In the end, the internet is just a carrier. It's neither good nor bad.
So you think the Internet is just the routers and switches that carry traffic, and doesn't include the end systems that are connected to it? And you think a site built for the purpose of selling child pornography is "neither good nor bad"? Curiouser and curiouser...
Why are these systems connected to the internet, if they're so important?
Whether they should be or not, a lot of them are. In the case of severe weather services, of course, you want them to be connected to the Internet so that people can find out about the severe weather. The same holds for tsunami warning systems and other public emergency notification services.
Even at its worst, the internet can't kill and your actions online can't hurt other people.
That's a facile claim. The reality is much more complex.
Profits from child porn sites support producers of child pornography. This hurts other people.
Insecure systems can be used to attack SCADA control systems and sites supporting emergency services and severe weather prediction capability. This can actually kill other people.
This is not to say that optional filtering, if it even worked, is much of a solution to these problems. But let's not oversimplify.
Satellite data also record the offshore lights where oil and gas production is active (visible e.g. in the North Sea, Chinese Sea and Arabic Gulf), other natural gas flares (visible e.g. in Nigeria) and the fishing fleets (visible e.g. near the coast of Argentina, in Japan Sea and near Malacca). Note that their upward emission functions likely differ from the average emission function of the urban night-time lighting that we use so that the predictions of their effects have some uncertainty.
Not really. Artificial light affects limiting magnitude far from cities, and for many people, traveling to a place where the sky is really dark is practically impossible.
Car break-ins and things like house intrusions are all easier to accomplish in the dark.
That depends. In many cases, break-ins are actually aided by ambient lighting, because people skulking around with flashlights are a lot more likely to be noticed, and unless you're skilled at ninjitsu, you're going to need some light. Motion-activated lighting is generally superior for crime prevention as it attracts attention. Yes, ambient lighting helps prevent people from tripping over things, but there's good evidence that in a lot of scenarios it increases, not decreases, crime.
See this site for more detailed discussion on the pros and cons.
Every time I fly into an airport at night, I look down with awe at all the streets lit up brightly. Usually I see very few cars making use of that lighting, and far fewer people. It baffles me to contemplate the vast quantity of energy that is being expended lighting up unused areas all night long, and I have to wonder seriously whether the benefits outweigh the costs. At the very least, I wish most night lighting were motion-activated; on roads, motion detectors coupled with short-range radio signals between lights could provide anticipatory lighting for travelers but save huge amounts of energy when there is no one about.
Then, it would slowly release the water during the night to water the plants around the base of the tree.
An interesting idea, but plants are already able to handle varying moisture conditions, while too-constant moisture promotes growth of damaging fungi. Rather than greener, you might end up with moldier.
it would not produce as much light as one of the regular street lights produce
Regular street lights produce way too much light, however. This causes people's eyes to adapt to brighter night-time light, which makes them blinder in places the street lights don't cover as well.
Furthermore, while the design looks attractive, it is not clear from the photograph that the light produced is fully shielded to prevent horizontal propagation and consequent energy waste and light pollution. If cities are looking to redesign night-time lighting, one hopes they will consider the importance of dark skies while they're at it.
Clearly it isn't there in the final comment. But it remained there in the textarea when previewing, through any number of preview passes. Even named entities, e.g. σ were dropped. Disappointing.
so they decided to steal "kimchi" as if it was from Japan by calling it "kimuchi". it is natural way to Japanese to pronounce 'm',as "meu".
This is not obfuscation; it is simply a result of Japanese language phonological rules, which, with very few exceptions (notably the syllabic 'n' sound), require every syllable to end in a vowel. This means a vowel must be inserted between the 'm' and the 'ch'. You can see why this happens if you simply try to write "kimchi" in hiragana.
[Note: this comment contains Unicode Greek characters, but they are not rendering in my browser for some reason. This takes a lot of the fun out of it. There are two Greek words in the next paragraph that you may be unable to see. Slashdot folks: bug?]
Fun fact: Sphinx is from Greek "", transliterated "sphiggo", pronounced "sphingo"—a verb meaning "to squeeze or throttle". "The Sphinx" literally means "The Throttler", which sounds like a villain from Batman. This same root figures prominently in another English word, the one derived from Greek "", transliterated "sphigktér".
One wonders if the Egyptians are perhaps taking this root meaning a little too literally.
So in what possible sense could you say these are "theories of everything"?
In the sense that they are consistent with everything actually observed. In practice, it might not matter that they are incomplete; we would simply be able to prove that they are. Since we eventually accept the arbitrariness of Nature—at some point it simply is—we needn't have a problem with this.
How exactly do you decide that a given theory is "best" if one of at least two other theories which decide the prediction must be "better" scientifically?
You can't; there may be multiple "best possible ToEs". But you may be able to prove that no ToE can be any better, and you may have to choose among the ToEs to best suit your practical purpose.
Yet that is the absurdity you create when you assert that a mechanism that cannot [i]give[/i] an ultimate truth [i]has[/i] an ultimate truth.
I didn't make any assertions about "ultimate truth"; on the contrary, I'm saying the best possible ToE may be incomplete, which falls short of what most people think of as "ultimate truth". It's possible, and one may able to prove, that no theory can predict everything that manifests in reality—an isomorphism between respective subsets of arithmetic and reality could suffice for this proof.
In any case, if all ToEs are incomplete, you'd need to do better than falsifiability as a criterion for science to avoid overbroad exclusion. I imagine you could see even without all this discussion that falsifiability on its own is far too trivial, so I'm not sure why we've had to go on this long. ID is not so threatening, after all, that we need to resort to trivialities to dismiss it. Ultimately ID and any ToE, complete or not, are equally arbitrary because one may always ask "Why?" until there is no falsifiable answer. Yet ID is dismissable because of its intellectual laziness—with ID, one pretty much stops at the first "Why?"
If the theory is one that cannot be decided as true or false then you cannot decide that it is true.
I didn't say the theory is undecidable; I said it may make undecidable predictions. Pay attention. This is why I wrote, "the best possible ToE".
Keep reading it over and over until you get it. You're getting closer. Hint: the suggestion that a theory that predicts everything we observe is not "scientific" solely because it makes some predictions that are undecidable and hence unfalsifiable is absurd. A good definition of science would not make this exclusion. You want to trivially define science in such a way that ID (which I am not defending) is "unscientific", but in your blundering you throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There is only one s in Plexiglas®. It's a trademark of the Rohm and Haas company. I am rather startled that everyone seems to think it's "plexiglass". Guess there are fewer plastics geeks out there than I thought.
Ideas that cannot be exposed to the process simply cannot be scientific - ever.
You seem to have missed the point completely—it may turn out that the best possible ToE is inherently unfalsifiable. This was the point at issue, not your lame attempts to define science in a way that such a ToE would not be "scientific". Or perhaps you don't recall writing:
If you cannot demonstrate that something is false (i.e. demonstrate that it does not exist) then you cannot talk about it scientifically.
And:
It could well be that there are laws that aren't falsifiable.
Yes, and then they wouldn't be scientific laws.
Friendly tip: pretending you don't understand someone is not an effective way to make yourself seem clever, even on slashdot.
Well, you don't strike me as thick, so I can only assume you're being disingenuous.
You said maths was "part of reality". Is 2+2=4 "part of reality," or merely a description of it?
Both, obviously. The idea represented by the sentence is a true model of many things both real and abstract.
I don't have much time for slashdot, really, so I guess I'll have to spell it out for you. A ToE could be regarded as a mathematical formal system. Predicted phenomena correspond to formulae in the system. It could be that the phenomena that would falsify a given ToE correspond to undecidable formulae—i.e. it may be that no complete ToE is possible because real phenomena cannot be covered by a formal system. It is relevant that mathematical abstractions model reality because one might find that no complete ToE exists solely on mathematical grounds. Descartes is relevant because of his work in mathematical foundations of physical reality prior to the recognition of undecidability. The possibility that no complete ToE exists doesn't render attempts to come up with one unscientific, even if the ultimate result might be unfalsifiable.
Being your own grandfather is just predestination, there's no paradox there. Killing your own grandfather is more of a paradox.
They're both predestination, unless you mean killing your own grandfather without resorting to time travel, e.g. at Thanksgiving dinner one year.
If you travel to you own past to kill your grandfather, then at least up to the moment in your own timeline when you do so, you are predestined to be there because you had been there your entire life. This is a causal consequence of any act of physical time travel—even just being there in your own past, you are displacing atmosphere and absorbing and reflecting radiation. If it's your own past then you had to have been there, so you will, unless you can think of a physical force that would magically restore the universe perfectly to its precise state as if you hadn't been there after you return, in which case time travel is a null operation.
If you postulate that you actually travel into an alternate universe, then the man you killed is not really your grandfather.
This only seems like a paradox if you don't bother to think it through.
Yes, and in all of those scenarios, it would remain equally remarkable that the overarching laws that allowed a multiverse or recycling universe to exist allowed the parameters to take the right values, in at least one instance, to support life.
Not that I subscribe to the anthropic principle, but the multiverse wanking;^) is just begging the question. And I don't think it's pointless (neither is wanking).:^)
"Truth" (my definition) is merely the degree to which a model resembles its referent according to desired metrics. As such, truth exists, in many cases may be measured, and generally may be regarded as a function applied to a model, the referent, and the language of the proposition, to yield a value in [0,1].
A "true wheel" is one that implicitly resembles an idealized circle on the plane. A "true-to-scale" model is one in which geometric proportions are represented adequately, but the material, color, density, etc. may differ. Note that the referent may be ideal or metaphysical, as in the true wheel, or "real", as in a true-to-scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise (the carrier, not the spacecraft;^).
The sorts of propositions (i.e. linguistic models) you are talking about that have referents in the past or future are just as metaphysical as the idealized circle. The only thing that may exist in "real life" is the instantaneous present--everything else is idealized. So propositions about the past or the future are just as metaphysical in nature as propositions about mathematics.
What some posters seem to be overlooking is that if there is a theory of everything, then we are living in a simulation. A simulation is an active model of a idealized process defined by certain laws and parameters. If there are physical laws governing the universe--most people, including me, believe there are--then the universe is a simulation of the idealized universe defined by those laws.
It's an heuristic or rule of thumb, another one of those strange cases where the universe seems to follow a pattern for no particular reason.
Yup. A tenet.
But really, the universe doesn't seem to follow Occam's Razor; using the Razor just makes the math easier for the same result (as far as we know). Making the math easier means you can accomplish more. And we should accomplish more because...?
I don't have any problem with speculation about hypothetical creators, or their relevance to humanity and morality. Tain't science though.
You pretty thoroughly misconstrued my statement (read it again). But to respond anyway, you were the one who postulated that accepting the arbitrariness of some things would terminate scientific progress. I'm simply suggesting that science can continue in the face of arbitrariness; in fact, it does so constantly.
You might consider, as well, that there may be a time when even the subset of science you personally consider "science" might be applied toward a number of metaphysical questions. Mathematics and linguistics are both physical and metaphysical, for example; once sufficient formalism exists for a subject, it may be treated scientifically.
... it may be that one day in the far future science must accept that some things could have happened differently but in the end Just Are. It would be an unsatisfying end to the scientific method which as proved so inexplicably fruitful.
It's an inevitable end. With any theory of everything, no matter how elegant, the question remains as to why it is the theory of everything, and not some other theory. Ultimately, it Just Is, as you say.
This is an important point for advocates of science to remember, because, in the long view, a lot of science's tenets, e.g. Occam's Razor, seem equally religious to non-subscribers.
The universe is arbitrary, and we may therefore speculate about whether an arbiter exists. That speculation is by definition pure projection, so we can learn from it, even if only about ourselves. Nothing fruitless about that...
cyborg_zx> the completeness of the formal system is indeterminable by logic alone.
Perhaps you should read up on a fellow named René Descartes.
cyborg_zx> 2+2 = 0 2+2 = ? 2+2 = 22 Wrong?
pawoieji jigjewo a. Wrong?
No, we're using conventional language here, so try interpreting the statements in kind. If you require formal definitions for all symbols on the page, we have a lot of bootstrapping to do.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this is superior to the traditional epoxy dip?
I already stated:
This is not to say that optional filtering, if it even worked, is much of a solution to these problems.Read, then respond.
So you think the Internet is just the routers and switches that carry traffic, and doesn't include the end systems that are connected to it? And you think a site built for the purpose of selling child pornography is "neither good nor bad"? Curiouser and curiouser...
Whether they should be or not, a lot of them are. In the case of severe weather services, of course, you want them to be connected to the Internet so that people can find out about the severe weather. The same holds for tsunami warning systems and other public emergency notification services.
That's a facile claim. The reality is much more complex.
This is not to say that optional filtering, if it even worked, is much of a solution to these problems. But let's not oversimplify.
Good question. See the FAQ.:
Satellite data also record the offshore lights where oil and gas production is active (visible e.g. in the North Sea, Chinese Sea and Arabic Gulf), other natural gas flares (visible e.g. in Nigeria) and the fishing fleets (visible e.g. near the coast of Argentina, in Japan Sea and near Malacca). Note that their upward emission functions likely differ from the average emission function of the urban night-time lighting that we use so that the predictions of their effects have some uncertainty.Not really. Artificial light affects limiting magnitude far from cities, and for many people, traveling to a place where the sky is really dark is practically impossible.
Take a look at these color-coded maps of artificial sky brightness, or read up on the Bortle dark-sky scale.
That depends. In many cases, break-ins are actually aided by ambient lighting, because people skulking around with flashlights are a lot more likely to be noticed, and unless you're skilled at ninjitsu, you're going to need some light. Motion-activated lighting is generally superior for crime prevention as it attracts attention. Yes, ambient lighting helps prevent people from tripping over things, but there's good evidence that in a lot of scenarios it increases, not decreases, crime.
See this site for more detailed discussion on the pros and cons.
Every time I fly into an airport at night, I look down with awe at all the streets lit up brightly. Usually I see very few cars making use of that lighting, and far fewer people. It baffles me to contemplate the vast quantity of energy that is being expended lighting up unused areas all night long, and I have to wonder seriously whether the benefits outweigh the costs. At the very least, I wish most night lighting were motion-activated; on roads, motion detectors coupled with short-range radio signals between lights could provide anticipatory lighting for travelers but save huge amounts of energy when there is no one about.
An interesting idea, but plants are already able to handle varying moisture conditions, while too-constant moisture promotes growth of damaging fungi. Rather than greener, you might end up with moldier.
Regular street lights produce way too much light, however. This causes people's eyes to adapt to brighter night-time light, which makes them blinder in places the street lights don't cover as well.
Furthermore, while the design looks attractive, it is not clear from the photograph that the light produced is fully shielded to prevent horizontal propagation and consequent energy waste and light pollution. If cities are looking to redesign night-time lighting, one hopes they will consider the importance of dark skies while they're at it.
An interesting article for reference.
Clearly it isn't there in the final comment. But it remained there in the textarea when previewing, through any number of preview passes. Even named entities, e.g. σ were dropped. Disappointing.
This is not obfuscation; it is simply a result of Japanese language phonological rules, which, with very few exceptions (notably the syllabic 'n' sound), require every syllable to end in a vowel. This means a vowel must be inserted between the 'm' and the 'ch'. You can see why this happens if you simply try to write "kimchi" in hiragana.
[Note: this comment contains Unicode Greek characters, but they are not rendering in my browser for some reason. This takes a lot of the fun out of it. There are two Greek words in the next paragraph that you may be unable to see. Slashdot folks: bug?]
Fun fact: Sphinx is from Greek "", transliterated "sphiggo", pronounced "sphingo"—a verb meaning "to squeeze or throttle". "The Sphinx" literally means "The Throttler", which sounds like a villain from Batman. This same root figures prominently in another English word, the one derived from Greek "", transliterated "sphigktér".
One wonders if the Egyptians are perhaps taking this root meaning a little too literally.
In the sense that they are consistent with everything actually observed. In practice, it might not matter that they are incomplete; we would simply be able to prove that they are. Since we eventually accept the arbitrariness of Nature—at some point it simply is—we needn't have a problem with this.
You can't; there may be multiple "best possible ToEs". But you may be able to prove that no ToE can be any better, and you may have to choose among the ToEs to best suit your practical purpose.
I didn't make any assertions about "ultimate truth"; on the contrary, I'm saying the best possible ToE may be incomplete, which falls short of what most people think of as "ultimate truth". It's possible, and one may able to prove, that no theory can predict everything that manifests in reality—an isomorphism between respective subsets of arithmetic and reality could suffice for this proof.
In any case, if all ToEs are incomplete, you'd need to do better than falsifiability as a criterion for science to avoid overbroad exclusion. I imagine you could see even without all this discussion that falsifiability on its own is far too trivial, so I'm not sure why we've had to go on this long. ID is not so threatening, after all, that we need to resort to trivialities to dismiss it. Ultimately ID and any ToE, complete or not, are equally arbitrary because one may always ask "Why?" until there is no falsifiable answer. Yet ID is dismissable because of its intellectual laziness—with ID, one pretty much stops at the first "Why?"
I didn't say the theory is undecidable; I said it may make undecidable predictions. Pay attention. This is why I wrote, "the best possible ToE".
Keep reading it over and over until you get it. You're getting closer. Hint: the suggestion that a theory that predicts everything we observe is not "scientific" solely because it makes some predictions that are undecidable and hence unfalsifiable is absurd. A good definition of science would not make this exclusion. You want to trivially define science in such a way that ID (which I am not defending) is "unscientific", but in your blundering you throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There is only one s in Plexiglas®. It's a trademark of the Rohm and Haas company. I am rather startled that everyone seems to think it's "plexiglass". Guess there are fewer plastics geeks out there than I thought.
I have just one word to say to you, Ben...
You seem to have missed the point completely—it may turn out that the best possible ToE is inherently unfalsifiable. This was the point at issue, not your lame attempts to define science in a way that such a ToE would not be "scientific". Or perhaps you don't recall writing:
And:Friendly tip: pretending you don't understand someone is not an effective way to make yourself seem clever, even on slashdot.
Well, you don't strike me as thick, so I can only assume you're being disingenuous.
You said maths was "part of reality". Is 2+2=4 "part of reality," or merely a description of it?Both, obviously. The idea represented by the sentence is a true model of many things both real and abstract.
I don't have much time for slashdot, really, so I guess I'll have to spell it out for you. A ToE could be regarded as a mathematical formal system. Predicted phenomena correspond to formulae in the system. It could be that the phenomena that would falsify a given ToE correspond to undecidable formulae—i.e. it may be that no complete ToE is possible because real phenomena cannot be covered by a formal system. It is relevant that mathematical abstractions model reality because one might find that no complete ToE exists solely on mathematical grounds. Descartes is relevant because of his work in mathematical foundations of physical reality prior to the recognition of undecidability. The possibility that no complete ToE exists doesn't render attempts to come up with one unscientific, even if the ultimate result might be unfalsifiable.
They're both predestination, unless you mean killing your own grandfather without resorting to time travel, e.g. at Thanksgiving dinner one year.
If you travel to you own past to kill your grandfather, then at least up to the moment in your own timeline when you do so, you are predestined to be there because you had been there your entire life. This is a causal consequence of any act of physical time travel—even just being there in your own past, you are displacing atmosphere and absorbing and reflecting radiation. If it's your own past then you had to have been there, so you will, unless you can think of a physical force that would magically restore the universe perfectly to its precise state as if you hadn't been there after you return, in which case time travel is a null operation.
If you postulate that you actually travel into an alternate universe, then the man you killed is not really your grandfather.
This only seems like a paradox if you don't bother to think it through.
Yes, and in all of those scenarios, it would remain equally remarkable that the overarching laws that allowed a multiverse or recycling universe to exist allowed the parameters to take the right values, in at least one instance, to support life.
Not that I subscribe to the anthropic principle, but the multiverse wanking ;^) is just begging the question. And I don't think it's pointless (neither is wanking). :^)
"Truth" (my definition) is merely the degree to which a model resembles its referent according to desired metrics. As such, truth exists, in many cases may be measured, and generally may be regarded as a function applied to a model, the referent, and the language of the proposition, to yield a value in [0,1].
A "true wheel" is one that implicitly resembles an idealized circle on the plane. A "true-to-scale" model is one in which geometric proportions are represented adequately, but the material, color, density, etc. may differ. Note that the referent may be ideal or metaphysical, as in the true wheel, or "real", as in a true-to-scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise (the carrier, not the spacecraft ;^).
The sorts of propositions (i.e. linguistic models) you are talking about that have referents in the past or future are just as metaphysical as the idealized circle. The only thing that may exist in "real life" is the instantaneous present--everything else is idealized. So propositions about the past or the future are just as metaphysical in nature as propositions about mathematics.
What some posters seem to be overlooking is that if there is a theory of everything, then we are living in a simulation. A simulation is an active model of a idealized process defined by certain laws and parameters. If there are physical laws governing the universe--most people, including me, believe there are--then the universe is a simulation of the idealized universe defined by those laws.
Yup. A tenet.
But really, the universe doesn't seem to follow Occam's Razor; using the Razor just makes the math easier for the same result (as far as we know). Making the math easier means you can accomplish more. And we should accomplish more because...?
I don't have any problem with speculation about hypothetical creators, or their relevance to humanity and morality. Tain't science though.You pretty thoroughly misconstrued my statement (read it again). But to respond anyway, you were the one who postulated that accepting the arbitrariness of some things would terminate scientific progress. I'm simply suggesting that science can continue in the face of arbitrariness; in fact, it does so constantly.
You might consider, as well, that there may be a time when even the subset of science you personally consider "science" might be applied toward a number of metaphysical questions. Mathematics and linguistics are both physical and metaphysical, for example; once sufficient formalism exists for a subject, it may be treated scientifically.
... it may be that one day in the far future science must accept that some things could have happened differently but in the end Just Are. It would be an unsatisfying end to the scientific method which as proved so inexplicably fruitful.It's an inevitable end. With any theory of everything, no matter how elegant, the question remains as to why it is the theory of everything, and not some other theory. Ultimately, it Just Is, as you say.
This is an important point for advocates of science to remember, because, in the long view, a lot of science's tenets, e.g. Occam's Razor, seem equally religious to non-subscribers.
The universe is arbitrary, and we may therefore speculate about whether an arbiter exists. That speculation is by definition pure projection, so we can learn from it, even if only about ourselves. Nothing fruitless about that...
cyborg_zx> the completeness of the formal system is indeterminable by logic alone.
Perhaps you should read up on a fellow named René Descartes.
cyborg_zx> 2+2 = 0 2+2 = ? 2+2 = 22 Wrong?
pawoieji jigjewo a. Wrong?
No, we're using conventional language here, so try interpreting the statements in kind. If you require formal definitions for all symbols on the page, we have a lot of bootstrapping to do.