The parent author is very literate and has some interesting ideas, but since s/he exposes an ignorance that is unusual for someone who seems otherwise intelligent, I'll venture that s/he's actually a troll. I'll bite just for fun.
"If language was really so easy to break down, analyse and interpret in a definitive matter, why is it that NLP is still in its infancy...?"
You don't need to be a deconstructionist to parse natural language. NLP is still in its infancy because common sense is often necessary to remove syntactic and semantic ambiguities.
"Science would benefit from the application of deconstruction and any other theory that might help it sort out what it means to claim that something is true, valid or meaningful."
Scientists aren't fools; they understand a theory as an interpretation of evidence, and consciously use the word "true" as a brief way of saying "so likely as to lie beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt." This understanding is the basis of the scientific method and is essential for success in academia (even though silly politics are too).
"Is it possible that there are two versions of science, both true? I suppose. Maybe particle/wave theory is an example. Maybe the controversies in superstring theory are other examples."
No. Wave/Particle duality is part of a single theory that is half wrong when either component is taken away. Controversies in String Theory are aesthetic because all String Theorists agree that future experiments, as difficult as they will be to devise and conduct, are necessary if the theory is to hold water. More generally, in the scientific community all disagreements about a theory are aesthetic: they vanish when the theory is shown to predict the behavior of a system better than the prevailing one.
"language is not capable of specificity"
You can never completely eliminate the possibility of being misinterpreted, but you can get arbitrarily close. In other words, you're theoretically right but practically wrong.
"with jargon, social and cultural perspectives, indeterminacy of the writer and reader, etc, the quest for the grand unified theory is not possible."
Is it possible that your claim is incorrect? If so, then it is possible that "the quest for the grand unified theory" is possible. If it's possible that it's possible, then it's possible. So the remotest possibility of folly renders this claim completely wrong.
If you would argue that this claim must be absolutely correct, you won't get my vote without a fairly rigorous proof.
Instead I'll assume that by "not possible" you mean "highly unlikely". I'll counter that with the observation that misunderstandings in the scientific community are naturally ironed out by the rigor that scientists employ when making their arguments.
In particular, jargon is an important part of that rigor rather than a hindrance to it. I believe it was you who wrote, "Jargon is necessary to identify complex (or specific) ideas in a minimal amount of words/time." (So is language capable of specificity or not?)
Your entire argument is so strongly based on the need to take great care when proclaiming something to be true that I'm surprised you were so bold in this final claim. More than anything else, this is what has me thinking you're a troll.
Alright, I've had my fun. If you meant all of the above sincerely, I apologize for calling you a troll.
The prevailing idea is that gas giants form at a distance and migrate inward, due either to hydrodynamic drag or a more complex mechanism that somehow binds the planet to the migration pattern of free material in the disk.
'...literally everything else can go, leaving American workers working at Wal-Mart.'
Yeah, and just about everyone who sells to Wal-Mart is forced to outsource jobs in order to keep their costs down. See the December issue of Fast Company.
Good point. I don't know for sure how to answer that.
I have an idea, though. Scientists are of course very interested in knowing whether or in what form life exists out there. However, even intelligent guesswork is nearly impossible because we have only one example a life-bearing planet. If we find life on Mars, it would shed a lot of light on the question. However, if we affected the Martian biosphere in some important way, we'd lose a very precious thing: an ecology that developed independently of Earth. All the value gained by studying the similarities and differences between the two biospheres, of being able to study those lifeforms as they existed before our intervention, would be lost forever. We couldn't ever get it back.
On the other hand, if we leave it alone, we can always reproduce the Martian environment in the laboratory. It wouldn't be perfect but we could make it just about as close as we like.
I think the argument of the powers that be is basically that we need to gather knowledge about the place before we go stomping around over there. History is full of examples to support that philosophy.
I see what you're saying. Lots of grammar nazis insist on the "one true way" despite the inconsistency it has accrued over the years. If we thought we could fight the spelling of a word once it was in the dictionary, we would back people up when they spelled phonetically. I would, anyway. With the way things work now, most words have a single accepted spelling convention, so that's what I'm used to seeing. As a result misspelled words just distract me. As for syntax, you and I probably agree that some of the rules are stupid and archaic. I split infinitives, for example. There's a rule against it because it is physically impossible to do in Latin, whose infinitives are single words. (That's what my English teacher told me in high school, anyway.) I've also been known to leave prepositions at the end of my sentences, because "that's the kind of English up with which I will not put."
Now that I've really thought about it, I'm going to revise my statement about English taking years to master. I still think it does because native 4 year old speakers aren't nearly as good at constructing English sentences as, say, a twelve year old or a college graduate, even when you adjust for the differences in vocabulary. I revise because idioms and common phrases play a major role in English, and generally one picks them up more as a result of experience than formal education.
It's fine for a living language to be subject to change. However, the reason why a language takes years to master is because of centuries of inconsistent additions, resulting in a condition where the rules are broken as often as not. I hear people getting upset when others call their inconsistent English "wrong". Yes, OK, in practice overwhelming popularity decides what's "right". But before a word like "virii" makes it into the *dictionary*, it's silly to be obstinate about using it just because everyone else does.
The *vast* majority of the rocks we need to worry about are already in our own system.
Interstellar debris is scarce compared to the debris orbiting the Sun, and the stuff already in our system goes round and round, giving near-Earth objects many chances to collide (and giving Earthlings many chances to detect them beforehand). We missed all those recent asteroids simply because they're faint and we don't have enough people actively looking for them.
My favorites were "Pokemon Proves Evolutionism Is False" and "Using Prayer to Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria". Dear God, I want to win the science fair, so let the E. Coli in dish A die, but spare the ones in dish B. Thank you."
Sorry I was a retard, everybody. I can't believe I forgot to link to the frickin' article! Geeze! (Kicking self -- hard) I'm just grateful no one came out and called me an idiot directly. I also agree that the article should not have been accepted. I do give myself credit for good grammar and spelling, however.
By the way, I must confess that I *still* think the exploding doctor joke is funny. You can call me an idiot now if you want. =*)
There's a difference between the laws of physics and the theoretical laws of physics. The laws of physics are unbreakable exactly because that is what we mean by a law of physics: if it can be broken, then it wasn't a law of physics in the first place. If we find it possible to break a theoretical law, it will simply point us in the direction of a deeper theory, which may or may not agree with the actual laws of physics.
>>This is the problem with the whole "is there >>life elsewhere in the universe" debate. I call >>it the "Star Trek Syndrome". People have gotten >>so used to movies and TV shows where space >>ships go zooming all over the galaxy that they >>have lost any understanding of the enormous >>distances involved.
>It's true, 90 light years is quite a distance >for us to travel or communicate. But, compared >to the rest of the galaxy, or universe, 90 light >years is quite close. If life is to be >discovered within, say, 200 years it will likely >be at that sort of range.
I agree that this must be what the original submitter had in mind. The statement, "90 light years is quite close," could even be considered an understatement. If you compare a 90 light year distance to the size of our galaxy (which is itself of negligible size compared to the observable universe) you'll see what I mean. It's like a flea on a dinner plate.
Automatic gain control: The electronics in the camera automatically adjusted for brightness.
Logarithmic quantization: The image data had to be digitized in order to be sent back, which requires quantization. But if you don't know ahead of time the brightness characteristics of the pictures you're taking, you don't know how subtle a difference in brightness the your digitization scheme should be able to handle, while still being able to capture the full range of brightnesses in the images. So when they digitized, which basically means that they made a table of integers and assigned a brightness value to each integer, the assignment scheme made each brightness value be some constant multiple K of the preceding value. In this way a brightness range of K^N, where N is the table size, can be captured in the digitization. This is opposed to a linear quantization scheme (like is used in digitized audio), where only a range of K*N can be represented.
Optical density: Don't know what this means.
Linear radiance: This is where they undid the logarithmic stuff to get numbers that their software was expecting, so they could massage their image data to get something suitable for human eyes.
Windowed sinc filter: This is part of the massaging they had to do. It's hard to explain without going into some deeper concepts. It's basically what the smooth filter in Photoshop does.
Correcting the modulation transfer function: I don't know. I'm an audio guy.
Gamma-corrected values: Different displays show colors differently. The gamma value has to do with some curve that maps between brightness values and display brightness. Or something like that.
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but it seems that if you were inside someone else's perceived event horizon and started to accelerate away from the black hole, *your* perceived event horizon would expand to engulf you. Does this sound right?
Another problem with breath mints is that sometimes, instead of changing everything to ice, they just take you into an alternate reality where everything is ice. Often you end up falling through big walls of ice, which looks pretty unnerving if not outright painful. However, the guy they show busting up all that ice seems to enjoy it, so who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent author is very literate and has some interesting ideas, but since s/he exposes an ignorance that is unusual for someone who seems otherwise intelligent, I'll venture that s/he's actually a troll. I'll bite just for fun.
"If language was really so easy to break down, analyse and interpret in a definitive matter, why is it that NLP is still in its infancy...?"
You don't need to be a deconstructionist to parse natural language. NLP is still in its infancy because common sense is often necessary to remove syntactic and semantic ambiguities.
"Science would benefit from the application of deconstruction and any other theory that might help it sort out what it means to claim that something is true, valid or meaningful."
Scientists aren't fools; they understand a theory as an interpretation of evidence, and consciously use the word "true" as a brief way of saying "so likely as to lie beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt." This understanding is the basis of the scientific method and is essential for success in academia (even though silly politics are too).
"Is it possible that there are two versions of science, both true? I suppose. Maybe particle/wave theory is an example. Maybe the controversies in superstring theory are other examples."
No. Wave/Particle duality is part of a single theory that is half wrong when either component is taken away. Controversies in String Theory are aesthetic because all String Theorists agree that future experiments, as difficult as they will be to devise and conduct, are necessary if the theory is to hold water. More generally, in the scientific community all disagreements about a theory are aesthetic: they vanish when the theory is shown to predict the behavior of a system better than the prevailing one.
"language is not capable of specificity"
You can never completely eliminate the possibility of being misinterpreted, but you can get arbitrarily close. In other words, you're theoretically right but practically wrong.
"with jargon, social and cultural perspectives, indeterminacy of the writer and reader, etc, the quest for the grand unified theory is not possible."
Is it possible that your claim is incorrect? If so, then it is possible that "the quest for the grand unified theory" is possible. If it's possible that it's possible, then it's possible. So the remotest possibility of folly renders this claim completely wrong.
If you would argue that this claim must be absolutely correct, you won't get my vote without a fairly rigorous proof.
Instead I'll assume that by "not possible" you mean "highly unlikely". I'll counter that with the observation that misunderstandings in the scientific community are naturally ironed out by the rigor that scientists employ when making their arguments.
In particular, jargon is an important part of that rigor rather than a hindrance to it. I believe it was you who wrote, "Jargon is necessary to identify complex (or specific) ideas in a minimal amount of words/time." (So is language capable of specificity or not?)
Your entire argument is so strongly based on the need to take great care when proclaiming something to be true that I'm surprised you were so bold in this final claim. More than anything else, this is what has me thinking you're a troll.
Alright, I've had my fun. If you meant all of the above sincerely, I apologize for calling you a troll.
You might also want to check this out.
In answer to your other question, this system isn't likely to rip itself apart anytime soon.
"...the infamous Tau Ceti..."
How is Tau Ceti infamous?
5280 ft = 1 mi
'...literally everything else can go, leaving American workers working at Wal-Mart.'
Yeah, and just about everyone who sells to Wal-Mart is forced to outsource jobs in order to keep their costs down. See the December issue of Fast Company.
Good point. I don't know for sure how to answer that.
I have an idea, though. Scientists are of course very interested in knowing whether or in what form life exists out there. However, even intelligent guesswork is nearly impossible because we have only one example a life-bearing planet. If we find life on Mars, it would shed a lot of light on the question. However, if we affected the Martian biosphere in some important way, we'd lose a very precious thing: an ecology that developed independently of Earth. All the value gained by studying the similarities and differences between the two biospheres, of being able to study those lifeforms as they existed before our intervention, would be lost forever. We couldn't ever get it back.
On the other hand, if we leave it alone, we can always reproduce the Martian environment in the laboratory. It wouldn't be perfect but we could make it just about as close as we like.
I think the argument of the powers that be is basically that we need to gather knowledge about the place before we go stomping around over there. History is full of examples to support that philosophy.
We want to be sure that if we find life on Mars, *we* weren't the ones who put it there in the first place.
I see what you're saying. Lots of grammar nazis insist on the "one true way" despite the inconsistency it has accrued over the years. If we thought we could fight the spelling of a word once it was in the dictionary, we would back people up when they spelled phonetically. I would, anyway. With the way things work now, most words have a single accepted spelling convention, so that's what I'm used to seeing. As a result misspelled words just distract me.
As for syntax, you and I probably agree that some of the rules are stupid and archaic. I split infinitives, for example. There's a rule against it because it is physically impossible to do in Latin, whose infinitives are single words. (That's what my English teacher told me in high school, anyway.) I've also been known to leave prepositions at the end of my sentences, because "that's the kind of English up with which I will not put."
Now that I've really thought about it, I'm going to revise my statement about English taking years to master. I still think it does because native 4 year old speakers aren't nearly as good at constructing English sentences as, say, a twelve year old or a college graduate, even when you adjust for the differences in vocabulary. I revise because idioms and common phrases play a major role in English, and generally one picks them up more as a result of experience than formal education.
It's fine for a living language to be subject to change. However, the reason why a language takes years to master is because of centuries of inconsistent additions, resulting in a condition where the rules are broken as often as not. I hear people getting upset when others call their inconsistent English "wrong". Yes, OK, in practice overwhelming popularity decides what's "right". But before a word like "virii" makes it into the *dictionary*, it's silly to be obstinate about using it just because everyone else does.
The *vast* majority of the rocks we need to worry about are already in our own system.
Interstellar debris is scarce compared to the debris orbiting the Sun, and the stuff already in our system goes round and round, giving near-Earth objects many chances to collide (and giving Earthlings many chances to detect them beforehand). We missed all those recent asteroids simply because they're faint and we don't have enough people actively looking for them.
My favorites were "Pokemon Proves Evolutionism Is False" and "Using Prayer to Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria". Dear God, I want to win the science fair, so let the E. Coli in dish A die, but spare the ones in dish B. Thank you."
I prefer this one.
"How is God so unfathomably inept at PR?"
My new sig. Well, it would be if I did the whole sig thing.
I guess now they can say, "Every dark nucleotide has a silver lining."
Sorry that joke totally sucked. It was the best I could come up with in a few seconds. Uh... here's a better one, I think:
This gives new meaning to the word geNETic!
Or how about: Let's call it "xednapS"! (xeDNApS, which is SpANDex backward? Get it? Har, har!)
Ooh, neat! Electronic jea^H^H^Hgenes!
Sorry I was a retard, everybody. I can't believe I forgot to link to the frickin' article! Geeze! (Kicking self -- hard) I'm just grateful no one came out and called me an idiot directly. I also agree that the article should not have been accepted. I do give myself credit for good grammar and spelling, however.
By the way, I must confess that I *still* think the exploding doctor joke is funny. You can call me an idiot now if you want. =*)
I would say she doesn't look a day over 6000 years old.
There's a difference between the laws of physics and the theoretical laws of physics. The laws of physics are unbreakable exactly because that is what we mean by a law of physics: if it can be broken, then it wasn't a law of physics in the first place. If we find it possible to break a theoretical law, it will simply point us in the direction of a deeper theory, which may or may not agree with the actual laws of physics.
>>>This system is a quick 90 light years away.
>>This is the problem with the whole "is there
>>life elsewhere in the universe" debate. I call
>>it the "Star Trek Syndrome". People have gotten
>>so used to movies and TV shows where space
>>ships go zooming all over the galaxy that they
>>have lost any understanding of the enormous
>>distances involved.
>It's true, 90 light years is quite a distance
>for us to travel or communicate. But, compared
>to the rest of the galaxy, or universe, 90 light
>years is quite close. If life is to be
>discovered within, say, 200 years it will likely
>be at that sort of range.
I agree that this must be what the original submitter had in mind. The statement, "90 light years is quite close," could even be considered an understatement. If you compare a 90 light year distance to the size of our galaxy (which is itself of negligible size compared to the observable universe) you'll see what I mean. It's like a flea on a dinner plate.
Automatic gain control:
The electronics in the camera automatically adjusted for brightness.
Logarithmic quantization:
The image data had to be digitized in order to be sent back, which requires quantization. But if you don't know ahead of time the brightness characteristics of the pictures you're taking, you don't know how subtle a difference in brightness the your digitization scheme should be able to handle, while still being able to capture the full range of brightnesses in the images. So when they digitized, which basically means that they made a table of integers and assigned a brightness value to each integer, the assignment scheme made each brightness value be some constant multiple K of the preceding value. In this way a brightness range of K^N, where N is the table size, can be captured in the digitization. This is opposed to a linear quantization scheme (like is used in digitized audio), where only a range of K*N can be represented.
Optical density:
Don't know what this means.
Linear radiance:
This is where they undid the logarithmic stuff to get numbers that their software was expecting, so they could massage their image data to get something suitable for human eyes.
Windowed sinc filter:
This is part of the massaging they had to do. It's hard to explain without going into some deeper concepts. It's basically what the smooth filter in Photoshop does.
Correcting the modulation transfer function:
I don't know. I'm an audio guy.
Gamma-corrected values:
Different displays show colors differently. The gamma value has to do with some curve that maps between brightness values and display brightness. Or something like that.
Artifact by Gregory Benford
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but it seems that if you were inside someone else's perceived event horizon and started to accelerate away from the black hole, *your* perceived event horizon would expand to engulf you. Does this sound right?
Even idiots get to be moderators, I guess. Thanks for the info. =*)
Another problem with breath mints is that sometimes, instead of changing everything to ice, they just take you into an alternate reality where everything is ice. Often you end up falling through big walls of ice, which looks pretty unnerving if not outright painful. However, the guy they show busting up all that ice seems to enjoy it, so who knows.