe increasing. The Second Law implies that the probability of a system will tend towards a maximum.
Stephen's solution was that the 'order' represented by his MP3s must come back out as Hawking Radiation due to quantum fluctuations at the event horizon (actually, in 1973, Stephen was more interested in whether or not black holes had a temperature).
So, in this context, the "Information wants to be Free" from the black Hole.
But I have a problem with using this analogy in the context of the spread of information across the Internet. The Second Law not only wants the information to be liberated from the Black Hole, the Second Law wants that information to be forgotten (which, according to Hawking, it effectively does by spewing it out as Hawking Radiation). The Second Law is all about the decrease of information (increase in disorder).
To me, if the information is not lost or mangled in the process of releasing it from it's constraints, such as the spread of information through the Internet, then it represents a local increase in information, and therefore a decrease in probability. This is similar to a biological system, which inherently represents a local increase in order
In my opinion, the Second Law not only states that "Information wants to be Free" from a locally constrained system, the Second Law wants the information to be mangled and forgotten.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics in inappropriate for explaining the behavior of information collection on the internet.
As a law of nature, the Second Law of Thermodynamics has little explanatory power for systems that exhibit the ability to spontaneously organize (i.e. most every living biological system). By definition, the collection and organization of information would represent an increase in order (a local increase in order is mathematically allowed under the Second Law if the overall order of the system is decreasing). When the collecting and organizing is being done by a biological system, then it represents a 'spontaneous' increase in order.
One important measure of the appropriateness of a given scientific theory or law is the ability to predict the behavior of the system. While the Second Law is very good at predicting the behavior of many sub-processes of a biological system (specifically, those sub-systems that decrease in order), the Second Law does not have the ability to predict the behavior of the sub-systems that are increasing in order. It merely allows for them mathematically.
Slashdot Mirror
Living on the Gulf Coast, the threat of strong storms has always been one of my reasons for being reluctant to plunk down a large investment on Solar Panels.
How well did existing Solar Panels fair in New York after Sandy?
Everyone seems to be envisioning a robotic battle.
Although we've made tremendous progress in getting spacecraft and other vehicles to act autonomously, we usually keep them on a pretty tight leash, and have thought out beforehand most of the situations we expect these automonous vehicles to negotiate.
It wouldn't surprise me to find humans still have a place in a hypothetical space battlefield, especially considering each opponent would strive to inject appropriate "fog of war" to confuse the robotic elements.
Either that, or well find a way to manufacture robots that are equivilant and/or superior to humans.
It seems like Darwin is under similar pressures to maintain backwards compatibility for gills that we no longer use as Intel and AMD are under pressure to maintain backwards compatibility for the x86 processors.
We can't get rid of that legacy reflex to exercise our gills because there's too much software written on top of it.
I was wondering the same thing myself.
Over the past two years, I've spent a great deal of time working with postgresql with relation to an online game I've been helping to develop (Open Merchant Empires).
We've been able to get good performance out of postgresql as long as we don't expect 24/7/365 availability. They've made great progress in making the VACUUMs less intrusive, but we've always ran into trouble if we don't impose on the database availability with a regular maintenance schedule (very regular partial vacuums which slow the database down considerably, semi-regular full vacuums which lock up the database, and occasional full rebuilds).
I'd love to learn how they achieve the high availability I'd expect you'd need for a TLD database server.
The validity of a scientific theory is measured by its ability to predict a behavior of the system under observation. The family of scientific theories that describe chemistry have excellent predicitve ability over a wide range of behaviors; however, these theories offer very little predicitve powers when it comes to predicting behavior for systems that spontaneously increase in organization (such as biological systems). 'Chemistry' can explain a great deal about the behavior of biological systems, but it doesn't offer much for describing that peculiar ability of biological systems to grow and increase in complexity.
I assume that is the 'big picture' referred to in the post.
I find this idea that we can pollute space without any consideration for the consequences ridiculous. We are constantly running into sites polluted many years ago. Your arguments for moving our pollution to space sounds too similar to the mindset that created all these polluted hazardous waste areas that we are now spending so much money to clean up.
Scientific American had an interesting article titled "Is Space Finite?" which discusses the the possibility of the universe being quite small. They assert that it is theoretically possible that we are looking at echos of ourselves when we look way back into the past with our telescopes.
I see your arguments as being similar to some of the supporting arguments for Hawking Radiation: If we take a hard disk full of Stephen Hawking's favorite MP3s, and throw them into a black hole, it represents a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for those MP3s to disappear forever behind the event horizon. This is because 'information = order' in the context of entropy and the Second Law. For this black hole to so jealously constrain Stephen's MP3s represents an increase in order (decrease in entropy) for the black hole. This seems to represent a violation of the Second Law because the localized concentration of information decreases the probability of a system.
So, even though the information is only being concentrated locally in the black hole while the entropy of the Universe increases, it contradicts the Second Law because the Second Law is all about the probability of things becoming more and more likely. The Second Law is not satisfied merely with the entropy of the Universe increasing. The Second Law implies that the probability of a system will tend towards a maximum.
Stephen's solution was that the 'order' represented by his MP3s must come back out as Hawking Radiation due to quantum fluctuations at the event horizon (actually, in 1973, Stephen was more interested in whether or not black holes had a temperature).
So, in this context, the "Information wants to be Free" from the black Hole.
But I have a problem with using this analogy in the context of the spread of information across the Internet. The Second Law not only wants the information to be liberated from the Black Hole, the Second Law wants that information to be forgotten (which, according to Hawking, it effectively does by spewing it out as Hawking Radiation). The Second Law is all about the decrease of information (increase in disorder).
To me, if the information is not lost or mangled in the process of releasing it from it's constraints, such as the spread of information through the Internet, then it represents a local increase in information, and therefore a decrease in probability. This is similar to a biological system, which inherently represents a local increase in order
In my opinion, the Second Law not only states that "Information wants to be Free" from a locally constrained system, the Second Law wants the information to be mangled and forgotten.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics in inappropriate for explaining the behavior of information collection on the internet.
As a law of nature, the Second Law of Thermodynamics has little explanatory power for systems that exhibit the ability to spontaneously organize (i.e. most every living biological system). By definition, the collection and organization of information would represent an increase in order (a local increase in order is mathematically allowed under the Second Law if the overall order of the system is decreasing). When the collecting and organizing is being done by a biological system, then it represents a 'spontaneous' increase in order.
One important measure of the appropriateness of a given scientific theory or law is the ability to predict the behavior of the system. While the Second Law is very good at predicting the behavior of many sub-processes of a biological system (specifically, those sub-systems that decrease in order), the Second Law does not have the ability to predict the behavior of the sub-systems that are increasing in order. It merely allows for them mathematically.