If we are going to keep getting grants (and, God willing, venture capital someday)
Exactly! The nanotech lobby are Foremost into lifestyle continuity. Of course the reason we have prosperity and high employment is because such tactics work, whether it be for AI or plaintiff lawyers. You don't have to achieve anything like what you promise to achieve, just so long as you have another story to spin tomorrow.
But I'd still be careful about using "impossible", even if a few more are starting to realise that replicators are unlikely to provide a viable path forward, I still wouldn't be betting that we don't finish up with some strongly transformative nanotechnologies by 2050 or 2100.
It's just that our growing addiction to money and growth demands incredulous rationales to keep the pot boiling, so we talk about applications before we have demonstrated a working technology... a bit like asking Turing or von Neumann to predict the applications we would eventually find for computers.
If I had moderator points that would definitely have got an "informative" but I guess there are a couple of points I can add to justify a response.
Firstly, it is rather sad that such a basic yet interesting fact as this angular momentum transfer seems to be completely missing from the standard education curriculum.
Secondly, I've been trying to get to first base in compiling some data on the energy storage and rate of use in major planet-wide systems (down to, say, the gravitational potential of elevated water and ice stores) but am stuggling to find clear data.
Even in such an obvious area as total solar radiation the ratio between what the Sun is claimed to radiate (386 billion billion megawatts) and what the Earth is claimed to receive (4.4 x 1016 watts) seems to fly in the face of simple geometry which seems to me should have the earth intercepting one part in 1.1 billion of the Sun's radiation.
Digging for data on other energy systems, there is a total mess of approaches and even units used by different specialties that are going to make even a basic comparison table hard work to draw together, unless of course I am willing to become a "Creation Scientist".
Just scanned the index for the first time since this was the top article and saw underneath:
( Read More... | 666 comments | Apple )
Definitely needed that laugh.
Having managed to stash away a few ancient Macs last week which I grabbed for archive retrieval purposes, I would have thought there was precious little evidence of evolution in the Mac lineage... at best punctuated equilibrium, but sometimes verging on mass extinction.
But if there is a prize, I could imagine worse than a new desk lamp.
That really is the point
on
Rare Earth
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· Score: 1
we still got by for 4 billion years without (human) intelligence
Being inclined to pedantry in this area, I would note that the simplest goal being identified for Rare Earth, the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox is radio communication, and that that is a lot narrower goal than just intelligence.
As many have noted, life itself isn't hard, but from there to the Cambrian explosion and the chordates, arthropods and molluscs the Cambrian eventually left us with took 80% of life's history on earth and seemingly the snowball crisis. After the explosion, it didn't take near as long for the range of multicellular life to reach something like today's levels.
The real problem that our anthropocentic perspective keeps hiding is that despite the amazing achievements of millions of animal species in the past couple of hundred million years, only homo sapiens sapiens crossed one particularly significant threshold starting us down a track towards planetary domination, and that less than 100,000 years ago.
To me one really weird thing is that we aspire to communicate with others who have reached a similar pinnacle elsewhere while we haven't managed to get to first base with respect to communication with orcas, elephants or corellas all of whom have useful knowledge and intelligence we aren't smart enough to be able to share.
Right now science doesn't have good explanations for exactly how macroevolution works.
While there is no problem with the underlying concept of evolution, the way even its greatest champions have learnt to talk/think about it sometimes inhibits their perceptions.
Evolution requires mechanisms for both variation and selection. One problem is that all the attention is placed on selection and none on the very sophisticated systems that have evolved within complex life to ensure not quite random variation.
The corollary is that selection is popularly presumed to be intrinsically non-random, while there is plenty of evidence from the premature accidental deaths of individuals to the impacts of comets and asteroids that we need to admit a significant fractal random component into our analysis of selection pressures... something a good deal more sophisticated than the naive notion of genetic drift.
One clear consequence is that while microevolution provides pressures towards increased efficiency, macroevolution provides counterbalancing pressures towards increased capacity for innovation... to rapidly expolit novel opportunities.
The most persuasive argument I see against a creator is all the stuff no intelligent designer would have dreampt of specifying, not even a malicious one.
That's because in such a giant colony many workers are unrelated to the queens they help to raise.
I thought it was already well understood, let alone obvious, that these super colonies are the result of a single immigrant nest/queen colonising virgin territory.
While worker ants are produced at quite a rate, the generation time from one queen to the next is longer than many insects, most likely of order once a year, so there may well have been less than 100 generations for the populations to diverge genetically since they arrived.
What might be interesting in view of the recently reduced gene pools in many species of larger animals is to see how such a large population of near(?) clones handles whatever challenges the coming years might throw at them.
It's striking that only two of the 12 research medals went to universities. I think this is because university departments seem to view the best HCI research as both too mundane and too resource intensive. Many academics disdain research topics that are closely connected to real-world needs.
From my experience this might be largely because the academic efforts network more readily than corporate labs do, and that experience might be closer to filling a book than a Slashdot post, so I'd better only mention where it all began.
Back in the mid '80s, inspired by Neilsen Norman Group partner Bruce Tognazzini to explore the syntheiss of graphical user interface and online information services, my then trade press hat was enough to get me in to have a chat about user interface research with Professor Peter Poole, the then relatively new head of the Computer Science department at my alma mater, the University of Melbourne.
At that interview Poole was dismissive of HCI as something best left to commercial interests but before the end of the '80s, through his role as chairman of an IFIP Technical Committee, he and I finished up in the Napa Valley at an IFIP working conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction.
During those years, I had opportunities to follow a few of the interconnected strands of inspiration variously categorised under Hypertext, Computer-supported Cooperative Work and the broader Computer Graphics communities and share in the early work and inspiration coming from institutions in the form of Brown's Intermedia and MIT's Notes (pre-Lotus), and from indepenents like Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart.
Meanwhile Prof Poole was making the University of Melbourne Australia's gateway to the Internet and creating a supportive campus-wide IT infrastructure that would allow a few early innitiatives to be explored, especially educational multimedia. But as is so often the way of academia, the benefit became spread much wider than Melbourne through the natural progression of individual careers.
It only gets speculative at the edges
on
Quark Stars
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· Score: 2, Informative
I did pay attention in High School/College, and I have to ask: Do we KNOW any of this stuff.
Sure prevailing theories influence what we look for, the way we look for it (instrument design) and the questions we ask of our observations. But that does not mean that there might be no substance to the scientific concensus.
One thing that is blindingly obvious from any perusal of the last couple of centuries of human history is that the rise of the scientific method has provided a potent tool to tamper with the world with.
While I certainly don't claim any ability to turn off my knowledge of such theories when looking at the world, I do see them rendering many things sensible which without them would demand special explanation... moreso given our propensity to ask and answer the Why? question even in circumstances where it should neither bn asked nor answered.
The example I like best is the theory of plate tectonics which renders sensible a host of observations and phenomena, such as volcanos and earthquakes, and ultimately has been shown by increasingly accurate measurement to account for the observed relative movement of adjacent tectonic plates.
When it comes to data from distant galaxies or from the subatomic realm, my confidence relies on little more than simple extrapolation from what I can observe directly with my own senses through the clear breadth gained by using even simple telescopes and microscopes to there being no sign of discontinuity as the power of such instruments is scaled up.
Are there any radical thinkers left? someone perhaps not starting from Newton or Einstein's work and trying to move it forward, but someone with NO preconsceptions, NO ingrained ideas, and NO outside influences?
Without language, it is going to be worse than hard for anybody to think too deeply in these areas, so it doesn't make any more sense to try to set up such a straw man than to try to ascertain the cosmology of an elephant.
Yet it remains important to remind ourselves just how much evil has been perpetarated by those who believed they knew the authoritative truth.
So how far can we go in discarding preconceptions and looking again with an open mind? And might anybody actually do it if they could?
Here I can only go from personal experience, although an experience I suspect at least a few have shared. As an already mature adult, I reached a point where things clearly were not working the way I had long assumed they would, so I consciously put aside my preconceptions and tried to start from scratch to find out how the world really works.
Now I'm first to admit it is nigh on impossible to put every detail behind you, most especially not deep personal values, likes and dislikes, but at least for me it was possible to have a sincerely fresh look at how the world works.
And while I certainly didn't find something which would overturn the bulk of mainstream science, I did identify useful patterns that extend way beyond the then traditional scope of science... knowledge that now gives me a pretty good idea when leading cosmologists might be typing with one hand.
I write this as a reformed Mathematician of sorts, which is analogous to being a reformed smoker... the expectations that half an education in Math gives as to the existence of right and wrong answers sure looks ugly once you can escape its grip.
And faith in Mathematical proof is counterproductive at a level beyond that... it hides the beautiful truth that Math is something that can be joyously explored in its multitudinous riches without any need for the reality checking of the (would be) sciences.
Personally I have come to see both Math and Science (or more strictly the scientific method) as but potent toolsets, and to confine my own quest for more profound truths to those "interdisciplinary" comparisons that have been called anything from "complex systems" to "general evolution".
This step is a bit like the step from geometry to topology which has clearly escaped the wit of the moderator who took offense at a not quite successful attempt to make something funny out of teacups and donuts.
I can't see Bill or Microsoft coming to mind much in 2102, well at least not unless serious life extension techniques are developed in time to benefit(?) the Internet generation.
Their problem from a future history perspective is that they really haven't done anything much of ongoing public interest. Sure I'm first to applaud their early work on Basic thru GW and their role with CD-ROM, but the most significant thing since those early days has been in the area of business practices which most won't want to remember. Hardly the stuff of Edisonesque legend.
There was a time, maybe even two times, when IBM meant computer, but even their incredible patent production process is nowadays only of note to those who peer behind the scenes.
If I had to bet on anybody being remembered for this generation's Internet time, it would be Tim Berners-Lee because of the role he has stepped into at W3C, with a place bet on Steve Jobs.
I saw a special on PBS a while back that came to basically the same conclusion, that only a hypernova...
Sounds very much like the program I caught on (Australian) ABC TV last night, which made every effort to look like a very current local production. They definitely made use of some of the same simulations that are shown on the PPARC press release linked from the story.
However the narrator on our ABC was clearly out of his depth:
Scientists knew that all the elements that make up the universe - the galaxies, the planets, even the air we breathe and the bones in our bodies - were all first made inside stars.
... but the mystery is: if the stars make all the elements then what made the very first stars?
The answer has to lie in those cosmic Dark Ages of the dawn of time. What scientists have now realised is that the gamma ray bursts may be a way of seeing into those Dark Ages.
seemingly ignorant of an expert mentioning "heavier elements" while he, the narrator, must have been too busy trying to invent his own idiosynchratic creation mythology to take notice of the quotes he was supposed to be bracketing.
I already posted my lay thoughts on gravastars and the idea of hypernova added nothing to them.
Why not post an informational article about mathematics or information theory that might actually enrich or prove beneficial to the careers of Slashdot's readers?
The occasional reminder from the natural world about the strange things that actually happen in defiance of all the best theoretical simplifications is never a bad thing.
For the record, this new class of insect ranks somewhere between the Coelacanth and the Wollemi Pine on at least a couple of measures of significance. In both those cases the media got quite excited.
On the Linnaean kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species scale, the Coelacanth ranks as the only living member of class actinistia which shares a closer common ancestor with the tetrapods (including us) than does any other fish in the ocean. However the Woolemi Pine only ranks as a new genus of the Araucariaceae family, and any common ancestor with us is clearly much further in the past than that of this new insect "gladiator".
Seeing as the Linnaean txonomy project has been ongoing since Carl Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, the illusion of completeness at higher levels ensures newsworthiness when something is discovered for which the closest related fossils known are tens of millions of years old.
So I really do see a similarities between finding a new bug in the Brandberg Mountains of Namibia and finding a new bug in software that had been running successfully for years.
BTW, I have no idea how anybody could imagine that calling a story "homosexual" would deter many Slashdot readers.
Disclaimer: Math is a powerful tool, useful so long as you don't grant it primacy.
The fundamental point of the theory of relativity is that observations are relative to the observer.
An observer who is at rest or close to it will see, through relativistic time dilation, all the matter (and energy, charge, angular monentum, entropy, extropy, whatever) that has fallen towards a black hole piled up asymptotically at the event horizon.
To an observer riding along with that matter it will look very different. There will be no actual bump to indicate the event horizon, especially for a big enough black hole where gradient effects don't become problematic.
On the other side of the event horizon, the observer's flashlight beam will, at least if shone in certain directions, circle back to him. However he might still see red shifted light from the outside world that has entered the black hole with him
I suspect things get even more interesting from the frame of reference of an observer approaching near the event horizon at a velocity which will evade capture, but as far as I know the math has only been attempted for the simplest of those situations.
Given that observed gravitational curvature of space required that the substance of "empty" space form an extensive 3D manifold in some extensive 4(+)D coordinate space, the crowding in 3D coordinates might be at least partially compensated by stretching in the extra dimension(s) and thus provide an escape clause for the observer from ever actually encountering the total disruption that a singularity is presumed to imply.
While we might be attracted to such an escape clause, it would seem hard to reconcile with Lee Smolin's ideas about the evolution of physical laws over many generations of proto black holes and big bangs.
money that goes to... doesn't vanish out of the economy... money doesn't just disappear
You can't go round telling people that. If the word gets out the whole house of cards comes crumbling down.
If the wider populace starts seeing that the local concepts of saving and wasting money simply do not apply at a global scale they will no longer be motivated to do such things.
This is a secret that is so secret that the keepers of secrets are not entrusted with it, and here you are letting it out of the bag deep in the obsucrity of/. where it can only corrupt those minors that are the focus of this thread... most especially those who have already learnt that there are rewards other than money to be had from doing good work.
During the past two million years, in very rough figures we have had 100,000 year spells of extended glaciation (mostly Europe and Canada but cooling more widely) alternating with 10,000 year interglacials.
There is simply no evidence to suggest that that pattern is broken and a lot of evidence that the "Atlantic conveyer" is the switch between those two phases.
Fact is we are about due for the current interglacial to end and anything that switches off the Atlantic conveyor is just about guaranteed to return us to the more normal state of extended glaciation.
It took until the current interglacial for an expansion of agriculture to trigger what has become human civilisation.
More speculatively, it looks as though our species may have separated from its since extinct cousins during the last interglacial. Exactly where in Africa we can only speculate, but I expect not on Danakil Island.
Personally I just wish I could live long enough to see the ice sheets suck 100 metres of water out of the oceans and open the door to some serious archaeology on the continental shelves of and around Indonesia so we might start to fill in some vital pieces of the jigsaw that represents the origins of human culture.
For all too many people in this world, hate remains the greatest motivator, so the tiny proportion of SlashDotters who have learnt to hate Jon become much more motivated to attack him and post more aggressively than however many there might be who enjoy his writings, to say nothing of the multitudes who either don't care or who just treat his writings on their merits.
I guess I should at least come clean and admit that finding Jon writing for/. turned me into a regular here, so substantive reasons others might have for hating him aren't reasons I relate to.
To me the even bigger question is why those who are so loud in their hatred don't apply the tools Slash has available to exclude Jon's articles from their view?
Surely they cannot claim technical ineptitude.
More seriously, the one thing that slightly worries me about the persistent attacks is that it is a measure of the reluctance of too many narrowly productive people to admit that a wider world view might have any relevance to them.
These might be representative of the kind of people you could hire to develop truly evil technologies without them giving the outcomes a second thought.
I somehow doubt that anybody who respects what Jon brings to SlashDot is going to be a party to things that might do the world substantial harm.
Most are probably unaware that there is a semi-official division of the English speaking print publishing world into two camps, one based in London and the other in New York, a division which has a long and complex history that might be of interest to a few of/.'s self-styled copyright scholars, but which i won't attempt to go into here.
Felix Dennis is one of London's most interesting publishers having gained considerable notoriety through the Oz obsenity trial of 1971 long before starting MacUser.
Now according to a link from this article Dennis is giving up on an eight year US involvement that started as Blender, "one of the first interactive magazines delivered on CD-ROM" and morphed into Dennis Interactive.
As one of the original editors for Australian Macworld I've followed the comings and goings of Mac mags with some interest.
Despite the Mac having had much greater success in market penetration terms in Australia than the UK, our three early titles gradually merged into one.
The MacUser licence here was acquired by the publishers of the locally created MacNews which operated the merged mag as MacUser until that too was merger with the local Macworld, so now the company that started MacNews publishes only Australian Macworld and our newstands carry a few UK and US Mac titles.
I hope that Ian Betteridge's prediction that the three UK Mac titles can survive proves to be accurate.
Corpset is simply trying to point out that no matter how many gap fossils are found opponents of evolution will always be able to proclaim a gap somehwere else, albeit a narrower one.
That post is definitely not "flame bait".
When the dopamine gets out of kilter
on
Pilot of My Soul
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· Score: 1
For the past couple of weeks I've been entangled in my flatmate's dopamine level problem. Fortunately he is doing much better, being allowed out on his own on day release today so I got my first break from psych ward visiting.
As morbid as it may seem, the whole experience provided very useful evidence against which to check out my own lay theory of mind.
From the article: Learning takes place only when something unexpected happens and dopamine firing rates increase or decrease.
I'd be more inclined to say that conscious attention takes place only when something unexpected happens and dopamine firing rates increase or decrease, that conscious attention mediating conscious learning. Laughter seems to weaken the pathway from conscious awareness to learning.
I find it useful to distinguish that kind of conscious learning from the subconscious learning with which we acquire and fine tune many skills.
My flatmate's dopamine level problem manifested itself in the form of a loss of any ability to retain attention against a tide of random associations seeming to bubble up from somewhere in his subconscious.
Trouble is we are talking a tight rope here, as overreactive dopamine pathways are implicated in depression.
My point is that the only way these people can raise money is by scaring the bejesus out of those who can be scared.
Not just raised money, but professional fees, product sales, budget funding and ultimately votes.
Maybe the real problem with power and influence is not what people do with them, nor even to get them, but just how evil they can become when possessed by the fear of losing them.
If you have nothing better to do than take a microscope to any of our social institutions, including the environmental movement, it is all too easy to see that Fouccault was very close to the mark about the power of their enculturation.
But if you take a couple of steps back you might also see that we need all of them doing pretty much what they are doing so as to provide checks and balances on each other.
The last thing the game of life needs is one winner.
I fondly remember VM as the first operating system I ran into that embodied a really good idea.
There was a stage during the '80s when I was working more as an industry analyst than as a developer when Sun and IBM between them had become two of the then only four serious pillars on which the future of computing rested at a conceptual level.
At that level, Sun was the embodiment of Unix, taking evnagelical responsibility for the cause, and it is reasonable to assume that within their own envorins they genuinely see themselves in that position still.
From my own biased perspective, I felt they abdicated that authority when they allowed their elegant Network-extensible Window System (NeWS) to be rolled by a tide of industry resistance that mobilised against the upstart Sun and behind the then clearly inferior X.
But I'm sure in Sun's hearts they still believe they are the ultimate repository of deep understanding on all things Unix and are being genuine and honest in the technical basis for this critique.
The real problem is thay they can't see beyond their own world view. They do not have places in their heart for deep understanding of either the VM nor the Linux view or the world, let alone the two in combination.
Still Sun struggles to find its own identity and focus, to say nothing of a sustainable business model for the future.
From NFS to RISC, to industrial strength Web servers and on to Java, Sun has been a major contributor to the direction of mainstream computing, but now seems to be edging closer to following the fall to oblivion of that other former pillar of hearts and minds, Digital.
It will be a worse than sad day when we finally have to convey Sun to history, especially if that comes before Java gets to really stand on its own feet.
Disinformation might need a WARNING label
on
Disinformation.com
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· Score: 1
Against all the principles that I and our many skeptical anti-establishment friends believe in, at the weekend we had no choice but to entrust the care of my flatmate... a very talented 19 year old sys admin/programmer... to the psychiatric unit of a major hospital to get his dopamine levels back to where he could retain line of thought for more than 2.5 seconds... basically because he has no reality filter on some of the utter crap that these sites give equal billing to... from smoking nutmeg to being able to control the world through psychic power alone.
As can happen near the edge of insanity, the journey produced some interesting insights and until right before we realised just how serious it had become, his explorations were helping me to write what I think are some fairly deep and meningful notes... but suddenly our life revolves around hospital visits and making sure our systems hold up for our clients without him around to tweak them.
Fortunately, the work he has been doing right up to a couple of days before falling over the edge is high quality, and there had been other signs of hope which tended to hide the now obvious fact that he was simultaneously drowning in New Age fanatasies.
The point I finally had to accept that we had a problem, was when I came home from a business meeting to discover, in his quest to explore his psychic powers without electrical interference, he had thrown all the circuit breakers, killing the server and worksatations we run at home without even thinking of shutting them down first.
Even then we gave him another 48 hours to regain some semblance of self management before we finally and still reluctantly embarked on his one way trip to the hospital... where he now seems to be slowly recovering.
Some of this disinformation really can be a health hazard and might need to start being labeled acccordingly, including The Matrix and a lot of Disney Channel programming... which just goes to underline than New Age is no different to tobacco in providing an irresponsible way to rip a buck off a billiion suckers.
Even better, we insert a flock of vast rotating millimetre mesh nets into the maser beam with the onboard intelligence to heal micrometeorite damage and hive-like communication for redundancy.
The very fabric of the mesh would provide both logic circuitry and the micromachines needed to trim the sails en route and coallesce more solid structures at their destination.
Without a separate payload, acceleration to a significant fraction of C should be possible, depending just how hard it turns out to be to stay ahead of the damage from increasingly energetic collisions with space dust and maybe even atoms.
Given the current nature of financial "accountability" the biggest obstacle might be ensuring the coherence of the maser beam for decades or centuries. This of course demands a maturing capacity for space-based industry, expertise which will greatly influence the probes' destination objectives.
My guess is that the history of interstellar will roughly parallel the history of interplanetary so that we will first send some fly-by probes to give us a crude look at what is actually in orbit around neighbouring stars, and follow up with probes able to decelerate into orbits suitable for sustained observation, with maybe the actual Von Neumann seeds coming in a third generation.
We may only ever send biosystems (and thus humans) to a tiny fraction of those stars we join into our ultimately galactic Von Neumann observational network, and we will only send bisystems once the Von Neumann pioneers have set up a receptive orbital environement, including deceleration masers.
Personally, I don't expect that evolutionary propensities to tooth and claw will finish up outweighing the value of information sharing over interstellar distances.
A wild card is whatever transformations humanity might have undergone closer to home while all this plays out over centuries, but if we can keep it together we should really be starting to build a useful sample picture of what is really out there before another millennium passes.
Worth a link for nostalgia's sake
on
Heart of the Net
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· Score: 1
Just reading that article was a cultural experience.
While it wasn't hard to remember its self description as the travelogue of a "hacker tourist" the article title "Mother Earth Mother Board" certainly didn't stick in the old memory.
You don't need to play with his math, let alone get into the discussions which test most humans' problems with large numbers, infinities and probabilities, in order to see that Dawkins's reductionism leads to vast oversimplicications and faulty thinking.
His selfish gene argument simply falls apart the moment you realise that not just individual genes but combinations of genes, whole organisms, populations and ecosystems all have to be viable in order for any to survive.
Still we must not undervalue Dawkins's intellectual contribution. Beyond the selfish gene sidetrack, he also brought us memes which are a really useful idea, albeit also reductionsist.
Slashdot Mirror
But I'd still be careful about using "impossible", even if a few more are starting to realise that replicators are unlikely to provide a viable path forward, I still wouldn't be betting that we don't finish up with some strongly transformative nanotechnologies by 2050 or 2100.
It's just that our growing addiction to money and growth demands incredulous rationales to keep the pot boiling, so we talk about applications before we have demonstrated a working technology
If I had moderator points that would definitely have got an "informative" but I guess there are a couple of points I can add to justify a response.
Firstly, it is rather sad that such a basic yet interesting fact as this angular momentum transfer seems to be completely missing from the standard education curriculum.
Secondly, I've been trying to get to first base in compiling some data on the energy storage and rate of use in major planet-wide systems (down to, say, the gravitational potential of elevated water and ice stores) but am stuggling to find clear data.
Even in such an obvious area as total solar radiation the ratio between what the Sun is claimed to radiate (386 billion billion megawatts) and what the Earth is claimed to receive (4.4 x 1016 watts) seems to fly in the face of simple geometry which seems to me should have the earth intercepting one part in 1.1 billion of the Sun's radiation.
Digging for data on other energy systems, there is a total mess of approaches and even units used by different specialties that are going to make even a basic comparison table hard work to draw together, unless of course I am willing to become a "Creation Scientist".
Just scanned the index for the first time since this was the top article and saw underneath:
... at best punctuated equilibrium, but sometimes verging on mass extinction.
( Read More... | 666 comments | Apple )
Definitely needed that laugh.
Having managed to stash away a few ancient Macs last week which I grabbed for archive retrieval purposes, I would have thought there was precious little evidence of evolution in the Mac lineage
But if there is a prize, I could imagine worse than a new desk lamp.
As many have noted, life itself isn't hard, but from there to the Cambrian explosion and the chordates, arthropods and molluscs the Cambrian eventually left us with took 80% of life's history on earth and seemingly the snowball crisis. After the explosion, it didn't take near as long for the range of multicellular life to reach something like today's levels.
The real problem that our anthropocentic perspective keeps hiding is that despite the amazing achievements of millions of animal species in the past couple of hundred million years, only homo sapiens sapiens crossed one particularly significant threshold starting us down a track towards planetary domination, and that less than 100,000 years ago.
To me one really weird thing is that we aspire to communicate with others who have reached a similar pinnacle elsewhere while we haven't managed to get to first base with respect to communication with orcas, elephants or corellas all of whom have useful knowledge and intelligence we aren't smart enough to be able to share.
Evolution requires mechanisms for both variation and selection. One problem is that all the attention is placed on selection and none on the very sophisticated systems that have evolved within complex life to ensure not quite random variation.
The corollary is that selection is popularly presumed to be intrinsically non-random, while there is plenty of evidence from the premature accidental deaths of individuals to the impacts of comets and asteroids that we need to admit a significant fractal random component into our analysis of selection pressures
One clear consequence is that while microevolution provides pressures towards increased efficiency, macroevolution provides counterbalancing pressures towards increased capacity for innovation
The most persuasive argument I see against a creator is all the stuff no intelligent designer would have dreampt of specifying, not even a malicious one.
While worker ants are produced at quite a rate, the generation time from one queen to the next is longer than many insects, most likely of order once a year, so there may well have been less than 100 generations for the populations to diverge genetically since they arrived.
What might be interesting in view of the recently reduced gene pools in many species of larger animals is to see how such a large population of near(?) clones handles whatever challenges the coming years might throw at them.
Back in the mid '80s, inspired by Neilsen Norman Group partner Bruce Tognazzini to explore the syntheiss of graphical user interface and online information services, my then trade press hat was enough to get me in to have a chat about user interface research with Professor Peter Poole, the then relatively new head of the Computer Science department at my alma mater, the University of Melbourne.
At that interview Poole was dismissive of HCI as something best left to commercial interests but before the end of the '80s, through his role as chairman of an IFIP Technical Committee, he and I finished up in the Napa Valley at an IFIP working conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction.
During those years, I had opportunities to follow a few of the interconnected strands of inspiration variously categorised under Hypertext, Computer-supported Cooperative Work and the broader Computer Graphics communities and share in the early work and inspiration coming from institutions in the form of Brown's Intermedia and MIT's Notes (pre-Lotus), and from indepenents like Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart.
Meanwhile Prof Poole was making the University of Melbourne Australia's gateway to the Internet and creating a supportive campus-wide IT infrastructure that would allow a few early innitiatives to be explored, especially educational multimedia. But as is so often the way of academia, the benefit became spread much wider than Melbourne through the natural progression of individual careers.
I did pay attention in High School/College, and I have to ask: Do we KNOW any of this stuff.
... moreso given our propensity to ask and answer the Why? question even in circumstances where it should neither bn asked nor answered.
... knowledge that now gives me a pretty good idea when leading cosmologists might be typing with one hand.
Sure prevailing theories influence what we look for, the way we look for it (instrument design) and the questions we ask of our observations. But that does not mean that there might be no substance to the scientific concensus.
One thing that is blindingly obvious from any perusal of the last couple of centuries of human history is that the rise of the scientific method has provided a potent tool to tamper with the world with.
While I certainly don't claim any ability to turn off my knowledge of such theories when looking at the world, I do see them rendering many things sensible which without them would demand special explanation
The example I like best is the theory of plate tectonics which renders sensible a host of observations and phenomena, such as volcanos and earthquakes, and ultimately has been shown by increasingly accurate measurement to account for the observed relative movement of adjacent tectonic plates.
When it comes to data from distant galaxies or from the subatomic realm, my confidence relies on little more than simple extrapolation from what I can observe directly with my own senses through the clear breadth gained by using even simple telescopes and microscopes to there being no sign of discontinuity as the power of such instruments is scaled up.
Are there any radical thinkers left? someone perhaps not starting from Newton or Einstein's work and trying to move it forward, but someone with NO preconsceptions, NO ingrained ideas, and NO outside influences?
Without language, it is going to be worse than hard for anybody to think too deeply in these areas, so it doesn't make any more sense to try to set up such a straw man than to try to ascertain the cosmology of an elephant.
Yet it remains important to remind ourselves just how much evil has been perpetarated by those who believed they knew the authoritative truth.
So how far can we go in discarding preconceptions and looking again with an open mind? And might anybody actually do it if they could?
Here I can only go from personal experience, although an experience I suspect at least a few have shared. As an already mature adult, I reached a point where things clearly were not working the way I had long assumed they would, so I consciously put aside my preconceptions and tried to start from scratch to find out how the world really works.
Now I'm first to admit it is nigh on impossible to put every detail behind you, most especially not deep personal values, likes and dislikes, but at least for me it was possible to have a sincerely fresh look at how the world works.
And while I certainly didn't find something which would overturn the bulk of mainstream science, I did identify useful patterns that extend way beyond the then traditional scope of science
I write this as a reformed Mathematician of sorts, which is analogous to being a reformed smoker ... the expectations that half an education in Math gives as to the existence of right and wrong answers sure looks ugly once you can escape its grip.
... it hides the beautiful truth that Math is something that can be joyously explored in its multitudinous riches without any need for the reality checking of the (would be) sciences.
And faith in Mathematical proof is counterproductive at a level beyond that
Personally I have come to see both Math and Science (or more strictly the scientific method) as but potent toolsets, and to confine my own quest for more profound truths to those "interdisciplinary" comparisons that have been called anything from "complex systems" to "general evolution".
This step is a bit like the step from geometry to topology which has clearly escaped the wit of the moderator who took offense at a not quite successful attempt to make something funny out of teacups and donuts.
I can't see Bill or Microsoft coming to mind much in 2102, well at least not unless serious life extension techniques are developed in time to benefit(?) the Internet generation.
Their problem from a future history perspective is that they really haven't done anything much of ongoing public interest. Sure I'm first to applaud their early work on Basic thru GW and their role with CD-ROM, but the most significant thing since those early days has been in the area of business practices which most won't want to remember. Hardly the stuff of Edisonesque legend.
There was a time, maybe even two times, when IBM meant computer, but even their incredible patent production process is nowadays only of note to those who peer behind the scenes.
If I had to bet on anybody being remembered for this generation's Internet time, it would be Tim Berners-Lee because of the role he has stepped into at W3C, with a place bet on Steve Jobs.
Sounds very much like the program I caught on (Australian) ABC TV last night, which made every effort to look like a very current local production. They definitely made use of some of the same simulations that are shown on the PPARC press release linked from the story.
However the narrator on our ABC was clearly out of his depth:
seemingly ignorant of an expert mentioning "heavier elements" while he, the narrator, must have been too busy trying to invent his own idiosynchratic creation mythology to take notice of the quotes he was supposed to be bracketing.
I already posted my lay thoughts on gravastars and the idea of hypernova added nothing to them.
Why not post an informational article about mathematics or information theory that might actually enrich or prove beneficial to the careers of Slashdot's readers?
The occasional reminder from the natural world about the strange things that actually happen in defiance of all the best theoretical simplifications is never a bad thing.
For the record, this new class of insect ranks somewhere between the Coelacanth and the Wollemi Pine on at least a couple of measures of significance. In both those cases the media got quite excited.
On the Linnaean kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species scale, the Coelacanth ranks as the only living member of class actinistia which shares a closer common ancestor with the tetrapods (including us) than does any other fish in the ocean. However the Woolemi Pine only ranks as a new genus of the Araucariaceae family, and any common ancestor with us is clearly much further in the past than that of this new insect "gladiator".
Seeing as the Linnaean txonomy project has been ongoing since Carl Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, the illusion of completeness at higher levels ensures newsworthiness when something is discovered for which the closest related fossils known are tens of millions of years old.
So I really do see a similarities between finding a new bug in the Brandberg Mountains of Namibia and finding a new bug in software that had been running successfully for years.
BTW, I have no idea how anybody could imagine that calling a story "homosexual" would deter many Slashdot readers.
Disclaimer: Math is a powerful tool, useful so long as you don't grant it primacy.
The fundamental point of the theory of relativity is that observations are relative to the observer.
An observer who is at rest or close to it will see, through relativistic time dilation, all the matter (and energy, charge, angular monentum, entropy, extropy, whatever) that has fallen towards a black hole piled up asymptotically at the event horizon.
To an observer riding along with that matter it will look very different. There will be no actual bump to indicate the event horizon, especially for a big enough black hole where gradient effects don't become problematic.
On the other side of the event horizon, the observer's flashlight beam will, at least if shone in certain directions, circle back to him. However he might still see red shifted light from the outside world that has entered the black hole with him
I suspect things get even more interesting from the frame of reference of an observer approaching near the event horizon at a velocity which will evade capture, but as far as I know the math has only been attempted for the simplest of those situations.
Given that observed gravitational curvature of space required that the substance of "empty" space form an extensive 3D manifold in some extensive 4(+)D coordinate space, the crowding in 3D coordinates might be at least partially compensated by stretching in the extra dimension(s) and thus provide an escape clause for the observer from ever actually encountering the total disruption that a singularity is presumed to imply.
While we might be attracted to such an escape clause, it would seem hard to reconcile with Lee Smolin's ideas about the evolution of physical laws over many generations of proto black holes and big bangs.
If the wider populace starts seeing that the local concepts of saving and wasting money simply do not apply at a global scale they will no longer be motivated to do such things.
This is a secret that is so secret that the keepers of secrets are not entrusted with it, and here you are letting it out of the bag deep in the obsucrity of
During the past two million years, in very rough figures we have had 100,000 year spells of extended glaciation (mostly Europe and Canada but cooling more widely) alternating with 10,000 year interglacials.
There is simply no evidence to suggest that that pattern is broken and a lot of evidence that the "Atlantic conveyer" is the switch between those two phases.
Fact is we are about due for the current interglacial to end and anything that switches off the Atlantic conveyor is just about guaranteed to return us to the more normal state of extended glaciation.
It took until the current interglacial for an expansion of agriculture to trigger what has become human civilisation.
More speculatively, it looks as though our species may have separated from its since extinct cousins during the last interglacial. Exactly where in Africa we can only speculate, but I expect not on Danakil Island.
Personally I just wish I could live long enough to see the ice sheets suck 100 metres of water out of the oceans and open the door to some serious archaeology on the continental shelves of and around Indonesia so we might start to fill in some vital pieces of the jigsaw that represents the origins of human culture.
For all too many people in this world, hate remains the greatest motivator, so the tiny proportion of SlashDotters who have learnt to hate Jon become much more motivated to attack him and post more aggressively than however many there might be who enjoy his writings, to say nothing of the multitudes who either don't care or who just treat his writings on their merits.
/. turned me into a regular here, so substantive reasons others might have for hating him aren't reasons I relate to.
I guess I should at least come clean and admit that finding Jon writing for
To me the even bigger question is why those who are so loud in their hatred don't apply the tools Slash has available to exclude Jon's articles from their view?
Surely they cannot claim technical ineptitude.
More seriously, the one thing that slightly worries me about the persistent attacks is that it is a measure of the reluctance of too many narrowly productive people to admit that a wider world view might have any relevance to them.
These might be representative of the kind of people you could hire to develop truly evil technologies without them giving the outcomes a second thought.
I somehow doubt that anybody who respects what Jon brings to SlashDot is going to be a party to things that might do the world substantial harm.
Most are probably unaware that there is a semi-official division of the English speaking print publishing world into two camps, one based in London and the other in New York, a division which has a long and complex history that might be of interest to a few of /.'s self-styled copyright scholars, but which i won't attempt to go into here.
Felix Dennis is one of London's most interesting publishers having gained considerable notoriety through the Oz obsenity trial of 1971 long before starting MacUser.
Now according to a link from this article Dennis is giving up on an eight year US involvement that started as Blender, "one of the first interactive magazines delivered on CD-ROM" and morphed into Dennis Interactive.
As one of the original editors for Australian Macworld I've followed the comings and goings of Mac mags with some interest.
Despite the Mac having had much greater success in market penetration terms in Australia than the UK, our three early titles gradually merged into one.
The MacUser licence here was acquired by the publishers of the locally created MacNews which operated the merged mag as MacUser until that too was merger with the local Macworld, so now the company that started MacNews publishes only Australian Macworld and our newstands carry a few UK and US Mac titles.
I hope that Ian Betteridge's prediction that the three UK Mac titles can survive proves to be accurate.
Corpset is simply trying to point out that no matter how many gap fossils are found opponents of evolution will always be able to proclaim a gap somehwere else, albeit a narrower one.
That post is definitely not "flame bait".
For the past couple of weeks I've been entangled in my flatmate's dopamine level problem. Fortunately he is doing much better, being allowed out on his own on day release today so I got my first break from psych ward visiting.
As morbid as it may seem, the whole experience provided very useful evidence against which to check out my own lay theory of mind.
From the article:
Learning takes place only when something unexpected happens and dopamine firing rates increase or decrease.
I'd be more inclined to say that conscious attention takes place only when something unexpected happens and dopamine firing rates increase or decrease, that conscious attention mediating conscious learning. Laughter seems to weaken the pathway from conscious awareness to learning.
I find it useful to distinguish that kind of conscious learning from the subconscious learning with which we acquire and fine tune many skills.
My flatmate's dopamine level problem manifested itself in the form of a loss of any ability to retain attention against a tide of random associations seeming to bubble up from somewhere in his subconscious.
Trouble is we are talking a tight rope here, as overreactive dopamine pathways are implicated in depression.
My point is that the only way these people can raise money is by scaring the bejesus out of those who can be scared.
Not just raised money, but professional fees, product sales, budget funding and ultimately votes.
Maybe the real problem with power and influence is not what people do with them, nor even to get them, but just how evil they can become when possessed by the fear of losing them.
If you have nothing better to do than take a microscope to any of our social institutions, including the environmental movement, it is all too easy to see that Fouccault was very close to the mark about the power of their enculturation.
But if you take a couple of steps back you might also see that we need all of them doing pretty much what they are doing so as to provide checks and balances on each other.
The last thing the game of life needs is one winner.
I fondly remember VM as the first operating system I ran into that embodied a really good idea.
There was a stage during the '80s when I was working more as an industry analyst than as a developer when Sun and IBM between them had become two of the then only four serious pillars on which the future of computing rested at a conceptual level.
At that level, Sun was the embodiment of Unix, taking evnagelical responsibility for the cause, and it is reasonable to assume that within their own envorins they genuinely see themselves in that position still.
From my own biased perspective, I felt they abdicated that authority when they allowed their elegant Network-extensible Window System (NeWS) to be rolled by a tide of industry resistance that mobilised against the upstart Sun and behind the then clearly inferior X.
But I'm sure in Sun's hearts they still believe they are the ultimate repository of deep understanding on all things Unix and are being genuine and honest in the technical basis for this critique.
The real problem is thay they can't see beyond their own world view. They do not have places in their heart for deep understanding of either the VM nor the Linux view or the world, let alone the two in combination.
Still Sun struggles to find its own identity and focus, to say nothing of a sustainable business model for the future.
From NFS to RISC, to industrial strength Web servers and on to Java, Sun has been a major contributor to the direction of mainstream computing, but now seems to be edging closer to following the fall to oblivion of that other former pillar of hearts and minds, Digital.
It will be a worse than sad day when we finally have to convey Sun to history, especially if that comes before Java gets to really stand on its own feet.
Against all the principles that I and our many skeptical anti-establishment friends believe in, at the weekend we had no choice but to entrust the care of my flatmate ... a very talented 19 year old sys admin/programmer ... to the psychiatric unit of a major hospital to get his dopamine levels back to where he could retain line of thought for more than 2.5 seconds ... basically because he has no reality filter on some of the utter crap that these sites give equal billing to ... from smoking nutmeg to being able to control the world through psychic power alone.
... but suddenly our life revolves around hospital visits and making sure our systems hold up for our clients without him around to tweak them.
... where he now seems to be slowly recovering.
... which just goes to underline than New Age is no different to tobacco in providing an irresponsible way to rip a buck off a billiion suckers.
As can happen near the edge of insanity, the journey produced some interesting insights and until right before we realised just how serious it had become, his explorations were helping me to write what I think are some fairly deep and meningful notes
Fortunately, the work he has been doing right up to a couple of days before falling over the edge is high quality, and there had been other signs of hope which tended to hide the now obvious fact that he was simultaneously drowning in New Age fanatasies.
The point I finally had to accept that we had a problem, was when I came home from a business meeting to discover, in his quest to explore his psychic powers without electrical interference, he had thrown all the circuit breakers, killing the server and worksatations we run at home without even thinking of shutting them down first.
Even then we gave him another 48 hours to regain some semblance of self management before we finally and still reluctantly embarked on his one way trip to the hospital
Some of this disinformation really can be a health hazard and might need to start being labeled acccordingly, including The Matrix and a lot of Disney Channel programming
Even better, we insert a flock of vast rotating millimetre mesh nets into the maser beam with the onboard intelligence to heal micrometeorite damage and hive-like communication for redundancy.
The very fabric of the mesh would provide both logic circuitry and the micromachines needed to trim the sails en route and coallesce more solid structures at their destination.
Without a separate payload, acceleration to a significant fraction of C should be possible, depending just how hard it turns out to be to stay ahead of the damage from increasingly energetic collisions with space dust and maybe even atoms.
Given the current nature of financial "accountability" the biggest obstacle might be ensuring the coherence of the maser beam for decades or centuries. This of course demands a maturing capacity for space-based industry, expertise which will greatly influence the probes' destination objectives.
My guess is that the history of interstellar will roughly parallel the history of interplanetary so that we will first send some fly-by probes to give us a crude look at what is actually in orbit around neighbouring stars, and follow up with probes able to decelerate into orbits suitable for sustained observation, with maybe the actual Von Neumann seeds coming in a third generation.
We may only ever send biosystems (and thus humans) to a tiny fraction of those stars we join into our ultimately galactic Von Neumann observational network, and we will only send bisystems once the Von Neumann pioneers have set up a receptive orbital environement, including deceleration masers.
Personally, I don't expect that evolutionary propensities to tooth and claw will finish up outweighing the value of information sharing over interstellar distances.
A wild card is whatever transformations humanity might have undergone closer to home while all this plays out over centuries, but if we can keep it together we should really be starting to build a useful sample picture of what is really out there before another millennium passes.
Just reading that article was a cultural experience.
While it wasn't hard to remember its self description as the travelogue of a "hacker tourist" the article title "Mother Earth Mother Board" certainly didn't stick in the old memory.
You don't need to play with his math, let alone get into the discussions which test most humans' problems with large numbers, infinities and probabilities, in order to see that Dawkins's reductionism leads to vast oversimplicications and faulty thinking.
His selfish gene argument simply falls apart the moment you realise that not just individual genes but combinations of genes, whole organisms, populations and ecosystems all have to be viable in order for any to survive.
Still we must not undervalue Dawkins's intellectual contribution. Beyond the selfish gene sidetrack, he also brought us memes which are a really useful idea, albeit also reductionsist.