Maybe because I got into it near the end of last millennium, or because I was well enough grounded in fundamentals from assembler days, or because I was often dealing with dirty data, Perl plus the also less than perfect MySQL have enabled me to play in several unconnected spaces.
In 2012 I'd add the disclaimer as long as you don't treat CPAN too seriously. While there are indispensable gems there, way too often it either doesn't quite do what you need or alternatively, in attempting to do so, it invokes ridiculous dependency trees where quality control collapses.
I've long argued that the main thing propping up the artificially way too high US Dollar is its preferencing by extralegal entities since the normalisation of white collar "work" drove most of the American economy out of inherently tradeable production into devices which must be propped up by legal fictions to acquire monetary value.
While it isn't any area for reductionist analysis. I've long suspected that people who are surprisingly successful have some internal model which accounts for critical systems effects, though they would most likely rationalise it away if pressed. Mostly they will by like N.N. Taleb (Black Swan) in convincing themselves this is a theory-free zone. What it really is, like specialised examples from plate tectonics to biological evolution, is theory that makes sense of the world we find ourselves in with only the broadest statistical predictive capacity.
Systems are not about efficiency. They are about resilience. Cancer is efficient.
The swells and waves have got noticeably stronger over my 50 years holidaying on the Otway coast, so I would very much welcome anything that could take any energy out of them and make it more useful elsewhere.
Then I might get back to diving more than once or twice per summer, down from better than every second day in years gone by.
Wolfram pushes his principle of computational equivalence which says that anything you can find in one discrete system you can find in any other (which can be shown to emulate a universal Turing machine). His preference for 1D and Conway's, my and others' preference for 2D cellular automata for exploring some of that space is much more a statement about human visual perception. He actually suggests that a simple graph (formal math term for network of nodes and links) is a more likely candidate, but they are much harder to get your head (and your algorithms) around.
Personally I find his strong notion of computational equivalence only distracts from the need to find smarter exploration strategies in a space of boundless possibility, although it has some value as a "weak" principle analogous to the weak anthropic principle.
Wolfram's argument for exploring the space of discrete computations as a source of models richer and cheaper than continuum math needs wider endorsement. Much of the criticism is the inverse of a long recognised problem: shooting the message when you really want to shoot the messenger (and that only because you know the reputation rather than the person).
And your critique of totalising narratives has long been well understood in the postmodernist framework, but pomo too has been so badly misrepresented as to have hidden its useful contributions. It's not just the physicists who try to formulate the whole world in their terms. You should be much more afraid of the accountants and lawyers doing likewise without hint of oversight.
If Goedel was still around I'm sure he would like to say to Wolfram what he was too polite to say directly to Wittgenstein: that while the formalism project can be a handy tool in isolated circumstances that it must ultimately fail to account for the world we find ourselves in, because there are truths formalism cannot reach before they emerge unexpectedly from expanding chaos. He might even add that you could see that all in cellular automata if you looked with better tools in more likely places. So any lifeboat needs to try to be ready for anything, not just the expected.
With every carriage/set having its own drive power (as our V/Locity and I'm sure many others already do) and superseding driver cabins though use of remote (including onboard remote) sensing and control functions, or even fully automatic, you can have stopping services docking at the front and dropping off the back of an always moving train system.
This could even allow a return to the once very comfortable mode of separate cabins opening off the side of a long corridor rather than the current fashion of squeezing longitudinal access between open plan seats so that every passenger is disturbed by anyone walking past.
... and on and on. By then I'll surely have even more things to leave unfinished than I look like leaving now.
One good thing serious life expectancy increase might do is help us get over quarterly profits disease, but then again I'm always too optimistic. It might also make the choice clearer between getting off planet and cutting per capita resource wastage down here.
By the time anyone dies of age-related causes they are already quite a work of art, albeit of varying quality, and something is lost when they fail to leave dense traces of at least their best bits for posterity. Yet I bet, I'll still put more effort into observing than into recording. Can't wait for a Siri descendent that will be able to tease out our stories.
I'm not convinced there are any technical obstacles to getting to a point where life expectancy increases by more than a year per year, but have no expectation that I'll find myself on the right side of that curve, so finish up thinking more about technical systems for reincarnating, systems we are surely going to need to move beyond this solar system, no matter how long we can stretch our biological span.
no interaction with photons, and no frictional clumping
AFAIK this is one point not two as frictional clumping is mediated by photons, as at some point are all our observations. Not that I don't fully accept the evidence for dark matter, nor have any sympathy with DM deniers. From a history of science perspective, their kind have always been wrong.
Two arbitrary lines in a 2D plane will meet with probability 1.0. Two arbitrary lines in 3D space will meet with probability 0.0. (In each case, the exceptions are vanishingly few relative to the norm.)
Extrapolating this to expanding 3D bubbles in almost any higher dimensional space the probability is again 0.0. Even more obviously, there is nowhere for collisions to happen if those bubbles are each creating their own space, not infecting some pre-existing space. The latter would have way too many other observable consequences to be a serious proposal.
(I have played with enough simplistic models to be currently comfortable with a notion that the implosion of a Type 1a supernova might be a good model for a cosmic egg which gives rise to a chaotic larval stage in which such conservative bubbles arise. (The political metaphor is not lost either.))
I still cite Out of Control as the most readable introduction to the oft confused subject of complexity, and am right now wading through What Technology Wants but finding it far more forced (sleep inducing). While I clearly don't disagree with the idea of seeing technology as a partner with humanity, your newer book reads like you have invested too long in a world constructed from your imaginings and cut back your level of interest in looking at what is actually going on, an interest which seemed to pervade your earlier projects.
Yes, I am well past your rationalisation for abandoning "extropy", so what I really want to know is whether we are all going to be condemned to defend our business models to the death?
Greene's NYT op ed piece perpetuates the silly notion that photons will somehow stop in their tracks and start going backwards due to the accelerating expansion. No they won't, they will just be red shifted further and there will certainly continue to be some asymptotic limit to how far away the furthest galaxies were that we are seeing, but everything we can see now is in a sense in front of the CMB and the CMB will keep coming, no matter how cold it gets.
While it must remain outside the realm of direct observation, I'm more comfortable with the idea of the multiverse as the domain in which physics has evolved through cycles from those Type 1a supernova eggs through some inflating placenta to a next generation Big Bang than I am about any notion that physics is somehow simultaneously testing countless possible variations on its laws. Larger possibility spaces demand smarter exploration techniques.
(Disclaimer: I don't expect to see significant breakthroughs any time soon in the quest to identify a discrete "simple" mechanism at Planck scale or similar, but that hasn't stopped Wolfram and unconnected others treating the possibility seriously. The extremely limited experimental simulations possible on foreseeable computers don't show signs of ruling out the possibility, so the thoughts below are confined to such a model and treat field theories et al as emergent.)
If there is a hypothetical microstructure in the form of a simple graph (as formally defined) or similar which is continually involved in determining the next local state based on the current local state via some "simple" (enough) mechanism/rule/Wolfram "program", then it should be obvious to many of us with deep experience in computing that there is a major unaddressed clock synchronisation problem that must be solved in order to produce the observed consistency of time across regions which cannot share a time signal.
I've recently speculated that the CMB might have a role in this given that, under certain measurement assumptions, space is approximately filled with CMB photons, with their omnidirectional passage being sufficient to stimulate a natural resonance in the microstructure. Obviously the neutrino flux, or the combination of both, could be part of such a story. And that might make local variation in radioactive decay rates correlated with neutrino flux variations no more surprising than the variation in refractive index between various forms of (transparent) condensed matter.
At this stage it is all speculation, and fun, but certainly not anti-scientific.
I'm a dozen years down the same track, though was a lot less intentional when I got back on that horse. Twice, I swore I would never learn another programming language, initially liking the look of C but feeling past it already then looking at Forth and immediately swearing off reverse Polish. I could not have been more wrong. All it took was the right incentive.
Having privileged very early access to a LaserWriter with the tangible reward it provided of high resolution dots on a page very quickly had me at the leading edge of independent PostScript development, but that morphed into a business opportunity and I again moved on, though at least with any barrier to thinking about the previously, to me, obscure notion of graphical programming thoroughly erased. (There is an aside in there about GW Basic and the false hopes it gave me that VB might be the way to go with some legacy Fortran, providing my final disillusionment with anything M$.)
Having spent a decade getting paid more for words than for code, I found myself doing some CGI tweaking with Perl which I soon came to see in its c.1998 incarnation as being the ideal language for an ageing coder to return to. A young colleague's accelerated learning soon dragged me through Perl's object model and MySQL, but there I've been stuck for a decade, still waiting for Perl 6 and earning an ever-decreasing drip feed enhancing a system I designed long ago... largely through choice as I place other values on whatever productive time I have left.
An aside on SQL: once you accept that it really does very little, it becomes a handy way to deal with lots of stuff. Nowadays I spend as much time writing queries as I do writing Perl 5.
Given the chance to choose again today, I'd focus on JavaScript and keep waiting for Perl 6.
In grade five at a liberal protestant church school our class burnt maybe a dozen teachers over the year, some in as little as three days. At least a few of us went on to make significant contributions in fields requiring at least intellectual competence.
In the first ever year 12 class at a then new suburban state secondary school, our math teacher fell ill and was never properly replaced. Three of us pretty much took on the job of keeping the math classes going and between us got better personal results than we otherwise might have.
But more than once in more recent times I've had to try to help youngsters who had relevant aptitude try to recover from the disaster of an incompetent math teacher at the wrong moment of their education, not an easy task.
While, thankfully, everyone is different, I lean towards more concern that emerging social dynamics, amplified in the cities, are producing a challenge-challenged generation who might really need to keep our richer experiences within reach when we would rather be retiring.
I tried teaching for a while in my early 20s before escaping back to the early days of commercial computing. Years later, by chance, I found out that one of the senior masters had an eye for boys. As far as I know he never crossed the boundary in the school situation where he was recognised as both an outstanding teacher in his field and as the disciplinarian of junior students, back when such a role was still seen as necessary.
While Conway's Life has been studied to death for 40 years and some wider categories of simple rules have been studied exhaustively by others, Golly enables you to explore much wider rule sets in the quest of some that are significantly more productive that Life.
For the past 18 months I've been using it to study just one of the Generations rules which were initially surveyed, especially by Mirek Wojtowicz, around 2000. I'm focused almost entirely on Generations 345/3/6, running it on 3 machines including one added just for that purpose. But I've recently noted that 345/2/4 may be even more productive in terms of novel phenomena, although I'm not planning to switch my own research which is nowhere near finished, let alone properly reported.
Beyond that, Golly also supports RuleTable and RuleTree algorithms which allow you to try an unlimited number of new rules, a few more of which are sure to be a lot more interesting than LIfe itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because I got into it near the end of last millennium, or because I was well enough grounded in fundamentals from assembler days, or because I was often dealing with dirty data, Perl plus the also less than perfect MySQL have enabled me to play in several unconnected spaces.
In 2012 I'd add the disclaimer as long as you don't treat CPAN too seriously. While there are indispensable gems there, way too often it either doesn't quite do what you need or alternatively, in attempting to do so, it invokes ridiculous dependency trees where quality control collapses.
Still waiting for Perl 6.
David Zindell's Neverness and its follow up Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy, the first of which The Broken God is my all time favourite.
I've long argued that the main thing propping up the artificially way too high US Dollar is its preferencing by extralegal entities since the normalisation of white collar "work" drove most of the American economy out of inherently tradeable production into devices which must be propped up by legal fictions to acquire monetary value.
While it isn't any area for reductionist analysis. I've long suspected that people who are surprisingly successful have some internal model which accounts for critical systems effects, though they would most likely rationalise it away if pressed. Mostly they will by like N.N. Taleb (Black Swan) in convincing themselves this is a theory-free zone. What it really is, like specialised examples from plate tectonics to biological evolution, is theory that makes sense of the world we find ourselves in with only the broadest statistical predictive capacity.
Systems are not about efficiency. They are about resilience. Cancer is efficient.
The swells and waves have got noticeably stronger over my 50 years holidaying on the Otway coast, so I would very much welcome anything that could take any energy out of them and make it more useful elsewhere.
Then I might get back to diving more than once or twice per summer, down from better than every second day in years gone by.
Wolfram pushes his principle of computational equivalence which says that anything you can find in one discrete system you can find in any other (which can be shown to emulate a universal Turing machine). His preference for 1D and Conway's, my and others' preference for 2D cellular automata for exploring some of that space is much more a statement about human visual perception. He actually suggests that a simple graph (formal math term for network of nodes and links) is a more likely candidate, but they are much harder to get your head (and your algorithms) around.
Personally I find his strong notion of computational equivalence only distracts from the need to find smarter exploration strategies in a space of boundless possibility, although it has some value as a "weak" principle analogous to the weak anthropic principle.
Wolfram's argument for exploring the space of discrete computations as a source of models richer and cheaper than continuum math needs wider endorsement. Much of the criticism is the inverse of a long recognised problem: shooting the message when you really want to shoot the messenger (and that only because you know the reputation rather than the person).
And your critique of totalising narratives has long been well understood in the postmodernist framework, but pomo too has been so badly misrepresented as to have hidden its useful contributions. It's not just the physicists who try to formulate the whole world in their terms. You should be much more afraid of the accountants and lawyers doing likewise without hint of oversight.
If Goedel was still around I'm sure he would like to say to Wolfram what he was too polite to say directly to Wittgenstein: that while the formalism project can be a handy tool in isolated circumstances that it must ultimately fail to account for the world we find ourselves in, because there are truths formalism cannot reach before they emerge unexpectedly from expanding chaos. He might even add that you could see that all in cellular automata if you looked with better tools in more likely places. So any lifeboat needs to try to be ready for anything, not just the expected.
Yeah, I too would like to believe, but the track record is abysmal and getting worse.
There is a cigarette paper between rationality and rationalisation.
They even made a movie about the case Larry Flint won, but nobody else has his courage.
With every carriage/set having its own drive power (as our V/Locity and I'm sure many others already do) and superseding driver cabins though use of remote (including onboard remote) sensing and control functions, or even fully automatic, you can have stopping services docking at the front and dropping off the back of an always moving train system.
This could even allow a return to the once very comfortable mode of separate cabins opening off the side of a long corridor rather than the current fashion of squeezing longitudinal access between open plan seats so that every passenger is disturbed by anyone walking past.
... and on and on. By then I'll surely have even more things to leave unfinished than I look like leaving now.
One good thing serious life expectancy increase might do is help us get over quarterly profits disease, but then again I'm always too optimistic. It might also make the choice clearer between getting off planet and cutting per capita resource wastage down here.
By the time anyone dies of age-related causes they are already quite a work of art, albeit of varying quality, and something is lost when they fail to leave dense traces of at least their best bits for posterity. Yet I bet, I'll still put more effort into observing than into recording. Can't wait for a Siri descendent that will be able to tease out our stories.
I'm not convinced there are any technical obstacles to getting to a point where life expectancy increases by more than a year per year, but have no expectation that I'll find myself on the right side of that curve, so finish up thinking more about technical systems for reincarnating, systems we are surely going to need to move beyond this solar system, no matter how long we can stretch our biological span.
no interaction with photons, and no frictional clumping
AFAIK this is one point not two as frictional clumping is mediated by photons, as at some point are all our observations. Not that I don't fully accept the evidence for dark matter, nor have any sympathy with DM deniers. From a history of science perspective, their kind have always been wrong.
Two arbitrary lines in a 2D plane will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary lines in 3D space will meet with probability 0.0.
(In each case, the exceptions are vanishingly few relative to the norm.)
Extrapolating this to expanding 3D bubbles in almost any higher dimensional space the probability is again 0.0. Even more obviously, there is nowhere for collisions to happen if those bubbles are each creating their own space, not infecting some pre-existing space. The latter would have way too many other observable consequences to be a serious proposal.
(I have played with enough simplistic models to be currently comfortable with a notion that the implosion of a Type 1a supernova might be a good model for a cosmic egg which gives rise to a chaotic larval stage in which such conservative bubbles arise. (The political metaphor is not lost either.))
I still cite Out of Control as the most readable introduction to the oft confused subject of complexity, and am right now wading through What Technology Wants but finding it far more forced (sleep inducing). While I clearly don't disagree with the idea of seeing technology as a partner with humanity, your newer book reads like you have invested too long in a world constructed from your imaginings and cut back your level of interest in looking at what is actually going on, an interest which seemed to pervade your earlier projects.
Yes, I am well past your rationalisation for abandoning "extropy", so what I really want to know is whether we are all going to be condemned to defend our business models to the death?
Greene's NYT op ed piece perpetuates the silly notion that photons will somehow stop in their tracks and start going backwards due to the accelerating expansion. No they won't, they will just be red shifted further and there will certainly continue to be some asymptotic limit to how far away the furthest galaxies were that we are seeing, but everything we can see now is in a sense in front of the CMB and the CMB will keep coming, no matter how cold it gets.
While it must remain outside the realm of direct observation, I'm more comfortable with the idea of the multiverse as the domain in which physics has evolved through cycles from those Type 1a supernova eggs through some inflating placenta to a next generation Big Bang than I am about any notion that physics is somehow simultaneously testing countless possible variations on its laws. Larger possibility spaces demand smarter exploration techniques.
(Disclaimer: I don't expect to see significant breakthroughs any time soon in the quest to identify a discrete "simple" mechanism at Planck scale or similar, but that hasn't stopped Wolfram and unconnected others treating the possibility seriously. The extremely limited experimental simulations possible on foreseeable computers don't show signs of ruling out the possibility, so the thoughts below are confined to such a model and treat field theories et al as emergent.)
If there is a hypothetical microstructure in the form of a simple graph (as formally defined) or similar which is continually involved in determining the next local state based on the current local state via some "simple" (enough) mechanism/rule/Wolfram "program", then it should be obvious to many of us with deep experience in computing that there is a major unaddressed clock synchronisation problem that must be solved in order to produce the observed consistency of time across regions which cannot share a time signal.
I've recently speculated that the CMB might have a role in this given that, under certain measurement assumptions, space is approximately filled with CMB photons, with their omnidirectional passage being sufficient to stimulate a natural resonance in the microstructure. Obviously the neutrino flux, or the combination of both, could be part of such a story. And that might make local variation in radioactive decay rates correlated with neutrino flux variations no more surprising than the variation in refractive index between various forms of (transparent) condensed matter.
At this stage it is all speculation, and fun, but certainly not anti-scientific.
I'm a dozen years down the same track, though was a lot less intentional when I got back on that horse. Twice, I swore I would never learn another programming language, initially liking the look of C but feeling past it already then looking at Forth and immediately swearing off reverse Polish. I could not have been more wrong. All it took was the right incentive.
Having privileged very early access to a LaserWriter with the tangible reward it provided of high resolution dots on a page very quickly had me at the leading edge of independent PostScript development, but that morphed into a business opportunity and I again moved on, though at least with any barrier to thinking about the previously, to me, obscure notion of graphical programming thoroughly erased. (There is an aside in there about GW Basic and the false hopes it gave me that VB might be the way to go with some legacy Fortran, providing my final disillusionment with anything M$.)
Having spent a decade getting paid more for words than for code, I found myself doing some CGI tweaking with Perl which I soon came to see in its c.1998 incarnation as being the ideal language for an ageing coder to return to. A young colleague's accelerated learning soon dragged me through Perl's object model and MySQL, but there I've been stuck for a decade, still waiting for Perl 6 and earning an ever-decreasing drip feed enhancing a system I designed long ago ... largely through choice as I place other values on whatever productive time I have left.
An aside on SQL: once you accept that it really does very little, it becomes a handy way to deal with lots of stuff. Nowadays I spend as much time writing queries as I do writing Perl 5.
Given the chance to choose again today, I'd focus on JavaScript and keep waiting for Perl 6.
In grade five at a liberal protestant church school our class burnt maybe a dozen teachers over the year, some in as little as three days. At least a few of us went on to make significant contributions in fields requiring at least intellectual competence.
In the first ever year 12 class at a then new suburban state secondary school, our math teacher fell ill and was never properly replaced. Three of us pretty much took on the job of keeping the math classes going and between us got better personal results than we otherwise might have.
But more than once in more recent times I've had to try to help youngsters who had relevant aptitude try to recover from the disaster of an incompetent math teacher at the wrong moment of their education, not an easy task.
While, thankfully, everyone is different, I lean towards more concern that emerging social dynamics, amplified in the cities, are producing a challenge-challenged generation who might really need to keep our richer experiences within reach when we would rather be retiring.
I tried teaching for a while in my early 20s before escaping back to the early days of commercial computing. Years later, by chance, I found out that one of the senior masters had an eye for boys. As far as I know he never crossed the boundary in the school situation where he was recognised as both an outstanding teacher in his field and as the disciplinarian of junior students, back when such a role was still seen as necessary.
As I posted moments ago on my own site, Google is now exceeding M$/IBM/GE/GM/Standard Oil/The East India Co at their worst.
Apple remains Apple. Comparing the two is like calling atheism a religion ... a category error.
You should sign up with put Conroy last.
Mind you with 98%+ voting above the line, that will be quite a struggle.
Never has anything more inappropriate been said by accident.
(Julia has been attacked by a notorious opposition ratbag for being childless by choice.)
... we could give Big Bad Bazza a spare ounce of Julia's self-control and acceptance of responsibility.
Though I'm still gonna put Conroy last.
While Conway's Life has been studied to death for 40 years and some wider categories of simple rules have been studied exhaustively by others, Golly enables you to explore much wider rule sets in the quest of some that are significantly more productive that Life.
For the past 18 months I've been using it to study just one of the Generations rules which were initially surveyed, especially by Mirek Wojtowicz, around 2000. I'm focused almost entirely on Generations 345/3/6, running it on 3 machines including one added just for that purpose. But I've recently noted that 345/2/4 may be even more productive in terms of novel phenomena, although I'm not planning to switch my own research which is nowhere near finished, let alone properly reported.
Beyond that, Golly also supports RuleTable and RuleTree algorithms which allow you to try an unlimited number of new rules, a few more of which are sure to be a lot more interesting than LIfe itself.
That explains it. Those of us who care about design are always working hard to pay our Apple tax.