Well, I don't know if it's what your prof was referring to, but Hofstadter's thesis in Gödel, Escher, Bach was that sentience was an emergent phenomenon of systems sufficiently complex for self-representation. I haven't read more of his work, so I don't know if he goes on to assert that sufficient complexity always yields intelligence, or just that it's a prerequisite.
By the way, GEB is a great work that all slashdotters should read.
The philosophical concept of a higher intelligence should not be conflated with the term "god".
Correct, and here's the problem with your arguments: it's not. All the things you say are correct, except for the unspoken axiom that all people who believe in god use the same definition as you do. I also do not believe in any gods that don't meet my criteria for what a god must or must not be (which align pretty well with yours I must say), but I do believe in a God.
If I am wrong, then I am sacrificing my eternal soul for the good of all mankind. If I am wrong, I have become more generous than Jesus or the God of Abraham even dares become.
It's also possible that you're wrong and not sacrificing your soul. One of the funny things about the God I believe in is that He appreciates self-sacrifice for the good of others. It's kind of His thing.
Very, very well said. I see religion as a set of beliefs about the supernatural. These beliefs may or may not be true. Religious institutions are just groups of people who profess to hold the same set of beliefs, but are subject to all the usual trappings of human institutions and power structures.
I believe in my religious for the same reason I believe in gravity: the theories explain observed phenomena. If I ever observe something that is incompatible with my religious belief, I'll have to reexamine my beliefs in light of the evidence.
It is true that many religious people are also superstitious, and my religion actively combats this, but it's human nature to be superstitious, and people will be people.
Just to add one data point, I and my siblings were homeschooled by deeply religious Republican parents, and we were taught that evolution was the prevailing scientific theory and the best explanation for the observable fossil record. Some of our textbooks had a creationist bent, and we were directed not to give credence to that aspect of them.
We were warned to be skeptical of people that were trying to use evolutionary theory to "disprove" some religious tenets, and also that literal 6-day creationist interpretations of Genesis were wrong.
This is just to say that conservative religious homeschooling != anti-science. At least not in my experience nor that of my homeschooled friends.
FUCK! China landed a probe on the moon. Dammit we haven't done a damm thing in ages.
Good for China. Now how many probes do they have on Mars? We just landed, what, our 4th rover?
CHINA. you know those guys who make all our cheap plastic walmart crap... is now kicking our asses in space.
Let me know when China lands men on the moon, or anything on Mars. Personally, I'm also super impressed with the Cassini mission. Did you know that Titan has lakes?
I didn't see anyone else mention it, but there's a decent low-budget sci-fi movie about the first manned mission to Europa where they're looking for life under the ice: Europa Report. I thought it was quite good.
My favorite argument on that list was over the issue of whether the article Exploding Whale should contain the phrase "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds."
Well, there's this one, but by "multitasking" one generally means "switching between multiple tasks is progress" rather than "simultaneous attention to different tasks," and the study indicates women may be better at the former.
What really gets me is this part, quoted from a neuroscientist:
We know that there is no such thing as 'hard wiring' when it comes to brain connections. Connections can change throughout life, in response to experience and learning.
So the brain connections men and women develop from their experiences happen to reflect the roles we tend to nudge men and women into.
Hmmm.
It can be both, and it wouldn't surprise me if genetics and environment both play a significant factor in this type of neural development. There may even be environmental feedback that amplifies the genetic tendencies. Divides in STEM etc. may be partially due to genetics as well as other factors.
Just to be pedantic: the wiring is not science; our understanding of it is. So the GP's point is that science (in general an ordered body of knowledge, in this case empirical and deduced knowledge about the physical world) comes to reflect some aspect of society present for millenia.
Which is not of course to make a moral argument, just [paraphrasing] an observation that society has been traditionally structured in a way that utilizes the biological strengths of the sexes. Which I'm sure will not be a controversial statement at all.
Doesn't the same rule apply (only more so) for FWD? If your rear wheels start to slip and you step on the gas, you transition weight off the front wheels, while simultaneously increasing the torque on them, making it more likely they'll spin? Honest question, I've never really pushed a FWD car on a track before, partly because their handling is just counter-intuitive to me.
If you're spinning out, it's because the rear tires lose traction when the front wheels still have it. If you shift weight off the front wheels, it has to go to the rear wheels, which although they may be sliding along the lateral axis, are not sliding along the direction of travel. Since they're rotating, adding weight (force) may cause them to cease sliding laterally since the friction will increase.
So yes, you're correct that the front wheels will start to slip. If you're cornering near the limit at a constant speed, adding throttle will cause your line through the corner to widen. Lifting the throttle will tighten it up.
Contrast this behavior with a RWD car, where if the rear tires are sliding laterally, adding throttle may cause them to slide in the direction of travel as well, completely breaking traction; while lifting the throttle may reduce the force on the tire in the direction of travel, allowing it to regain traction as it rotates. Lifting too much, however, can cause the drag of the engine and drivetrain to exert too much force in the other direction, causing "lift-throttle oversteer."
This means RWD cars potentially can exit a corner faster, because the weight transfer can add traction to the drive wheels, but too much causes a spin. In a FWD car, the weight transfer away from the drive wheels means too much throttle leads to oversteer. Safer, but potentially slower.
Racing FWD cars is fun, and probably demands less skill than RWD cars. The proper reaction to a spin is reversed, and catches a lot of people off guard. I think after 9 races I'm finally getting it.
The car is only unforgiving when trying to drive it at the limit. When driving under normal street conditions, it's perfectly safe. Cars in this category are designed with performance driving in mind, with the assumption being that if you want to experience the full potential of the car, you'll take it someplace where it's appropriate to do so, such as a racetrack. Unlike pure "track cars," though, they also include the features required to be safe and comfortable for road use.
If you read the linked articles, the reviewers actually indicate the car is actually very easy to control under normal driving, only when you're trying to push it does it become a challenging car to control.
Exactly. I race a Festiva (don't laugh (okay, go ahead and laugh)), and like all performance cars you use the throttle to change the car's behavior in the corners, by transferring weight front to rear like you describe. The biggest difference between the Festiva and the Carrera GT (besides about 500 HP) is that the Festiva is front-wheel drive, so if the back end gets loose you stomp on the gas, which adds rear grip and pulls the car in the direction the front wheels are pointing.
If you're cornering a RWD car at the limit, and the back end starts to get loose, adding throttle may just hasten the spin. And in high-performance lightweight cars like the Carrera GT, things like this happen very suddenly. High performance tires also tend to transition from gripping to sliding much more quickly.
The rule of thumb is that getting the most out of a high performance car requires driving it right up to the limit of its capabilities. But obviously this should only be done in an appropriate venue, such as a racetrack.
Porsche's first car with Porsche Stability Management was the 911 Carrera 4 in 1998. And car electronics were quite good in 2004. I think the Carrera GT is like the Dodge Viper - designed to be a driver's car that takes skill to drive competently at the edge, contrasted with the Nissan GTR (yes I know it came later), in which the electronics take care of that for you.
The key is that the Carrera GT on public roads at legal speeds will be far safer than most cars, because of its far superior handling, grip, and brakes.
Follow-up: the caveat in the above is that you're sitting at the same distance. The recommended distance for TVs is twice the diagonal, which would be about 3 feet for the 19" and 6 for the 39", which would again halve the angular pixel pitch. I don't think someone using this as a monitor would be that far away, however.
I think he's referring to pixel density, which he probably assumed (as did I) would be so fine you wouldn't notice the increase. However, after actually calculating it, here's a comparison:
Which is only 23% finer than the 24" HD monitor, and 31% finer than the uber-common 5:4 19" LCD. So I think you'd notice an improvement, and with proper DPI adjustment would be quite nice.
But we need the deep-pocketed early-adopting suckers to offset R&D costs as much as possible so the prices come down for us average Joes when the content is actually widely available!
The problem with this is that the CTA already operates at a loss, based purely on revenue from fares. City sales taxes in Chicago are already very high (>11%), and the state of Illinois subsidizes part of CTA's operating cost.
According to Wiki, the CTA provided 620.5 million rides in 2011. At an average of roughly $2/ride, free rides would mean over a billion dollars in fares not collected. Illinois' budget shortfall is currently about $1 billion, and the state is currently $6 billion in debt.
So where's the money going to come from? The CTA's proposed budget for 2014 is $1.4 billion, but critics point out that relying on state funding isn't a good idea. Tax increases are never popular, and $1.4B works out to roughly $140 per capita in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.
Yes. I haven't seen a survey, but for the majority of riders I'd say the Ventra card offers no notable benefit over the old Chicago Card Plus. For me it's the same - a pre-loaded transit benefit card that comes out of my pre-tax paycheck - except that the card readers are WAY less reliable.
The theoretical advantages are it's usable on PACE, as someone else mentioned, plus the played-up-aspect that you can treat it like a preloaded debit card and use it in taxis as well. You know, because having two cards (Chicago Card + credit card) was so onerous before.
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but I'd assume the city gets a cut of all the debit transactions made with the card, and that this was a large part of the reason to have it installed. This is the same city that sold 75 years of parking meter rights and spent the money from the sale in the first year to cover budget shortfalls.
An Astronomer, a Physicist, and an Mathematician have traveled to England for the first time to attend a conference and are riding a train through the countryside. Before long they pass a field with a single black sheep in it. The Astronomer says, "well look at that, in England, the sheep are black." The Physicist rebukes him, saying, "how can you make such a broad statement? All we know is that in THIS field, the sheep are black." The Mathematician shakes his head in scorn at both of them and says, "gentlemen, you are both making overly general assumptions. All we can says for certain is that in England there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't know if it's what your prof was referring to, but Hofstadter's thesis in Gödel, Escher, Bach was that sentience was an emergent phenomenon of systems sufficiently complex for self-representation. I haven't read more of his work, so I don't know if he goes on to assert that sufficient complexity always yields intelligence, or just that it's a prerequisite.
By the way, GEB is a great work that all slashdotters should read.
The philosophical concept of a higher intelligence should not be conflated with the term "god".
Correct, and here's the problem with your arguments: it's not. All the things you say are correct, except for the unspoken axiom that all people who believe in god use the same definition as you do. I also do not believe in any gods that don't meet my criteria for what a god must or must not be (which align pretty well with yours I must say), but I do believe in a God.
If I am wrong, then I am sacrificing my eternal soul for the good of all mankind. If I am wrong, I have become more generous than Jesus or the God of Abraham even dares become.
It's also possible that you're wrong and not sacrificing your soul. One of the funny things about the God I believe in is that He appreciates self-sacrifice for the good of others. It's kind of His thing.
Very, very well said. I see religion as a set of beliefs about the supernatural. These beliefs may or may not be true. Religious institutions are just groups of people who profess to hold the same set of beliefs, but are subject to all the usual trappings of human institutions and power structures.
I believe in my religious for the same reason I believe in gravity: the theories explain observed phenomena. If I ever observe something that is incompatible with my religious belief, I'll have to reexamine my beliefs in light of the evidence.
It is true that many religious people are also superstitious, and my religion actively combats this, but it's human nature to be superstitious, and people will be people.
Just to add one data point, I and my siblings were homeschooled by deeply religious Republican parents, and we were taught that evolution was the prevailing scientific theory and the best explanation for the observable fossil record. Some of our textbooks had a creationist bent, and we were directed not to give credence to that aspect of them.
We were warned to be skeptical of people that were trying to use evolutionary theory to "disprove" some religious tenets, and also that literal 6-day creationist interpretations of Genesis were wrong.
This is just to say that conservative religious homeschooling != anti-science. At least not in my experience nor that of my homeschooled friends.
FUCK! China landed a probe on the moon. Dammit we haven't done a damm thing in ages.
Good for China. Now how many probes do they have on Mars? We just landed, what, our 4th rover?
CHINA. you know those guys who make all our cheap plastic walmart crap... is now kicking our asses in space.
Let me know when China lands men on the moon, or anything on Mars. Personally, I'm also super impressed with the Cassini mission. Did you know that Titan has lakes?
I didn't see anyone else mention it, but there's a decent low-budget sci-fi movie about the first manned mission to Europa where they're looking for life under the ice: Europa Report. I thought it was quite good.
My favorite argument on that list was over the issue of whether the article Exploding Whale should contain the phrase "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds."
Well, you know what they say... It's all fun and games until someone grows an extra eye.
Yup. Sheesh, I even proofread it.
that should be "multiple tasks in progress"
Well, there's this one, but by "multitasking" one generally means "switching between multiple tasks is progress" rather than "simultaneous attention to different tasks," and the study indicates women may be better at the former.
What really gets me is this part, quoted from a neuroscientist:
We know that there is no such thing as 'hard wiring' when it comes to brain connections. Connections can change throughout life, in response to experience and learning.
So the brain connections men and women develop from their experiences happen to reflect the roles we tend to nudge men and women into.
Hmmm.
It can be both, and it wouldn't surprise me if genetics and environment both play a significant factor in this type of neural development. There may even be environmental feedback that amplifies the genetic tendencies. Divides in STEM etc. may be partially due to genetics as well as other factors.
Just to be pedantic: the wiring is not science; our understanding of it is. So the GP's point is that science (in general an ordered body of knowledge, in this case empirical and deduced knowledge about the physical world) comes to reflect some aspect of society present for millenia.
Which is not of course to make a moral argument, just [paraphrasing] an observation that society has been traditionally structured in a way that utilizes the biological strengths of the sexes. Which I'm sure will not be a controversial statement at all.
Doesn't the same rule apply (only more so) for FWD? If your rear wheels start to slip and you step on the gas, you transition weight off the front wheels, while simultaneously increasing the torque on them, making it more likely they'll spin? Honest question, I've never really pushed a FWD car on a track before, partly because their handling is just counter-intuitive to me.
If you're spinning out, it's because the rear tires lose traction when the front wheels still have it. If you shift weight off the front wheels, it has to go to the rear wheels, which although they may be sliding along the lateral axis, are not sliding along the direction of travel. Since they're rotating, adding weight (force) may cause them to cease sliding laterally since the friction will increase.
So yes, you're correct that the front wheels will start to slip. If you're cornering near the limit at a constant speed, adding throttle will cause your line through the corner to widen. Lifting the throttle will tighten it up.
Contrast this behavior with a RWD car, where if the rear tires are sliding laterally, adding throttle may cause them to slide in the direction of travel as well, completely breaking traction; while lifting the throttle may reduce the force on the tire in the direction of travel, allowing it to regain traction as it rotates. Lifting too much, however, can cause the drag of the engine and drivetrain to exert too much force in the other direction, causing "lift-throttle oversteer."
This means RWD cars potentially can exit a corner faster, because the weight transfer can add traction to the drive wheels, but too much causes a spin. In a FWD car, the weight transfer away from the drive wheels means too much throttle leads to oversteer. Safer, but potentially slower.
Racing FWD cars is fun, and probably demands less skill than RWD cars. The proper reaction to a spin is reversed, and catches a lot of people off guard. I think after 9 races I'm finally getting it.
Besides the Carrera GT is an iconic car and should be kept on a pedestal and not driven on the edge on the roads.
No! Sacrilege! Supercars are made for driving! The should be driven to the track (safely), thrashed/hooned/enjoyed, and then driven home (safely).
The car is only unforgiving when trying to drive it at the limit. When driving under normal street conditions, it's perfectly safe. Cars in this category are designed with performance driving in mind, with the assumption being that if you want to experience the full potential of the car, you'll take it someplace where it's appropriate to do so, such as a racetrack. Unlike pure "track cars," though, they also include the features required to be safe and comfortable for road use.
If you read the linked articles, the reviewers actually indicate the car is actually very easy to control under normal driving, only when you're trying to push it does it become a challenging car to control.
Exactly. I race a Festiva (don't laugh (okay, go ahead and laugh)), and like all performance cars you use the throttle to change the car's behavior in the corners, by transferring weight front to rear like you describe. The biggest difference between the Festiva and the Carrera GT (besides about 500 HP) is that the Festiva is front-wheel drive, so if the back end gets loose you stomp on the gas, which adds rear grip and pulls the car in the direction the front wheels are pointing.
If you're cornering a RWD car at the limit, and the back end starts to get loose, adding throttle may just hasten the spin. And in high-performance lightweight cars like the Carrera GT, things like this happen very suddenly. High performance tires also tend to transition from gripping to sliding much more quickly.
The rule of thumb is that getting the most out of a high performance car requires driving it right up to the limit of its capabilities. But obviously this should only be done in an appropriate venue, such as a racetrack.
Porsche's first car with Porsche Stability Management was the 911 Carrera 4 in 1998. And car electronics were quite good in 2004. I think the Carrera GT is like the Dodge Viper - designed to be a driver's car that takes skill to drive competently at the edge, contrasted with the Nissan GTR (yes I know it came later), in which the electronics take care of that for you.
The key is that the Carrera GT on public roads at legal speeds will be far safer than most cars, because of its far superior handling, grip, and brakes.
Follow-up: the caveat in the above is that you're sitting at the same distance. The recommended distance for TVs is twice the diagonal, which would be about 3 feet for the 19" and 6 for the 39", which would again halve the angular pixel pitch. I don't think someone using this as a monitor would be that far away, however.
I think he's referring to pixel density, which he probably assumed (as did I) would be so fine you wouldn't notice the increase. However, after actually calculating it, here's a comparison:
1280x1024, 19": 86.27 px/in
1920x1080, 24": 91.79 px/in
3840x2160, 39": 112.97 px/in
Which is only 23% finer than the 24" HD monitor, and 31% finer than the uber-common 5:4 19" LCD. So I think you'd notice an improvement, and with proper DPI adjustment would be quite nice.
But we need the deep-pocketed early-adopting suckers to offset R&D costs as much as possible so the prices come down for us average Joes when the content is actually widely available!
The problem with this is that the CTA already operates at a loss, based purely on revenue from fares. City sales taxes in Chicago are already very high (>11%), and the state of Illinois subsidizes part of CTA's operating cost.
According to Wiki, the CTA provided 620.5 million rides in 2011. At an average of roughly $2/ride, free rides would mean over a billion dollars in fares not collected. Illinois' budget shortfall is currently about $1 billion, and the state is currently $6 billion in debt.
So where's the money going to come from? The CTA's proposed budget for 2014 is $1.4 billion, but critics point out that relying on state funding isn't a good idea. Tax increases are never popular, and $1.4B works out to roughly $140 per capita in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.
Yes. I haven't seen a survey, but for the majority of riders I'd say the Ventra card offers no notable benefit over the old Chicago Card Plus. For me it's the same - a pre-loaded transit benefit card that comes out of my pre-tax paycheck - except that the card readers are WAY less reliable.
The theoretical advantages are it's usable on PACE, as someone else mentioned, plus the played-up-aspect that you can treat it like a preloaded debit card and use it in taxis as well. You know, because having two cards (Chicago Card + credit card) was so onerous before.
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but I'd assume the city gets a cut of all the debit transactions made with the card, and that this was a large part of the reason to have it installed. This is the same city that sold 75 years of parking meter rights and spent the money from the sale in the first year to cover budget shortfalls.
...(been collecting CD's for the last 3 decades...
But CDs haven't even been around for 3... Oh... I feel old.
Seems like a good place for my favorite joke:
An Astronomer, a Physicist, and an Mathematician have traveled to England for the first time to attend a conference and are riding a train through the countryside. Before long they pass a field with a single black sheep in it. The Astronomer says, "well look at that, in England, the sheep are black." The Physicist rebukes him, saying, "how can you make such a broad statement? All we know is that in THIS field, the sheep are black." The Mathematician shakes his head in scorn at both of them and says, "gentlemen, you are both making overly general assumptions. All we can says for certain is that in England there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."