Digital computers are deterministic: Throw the same equation at them a thousand times and they will always spit out the same answer. Throw a question at the brain and it can produce a thousand different answers, canvassed from a chorus of quirky neurons. "The evidence is overwhelming that the brain computes with probability," Sejnowski says. Wishy-washy responses may make life easier in an uncertain world where we do not know which way an errant football will bounce, or whether a growling dog will lunge. Unpredictable neurons might cause us to take a wrong turn while walking home and discover a shortcut, or to spill acid on a pewter plate and during the cleanup to discover the process of etching.
So God does play dice. And we call it "free will".
"Ok, I understand the 'coolness' factor of radio transmissions to the stars, but in the end are they all wasted money?"
Now I will have to balance books. I applied for two small grants to help me do this. Both were denied. I was not funded by MIT, the government, or anyone else to carry out this project. It has been expensive, at least, from my point of view. I do have the coolest iPhone now, so how can I complain? Who knows who's going to be calling back?
The only "wasted" money is his own. Let a man do something cool with his life without being criticized for adding billions to the federal deficit. As something of a romantic, I'd hope that he could make enough money selling that iPhone to a collector of mankind's First Contact artifacts to pay for the trip.
Or they might stop and say, "Oh, hey! We were about to build a hyperspace bypass through your solar system. But now that we know it's inhabited, we'll reroute that and give you an on-ramp. And by the way, here's the technology for zero-point energy, faster-than-light communication, and the meaning of life. Welcome to the club!"
It does amaze me how many people will waste twenty minutes complaining about a problem that is slowing them down by a few seconds.
Little delays have a big impact when they occur frequently and during moments of concentration. What if your keyboard took one second to respond to each key you pressed? And then waited another second to register the next key? You probably wouldn't have much fun typing up an email and waiting three minutes for all the letters to register, just to find that you made a typo in the first sentence and need another two minutes to correct one mistake. And you'd probably lose your train of thought before reaching the second paragraph and forget to tell your coworker that one very important reminder that would have saved them an extra day of work. Would it be worth ten minutes of your time Googling around and finding how to fix your computer?
So an increase from one second to four seconds isn't just three seconds, it's four times longer! And if that delay occurs while you're in a frame of mind that you only attain for an hour a day, that's another factor of twenty-four to count. Little delays when you're working intensely are a big problem.
I wonder how bad the seasonal flu wave will be this year. With all the excitement about swine flu, seasonal flu vaccinations seem to be forgotten.
I've been undergoing cancer treatment for the past five years and usually get the shot to reduce the chance of getting the flu while I'm busy fighting something else. But this year my oncologist's office ran out of the vaccine between my monthly checkups. My backup plan is to get the shot at work or a drugstore, but I haven't seen any information about those clinics this year.
I won't be surprised if many people get the swine flu vaccine (or try to get it and fail), then figure they've taken care of the biggest threat and forget to prepare for seasonal flu.
As it was explained to me: Patents aren't written so that they're impossible to read. Patents are written so that they're impossible to misread. The enforceable parts must be written very precisely so that a judge knows exactly what they mean without any guesswork. You can think of the judge as a compiler who needs to have each part of the program described in careful language.
The form of patent applications is generally the same as a century ago. That's necessary since they need to maintain a consistent and interactive structure. That also means that they appear archaic. But that's mostly due to unfamiliarity. Once you learn to read the code, they become straightforward.
Would you expect to read a template class in C++ without ever studying the C++ language? Would you expect to read a medical research paper and understand it completely without studying medicine?
The good news is that reading patents is easier than writing them. I myself am feeling more confident about the first but looking for professional help with the second. Patent It Yourself by David Pressman gives an explanation that will be clear to any computer coder with just a little study.
First, we had letters to the editor. If the editor was concerned about the sanity of an anonymous writer, he had to examine the postmark, drive over to the post office where it was mailed, talk to the postmaster and ask if he recognized the handwriting, and then visit city hall to find tax records and find out where the writer works. Then type up and send a letter to the writer's employer.
Then we get phone-in comments. The editor has to arrange with the phone company to trace incoming calls, then wait for the unwanted caller to call again and get his phone number. Then pay or get a warrant to obtain the address for that phone number. Then call city hall, find the homeowner's employer, and call that employer to explain the situation.
Fast forward to online comments. Somebody makes a comment that you aren't comfortable publishing in a public forum on your private, for-profit web site. The editor delete that comment. The commenter submits a duplicate. The editor takes ten seconds to see the domain the comment was made from and another sixty seconds to forward that information to that domain's webmaster.
It's not like the editor spent days and thousand of dollars to hunt down and prosecute the man who said a bad word. He probably spent less time firing off an email than the poster did reading the article, posting a comment, reloading to see it and giggle, finding it gone, and posting again.
The editor did take the time to write up a description of the event (with names withheld to protect the mildly guilty). But it's his job to write things that people are interested in reading and discussing. And in that he succeeded.
If this guy was posting from home I'd be more defensive of his free speech (although I still think that something that would be inappropriate as a Letter To The Editor is still inappropriate as a comment on a general purpose newspaper). But the rules for personal use of computers at work usually includes not doing anything that will bring embarrassment or legal action against your employer.
This is something he should not have done, but even then termination seems excessive. There's a concept of "escalating discipline" in which an employee is first given warnings and minor punishments before escalating to major punishments and termination. That gives them fair warning that what they did was wrong and allows them a chance to reform. Immediate termination is reserved for infractions that are extreme and indefensible.
So maybe we're missing part of the story. Maybe this guy works in a situation where vulgar sexual expressions are really creepy. I don't mind the fact that teachers reproduce, but my 8-year-old daughter's soccer coach doesn't need to be talking about oral sex in the locker room. Or maybe this guy had a history of misbehavior, and the IT guy was happy to have hard evidence to catch him red handed.
A couple years ago I went to a local movie theater and the box office line was too long so I chose to buy tickets from the computer kiosk. After choosing the showtime and sliding my credit card, a screen popped up saying:
Customer Loyalty? YES | NO
Uh, no? I thought it was asking me if I was enrolled in some discount program I had never heard about. I answered honestly (or figured that if I lied then it'd ask for an ID number I didn't have). But I could see how Web sites might ask a similar question and fool customers into buying something when they had a reasonable expectation of getting something free.
It's striking how few supercomputers are sold to commercial companies. Even the military doesn't use them much any more.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home to the world's fastest supercomputer, does a lot of work for national security. At the labs housing the top ten supercomputers, at least five do weapons and defense research. And that's just what the public knows about. I would be shocked if there weren't similar supercomputers working on intelligence and classified projects.
Even if the computers aren't stamped with "U.S. Army", the military does indeed use many of them. The wonderful side effect of their push to simulate things like aging nuclear weapons is that it helps develop the technology for peacetime purposes like renewable energy and pharmaceuticals.
It's still just physics. You don't have to do any energy minimizations or understand how protein folds. Just solve it the way Nature does: brute force. Stick some atoms together and plot their movement over time. If you want to include the slug's environment and food, then expand the box to include those things too.
The only problem is that your computer isn't fast enough. You can't simulate a slug. You can't simulate a slug's heart. You can't simulate a single cell. You can't simulate a strand of DNA. The best you can do with current technology is to spend a week of processor time to simulate a few atoms moving around for a few nanoseconds. To scale that up to a slug (with interactions making the computational work scale much worse than linearly) would take more than all the computer power ever assembled by all of humanity.
My point is that our computers are pathetic compared to Nature's computers. If we could do a fraction of what Nature does with even a hundred atoms we'd be closer to simulating life. There's tremendous room for improvement.
I challenge you to produce the results of any study that backs up your claim that isn't countered by double the number of studies that find exactly the opposite
P.S. I'm not convinced that you can toss out studies that find something just because other studies didn't. That's like saying we sent three expeditions to find a white whale. Two returned empty-handed and one returned with a white whale. Therefore, white whales do not exist. If the studies looked for different things, in different places, or in different ways then they might all be valid.
I've heard LSD called the drug that keeps on giving. So even if the drug itself is no longer in your system, there could be mental effects for a month after.
I can't comment on natural marijuana, but I did take synthetic THC (Marinol) during chemotherapy. I wasn't getting much effect from single-pill doses, so one night I tried two pills spaced two hours apart (which was still well within the prescribed dosage). A couple hours later I was hit with unpleasant hallucinations and distortions of time (my blog entry). My body returned to normal overnight, but my brain was well scrambled for at least a week.
So I don't think it's crazy to say some drugs could have an effect for longer than they're measurable in the bloodstream. I'd like to see more scientific studies of many drugs and legalization of those that can be used with reasonable safety. Maybe natural marijuana would have been a better treatment for my chemotherapy side effects, but unfortunately in my district it's still thoroughly illegal.
Actually, I think this is the right way to determine legality of drugs. (And alcohol and caffeine are certainly drugs.) Determine whether a reasonable person can use the drug with a high confidence of safety. If yes, the drug is legal. If no, the drug is illegal for reasons of public health and safety.
Jack and Coke are two consumables that are reasonably safe in their separate forms. If you mix them together then indeed you have alcohol and caffeine, but each active ingredient is more dilute than before. That's different than adding all the caffeine of Coke (or much more) to a drink with all the alcohol of Jack Daniels.
To paraphrase your argument: "Everything must have a cause except the thing that doesn't need a cause."
1) Why are you satisfied by calling the uncaused cause God? Why can't you define the Universe to include the uncaused cause and accept that not all effects have identifiable causes?
2) If you do decide to call the uncaused cause God, how do you jump from that to believing that God cares about you and listens to your prayers? Wouldn't that be like the flames of a forest fire praying to the lightning bolt that started the fire? Is the lightning bolt watching over His creation and deciding which flames get a happy afterlife?
3) Mathematically, you can have a function with periodic boundaries that depends only on itself without a beginning or end. If the Universe is mathematical and time is a characteristic of the Universe (not a supernatural clock existing outside the Universe), then the Universe could exist in a self-consistent state without any need for a beginning. Time is an illusion experienced by hunks of matter present within the Universe. The Universe, including all of time and all possible states, simply exists.
4) If you argue that what I have just describe as the Universe is actually God, then we need to have a long discussion about Baptism, Communion, Marriage, Sin, Heaven, and Hell.
The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base.
I'm curious why you used that bit of patent text for your signature. I know that many Slashdotters ridicule patents for claiming the invention of common things. But that's not what that sentence is doing in that patent. It's just defining what a "cup" is for purposes of the patent. That's a wise thing to do since a "cup" could also mean a jockstrap, part of a bra, or the hole in a putting green. The invention includes a certain kind of insulated holder for drinking cups, and with that sentence makes clear that it doesn't apply to the other cups.
The motto is not "Do no evil", it's "Don't be evil". "Do no evil" implies never doing anything that could be construed as wrong - an impossible task unless you resign yourself to just "Do nothing". "Don't be evil" allows you to make mistakes and correct them, or to choose the lesser of two evils.
There were nukes built by Soviets. And there were nukes built for delivery to Soviets. (Intercontinental ballistic missiles: When it absolutely, positively has to be there in twenty minutes.) Whether most of that material would belong to Soviets or Americans depends on who launched first.
For a car, failing to buy gas or get an oil change won't increase the chance of an expensive accident. For a human, failing to get an EKG or an X-ray can leave that human at higher risk for a heart attack or metastatic cancer. So it's wise economics for a health insurer to pay for those little things when the insured might say "I feel fine. Why should I pay $200 for a silly test?" otherwise.
Also, the liability on a car is limited to the replacement cost. What's the replacement cost for your own body? The cost of health care over your entire life is so unpredictable that it's wise to pay into a pool of coverage even if it means that for most of your life you'll be paying for some other guy's health care. Because someday you might find yourself with an expensive chronic condition like diabetes that's not just a single catastrophic event and can't be fixed by just buying a new body.
Article III. Section 1. The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
Congress is neither qualified nor empowered to decide the constitutionality of the bill. Nor are we Slashdot commenters. It's the duty of the Supreme Court to decide that.
Article I. Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States;
We already impose many conditional taxes that vary depending on whether you're married, have children, or own a house. It's not such an astounding stretch to impose a tax that depends on whether you have health insurance. And imposing a tax on those without health insurance so that everyone has access to affordable health insurance could be construed as providing for the general welfare of the United States.
If the government insurance is as good as the private insurance but cheaper, what's the problem? If the government insurance is worse than the private insurance, well the business was free to buy cheap and crappy insurance anyway. Or not provide any insurance at all.
A smart business factors employee contentment into their assessment of "cost". They won't choose to save $100 a month on health insurance if it means losing employees that brought in $10,000 a month in business.
Slashdot Mirror
So God does play dice. And we call it "free will".
Whoa. Déjà vu.
"Ok, I understand the 'coolness' factor of radio transmissions to the stars, but in the end are they all wasted money?"
The only "wasted" money is his own. Let a man do something cool with his life without being criticized for adding billions to the federal deficit. As something of a romantic, I'd hope that he could make enough money selling that iPhone to a collector of mankind's First Contact artifacts to pay for the trip.
Or they might stop and say, "Oh, hey! We were about to build a hyperspace bypass through your solar system. But now that we know it's inhabited, we'll reroute that and give you an on-ramp. And by the way, here's the technology for zero-point energy, faster-than-light communication, and the meaning of life. Welcome to the club!"
Little delays have a big impact when they occur frequently and during moments of concentration. What if your keyboard took one second to respond to each key you pressed? And then waited another second to register the next key? You probably wouldn't have much fun typing up an email and waiting three minutes for all the letters to register, just to find that you made a typo in the first sentence and need another two minutes to correct one mistake. And you'd probably lose your train of thought before reaching the second paragraph and forget to tell your coworker that one very important reminder that would have saved them an extra day of work. Would it be worth ten minutes of your time Googling around and finding how to fix your computer?
So an increase from one second to four seconds isn't just three seconds, it's four times longer! And if that delay occurs while you're in a frame of mind that you only attain for an hour a day, that's another factor of twenty-four to count. Little delays when you're working intensely are a big problem.
I wonder how bad the seasonal flu wave will be this year. With all the excitement about swine flu, seasonal flu vaccinations seem to be forgotten.
I've been undergoing cancer treatment for the past five years and usually get the shot to reduce the chance of getting the flu while I'm busy fighting something else. But this year my oncologist's office ran out of the vaccine between my monthly checkups. My backup plan is to get the shot at work or a drugstore, but I haven't seen any information about those clinics this year.
I won't be surprised if many people get the swine flu vaccine (or try to get it and fail), then figure they've taken care of the biggest threat and forget to prepare for seasonal flu.
As it was explained to me: Patents aren't written so that they're impossible to read. Patents are written so that they're impossible to misread. The enforceable parts must be written very precisely so that a judge knows exactly what they mean without any guesswork. You can think of the judge as a compiler who needs to have each part of the program described in careful language.
The form of patent applications is generally the same as a century ago. That's necessary since they need to maintain a consistent and interactive structure. That also means that they appear archaic. But that's mostly due to unfamiliarity. Once you learn to read the code, they become straightforward.
Would you expect to read a template class in C++ without ever studying the C++ language? Would you expect to read a medical research paper and understand it completely without studying medicine?
The good news is that reading patents is easier than writing them. I myself am feeling more confident about the first but looking for professional help with the second. Patent It Yourself by David Pressman gives an explanation that will be clear to any computer coder with just a little study.
First, we had letters to the editor. If the editor was concerned about the sanity of an anonymous writer, he had to examine the postmark, drive over to the post office where it was mailed, talk to the postmaster and ask if he recognized the handwriting, and then visit city hall to find tax records and find out where the writer works. Then type up and send a letter to the writer's employer.
Then we get phone-in comments. The editor has to arrange with the phone company to trace incoming calls, then wait for the unwanted caller to call again and get his phone number. Then pay or get a warrant to obtain the address for that phone number. Then call city hall, find the homeowner's employer, and call that employer to explain the situation.
Fast forward to online comments. Somebody makes a comment that you aren't comfortable publishing in a public forum on your private, for-profit web site. The editor delete that comment. The commenter submits a duplicate. The editor takes ten seconds to see the domain the comment was made from and another sixty seconds to forward that information to that domain's webmaster.
It's not like the editor spent days and thousand of dollars to hunt down and prosecute the man who said a bad word. He probably spent less time firing off an email than the poster did reading the article, posting a comment, reloading to see it and giggle, finding it gone, and posting again.
The editor did take the time to write up a description of the event (with names withheld to protect the mildly guilty). But it's his job to write things that people are interested in reading and discussing. And in that he succeeded.
If this guy was posting from home I'd be more defensive of his free speech (although I still think that something that would be inappropriate as a Letter To The Editor is still inappropriate as a comment on a general purpose newspaper). But the rules for personal use of computers at work usually includes not doing anything that will bring embarrassment or legal action against your employer.
This is something he should not have done, but even then termination seems excessive. There's a concept of "escalating discipline" in which an employee is first given warnings and minor punishments before escalating to major punishments and termination. That gives them fair warning that what they did was wrong and allows them a chance to reform. Immediate termination is reserved for infractions that are extreme and indefensible.
So maybe we're missing part of the story. Maybe this guy works in a situation where vulgar sexual expressions are really creepy. I don't mind the fact that teachers reproduce, but my 8-year-old daughter's soccer coach doesn't need to be talking about oral sex in the locker room. Or maybe this guy had a history of misbehavior, and the IT guy was happy to have hard evidence to catch him red handed.
A couple years ago I went to a local movie theater and the box office line was too long so I chose to buy tickets from the computer kiosk. After choosing the showtime and sliding my credit card, a screen popped up saying:
Customer Loyalty?
YES | NO
Uh, no? I thought it was asking me if I was enrolled in some discount program I had never heard about. I answered honestly (or figured that if I lied then it'd ask for an ID number I didn't have). But I could see how Web sites might ask a similar question and fool customers into buying something when they had a reasonable expectation of getting something free.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home to the world's fastest supercomputer, does a lot of work for national security. At the labs housing the top ten supercomputers, at least five do weapons and defense research. And that's just what the public knows about. I would be shocked if there weren't similar supercomputers working on intelligence and classified projects.
Even if the computers aren't stamped with "U.S. Army", the military does indeed use many of them. The wonderful side effect of their push to simulate things like aging nuclear weapons is that it helps develop the technology for peacetime purposes like renewable energy and pharmaceuticals.
It's still just physics. You don't have to do any energy minimizations or understand how protein folds. Just solve it the way Nature does: brute force. Stick some atoms together and plot their movement over time. If you want to include the slug's environment and food, then expand the box to include those things too.
The only problem is that your computer isn't fast enough. You can't simulate a slug. You can't simulate a slug's heart. You can't simulate a single cell. You can't simulate a strand of DNA. The best you can do with current technology is to spend a week of processor time to simulate a few atoms moving around for a few nanoseconds. To scale that up to a slug (with interactions making the computational work scale much worse than linearly) would take more than all the computer power ever assembled by all of humanity.
My point is that our computers are pathetic compared to Nature's computers. If we could do a fraction of what Nature does with even a hundred atoms we'd be closer to simulating life. There's tremendous room for improvement.
P.S. I'm not convinced that you can toss out studies that find something just because other studies didn't. That's like saying we sent three expeditions to find a white whale. Two returned empty-handed and one returned with a white whale. Therefore, white whales do not exist. If the studies looked for different things, in different places, or in different ways then they might all be valid.
I've heard LSD called the drug that keeps on giving. So even if the drug itself is no longer in your system, there could be mental effects for a month after.
I can't comment on natural marijuana, but I did take synthetic THC (Marinol) during chemotherapy. I wasn't getting much effect from single-pill doses, so one night I tried two pills spaced two hours apart (which was still well within the prescribed dosage). A couple hours later I was hit with unpleasant hallucinations and distortions of time (my blog entry). My body returned to normal overnight, but my brain was well scrambled for at least a week.
So I don't think it's crazy to say some drugs could have an effect for longer than they're measurable in the bloodstream. I'd like to see more scientific studies of many drugs and legalization of those that can be used with reasonable safety. Maybe natural marijuana would have been a better treatment for my chemotherapy side effects, but unfortunately in my district it's still thoroughly illegal.
Actually, I think this is the right way to determine legality of drugs. (And alcohol and caffeine are certainly drugs.) Determine whether a reasonable person can use the drug with a high confidence of safety. If yes, the drug is legal. If no, the drug is illegal for reasons of public health and safety.
Jack and Coke are two consumables that are reasonably safe in their separate forms. If you mix them together then indeed you have alcohol and caffeine, but each active ingredient is more dilute than before. That's different than adding all the caffeine of Coke (or much more) to a drink with all the alcohol of Jack Daniels.
To paraphrase your argument: "Everything must have a cause except the thing that doesn't need a cause."
1) Why are you satisfied by calling the uncaused cause God? Why can't you define the Universe to include the uncaused cause and accept that not all effects have identifiable causes?
2) If you do decide to call the uncaused cause God, how do you jump from that to believing that God cares about you and listens to your prayers? Wouldn't that be like the flames of a forest fire praying to the lightning bolt that started the fire? Is the lightning bolt watching over His creation and deciding which flames get a happy afterlife?
3) Mathematically, you can have a function with periodic boundaries that depends only on itself without a beginning or end. If the Universe is mathematical and time is a characteristic of the Universe (not a supernatural clock existing outside the Universe), then the Universe could exist in a self-consistent state without any need for a beginning. Time is an illusion experienced by hunks of matter present within the Universe. The Universe, including all of time and all possible states, simply exists.
4) If you argue that what I have just describe as the Universe is actually God, then we need to have a long discussion about Baptism, Communion, Marriage, Sin, Heaven, and Hell.
I'm curious why you used that bit of patent text for your signature. I know that many Slashdotters ridicule patents for claiming the invention of common things. But that's not what that sentence is doing in that patent. It's just defining what a "cup" is for purposes of the patent. That's a wise thing to do since a "cup" could also mean a jockstrap, part of a bra, or the hole in a putting green. The invention includes a certain kind of insulated holder for drinking cups, and with that sentence makes clear that it doesn't apply to the other cups.
The motto is not "Do no evil", it's "Don't be evil". "Do no evil" implies never doing anything that could be construed as wrong - an impossible task unless you resign yourself to just "Do nothing". "Don't be evil" allows you to make mistakes and correct them, or to choose the lesser of two evils.
So then Google should make it clear that their language is not McCabe's "Go!" by changing the name to "!Go!" (not Go!).
P.S. I suspect grandparent is spinning a yarn. Perhaps "Funny" is a more appropriate moderation than "Insightful".
!Go! (since it's not Go!)
Goobar
Goooooooooooooo
6o
G0
This guy reminds me of the Heat Miser. Maybe he's just grumpy because Santa never gave him the toy he wanted.
We should get together and send him a Hannah Montana Holiday Singing Doll. That'll cheer him up.
There were nukes built by Soviets. And there were nukes built for delivery to Soviets. (Intercontinental ballistic missiles: When it absolutely, positively has to be there in twenty minutes.) Whether most of that material would belong to Soviets or Americans depends on who launched first.
For a car, failing to buy gas or get an oil change won't increase the chance of an expensive accident. For a human, failing to get an EKG or an X-ray can leave that human at higher risk for a heart attack or metastatic cancer. So it's wise economics for a health insurer to pay for those little things when the insured might say "I feel fine. Why should I pay $200 for a silly test?" otherwise.
Also, the liability on a car is limited to the replacement cost. What's the replacement cost for your own body? The cost of health care over your entire life is so unpredictable that it's wise to pay into a pool of coverage even if it means that for most of your life you'll be paying for some other guy's health care. Because someday you might find yourself with an expensive chronic condition like diabetes that's not just a single catastrophic event and can't be fixed by just buying a new body.
Congress is neither qualified nor empowered to decide the constitutionality of the bill. Nor are we Slashdot commenters. It's the duty of the Supreme Court to decide that.
We already impose many conditional taxes that vary depending on whether you're married, have children, or own a house. It's not such an astounding stretch to impose a tax that depends on whether you have health insurance. And imposing a tax on those without health insurance so that everyone has access to affordable health insurance could be construed as providing for the general welfare of the United States.
If the government insurance is as good as the private insurance but cheaper, what's the problem? If the government insurance is worse than the private insurance, well the business was free to buy cheap and crappy insurance anyway. Or not provide any insurance at all.
A smart business factors employee contentment into their assessment of "cost". They won't choose to save $100 a month on health insurance if it means losing employees that brought in $10,000 a month in business.