However, we're talking about small changes in c over more than half the age of the universe, and the universe has expanded enough in that time that you won't get a single local Lorentz frame to encompass both particles when they start heading towards each other.
Fine. Have the masses bouncing back and forth losslessly in a box for eons before colliding. Or put them on the ends of a stick and start rotating it. The total energy of the system will increase over time if c decreases while v remains the same. You can probably find arguments against these cases as well, but the fact is that a variable c with constant v does bad things to conservation of energy in special relativity. Since the possible changes in c are small and cover large periods of time, it is possible that these minor conservation violations are countered by GR considerations, but that remains to be demonstrated, not assumed.
Just off the cuff, E = gamma mc^2 where gamma = 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), so if c decreases while v remains constant, gamma will increase and hence the total energy will increase. In other words, two particles moving toward each other will collide with more energy than what they started with, on a local level. But it is unlikely that v will remain unchanged, since if it did, particles that have a relative velocity of 99.9c will have a relative velocity greater than c if c decreases by.2%. If relative velocities reduce proportional to c such that v/v' = c/c', then gamma remains unchanged and energy is conserved in this example.
I am too lazy to figure out how to contact you, so I posting here. The puzzle/game you created does in fact have unreachable positions.
The rules for the puzzle are associative, in other words you get the same result if you click on cell A then cell B as you would if you click on cell B then cell A. Since each cell rotates through 3 states, then any reachable board position is achieved by clicking on any particular cell at the most 2 times, and the order in which the cells are clicked does not matter.
Since the order of clicking does not matter, there are 3^25 ways you can click on the cells. There are also 3^25 different board positions. If every possible clicking combination resulted in a unique board position, then it would indeed be possible to reach every possible game position. But there are duplicates. It is easy to see this by clicking once on each of two adjacent cells. The end state of the two cells remains the same as the starting state, even though other surrounding cells change. One would suspect that there are ways to have the same affect on the whole grid, and there are. Since there are duplicate states, that means that clicking on cells will result in less that 3^25 unique board positions, which means that there are unreachable positions.
For example, if you click on the appropriate cell the indicated number of times as shown below,
1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1
you will have the same result as if you had done this:
0 2 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 1 2
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to prove that the A2 puzzle is unsolvable;-)
This tells you that there are at least 7 balls in the urn. Clearly, it tells you absolutely nothing else about the probability of there being 10 or 10,000 balls in the urn.
Actually, if you were to run a simulation, you would probably find that the odds of the urn having more than a hundred or so balls would be less than ten percent. This "hidden information" encoded in the ball number is similar to the classic game show paradox where a prize is hidden behind one of three doors, and you choose a door but get a chance to change your mind after the host opens one of the other doors. While the host can always pick an empty room, the fact that he opened one of the doors adds information and you should change your choice. Similarly, once you have a ball number, you have a small amount of information on possible distributions. Picking another ball will give you more information, and so on. By taking out a relatively small number of balls, you can be very confident in your prediction about the approximate number of balls in the jar.
But I definitely agree with you in that the "Doomsday Argument" is fallacious. The error is in mixing dependent and independent variables. The jar analogy assumes that you are free to choose any ball out of the jar, but that is not really the case. A better analogy would be to have a large packing crate separated into small compartments that may or may not have a ball in them. You then reach into the crate and examine a compartment, but there are many compartments that you can't reach and you aren't sure how many compartments there are.
In this scenario, the balls aren't numbered, and I helped you out by saying that there is at least one ball in the box and showed you a compartment with a ball in it. In order for you to make any informed predictions about the number of balls in the box, you need to examine more compartments plus get a rough idea of how many compartments there are. The Drake equation is a rough estimate of the probability of a compartment's being occupied as well as how many compartments there are out there. It is certainly heads and tails above the misguided "Doomsday Arguments".
The Meyers-Briggs personality typing system has a predictive value greater than chance when determining a person's preferences, and definitely should not be considered equivalent to star signs as a predictor of human behavior. What's more, a person may identify strongly with their type description, and prefer to interact with others on that basis rather than going through with the effort of acting differently. There is nothing wrong with this, if somebody doesn't like peppers you shouldn't condemn him or her for not eating them.
On the other hand, personality typing does have a fairly high error rate, people often are interested in doing things contrary to their assigned type, and justifying self-destructive behavior with type is clearly unsupportable. Type should be used, if at all, only as a starting point for human interaction that is built on as you develop a more complex understanding of the relationship.
As other posters have pointed out, awareness of a customers personality type and catering to it can significantly help improve customer satisfaction.
The equation allows you to place bounds on what is possible. For instance, if you have good, scientific estimate on the number of stars in the universe, then you have an idea of the maximum number of solar systems that could support life, and thus a minimum on the probability that life exists in the universe.
As you start adding terms, you can modify this probability, and start studying the effect different assumptions have on this probability. The probability isn't meaningful in terms of predictive value since it varies so much, but by studying the terms that contribute to it we can determine which unknowns contribute the most uncertainty and work on trying to get more information in those areas.
For instance, while life may exist on gas giants, we know that it CAN exist on small, water covered planets. Thus it will probably be more productive to look for and study these planets rather than gas giants when looking for life.
It's prejudices like yours among the sci-tech crowd that render the Eric Weissteins of the world so vulnerable to this type of exploitation.
Unfortunately, pretty much anybody who is not a good lawyer specializing in that particular type of contract will be vulnerable to exploitation. Most people are used to handshakes and agreements in good faith. They are not expecting to be deliberately deceived by vague wording, or to have the spirit of the contract intentionally violated by the other party. They actually want to believe the person on the other side of the desk when he says that he will look out for their interests.
In the business world, however, personal integrity and honor are irrelevant. Only words on paper count, and they only count as far as you have the legal muscle to back them up. Exploiting the unwary is considered to be a legitimate business strategy. Many companies thrive on it, from the music industry to memory manufactures.
It is perfectly understandable that people resent having to hire a lawyer to examine what should be a straightforward business contract. To use your analogy, it is equivalent to hiring a security consultant to set up your home PC. Yes, these days such precautions are almost necessary, but can you blame a guy if he wants to be able to take a computer that he just bought and surf the web without having his box rooted five minutes after he plugs into the phone jack? Can you blame a guy if he wants to enter into a simple book contract without having his efforts looted five minutes after the ink dries?
But thank heaven for security consultants and lawyers. Consultants to protect us from security holes in poorly designed software, and lawyers to protect us from loopholes in poorly written contracts. Your blaming Eric Weisstein for being open and trusting is like a defense attorney blaming the rape victim for wearing a mini-skirt. Eric Weisstein shouldn't have had to consult a lawyer in advance, he shouldn't have needed protection when dealing with a large and reputable firm. The fact that he did is a sad commentary on society, not a cautionary tale on the benefits of lawyers.
We all die. Putting that eventuality off a little bit longer is what medicine and health care is all about. A drug is "life-saving" if it extends life by a meaningful amount. Insulin-dependent diabetics aren't "cured" by insulin, and they will probably eventually die from diabetic complications, but insulin is certainly life-saving for them. So while AIDs drugs may not cure the patient, or even assure them a relatively normal life span, they are certainly life-saving, and the moral question of whether or not to violate the patent to save lives is still relavant
So even if the fundamental axioms the robot lives its life by are evil from our point of view, no amount of intelligence can change that.
Your error is in the assumption that descriptive statements and normative statements are completely independent. Descriptive statements can place limitations on what normative statements are meaningful. For instance, the descriptive statement ("the table is wet") precludes the meaningful use of the normative statement ("the table should be painted now")
The more intelligence you have, the more descriptive statements you can evaluate when considering what normative statements are meaningful and consistent, and the greater the restrictions you have for creating those statements. It is an open question as to whether or not the universe is constructed in such a way that there is only one set of normative statements that is consistent with the descriptive statements, but it is easy to see how intelligent, rational beings will be forced to agree on a large number of normative statements even if certain core values differ.
In other words, it is not unreasonable to assume that an AI with an intelligence comparable to a human's will have many values in common with a human's. If the AI is more intelligent, it will be able to educate at least some people into seeing that its value system is more consistent than theirs, and possibly change their minds. An "evil" AI would have to have many values inconsistent with human values, and it is difficult to do so without being logicly inconsistent as well.
In the charity business a common metric is "administrative costs". If a person wants to give to a benevolent organization that, say, feeds hungry children, the charity that has the lowest administrative costs per child will use the money most effectively. An organization that spends 90% of its received donations on salaries probably shouldn't get your dollar.
By the same token, it does not make sense to donate my CPU cycles to a company that spends most of them for its own benefit. Don't throw your resources at anybody claiming to be "researching cancer". Do research and put your resources where they will be most effective.
There are going to be narrow-minded, self-serving jerks in any profession, including IT. A well-rounded professional is one who keeps up to speed on his or her profession and makes an effort to stay informed on issues only tangentially related to the profession.
I guess I don't understand why you feel that you had to leave physics just because the professor was a jerk, or why you think that the IT industry would be any different.
I happened to thoroughly enjoy my humanities classes during college, and had more than a few obtuse science professors, yet I did not choose to change my major or drop out because of that.
In a desparate attempt to get back on topic, I will say that anybody familiar with physics would know that plugging numbers into the billiard equations will not result in exact predictions of the real world. Even more "accurate" equations taking quantum mechanics and relativity into account would fail after a few collisions. Your prominent scientist must have been incredibly toasted if he was claiming that any particular set of equations were "true"
Yes, roundworms have different behavior patterns and capabilities when compared to people, and comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges. But you CAN make observations noting the number of behaviors possible, and compare those numbers.
In other words, observe the number of different states obtainable in a given environment, and observe how many different environments result in different states. You can argue about what defines a "state" or an "environment", but even a rough estimate is enough to show that there is a significant difference in complexity between people and roundworms.
Complexity in definitely not a linear function of the number of genes, but it is reasonable to presume that more complex behaviors require more genes.
Personally, I am strongly against capital punishment. Also, working in emergency medicine as I do, I see up close and personal the consequences of others having a cavilier attitude towards human life.
But, as has been said before, if you can't laugh at death, what can you laugh at? Joe Martin, creator of the comic strip Mr. Boffo, has created a number of comics showing a man in an electric chair to hilarious effect. One has him holding slices of bread, another has him smiling and the warden asking if it is his first time, etc.
This type of humor doesn't necessarily breed contempt for human life, though. It mitigates the horror of the situation, allowing the viewer to consider the situation rationally instead of emotionally. Satire can also shock viewers into reconsidering their point of view. A classic example of this sort of satire is Jonathan Swift's suggestion of eating Irish childern to ease a famine.
Violence to Furbies is a cartoonish sort of violence that even the most naive kid will not likely apply to humans. Roadrunner cartoons are of a similiar nature and I have yet to see real-life violence that can be traced back to watching Loony Tunes.
The problem with this reasoning is that once a big company has sufficient investment in a product, it can go to Congress and ask for laws to be passed to protect that investment. This would be in the taxpayer's best interest, since we all know what terrible woes will befall the consumer should shareholder value weaken.
Laws could be passed outlawing the sale of non-SDMI compliant equipment, or a least placing high taxes upon it. End-to-end encryption could be required on audio equipment, etc. Yes, all this could be worked around by a dedicated hacker, but it would be illegal and difficult. Meanwhile the average consumer gets used to the loss freedom and villifies the evil hackers.
This war not just about beating SDMI and sticking it to the recording industry. There must be a viable alternative. The longer SDMI and its clones stay out of the marketplace, the greater the opportunity for more open initiatives to create a successful business model.
The problem with this is soft money. Suppose I support Bush, donate the maximum amount to his campaign, but feel that it is not enough. I may go out and have a printer make some placards supporting him, or place ads on TV and the paper supporting him, or maybe buy some overpriced knickacks from him. It is difficult to count or suppress these kinds of contributions without suppressing freedom of speech. And even if you could, I could always take out ads bashing Gore with no reference to Bush.
I find it less important that campaign contributions are limited so much as that the contributions are on the public record. At least that way we know who has bought our politicians.
Uh, no. Not unless you talk real slow. Typical speech is around 150-180 words per minute but a good typist rarely gets above 100 words per minute. That's why stenographers use special shorthand or special machines to up the speed when taking dictation in real time.
You still run into the counting problem. There are many, many more possible 10 MB files out there than there are possible combinations of 3 integers (assuming you aren't allowing 1000 digit integers). There is no way to map the large set to the small set without duplication. It's like trying to represent each of the 50 states with its own letter from the 26 letters of the alphabet. Can't be done. Now if we were working with infinite sets...
If you were to try to actually implement this, you would find that RNGs rarely generate strings that match significant chunks of the source file, and that at some point your file with seeds for decompressing chunks would be as large as or larger than the file you compressing.
File compression works on the basis that most files aren't completely random, but only represent a small subset of all possible files. The trick is to find a way to enumerate this subset so that you can represent a given file with a relatively small index into this subset.
I never said that drugs should be illegal. Heck, I didn't even say that pre-teen prostitution should be illegal. For all I know, there are twelve-year olds out there who want to get into the business but can't due to overly moralistic social structures. My point was that companies are perfectly willing to sell you things that aren't good for you and will take advantage of you and will do so as long as it is legal. They will even do so when it's not legal if they can get away with it.
As far as companies being the *true* cause of shaky drug laws, that may or may not be true. But even if it is true, it still only goes to show that the companies were only interested in their profits, not in the well being of their customers.
Government, on the other hand, is supposed to keep the well-being of the citizen in mind while formulating policies. The fact that it often doesn't is a reflection of the fact that politicians are elected on the basis of visibility (read money) and charisma, characteristics that don't lend themselves to altruistic concern for the little guy.
>Products such as tobacco, alcohol, and Furbies are of dubious usefulness, and yet they sell well. That's an arrogant statement... Who is going to benefit more, the consumer of the taxpayer?
Ok, instead of Furbies, how about cocaine? Or LSD? Or pre-teen prostitutes? There is a demand for all of these things. People buy and use self-destructive things all the time. A taxpayer benefits by having access to these items limited to the point that they can exercise self-control. What those items are and what the location of that point is a topic of considerable debate, but corporations have no interest in keeping products away from the consumer, even if it is in the consumer's best interest. As far as politicians go, if a politician does what is necessary to get re-elected, are not the voters getting what they 'paid' for? So you don't happen to like the politician or his/her agenda, who are you to say that the voters are wrong?
>Efficiency is not necessarily good. It is more 'efficient' to use third world sweat shops... I love it when wealthy Westerners self-righteously denounce "exploitation" of the third world. This indicates not just a lack of understanding of economics, but a complete lack of respect for the people who work in those sweatshops.
ROTFL... if you could just see my bank acount right now..."wealthy Westerner" indeed. But, admittedly, better off than most people in Paraguay, where, incidently, my sister has spent the last three years. I even managed to visit her for a while, and Paraguay is as third world as it gets. I know that any paying job down there is better than begging on the streets. But I have seen where an entire community was kicked off its land with no compensation, their homes burnt to the ground, because of a corporation. Now instead of farming their own land, they work for the ranch owner at subsistence wages. As I stated in a response to an AC post above, multi-nationals don't care about the safety or quality of life of their workers, and the profit the multi-nationals make doesn't benefit the workers community. It angers me that people like *you* think that the people of these countries could not improve their lot without foreign companies coming in and doing it for them. It indicates a complete lack of respect for the people who live in those countries.;-) They are perfectly capable of building factories to sell shoes to wealthy Westerners, but they never get the chance because Nike comes in and does it for them. And Nike shareholders don't live in the worker's country spending the profits in the worker's community.
The point is that we need the government to protect us from everyone's "excesses"-- corporate or otherwise.
Hear, hear.
My problem is that we have government laws specifically targeted at corporations, when if fact corporations have no more power than any other type of organization. Without the power of the government, corporations are no threat to anyone.
Small companies are not a threat. Large companies, however, have the resources to crush any individual who happens to get in their way. They have to play by separate rules, because the consequences of their actions are so much larger. If I throw a battery in the trash, yeah, I probably should have disposed of it 'properly', but the environmental consequences aren't nearly the same as if AT&T decides to throw its batteries in the trash.
First, a little rant here, and then on to your points.
Companies make money. Period. They are not moral. They are not just. They are not compassionate. If they fail to make money, they fail. Nothing more. I get tired of people claiming that all of our problems will be solved if we just let the free market have its way. Companies are like fire. In and of itself, fire is neither good nor bad. It just is. It can be very useful and warm your house, smelt your iron, cure your bricks, or it can burn your house down, destroy your fields, kill your loved ones. Companies can provide you with products that improve your quality of life and keep you from harm, or they can dictate your decisions, hamper your potential, and provide you with dangerous products and working conditions.
A good government acts to mold the morality of corporations, forcing them to compete fairly, respect their workers and the environment, and yet still gives them the freedom to innovate and thrive. Most governments, including the US, unfortunately, don't seem to be on the ball. As a matter of fact, the US government is terrible. Regulators apparently care more about whether or not form WM-524 has been filled out correctly than about the company's actual practices. It is a bloated bureaucracy. But trimming fat does not mean feeding it to the corporations.
>>> 3.... corporations... are at least efficient. >>Efficiency is not necessarily good... >I have a problem with Left wing First World ranting about third world sweat shops...
Wow. That is the first time anybody has called me Left wing (with a capital L, even). Cool.;-) Usually it's the other way around. But personal attacks aside...
Granted, sweat shops can benefit third-world economies. I never said that they didn't. But that's not the point. The point is that, left to its own devices, a company will do whatever it takes to save money, including placing workers in unsafe, low-wage conditions. A company has no interest in providing respirators for its coal miners, since by the time black lung kills them off they will have been replaced. Yeah, some safety precautions save money in the long run because accidents cost money, but most safety measures aren't cost-effective. And if a company can get away with paying you a couple of bucks an hour, it will. It will have to, since its competitors will paying that wage to its workers if it can.
A corporate sweat shop may improve the lot of its workers somewhat, but a locally owned company would help them even more since the profits of the company would flow back to the community, rather than back to the states. Mult-national corporations hurt third world economies by using their cheap labor and natural resources without returning the profits to them. You assume that the shoe factory wouldn't exist if it weren't for Nike building it, but it is perfectly reasonable that a locally-owned factory could produce the goods and sell them to Nike (or other vendors as well).
>>> 6.... reducing the government to its constitutional limits would end most corporate excesses >>Huh? Corporate excesses... Pollution... >In the 19 century polution was dealt with by...being sued...
I find it ironic that you advocate lawsuits over law enforcement, considering how much the government is involved in handling litigation. Lawsuits are costly, requiring considerable resources that most individuals don't have, and it is incredibly difficult to get everybody affected on board in order to have the manpower to fight a corporation. What's more, while fear of a lawsuit might serve as a deterrent from dumping hexavalent chromium into the local swimming pool, it really isn't effective in handling more diffuse pollutants, such as CFCs, or tailpipe emissions.
>>seat belts, >How is this corpreat exess?
The car companies would never have bothered putting seat belts in cars without government intervention (there is a quote from Henry Ford to that effect, in fact). And there never would have been consumer demand for them.
>>minimum wages, >Economics 101: Effective(higher than the wage would be in the free market) minimum wage causes un employment...
Economics 102: The more money workers have, the more money they will spend on consumer products, requiring more jobs to make those products. And if the US does not have an effective minimum wage (higher than the free market) why are there significant number of companies paying less than minimum wage to undocumented workers in spite of the low unemployment rate?
Once again, I am not trying to paint a glowing picture of government. I just think it's wrong to say that corporate-control=good, government-control = bad.
> 1. The government is... bigger than any corporation.
The government makes lots of money, true. But whereas as corporation spends its money on itself, not its customers if at all possible, the government is supposed to spend the money it gets on the people who pay taxes.
The federal government is not a corporation. It consists of three branches that counter one another's power. It has to play by its own rules. When the DOJ took on Microsoft, it couldn't just arbitrarily start imposing penalties. It had to take them to court. If Microsoft decides that it doesn't like Netscape, it can arbitrarily decide to make its products incompatible, and Netscape has no say in the matter.
> 2.... corporations have to at least do something useful... Government... has... no direct obligations to the taxpayer.
Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. Products such as tobacco, alcohol, and Furbies are of dubious usefulness, and yet they sell well. Corporation spend huge quantities of money trying to convince people that their products are 'useful' and that their competitor's products aren't. The government may not go out of business if its programs don't sell, but an unpopular program has ousted many a politician.
> 3.... corporations... are at least efficient.
Efficiency is not necessarily good. It is more 'efficient' to use third world sweat shops to produce goods since these countries have fewer laws protecting workers from exploitation. Government agencies that run under budgetary restraints can promote efficiency without circumventing rules that prevent exploitation.
> >.... the power to tax is the power to destroy.
The interstate freeway system--built with your tax dollars--has had a tremendous positive impact on economic growth. It is unlikely that this system could have been built by private industry, since the only direct means of getting a profit is through toll booths, which run counter to the idea of a freeway.
Taxes redistribute money. Sometimes this harms the entity taxed to the benefit of other people, sometimes it even helps the people taxed by giving them a service they would have had a hard time getting otherwise.
> 5. The government has a military.
Corporations don't have military forces because they don't need them. If a corporation is threatened physically, it can count on the government to protect it, just like you can count on a police officer to protect you (in theory). If a corporation needed to use physical force to protect its interests, believe me, it would. Just look at old-time strike busting tactics, or at the quasi-military forces that drug cartels use.
> 6.... reducing the government to its constitutional limits would end most corporate excesses
Huh? Corporate excesses were done within the power of the state, perhaps, but they weren't stopped until the state stopped them. Pollution controls, seat belts, minimum wages, etc. are all a result of the government reigning in corporate excesses.
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I am not trying to be an apologist for the government. The U.S. government currently sucks, big time. But reducing it or eliminating it in favor of corporations is not a good solution. Many problems associated with the government are caused by it by giving in to corporate interests, not because it is fighting them. Competition and the free market work well when there are many small players with similar resources. Today's economy is dominated by huge mega-corporations that don't have to be competitive in quality or service as long as they can shut their smaller rivals out of the market. They need to be regulated in order to be competitive. The difficulty lies getting government officials who understand economics and make it a priority rather than wasting their time debating a bloody stupid flag-burning amendment.
Most intelligence tests have sections where the test taker tries to figure out the next number/letter in a sequence. I wonder if a person were to study the sequences in this database, if they would be able to 'raise' their IQ as measured on standard tests, or if exposure to the different types of sequences doesn't correlate well to the ability to figure out a given sequence.
Of course, as another poster stated, any given finite sequence has an infinite number of polynomials that can generate it and any other term you choose, which is why those types of questions tend to irritate me. The question should be qualified, as in, 'What is the next number in this sequence, assuming a simple generator for the sequence?' (Leaving room to quibble over the meaning of the word 'simple', naturally)
Definitely a very cool site, and I am glad to see this type of stuff here.
Since we are on the topic of sequences, and there was another article about puzzles, here's an old chestnut:
What is the next letter in the following sequence?
Slashdot Mirror
Fine. Have the masses bouncing back and forth losslessly in a box for eons before colliding. Or put them on the ends of a stick and start rotating it. The total energy of the system will increase over time if c decreases while v remains the same. You can probably find arguments against these cases as well, but the fact is that a variable c with constant v does bad things to conservation of energy in special relativity. Since the possible changes in c are small and cover large periods of time, it is possible that these minor conservation violations are countered by GR considerations, but that remains to be demonstrated, not assumed.
Just off the cuff, E = gamma mc^2 where gamma = 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), so if c decreases while v remains constant, gamma will increase and hence the total energy will increase. In other words, two particles moving toward each other will collide with more energy than what they started with, on a local level. But it is unlikely that v will remain unchanged, since if it did, particles that have a relative velocity of 99.9c will have a relative velocity greater than c if c decreases by .2%. If relative velocities reduce proportional to c such that v/v' = c/c', then gamma remains unchanged and energy is conserved in this example.
The rules for the puzzle are associative, in other words you get the same result if you click on cell A then cell B as you would if you click on cell B then cell A. Since each cell rotates through 3 states, then any reachable board position is achieved by clicking on any particular cell at the most 2 times, and the order in which the cells are clicked does not matter.
Since the order of clicking does not matter, there are 3^25 ways you can click on the cells. There are also 3^25 different board positions. If every possible clicking combination resulted in a unique board position, then it would indeed be possible to reach every possible game position. But there are duplicates. It is easy to see this by clicking once on each of two adjacent cells. The end state of the two cells remains the same as the starting state, even though other surrounding cells change. One would suspect that there are ways to have the same affect on the whole grid, and there are. Since there are duplicate states, that means that clicking on cells will result in less that 3^25 unique board positions, which means that there are unreachable positions.
For example, if you click on the appropriate cell the indicated number of times as shown below, ;-)
1 0 1 0 1
0 0 0 0 0
1 0 1 0 1
0 0 0 0 0
1 0 1 0 1
you will have the same result as if you had done this:
0 2 1 1 2
0 0 0 0 0
2 1 1 2 0
0 0 0 0 0
0 2 1 1 2
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to prove that the A2 puzzle is unsolvable
This tells you that there are at least 7 balls in the urn. Clearly, it tells you absolutely nothing else about the probability of there being 10 or 10,000 balls in the urn.
Actually, if you were to run a simulation, you would probably find that the odds of the urn having more than a hundred or so balls would be less than ten percent. This "hidden information" encoded in the ball number is similar to the classic game show paradox where a prize is hidden behind one of three doors, and you choose a door but get a chance to change your mind after the host opens one of the other doors. While the host can always pick an empty room, the fact that he opened one of the doors adds information and you should change your choice. Similarly, once you have a ball number, you have a small amount of information on possible distributions. Picking another ball will give you more information, and so on. By taking out a relatively small number of balls, you can be very confident in your prediction about the approximate number of balls in the jar.
But I definitely agree with you in that the "Doomsday Argument" is fallacious. The error is in mixing dependent and independent variables. The jar analogy assumes that you are free to choose any ball out of the jar, but that is not really the case. A better analogy would be to have a large packing crate separated into small compartments that may or may not have a ball in them. You then reach into the crate and examine a compartment, but there are many compartments that you can't reach and you aren't sure how many compartments there are.
In this scenario, the balls aren't numbered, and I helped you out by saying that there is at least one ball in the box and showed you a compartment with a ball in it. In order for you to make any informed predictions about the number of balls in the box, you need to examine more compartments plus get a rough idea of how many compartments there are. The Drake equation is a rough estimate of the probability of a compartment's being occupied as well as how many compartments there are out there. It is certainly heads and tails above the misguided "Doomsday Arguments".
The Meyers-Briggs personality typing system has a predictive value greater than chance when determining a person's preferences, and definitely should not be considered equivalent to star signs as a predictor of human behavior. What's more, a person may identify strongly with their type description, and prefer to interact with others on that basis rather than going through with the effort of acting differently. There is nothing wrong with this, if somebody doesn't like peppers you shouldn't condemn him or her for not eating them.
On the other hand, personality typing does have a fairly high error rate, people often are interested in doing things contrary to their assigned type, and justifying self-destructive behavior with type is clearly unsupportable. Type should be used, if at all, only as a starting point for human interaction that is built on as you develop a more complex understanding of the relationship.
As other posters have pointed out, awareness of a customers personality type and catering to it can significantly help improve customer satisfaction.
As you start adding terms, you can modify this probability, and start studying the effect different assumptions have on this probability. The probability isn't meaningful in terms of predictive value since it varies so much, but by studying the terms that contribute to it we can determine which unknowns contribute the most uncertainty and work on trying to get more information in those areas.
For instance, while life may exist on gas giants, we know that it CAN exist on small, water covered planets. Thus it will probably be more productive to look for and study these planets rather than gas giants when looking for life.
Unfortunately, pretty much anybody who is not a good lawyer specializing in that particular type of contract will be vulnerable to exploitation. Most people are used to handshakes and agreements in good faith. They are not expecting to be deliberately deceived by vague wording, or to have the spirit of the contract intentionally violated by the other party. They actually want to believe the person on the other side of the desk when he says that he will look out for their interests.
In the business world, however, personal integrity and honor are irrelevant. Only words on paper count, and they only count as far as you have the legal muscle to back them up. Exploiting the unwary is considered to be a legitimate business strategy. Many companies thrive on it, from the music industry to memory manufactures.
It is perfectly understandable that people resent having to hire a lawyer to examine what should be a straightforward business contract. To use your analogy, it is equivalent to hiring a security consultant to set up your home PC. Yes, these days such precautions are almost necessary, but can you blame a guy if he wants to be able to take a computer that he just bought and surf the web without having his box rooted five minutes after he plugs into the phone jack? Can you blame a guy if he wants to enter into a simple book contract without having his efforts looted five minutes after the ink dries?
But thank heaven for security consultants and lawyers. Consultants to protect us from security holes in poorly designed software, and lawyers to protect us from loopholes in poorly written contracts. Your blaming Eric Weisstein for being open and trusting is like a defense attorney blaming the rape victim for wearing a mini-skirt. Eric Weisstein shouldn't have had to consult a lawyer in advance, he shouldn't have needed protection when dealing with a large and reputable firm. The fact that he did is a sad commentary on society, not a cautionary tale on the benefits of lawyers.
We all die. Putting that eventuality off a little bit longer is what medicine and health care is all about. A drug is "life-saving" if it extends life by a meaningful amount. Insulin-dependent diabetics aren't "cured" by insulin, and they will probably eventually die from diabetic complications, but insulin is certainly life-saving for them. So while AIDs drugs may not cure the patient, or even assure them a relatively normal life span, they are certainly life-saving, and the moral question of whether or not to violate the patent to save lives is still relavant
Your error is in the assumption that descriptive statements and normative statements are completely independent. Descriptive statements can place limitations on what normative statements are meaningful. For instance, the descriptive statement ("the table is wet") precludes the meaningful use of the normative statement ("the table should be painted now")
The more intelligence you have, the more descriptive statements you can evaluate when considering what normative statements are meaningful and consistent, and the greater the restrictions you have for creating those statements. It is an open question as to whether or not the universe is constructed in such a way that there is only one set of normative statements that is consistent with the descriptive statements, but it is easy to see how intelligent, rational beings will be forced to agree on a large number of normative statements even if certain core values differ.
In other words, it is not unreasonable to assume that an AI with an intelligence comparable to a human's will have many values in common with a human's. If the AI is more intelligent, it will be able to educate at least some people into seeing that its value system is more consistent than theirs, and possibly change their minds. An "evil" AI would have to have many values inconsistent with human values, and it is difficult to do so without being logicly inconsistent as well.
It is on Laserdisk, which, interestingly enough, is not encrypted and can be digitally copied.
In the charity business a common metric is "administrative costs". If a person wants to give to a benevolent organization that, say, feeds hungry children, the charity that has the lowest administrative costs per child will use the money most effectively. An organization that spends 90% of its received donations on salaries probably shouldn't get your dollar.
By the same token, it does not make sense to donate my CPU cycles to a company that spends most of them for its own benefit. Don't throw your resources at anybody claiming to be "researching cancer". Do research and put your resources where they will be most effective.
I guess I don't understand why you feel that you had to leave physics just because the professor was a jerk, or why you think that the IT industry would be any different.
I happened to thoroughly enjoy my humanities classes during college, and had more than a few obtuse science professors, yet I did not choose to change my major or drop out because of that.
In a desparate attempt to get back on topic, I will say that anybody familiar with physics would know that plugging numbers into the billiard equations will not result in exact predictions of the real world. Even more "accurate" equations taking quantum mechanics and relativity into account would fail after a few collisions. Your prominent scientist must have been incredibly toasted if he was claiming that any particular set of equations were "true"
Yes, roundworms have different behavior patterns and capabilities when compared to people, and comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges. But you CAN make observations noting the number of behaviors possible, and compare those numbers.
In other words, observe the number of different states obtainable in a given environment, and observe how many different environments result in different states. You can argue about what defines a "state" or an "environment", but even a rough estimate is enough to show that there is a significant difference in complexity between people and roundworms.
Complexity in definitely not a linear function of the number of genes, but it is reasonable to presume that more complex behaviors require more genes.
Whoa there. Chill a bit.
Personally, I am strongly against capital punishment. Also, working in emergency medicine as I do, I see up close and personal the consequences of others having a cavilier attitude towards human life.
But, as has been said before, if you can't laugh at death, what can you laugh at? Joe Martin, creator of the comic strip Mr. Boffo, has created a number of comics showing a man in an electric chair to hilarious effect. One has him holding slices of bread, another has him smiling and the warden asking if it is his first time, etc.
This type of humor doesn't necessarily breed contempt for human life, though. It mitigates the horror of the situation, allowing the viewer to consider the situation rationally instead of emotionally. Satire can also shock viewers into reconsidering their point of view. A classic example of this sort of satire is Jonathan Swift's suggestion of eating Irish childern to ease a famine.
Violence to Furbies is a cartoonish sort of violence that even the most naive kid will not likely apply to humans. Roadrunner cartoons are of a similiar nature and I have yet to see real-life violence that can be traced back to watching Loony Tunes.
http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.peacefire.o rg/c efire.org/
http://a123.g.akamaitech.net/7/123/21/000/www.pea
The problem with this reasoning is that once a big company has sufficient investment in a product, it can go to Congress and ask for laws to be passed to protect that investment. This would be in the taxpayer's best interest, since we all know what terrible woes will befall the consumer should shareholder value weaken.
Laws could be passed outlawing the sale of non-SDMI compliant equipment, or a least placing high taxes upon it. End-to-end encryption could be required on audio equipment, etc. Yes, all this could be worked around by a dedicated hacker, but it would be illegal and difficult. Meanwhile the average consumer gets used to the loss freedom and villifies the evil hackers.
This war not just about beating SDMI and sticking it to the recording industry. There must be a viable alternative. The longer SDMI and its clones stay out of the marketplace, the greater the opportunity for more open initiatives to create a successful business model.
The problem with this is soft money. Suppose I support Bush, donate the maximum amount to his campaign, but feel that it is not enough. I may go out and have a printer make some placards supporting him, or place ads on TV and the paper supporting him, or maybe buy some overpriced knickacks from him. It is difficult to count or suppress these kinds of contributions without suppressing freedom of speech. And even if you could, I could always take out ads bashing Gore with no reference to Bush.
I find it less important that campaign contributions are limited so much as that the contributions are on the public record. At least that way we know who has bought our politicians.
Uh, no. Not unless you talk real slow. Typical speech is around 150-180 words per minute but a good typist rarely gets above 100 words per minute. That's why stenographers use special shorthand or special machines to up the speed when taking dictation in real time.
Uh, no.
You still run into the counting problem. There are many, many more possible 10 MB files out there than there are possible combinations of 3 integers (assuming you aren't allowing 1000 digit integers). There is no way to map the large set to the small set without duplication. It's like trying to represent each of the 50 states with its own letter from the 26 letters of the alphabet. Can't be done. Now if we were working with infinite sets...
If you were to try to actually implement this, you would find that RNGs rarely generate strings that match significant chunks of the source file, and that at some point your file with seeds for decompressing chunks would be as large as or larger than the file you compressing.
File compression works on the basis that most files aren't completely random, but only represent a small subset of all possible files. The trick is to find a way to enumerate this subset so that you can represent a given file with a relatively small index into this subset.
Now try to prove or disprove that this has a solution:
;-)
find a,b,c,n in N:
a^n+b^n=c^n
Ah, but it does have solutions for n=2
As far as companies being the *true* cause of shaky drug laws, that may or may not be true. But even if it is true, it still only goes to show that the companies were only interested in their profits, not in the well being of their customers.
Government, on the other hand, is supposed to keep the well-being of the citizen in mind while formulating policies. The fact that it often doesn't is a reflection of the fact that politicians are elected on the basis of visibility (read money) and charisma, characteristics that don't lend themselves to altruistic concern for the little guy.
That's an arrogant statement... Who is going to benefit more, the consumer of the taxpayer?
Ok, instead of Furbies, how about cocaine? Or LSD? Or pre-teen prostitutes? There is a demand for all of these things. People buy and use self-destructive things all the time. A taxpayer benefits by having access to these items limited to the point that they can exercise self-control. What those items are and what the location of that point is a topic of considerable debate, but corporations have no interest in keeping products away from the consumer, even if it is in the consumer's best interest. As far as politicians go, if a politician does what is necessary to get re-elected, are not the voters getting what they 'paid' for? So you don't happen to like the politician or his/her agenda, who are you to say that the voters are wrong?
>Efficiency is not necessarily good. It is more 'efficient' to use third world sweat shops...
I love it when wealthy Westerners self-righteously denounce "exploitation" of the third world. This indicates not just a lack of understanding of economics, but a complete lack of respect for the people who work in those sweatshops.
ROTFL ... if you could just see my bank acount right now..."wealthy Westerner" indeed. But, admittedly, better off than most people in Paraguay, where, incidently, my sister has spent the last three years. I even managed to visit her for a while, and Paraguay is as third world as it gets. I know that any paying job down there is better than begging on the streets. But I have seen where an entire community was kicked off its land with no compensation, their homes burnt to the ground, because of a corporation. Now instead of farming their own land, they work for the ranch owner at subsistence wages. As I stated in a response to an AC post above, multi-nationals don't care about the safety or quality of life of their workers, and the profit the multi-nationals make doesn't benefit the workers community. It angers me that people like *you* think that the people of these countries could not improve their lot without foreign companies coming in and doing it for them. It indicates a complete lack of respect for the people who live in those countries. ;-) They are perfectly capable of building factories to sell shoes to wealthy Westerners, but they never get the chance because Nike comes in and does it for them. And Nike shareholders don't live in the worker's country spending the profits in the worker's community.
The point is that we need the government to protect us from everyone's "excesses"-- corporate or otherwise.
Hear, hear.
My problem is that we have government laws specifically targeted at corporations, when if fact corporations have no more power than any other type of organization. Without the power of the government, corporations are no threat to anyone.
Small companies are not a threat. Large companies, however, have the resources to crush any individual who happens to get in their way. They have to play by separate rules, because the consequences of their actions are so much larger. If I throw a battery in the trash, yeah, I probably should have disposed of it 'properly', but the environmental consequences aren't nearly the same as if AT&T decides to throw its batteries in the trash.
Companies make money. Period. They are not moral. They are not just. They are not compassionate. If they fail to make money, they fail. Nothing more. I get tired of people claiming that all of our problems will be solved if we just let the free market have its way. Companies are like fire. In and of itself, fire is neither good nor bad. It just is. It can be very useful and warm your house, smelt your iron, cure your bricks, or it can burn your house down, destroy your fields, kill your loved ones. Companies can provide you with products that improve your quality of life and keep you from harm, or they can dictate your decisions, hamper your potential, and provide you with dangerous products and working conditions.
A good government acts to mold the morality of corporations, forcing them to compete fairly, respect their workers and the environment, and yet still gives them the freedom to innovate and thrive. Most governments, including the US, unfortunately, don't seem to be on the ball. As a matter of fact, the US government is terrible. Regulators apparently care more about whether or not form WM-524 has been filled out correctly than about the company's actual practices. It is a bloated bureaucracy. But trimming fat does not mean feeding it to the corporations.
>>> 3. ... corporations ... are at least efficient.
>>Efficiency is not necessarily good...
>I have a problem with Left wing First World ranting about third world sweat shops...
Wow. That is the first time anybody has called me Left wing (with a capital L, even). Cool. ;-) Usually it's the other way around. But personal attacks aside...
Granted, sweat shops can benefit third-world economies. I never said that they didn't. But that's not the point. The point is that, left to its own devices, a company will do whatever it takes to save money, including placing workers in unsafe, low-wage conditions. A company has no interest in providing respirators for its coal miners, since by the time black lung kills them off they will have been replaced. Yeah, some safety precautions save money in the long run because accidents cost money, but most safety measures aren't cost-effective. And if a company can get away with paying you a couple of bucks an hour, it will. It will have to, since its competitors will paying that wage to its workers if it can.
A corporate sweat shop may improve the lot of its workers somewhat, but a locally owned company would help them even more since the profits of the company would flow back to the community, rather than back to the states. Mult-national corporations hurt third world economies by using their cheap labor and natural resources without returning the profits to them. You assume that the shoe factory wouldn't exist if it weren't for Nike building it, but it is perfectly reasonable that a locally-owned factory could produce the goods and sell them to Nike (or other vendors as well).
>>> 6. ... reducing the government to its constitutional limits would end most corporate excesses ... Pollution...
>>Huh? Corporate excesses
>In the 19 century polution was dealt with by...being sued...
I find it ironic that you advocate lawsuits over law enforcement, considering how much the government is involved in handling litigation. Lawsuits are costly, requiring considerable resources that most individuals don't have, and it is incredibly difficult to get everybody affected on board in order to have the manpower to fight a corporation. What's more, while fear of a lawsuit might serve as a deterrent from dumping hexavalent chromium into the local swimming pool, it really isn't effective in handling more diffuse pollutants, such as CFCs, or tailpipe emissions.
>>seat belts,
>How is this corpreat exess?
The car companies would never have bothered putting seat belts in cars without government intervention (there is a quote from Henry Ford to that effect, in fact). And there never would have been consumer demand for them.
>>minimum wages,
>Economics 101:
Effective(higher than the wage would be in the free market) minimum wage causes un employment...
Economics 102: The more money workers have, the more money they will spend on consumer products, requiring more jobs to make those products. And if the US does not have an effective minimum wage (higher than the free market) why are there significant number of companies paying less than minimum wage to undocumented workers in spite of the low unemployment rate?
Once again, I am not trying to paint a glowing picture of government. I just think it's wrong to say that corporate-control=good, government-control = bad.
> 1. The government is ... bigger than any corporation.
The government makes lots of money, true. But whereas as corporation spends its money on itself, not its customers if at all possible, the government is supposed to spend the money it gets on the people who pay taxes.
The federal government is not a corporation. It consists of three branches that counter one another's power. It has to play by its own rules. When the DOJ took on Microsoft, it couldn't just arbitrarily start imposing penalties. It had to take them to court. If Microsoft decides that it doesn't like Netscape, it can arbitrarily decide to make its products incompatible, and Netscape has no say in the matter.
> 2. ... corporations have to at least do something useful ... Government ... has ... no direct obligations to the taxpayer.
Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. Products such as tobacco, alcohol, and Furbies are of dubious usefulness, and yet they sell well. Corporation spend huge quantities of money trying to convince people that their products are 'useful' and that their competitor's products aren't. The government may not go out of business if its programs don't sell, but an unpopular program has ousted many a politician.
> 3. ... corporations ... are at least efficient.
Efficiency is not necessarily good. It is more 'efficient' to use third world sweat shops to produce goods since these countries have fewer laws protecting workers from exploitation. Government agencies that run under budgetary restraints can promote efficiency without circumventing rules that prevent exploitation.
> >. ... the power to tax is the power to destroy.
The interstate freeway system--built with your tax dollars--has had a tremendous positive impact on economic growth. It is unlikely that this system could have been built by private industry, since the only direct means of getting a profit is through toll booths, which run counter to the idea of a freeway.
Taxes redistribute money. Sometimes this harms the entity taxed to the benefit of other people, sometimes it even helps the people taxed by giving them a service they would have had a hard time getting otherwise.
> 5. The government has a military.
Corporations don't have military forces because they don't need them. If a corporation is threatened physically, it can count on the government to protect it, just like you can count on a police officer to protect you (in theory). If a corporation needed to use physical force to protect its interests, believe me, it would. Just look at old-time strike busting tactics, or at the quasi-military forces that drug cartels use.
> 6. ... reducing the government to its constitutional limits would end most corporate excesses
Huh? Corporate excesses were done within the power of the state, perhaps, but they weren't stopped until the state stopped them. Pollution controls, seat belts, minimum wages, etc. are all a result of the government reigning in corporate excesses.
--------
I am not trying to be an apologist for the government. The U.S. government currently sucks, big time. But reducing it or eliminating it in favor of corporations is not a good solution. Many problems associated with the government are caused by it by giving in to corporate interests, not because it is fighting them. Competition and the free market work well when there are many small players with similar resources. Today's economy is dominated by huge mega-corporations that don't have to be competitive in quality or service as long as they can shut their smaller rivals out of the market. They need to be regulated in order to be competitive. The difficulty lies getting government officials who understand economics and make it a priority rather than wasting their time debating a bloody stupid flag-burning amendment.
Most intelligence tests have sections where the test taker tries to figure out the next number/letter in a sequence. I wonder if a person were to study the sequences in this database, if they would be able to 'raise' their IQ as measured on standard tests, or if exposure to the different types of sequences doesn't correlate well to the ability to figure out a given sequence.
...
Of course, as another poster stated, any given finite sequence has an infinite number of polynomials that can generate it and any other term you choose, which is why those types of questions tend to irritate me. The question should be qualified, as in, 'What is the next number in this sequence, assuming a simple generator for the sequence?' (Leaving room to quibble over the meaning of the word 'simple', naturally)
Definitely a very cool site, and I am glad to see this type of stuff here.
Since we are on the topic of sequences, and there was another article about puzzles, here's an old chestnut:
What is the next letter in the following sequence?
O T T F F S S