But isn't this point? As the ability for machines to impersonate humans improves, they will become progressively more indistinguishable. Thus, judges will move their goalposts and the number of false negatives (humans erroneously considered to be machines) will increase. The fact that this is happening is an indicator that machines that can pass the Turing test are slowly starting to mature.
But I guess we as human beings still have minds from 50,000 years ago and we want to see a leader to our tribe. The concept of shared leadership is brilliant, but too advanced for our stone-age brains.
I think the evolutionary psychology line is going too far. I don't think anyone is suggesting that losing the president will make us all leaderless and lost. Instead, that losing the president is a substantial blow that's best avoided. The reason for this is that the "shared leaders" you describe do not have equal seniority. So if you lose the top one, you still require a reshuffle and there will still be disruption. Further, the president is the figurehead of the nation and it is a blow to morale if he is taken out. For similar reasons, there was a big security boost around the statue of liberty following 9/11. Symbols matter, that's all.
The point spread function of a 2 photon microscope is about 3 microns in the axial direction for 900 nm light. So it could plausibly be 1/3 here because they're using UV. I suspected they indeed created the blurrier looking figurines toward the bottom of the page with the rest being being representations of what the figurine would look like on other objects. Yes, it would be visible with a light microscope, since it was created with a light microscope.
The interesting thing is that this isn't currently possible even with the worm. Yes, we know the circuit diagram, but we can't actually use it to produce simulations that behave like a worm.
Here's a nice page on the two photon effect, which explains how the resolution was achieved. Two-photon imaging has been used for some time in the life sciences to achieve super-thin optical sectioning.
Stop being offended. In China it's not remembrance day. They just like 11/11 because of the symmetry and because they're superstitious. There was chaos in 2011, because that was an even more awesome date.
Check out the backyardbrains website. They provide materials for doing this sort of thing at home as part of an educational kit. I'm not affiliated with them in any way.
Every neuron isn't independent of the rest. A neuron is node in a network and its output depends very heavily on its inputs, which are from other neurons. Thus it's not independent. Nearby neurons involved in similar tasks often share the same noise, indicating that they are very tightly coupled (either because they share inputs or because they are connected).
I think we've reached the stage some time ago where the term "life" has outlived its usefulness. It seems it's no longer helpful to attempt to classify stuff as alive or not alive. We know what viruses and prions are and how they operate. So we know what's important. Deciding whether or not they're alive is just semantics and you can tie yourself in knots that way pretty quickly. You ask if a prion is form of life, for instance. Well, it's just protein so insulin also to be considered a form of life? Prions just form aggregates--they self-assemble. So can we consider anything that does that alive? Salt crystals? What about saying that stuff that maintains its environment is a alive? So is a buffer solution alive?
Indeed. I've just returned to Europe following a 6 year stint in the US. There were a lot of things I really liked about America, but what I won't miss is watching the news, seeing how increasingly fucked up and dysfunctional is the whole political system, and hearing the meaning of the word "freedom" being twisted out of all recognition. It's all together rather depressing.
In my experience, a lot of the best talks I see are the ones with the most simple slides (e.g. little text and little distracting material). Speakers who pull this off are generally the ones who know their shit and are good at conveying it. Talks with too much text, too many images on one slide, or too many effects (ahem) are less likely to be good. These really over-the-top presentations are like excalamation marks after the punchline of jokes. If what you have to say isn't interesting then you won't make it so by embelishing it with irrelevent crap. For this reason I have not motivation whatsoever to invest time in making flashy presentations.
Glaciers being responsible for carving geological features is another one. This was widely ridiculed when first proposed. I don't think relativity was ever ridiculed and it was accepted pretty quickly. In fact, Eddington's early results were quite equivocal but the theory was accepted by consensus nonetheless. Cosmology is the name of a whole field, so it doesn't really fit on your list. It's like asking how long it took for "biology" to be accepted by the scientific community.
I don't personally give a shit what the pope thinks. However, it's clear that millions of other people very much do give a shit. In this instance, the pope is obviously trying to discourage creationism and reduce the friction between science and religion. At least some creationists are likely to listen to the pope and accept what he's saying, in a way that they wouldn't listen to scientists. So I don't see this as the pope giving his seal if approval to the theories in question. Instead, he's giving his seal of approval for catholics to accept the theories. Given that the religion isn't going away any time soon, I consider this to be of value.
The presence or absence of semi-colons is not really an important factor in choosing a language. Yes, there's shitty MATLAB code out there by self-taught people. But if those people were self-taught in Python, then they'd be producing shitty Pyhton code instead. You can't judge a language by the code quality of its inexperienced users. You can write crap in anything.
I've work with both MATLAB and Python and I see MATLAB has having various advantages. It has excellent syntax for matrix manipulations--much nicer than numpy. It has huge collection of highly optmised functions that generally work very quickly. I do a lot of image processing and when I ported my MATLAB code to Python it generally ran much slower. I spent ages on Googling and talking to people in forums. I couldn't get it to run faster. In MATLAB it just worked quickly with no extra effort on my part.
With MATLAB you get a huge collection of algorithms at your fingertips. They're generally very well tested and the syntax is consistent throughout. The documentation is excellent, too. Python, on the other hand, is a network of libraries which often have rather different syntax to each other. It's common for version updates to lead to regressions.
R has great syntax for a stats package. For a programming language it's an awful mess. I always find myself having to look stuff up, because every library does things differently.
People don't listen to that preflight announcement stuff because they've heard it a hundred times before. People who've flown even a couple of times before don't need to listen.
That may not be true, actually. I've got a skydiving licence and I can tell you that the beginner training depends absolutely on mindless repetition. All you have to do on your first two or three jumps is arch your back and pull the cord at 5,000 feet. There are two people there with you. It really only takes about ten or twenty minutes to understand what's required and practice it a few times. However, that's not going to cut it. When you're in a very high stress situation you no longer think normally and instead enter a semi-conscious autopilot mode where you react instinctively. I had no idea what happened during my first few jumps, for instance, virtually no recollection. The only reason I did what I was meant to do was because I'd practised it many, many, times (for two days) that it just happened without me thinking.
Based on my skydiving experience, I often wonder how much people really take in when they watch the in-flight safety stuff. I wonder how effective it is to merely watch what your supposed to do as opposed to practising it. Of course the latter is impractical so we're stuck with the former.
Whilst I agree with you in principle, "half a billion years" is not a unit of mass and most plants and trees that have existed didn't turn into coal. I'm not being pedantic, the way your post is written emotively implies that a substantial proportion of all the plant biomass that has existed was locked up as coal. This isn't true. The fossil fuel carbon pool is only about twice the size of the terrestrial biosphere, which re-circulates comparatively quickly. Thus, the carbon from most ancient plants got recirculated and didn't get locked up as coal. In fact, both fossil fuel and biosphere carbon pools are dwarfed in size by the carbon pool present in limestone (so fossilised marine organisms), there's also a vast store in the oceans. Look up the carbon cycle on the Wikipedia.
Some PDF of a website isn't really good enough. When it's peer reviewed by a major journal and repeated, then I might be interested. Until then I don't believe a word.
You could say that about most car crashes too. People don't set out to have accidents, particularly nurses who know the risks of the disease they're working with. Accidents happen, though. If they can happen so easily, then it may be hubris to say that Ebola can easily be contained if it spreads to the West. It may be harder than we think.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the whole point of SPSS was that you didn't have to think?
But isn't this point? As the ability for machines to impersonate humans improves, they will become progressively more indistinguishable. Thus, judges will move their goalposts and the number of false negatives (humans erroneously considered to be machines) will increase. The fact that this is happening is an indicator that machines that can pass the Turing test are slowly starting to mature.
But I guess we as human beings still have minds from 50,000 years ago and we want to see a leader to our tribe. The concept of shared leadership is brilliant, but too advanced for our stone-age brains.
I think the evolutionary psychology line is going too far. I don't think anyone is suggesting that losing the president will make us all leaderless and lost. Instead, that losing the president is a substantial blow that's best avoided. The reason for this is that the "shared leaders" you describe do not have equal seniority. So if you lose the top one, you still require a reshuffle and there will still be disruption. Further, the president is the figurehead of the nation and it is a blow to morale if he is taken out. For similar reasons, there was a big security boost around the statue of liberty following 9/11. Symbols matter, that's all.
The point spread function of a 2 photon microscope is about 3 microns in the axial direction for 900 nm light. So it could plausibly be 1/3 here because they're using UV. I suspected they indeed created the blurrier looking figurines toward the bottom of the page with the rest being being representations of what the figurine would look like on other objects. Yes, it would be visible with a light microscope, since it was created with a light microscope.
The interesting thing is that this isn't currently possible even with the worm. Yes, we know the circuit diagram, but we can't actually use it to produce simulations that behave like a worm.
Here's a nice page on the two photon effect, which explains how the resolution was achieved. Two-photon imaging has been used for some time in the life sciences to achieve super-thin optical sectioning.
Here's the paper: http://expirebox.com/download/...
Stop being offended. In China it's not remembrance day. They just like 11/11 because of the symmetry and because they're superstitious. There was chaos in 2011, because that was an even more awesome date.
Check out the backyardbrains website. They provide materials for doing this sort of thing at home as part of an educational kit. I'm not affiliated with them in any way.
It doesn't because phrenology is made-up pseudo-science.
Every neuron isn't independent of the rest. A neuron is node in a network and its output depends very heavily on its inputs, which are from other neurons. Thus it's not independent. Nearby neurons involved in similar tasks often share the same noise, indicating that they are very tightly coupled (either because they share inputs or because they are connected).
I think we've reached the stage some time ago where the term "life" has outlived its usefulness. It seems it's no longer helpful to attempt to classify stuff as alive or not alive. We know what viruses and prions are and how they operate. So we know what's important. Deciding whether or not they're alive is just semantics and you can tie yourself in knots that way pretty quickly. You ask if a prion is form of life, for instance. Well, it's just protein so insulin also to be considered a form of life? Prions just form aggregates--they self-assemble. So can we consider anything that does that alive? Salt crystals? What about saying that stuff that maintains its environment is a alive? So is a buffer solution alive?
Indeed. I've just returned to Europe following a 6 year stint in the US. There were a lot of things I really liked about America, but what I won't miss is watching the news, seeing how increasingly fucked up and dysfunctional is the whole political system, and hearing the meaning of the word "freedom" being twisted out of all recognition. It's all together rather depressing.
In my experience, a lot of the best talks I see are the ones with the most simple slides (e.g. little text and little distracting material). Speakers who pull this off are generally the ones who know their shit and are good at conveying it. Talks with too much text, too many images on one slide, or too many effects (ahem) are less likely to be good. These really over-the-top presentations are like excalamation marks after the punchline of jokes. If what you have to say isn't interesting then you won't make it so by embelishing it with irrelevent crap. For this reason I have not motivation whatsoever to invest time in making flashy presentations.
Glaciers being responsible for carving geological features is another one. This was widely ridiculed when first proposed. I don't think relativity was ever ridiculed and it was accepted pretty quickly. In fact, Eddington's early results were quite equivocal but the theory was accepted by consensus nonetheless. Cosmology is the name of a whole field, so it doesn't really fit on your list. It's like asking how long it took for "biology" to be accepted by the scientific community.
I don't personally give a shit what the pope thinks. However, it's clear that millions of other people very much do give a shit. In this instance, the pope is obviously trying to discourage creationism and reduce the friction between science and religion. At least some creationists are likely to listen to the pope and accept what he's saying, in a way that they wouldn't listen to scientists. So I don't see this as the pope giving his seal if approval to the theories in question. Instead, he's giving his seal of approval for catholics to accept the theories. Given that the religion isn't going away any time soon, I consider this to be of value.
The presence or absence of semi-colons is not really an important factor in choosing a language. Yes, there's shitty MATLAB code out there by self-taught people. But if those people were self-taught in Python, then they'd be producing shitty Pyhton code instead. You can't judge a language by the code quality of its inexperienced users. You can write crap in anything.
I've work with both MATLAB and Python and I see MATLAB has having various advantages. It has excellent syntax for matrix manipulations--much nicer than numpy. It has huge collection of highly optmised functions that generally work very quickly. I do a lot of image processing and when I ported my MATLAB code to Python it generally ran much slower. I spent ages on Googling and talking to people in forums. I couldn't get it to run faster. In MATLAB it just worked quickly with no extra effort on my part.
With MATLAB you get a huge collection of algorithms at your fingertips. They're generally very well tested and the syntax is consistent throughout. The documentation is excellent, too. Python, on the other hand, is a network of libraries which often have rather different syntax to each other. It's common for version updates to lead to regressions.
R has great syntax for a stats package. For a programming language it's an awful mess. I always find myself having to look stuff up, because every library does things differently.
I had the opposite experience, unfortunately. I found it much easier to write fast linear algebra stuff in MATLAB than in Python.
This doesn't deactivate the slider animation in the K menu or the slow opening of the top-right corner plasma widget.
I think I see a flaw in your plan...
People don't listen to that preflight announcement stuff because they've heard it a hundred times before. People who've flown even a couple of times before don't need to listen.
That may not be true, actually. I've got a skydiving licence and I can tell you that the beginner training depends absolutely on mindless repetition. All you have to do on your first two or three jumps is arch your back and pull the cord at 5,000 feet. There are two people there with you. It really only takes about ten or twenty minutes to understand what's required and practice it a few times. However, that's not going to cut it. When you're in a very high stress situation you no longer think normally and instead enter a semi-conscious autopilot mode where you react instinctively. I had no idea what happened during my first few jumps, for instance, virtually no recollection. The only reason I did what I was meant to do was because I'd practised it many, many, times (for two days) that it just happened without me thinking.
Based on my skydiving experience, I often wonder how much people really take in when they watch the in-flight safety stuff. I wonder how effective it is to merely watch what your supposed to do as opposed to practising it. Of course the latter is impractical so we're stuck with the former.
Whilst I agree with you in principle, "half a billion years" is not a unit of mass and most plants and trees that have existed didn't turn into coal. I'm not being pedantic, the way your post is written emotively implies that a substantial proportion of all the plant biomass that has existed was locked up as coal. This isn't true. The fossil fuel carbon pool is only about twice the size of the terrestrial biosphere, which re-circulates comparatively quickly. Thus, the carbon from most ancient plants got recirculated and didn't get locked up as coal. In fact, both fossil fuel and biosphere carbon pools are dwarfed in size by the carbon pool present in limestone (so fossilised marine organisms), there's also a vast store in the oceans. Look up the carbon cycle on the Wikipedia.
Some PDF of a website isn't really good enough. When it's peer reviewed by a major journal and repeated, then I might be interested. Until then I don't believe a word.
Then, correct procedures weren't followed.
You could say that about most car crashes too. People don't set out to have accidents, particularly nurses who know the risks of the disease they're working with. Accidents happen, though. If they can happen so easily, then it may be hubris to say that Ebola can easily be contained if it spreads to the West. It may be harder than we think.