Yeah, it's the kind of item that if I had moderator points right now I'd want to give them to the submitter, or maybe to the guy who submitted three weeks ago, or even to Cowboy Neal for letting it through. Hey maybe I should just vote for him in more polls.
Not needing chemicals to get into trouble, my heaviest dose of K & P came at the end of a long winter's day outside municipal polling booths... fortunately given how history turned a not quite successful day... I watched K & P back to back in a local art/nostalgia theatre, since sadly departed.
Right now I have a problem with my P CD which unfortunately diappeared into an unnoticed slit between my car CD player and a defunct tape player when I was trying to put it in the CD slot during a recent interstate drive, but that isn't stopping me listening to it on iTunes as I type.
The last line of/etc/httpd/httpd.conf in the default OS X.1.5 installation reads:
Include/private/etc/httpd/users
one/private/etc/httpd/users file being added for each user which enable you to serve anything you put in the Sites folder in your personal home directory. These are served in turn as http://your.domain.name/~username/page.html or the prevailing DirectoryIndex file to you (me) locally as http://127.0.0.1/~ynotds/
The main config file includes a script alias to run any CGI scripts in/library/webserver/CGI-Executables
They have put one Perl test script in that directory which you can view locally at http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/test-cgi, or at least you can after you have done a
From there, it isn't a lot of work to tweak your config files and uncomment AddHandler cgi-script.cgi to get scripts running throughout your site.
Of course the real point to setting up your Mac as a fully functional server is that you get to do all your editing in BBEdit which not only does syntax checking and colour coding on the fly of HTML, Perl, JavaScript and more, but also can directly run Perl in an open document window, enabling you to all manner of extrancting and reporting on the fly.
Now I just need to get brave enough to install MySQL.
So what does this have to do with Christian Science exactly?
Your question is equivalent to asking whether some arbitrarily selected article on/. is for nerds.
Surely it is safer to assume that many Christian Scientists (and many nerds) have some interest in the wider world which the editors of their targeted news services might sometimes attempt to make allowance for.
Just to get this back somewhere near on topic, I have long felt smart fabrics could be the killer app for nanotechnology... to the point of making a serious start on a sci fi manuscript exploring such possibilities more than a decade ago.
It is not too hard to imagine redundancy and even self repair built into wearable systems.
What is a bit harder is the how we get there from here question, especially when we don't seem to be able to see a way past worrying about crumpling optical fibres.
It's only through spreading panic that governements retain their illusion of relevance. The worst of them manage to panic us sufficiently about drugs, illegal immigrants, sex, terrorists, corruption, hackers, disease and the purported untrustworthiness of our fellow man that enough turn out to vote to maintain some appearance of legitimacy to their exercise of the military, taxation and diplomatic privileges of statehood. What better than an asteroid heading for earth to ensure a star wars candidate gets reelected?
More practically, there is another significant scientific question which might be resolved by giving a nudge to an asteroid. Right now Newton's gravitational constant is only known to an accuracy of 0.15% which is worse than crude compared to other important physical constants. The problem is basically that it's hard to measure precisely between objects on the earth's surface and we only have crude estimates of the weights of planets, etc. However if we were able to impart an accurately measured and large enough impulse to an asteroid which has its own satelite, with precise tracking before and after, it might just enable us to improve that accuracy by some orders of magnitude.
... last (southern) summer when I spent a couple of weeks on vacation at an unpowered camp ground beyond reach of even cellular coverage.
It soon got to the point where it would have detracted from my holiday less if I had been able to write more freely that my iBook batteries allowed.
But even for the rest of the year, there is some appeal in the idea of being able to do something for cardiovascular fitness while we work.
So there really might be a market amongst relatively affluent nerds for early implementations of pedal powered computing, though maybe sans printer.
Then if the third world continues to see wisdom in leaping straight into the information age as a tactic for improving the rest of their lives the technology might be got to the point needed to make economic sense.
A lifetime ago, the lives of settlers in the Australian outback were improved by the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the School of the Air, both of which were made effective by Alfred Traegar's development of the pedal wireless and a morse code keyboard.
Practical steps to answering the main question
on
Back to the Moon?
·
· Score: 2
low gravity environments (like the moon) are thought to be ok
Unfortunately we don't yet have any evidence whether or not this might be true and it is starting to rank as the most important question of the new (half?) century in determining our destiny.
If, and it remains a significant "if", humans can operate (in suitably protected structures) on the lunar surface long term without seriously adverse health consequences, then the course that makes the most sense is to establish a serious lunar industrial complex before we worry too much about sending anything more than ever smarter robotic probes to explore other parts of the solar system.
For quite a while yet, there are going to remain very serious constraints on what unattended robots can achieve. On the moon we can push that boundary to reach the point of confidence in sending off the robots that will be needed to prepare on Mars (and/or its satelites) sufficient supplies for the first arrival of human vistors/colonists.
Not only will it be much easier to do this if humans can stay healthy for years rather than months on the moon, but that will also open the way to much greater development on the moon when we start to see the energy and environmental trade offs from a lunar perspective.
booked the meeting at 7 at a nightclub that doesn't open till 8:30.
That was our story that started the thread in the first place.
The place the Melbourne gathering finished up at was more than appropriate. It didn't just have a row of Internet terminals available for $A2 an hour if you bought a drink, but the tipping jar on the counter next to the Internet prices promised to improve your karma.
I don't expect it is too hard to get it to do whatever you want it to do.
Theo has been a key member of the Mathematica development team since day one.
Early on he was looking at defining its graphical user interface using Mathematica itself, and it isn't all that far from GUI to Web site and book design.
Melbourne University's Faculty of the Arts, which uses 4,676 Macs and 5,338 Wintel machines
Having done a Masters there not so long ago, I can assure anybody interested that
the faculty itself doesn't have anything like that number of computers, so they were clearly studying the world beyond the faculty, and
it is anything but a place for graphic artists, being much more of a traditional history and philosophy oriented big old university arts faculty
If you are more interested in what you are using the computer for than in the computer itself then the Mac has been the only choice for 18 years, says he sitting next to a Linux gateway/server and sharing with a dedicated PC/Linux user.
The use of "actor" in his context is clearly different to the one you are familiar with.
Maybe you wouldn't get a gig in Hollywood, but you are indisputably an "actor" in the sense used by Bruno Latour to encompass all humans and whatever other entities might act so as to influence the data/knowledge. Latour's actor's do not even need to have intentions.
I ran into them in a Philosophy of Science course a decade ago, but nowadays you can just use a Google search.
Before thinking too hard about regulations for the longer term it would make more sense to open up some space for experimentation with what kind of services radio might help deliver in an era of ubiguitous computing, ubiquitous digital storage and ubiquitous wired bandwidth.
Personally, I only use radio in car and in bed, but even there I would like to get a lot more value from my listening time.
Ideally almost all radio broadcasts would be mediated and buffered using my local storage and preferences, with a simple enough control to be used while driving (and in bed) enabling me to skip/kill items or request more depth/options.
Once in a while I'd like the ability to fine tune my preferences from a browser, especially the integration of my personal music collection with broadcast material.
And I'd be more than happy if localised advertising paid for the costs, both at home as a smarter substitute for junk mail and in transit as a smarter substitute for billboards.
Unfortunately, I suspect, that the kind of people likely to buy up property rights to the radio spectrum are unlikely to ever have the wit to risk that level of potential destabilisation to their tired business models.
There are generally five biggies identified since the "Cambrian explosion", the sudden diversification of animal body plans/phyla, these being identified with the Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian and Cretaceous geological periods.
However it doesn't take a lot of imagination to realise that the abrupt changes in the rocks which have long guided geologists to divide geologic time into distinct epochs must be due to global changes in the ecology, especially in marine microorganisms... the smoking gun for the late Stephen Jay Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium.
This overview of the big five events and their causes shows them bracketed by a pair that led into the Cambrian explosion and a seemingly human induced one.
There is a lot of conjecture about causes for specific extinction events, IMNSHO mainly due to the growing human (and especially scientific) demand that causes be singular. Purported causes include extensive glaciation which is relatively easy to spot in the geological record, flood volcanism, which is a bit harder because it is relatively localised, and impacts, the most recent of which at least managed to leave a layer enriched with iridium and a large crater.
But even re that most recent dinosaur ending event there is still evidence that the Deccan Traps lava flood may have played a role, as there are persistent claims for impacts as well as Siberian lava flows around the time of the real biggie at the end of the Permian which this article focuses on.
Personally I'm leaning more and more towards a double whammy theory of mass extinction that would require some sustained global stress complemented by a more sudden knockout punch. And that doesn't get humanity off the hook.
Of more consequence for populist misinterpretations of Darwin's great insights is that it has needed the slate to be wiped almost clean many times before an opportunity arose for mammals, let alone humans, to rise to prominence.
As co-conspirators in the rise of imformation technology we should be able to see the importance of mass extinctions opening opportunities for those who may be better at innovation.
Reading through this Apocalypse, I gained two strong impressions:
2. It is going to be a lot more manageable for me to program a parser I need in Perl 6 than it has been in Perl 5, because (i) regexes can now be laid out readably and (ii) clean reentry into Perl for stuff that is better done in Perl than in regex.
1. For all the common little applications of regexes things are going to be much the same or easier.
I suspect a lot more than me struggled to really get into some of the kludges added in Perl 5 in an attempt to provide useful functionality, so the Perl 6 approach of being willing to break backwards compatability where appropriate is going to produce a language which is much better while still being unmistakably Perl.
One key to all this is that Perl 6, through its regex parsing power as much as anything else, will be able to seamlessly deal with Perl 5 syntax when you need it to.
For once I got to something early on thanks to a tip from a friend and it was mostly stable running Moz 0.98 under Mac OS 9.1 over cable although once or thrice it seemed to stop accepting input into its search bar.
I'd been waiting for somebody to try something genuinely useful with Flash for a while, at least useful beyond providing something to hide behind when you haven't got any real content, and while Kartoo is nice enough to now be near the top of my five miles of mostly unsorted bookmarks, one side of me wishes that they'd waited for SVG to be a bit more available.
Maybe I was lucky in my first choice, but I opted for "complexity nonlinear emergence" and was richly rewarded. The visual presentation of results and associated keywords seemed like a significant step forward and led me to a bunch of useful cross disciplinary sites that I haven't had a chance to more than skim yet.
It has been interesting to compare Kartoo with Google Sets that was discussed here last week. Both are novel approaches to situating search items in context, but at least for "complexity nonlinear emergence" Google Sets is singularly unhelpful.
100% stuffy middle aged gents who were working for defense contractors
Ok, you and I might remember the Net from back when we only had gopher and MUDs, but for most of the world, the "early Net" starts with the first public beta of Mosaic for Mac and Windoze.
How can some personal obsrervations about roller blading in Venice, CA, in the '80s be damned as "troll" and "flamebait" to a story about shatboarding in Dogtown in the '70s????
Could those moderators who know even as little about LA as I do from the other side of the Pacific please moderate the parent, not this, at least back to it's starting level, and maybe even give it a +1 interesting.
I wouldn't be posting this except I can't find the moderation abuse link which I'm sure was in the metamoderation instructions only days ago.
at the close of what is known as the Miocene era, when Ice Age conditions cooled the planet
Any paleontologist worth their salt will be so familiar with the stratigraphic boundaries between the various geological epochs, including the Miocene, that they aren't going to think to give their dating a special mention, especially not in a CNN one page summary.
if the clones (ie., early stormtroopers) are so damn good at this point in time, why in the subsequent movies are they so damned useless?
I felt that Yoda's off screen efforts in delivering the clone army said a lot more about the power of the force in him than his little onscreen skirmish with Dooku.
Actually, I lie, it is really me that is straying and the dogs that are locked safely behind tall fences, but it sounded better that way.
I guess I first noticed it with a much missed pet, but have noticed it more and more since I learnt to walk without the aid of my own dog.
But I am now quite certain that at least some dogs import significance to the number of repetitions in a short sequence, be it the dog's own barks or the human's poor imitations, or even clicking vocalisations.
The only cat I know that meows a lot is stone deaf.
All we have to do is grow up, go up, leave the nest, and get on with it.
Interstellar emigration isn't likely to be an option for a bloat in carbon-based lifeforms any time soon, so until we know that there are at least dinosaur-equivalents on a significant percentage of damp rocky planets (research that might take much of the new millennium) we have a considerable obligation to protect our nest from double whammy catastrophes.
It will take more than an expanding shell of von Neumann probes to achieve the organisational complexity the biosphere has achieved on this planet, so we still need techno sapiens to leave this nest (for cyberspace and/or outerspace as quickly as possible) returning the evolution of terrestrial systems in non technological hands.
The powers-that-be must show they have working teeth.
I hope you were trying to be sarcastic. That certainly doesn't describe the kind of world I aspire to live in.
As we have to deal with more and more complexity, one thing that can help is truth in labeling/signage/documentation so we can have justified confidence in things we encounter occasionally without needing to become experts in their every detail.
I for one do not want to trust "powers-that-be" to get their labeling/signage/documentation right every time to the finest detail... although I do want to trust them to establish style guides that ensure whatever the signs might say isn't obscured by artistic licence.
However it does seem to me to be a good idea for the content of signs et al to be open to public review, a concept that the Internet and an open ended program to devolve responsibilities for detail to a more local level can both help with.
Likely outcome of the bust left as an exercise for the reader.
Living in a lucky country where the economic measures didn't even shorten stride as they gallop into the unknown, I have noted a few other people starting to bemoan the degree to which money is starting to get in the way of even the simplest things which are essential to our very humanity... from seeing friends to putting one person's junk to the service of some less demanding cause.
But every day it looks more likely that we do not have to wait till after the boom for depression, but that depression has already set in, both for those whose ever harder work continues to underpin the indicators and for those struggling to find their way into the loop.
There is something primitively natural in the cycle of long growth and rapid death which flies in the face of human aspirations to fairness, the kind of overgrowth which our granting veto to the bean counters has made has made an inescapable aspiration of every human institution... and at which those best at spreading FUD continue to have the greatest success, be they involved in hyping upgrades or the war against drugs.
So you don't have to wait for the depression to follow Wired's long boom, you just have to look around and ask people how they feel.
John Conway's Game of Life, the most well-known cellular automaton, shows how nonlocal phenomena can be generated from purely local rules.
Since exposed to the science minded through Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American in 1970, Life has introduced many to the study of complex systems, emergence, etc, etc, which I now see as providing a broader context for the physics (and chemistry and biology and collaborative systems) which we find in this world.
For the record, this does not mean that I am convinced that our cosmos is a cellular automaton, but rather that complex systems provide a tool even more powerful than traditional math for modeling, and thus in some ways understanding, our world.
I've long been inspired by the likes of the Butlerian Jihad to a dream that we may soon enough agree that at least those Enhancements that offer (indefinite?) life extension should only be available off planet.
Lee Smolin talks about an evolutionary model in The Life of the Cosmos which has the great advantage, for those who can get their head around it, of not requiring any assumptions about special conditions just arising out of nowhere, which is to my mind indistiguiushable from always having been there.
Because we can't really escape them here, we have a lot of trouble contemplating anything at all which does not involve space, time, energy nor matter. An evolutionary universe gets us past this, not because it is concerned about survival, but about fecundity of the production process whereby black holes rebound to form disconnected big (and maybe sometimes little) bangs, then extrapolating this process back till when there was truly nothing except the possibility.
Granting William of Occam an oversized razor, it would surely favour Smolin's idea of evolution from a state where the only certainty is that nothing is unstable to the world we find ourselves in; rather than Ekprotic Theory, any of the many attempts to revive the steady state corpse, the quantum theorists' many world interpretation or "intelligent design".
Cycles never truly come back to their starting point.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's the kind of item that if I had moderator points right now I'd want to give them to the submitter, or maybe to the guy who submitted three weeks ago, or even to Cowboy Neal for letting it through. Hey maybe I should just vote for him in more polls.
... fortunately given how history turned a not quite successful day ... I watched K & P back to back in a local art/nostalgia theatre, since sadly departed.
Not needing chemicals to get into trouble, my heaviest dose of K & P came at the end of a long winter's day outside municipal polling booths
Right now I have a problem with my P CD which unfortunately diappeared into an unnoticed slit between my car CD player and a defunct tape player when I was trying to put it in the CD slot during a recent interstate drive, but that isn't stopping me listening to it on iTunes as I type.
The last line of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf in the default OS X.1.5 installation reads:
/private/etc/httpd/users
/private/etc/httpd/users file being added for each user which enable you to serve anything you put in the Sites folder in your personal home directory. These are served in turn as http://your.domain.name/~username/page.html or the prevailing DirectoryIndex file to you (me) locally as http://127.0.0.1/~ynotds/
/library/webserver/CGI-Executables
/library/webserver/CGI-Executables/*
.cgi to get scripts running throughout your site.
Include
one
The main config file includes a script alias to run any CGI scripts in
They have put one Perl test script in that directory which you can view locally at http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/test-cgi, or at least you can after you have done a
sudo chmod 775
from your Terminal window.
From there, it isn't a lot of work to tweak your config files and uncomment AddHandler cgi-script
Of course the real point to setting up your Mac as a fully functional server is that you get to do all your editing in BBEdit which not only does syntax checking and colour coding on the fly of HTML, Perl, JavaScript and more, but also can directly run Perl in an open document window, enabling you to all manner of extrancting and reporting on the fly.
Now I just need to get brave enough to install MySQL.
Surely it is safer to assume that many Christian Scientists (and many nerds) have some interest in the wider world which the editors of their targeted news services might sometimes attempt to make allowance for.
Just to get this back somewhere near on topic, I have long felt smart fabrics could be the killer app for nanotechnology
It is not too hard to imagine redundancy and even self repair built into wearable systems.
What is a bit harder is the how we get there from here question, especially when we don't seem to be able to see a way past worrying about crumpling optical fibres.
It's only through spreading panic that governements retain their illusion of relevance. The worst of them manage to panic us sufficiently about drugs, illegal immigrants, sex, terrorists, corruption, hackers, disease and the purported untrustworthiness of our fellow man that enough turn out to vote to maintain some appearance of legitimacy to their exercise of the military, taxation and diplomatic privileges of statehood. What better than an asteroid heading for earth to ensure a star wars candidate gets reelected?
More practically, there is another significant scientific question which might be resolved by giving a nudge to an asteroid. Right now Newton's gravitational constant is only known to an accuracy of 0.15% which is worse than crude compared to other important physical constants. The problem is basically that it's hard to measure precisely between objects on the earth's surface and we only have crude estimates of the weights of planets, etc. However if we were able to impart an accurately measured and large enough impulse to an asteroid which has its own satelite, with precise tracking before and after, it might just enable us to improve that accuracy by some orders of magnitude.
... last (southern) summer when I spent a couple of weeks on vacation at an unpowered camp ground beyond reach of even cellular coverage.
It soon got to the point where it would have detracted from my holiday less if I had been able to write more freely that my iBook batteries allowed.
But even for the rest of the year, there is some appeal in the idea of being able to do something for cardiovascular fitness while we work.
So there really might be a market amongst relatively affluent nerds for early implementations of pedal powered computing, though maybe sans printer.
Then if the third world continues to see wisdom in leaping straight into the information age as a tactic for improving the rest of their lives the technology might be got to the point needed to make economic sense.
A lifetime ago, the lives of settlers in the Australian outback were improved by the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the School of the Air, both of which were made effective by Alfred Traegar's development of the pedal wireless and a morse code keyboard.
low gravity environments (like the moon) are thought to be ok
Unfortunately we don't yet have any evidence whether or not this might be true and it is starting to rank as the most important question of the new (half?) century in determining our destiny.
If, and it remains a significant "if", humans can operate (in suitably protected structures) on the lunar surface long term without seriously adverse health consequences, then the course that makes the most sense is to establish a serious lunar industrial complex before we worry too much about sending anything more than ever smarter robotic probes to explore other parts of the solar system.
For quite a while yet, there are going to remain very serious constraints on what unattended robots can achieve. On the moon we can push that boundary to reach the point of confidence in sending off the robots that will be needed to prepare on Mars (and/or its satelites) sufficient supplies for the first arrival of human vistors/colonists.
Not only will it be much easier to do this if humans can stay healthy for years rather than months on the moon, but that will also open the way to much greater development on the moon when we start to see the energy and environmental trade offs from a lunar perspective.
The place the Melbourne gathering finished up at was more than appropriate. It didn't just have a row of Internet terminals available for $A2 an hour if you bought a drink, but the tipping jar on the counter next to the Internet prices promised to improve your karma.
I don't expect it is too hard to get it to do whatever you want it to do.
Theo has been a key member of the Mathematica development team since day one.
Early on he was looking at defining its graphical user interface using Mathematica itself, and it isn't all that far from GUI to Web site and book design.
- the faculty itself doesn't have anything like that number of computers, so they were clearly studying the world beyond the faculty, and
- it is anything but a place for graphic artists, being much more of a traditional history and philosophy oriented big old university arts faculty
If you are more interested in what you are using the computer for than in the computer itself then the Mac has been the only choice for 18 years, says he sitting next to a Linux gateway/server and sharing with a dedicated PC/Linux user.Maybe you wouldn't get a gig in Hollywood, but you are indisputably an "actor" in the sense used by Bruno Latour to encompass all humans and whatever other entities might act so as to influence the data/knowledge. Latour's actor's do not even need to have intentions.
I ran into them in a Philosophy of Science course a decade ago, but nowadays you can just use a Google search.
Before thinking too hard about regulations for the longer term it would make more sense to open up some space for experimentation with what kind of services radio might help deliver in an era of ubiguitous computing, ubiquitous digital storage and ubiquitous wired bandwidth.
Personally, I only use radio in car and in bed, but even there I would like to get a lot more value from my listening time.
Ideally almost all radio broadcasts would be mediated and buffered using my local storage and preferences, with a simple enough control to be used while driving (and in bed) enabling me to skip/kill items or request more depth/options.
Once in a while I'd like the ability to fine tune my preferences from a browser, especially the integration of my personal music collection with broadcast material.
And I'd be more than happy if localised advertising paid for the costs, both at home as a smarter substitute for junk mail and in transit as a smarter substitute for billboards.
Unfortunately, I suspect, that the kind of people likely to buy up property rights to the radio spectrum are unlikely to ever have the wit to risk that level of potential destabilisation to their tired business models.
However it doesn't take a lot of imagination to realise that the abrupt changes in the rocks which have long guided geologists to divide geologic time into distinct epochs must be due to global changes in the ecology, especially in marine microorganisms
This overview of the big five events and their causes shows them bracketed by a pair that led into the Cambrian explosion and a seemingly human induced one.
There is a lot of conjecture about causes for specific extinction events, IMNSHO mainly due to the growing human (and especially scientific) demand that causes be singular. Purported causes include extensive glaciation which is relatively easy to spot in the geological record, flood volcanism, which is a bit harder because it is relatively localised, and impacts, the most recent of which at least managed to leave a layer enriched with iridium and a large crater.
But even re that most recent dinosaur ending event there is still evidence that the Deccan Traps lava flood may have played a role, as there are persistent claims for impacts as well as Siberian lava flows around the time of the real biggie at the end of the Permian which this article focuses on.
Personally I'm leaning more and more towards a double whammy theory of mass extinction that would require some sustained global stress complemented by a more sudden knockout punch. And that doesn't get humanity off the hook.
Of more consequence for populist misinterpretations of Darwin's great insights is that it has needed the slate to be wiped almost clean many times before an opportunity arose for mammals, let alone humans, to rise to prominence.
As co-conspirators in the rise of imformation technology we should be able to see the importance of mass extinctions opening opportunities for those who may be better at innovation.
Reading through this Apocalypse, I gained two strong impressions:
2. It is going to be a lot more manageable for me to program a parser I need in Perl 6 than it has been in Perl 5, because (i) regexes can now be laid out readably and (ii) clean reentry into Perl for stuff that is better done in Perl than in regex.
1. For all the common little applications of regexes things are going to be much the same or easier.
I suspect a lot more than me struggled to really get into some of the kludges added in Perl 5 in an attempt to provide useful functionality, so the Perl 6 approach of being willing to break backwards compatability where appropriate is going to produce a language which is much better while still being unmistakably Perl.
One key to all this is that Perl 6, through its regex parsing power as much as anything else, will be able to seamlessly deal with Perl 5 syntax when you need it to.
For once I got to something early on thanks to a tip from a friend and it was mostly stable running Moz 0.98 under Mac OS 9.1 over cable although once or thrice it seemed to stop accepting input into its search bar.
I'd been waiting for somebody to try something genuinely useful with Flash for a while, at least useful beyond providing something to hide behind when you haven't got any real content, and while Kartoo is nice enough to now be near the top of my five miles of mostly unsorted bookmarks, one side of me wishes that they'd waited for SVG to be a bit more available.
Maybe I was lucky in my first choice, but I opted for "complexity nonlinear emergence" and was richly rewarded. The visual presentation of results and associated keywords seemed like a significant step forward and led me to a bunch of useful cross disciplinary sites that I haven't had a chance to more than skim yet.
It has been interesting to compare Kartoo with Google Sets that was discussed here last week. Both are novel approaches to situating search items in context, but at least for "complexity nonlinear emergence" Google Sets is singularly unhelpful.
How can some personal obsrervations about roller blading in Venice, CA, in the '80s be damned as "troll" and "flamebait" to a story about shatboarding in Dogtown in the '70s????
Could those moderators who know even as little about LA as I do from the other side of the Pacific please moderate the parent, not this, at least back to it's starting level, and maybe even give it a +1 interesting.
I wouldn't be posting this except I can't find the moderation abuse link which I'm sure was in the metamoderation instructions only days ago.
Actually, I lie, it is really me that is straying and the dogs that are locked safely behind tall fences, but it sounded better that way.
I guess I first noticed it with a much missed pet, but have noticed it more and more since I learnt to walk without the aid of my own dog.
But I am now quite certain that at least some dogs import significance to the number of repetitions in a short sequence, be it the dog's own barks or the human's poor imitations, or even clicking vocalisations.
The only cat I know that meows a lot is stone deaf.
It will take more than an expanding shell of von Neumann probes to achieve the organisational complexity the biosphere has achieved on this planet, so we still need techno sapiens to leave this nest (for cyberspace and/or outerspace as quickly as possible) returning the evolution of terrestrial systems in non technological hands.
I hope you were trying to be sarcastic. That certainly doesn't describe the kind of world I aspire to live in.
As we have to deal with more and more complexity, one thing that can help is truth in labeling/signage/documentation so we can have justified confidence in things we encounter occasionally without needing to become experts in their every detail.
I for one do not want to trust "powers-that-be" to get their labeling/signage/documentation right every time to the finest detail
However it does seem to me to be a good idea for the content of signs et al to be open to public review, a concept that the Internet and an open ended program to devolve responsibilities for detail to a more local level can both help with.
Likely outcome of the bust left as an exercise for the reader.
... from seeing friends to putting one person's junk to the service of some less demanding cause.
... and at which those best at spreading FUD continue to have the greatest success, be they involved in hyping upgrades or the war against drugs.
Living in a lucky country where the economic measures didn't even shorten stride as they gallop into the unknown, I have noted a few other people starting to bemoan the degree to which money is starting to get in the way of even the simplest things which are essential to our very humanity
But every day it looks more likely that we do not have to wait till after the boom for depression, but that depression has already set in, both for those whose ever harder work continues to underpin the indicators and for those struggling to find their way into the loop.
There is something primitively natural in the cycle of long growth and rapid death which flies in the face of human aspirations to fairness, the kind of overgrowth which our granting veto to the bean counters has made has made an inescapable aspiration of every human institution
So you don't have to wait for the depression to follow Wired's long boom, you just have to look around and ask people how they feel.
John Conway's Game of Life, the most well-known cellular automaton, shows how nonlocal phenomena can be generated from purely local rules.
Since exposed to the science minded through Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American in 1970, Life has introduced many to the study of complex systems, emergence, etc, etc, which I now see as providing a broader context for the physics (and chemistry and biology and collaborative systems) which we find in this world.
For the record, this does not mean that I am convinced that our cosmos is a cellular automaton, but rather that complex systems provide a tool even more powerful than traditional math for modeling, and thus in some ways understanding, our world.
I've long been inspired by the likes of the Butlerian Jihad to a dream that we may soon enough agree that at least those Enhancements that offer (indefinite?) life extension should only be available off planet.
Lee Smolin talks about an evolutionary model in The Life of the Cosmos which has the great advantage, for those who can get their head around it, of not requiring any assumptions about special conditions just arising out of nowhere, which is to my mind indistiguiushable from always having been there.
Because we can't really escape them here, we have a lot of trouble contemplating anything at all which does not involve space, time, energy nor matter. An evolutionary universe gets us past this, not because it is concerned about survival, but about fecundity of the production process whereby black holes rebound to form disconnected big (and maybe sometimes little) bangs, then extrapolating this process back till when there was truly nothing except the possibility.
Granting William of Occam an oversized razor, it would surely favour Smolin's idea of evolution from a state where the only certainty is that nothing is unstable to the world we find ourselves in; rather than Ekprotic Theory, any of the many attempts to revive the steady state corpse, the quantum theorists' many world interpretation or "intelligent design".
Cycles never truly come back to their starting point.