95% false? that leaves 5% of a language untranslatable to another!
I would not go so far as saying a language "restricts" particular thoughts, but I'm sure that some concepts can be more concisely expressed in some languages more than others. For example, I do not know if the phrase "Moral hazard" has any simple translation in chinese or thai, without going through a lengthy explanation AND WITH an example. Try the same with "Deja vu": English speakers eventually borrow the phrase.
I do agree that the issues are mostly a question of finding the right tool for the job.
cli is known for its compact form, as are many components of the unix OS (directory structure, for instance). In the hand of a skilled user (and probably with a good shell/emacs client), cli flies. Resorting to standardized interface would probably introduces unnecessary complexities to what's fundamental: efficiency in expression. Take the flags as examples: they are like prepositions. We call down a disobedient student, we call off a trip, but we put down important things in a notebook, and we put off doing homework until the last minute. See, much of a language's richness lies in the very flexibility in conveying alot of things with just a few words.
Like painting. It takes so many man years to development something like half-life, unreal tournament, it makes the venture highly risky from a financier's perspective. Picasso's or Michelangelo's reach to fame before their death were highly unusual. Let's face it: we (at least I) should be thankful that once in a while there ARE good games!
Oh, and we need intermediaries between gamers (who like to play good games but who don't like to pay $50 bucks 2 years in advance) and game programmers (who LIKE to make good games but who have to suffer ALOT in doing so). Without these publishers, sharewares are probably our only choices (Yes, there are good sharewares, and they are even rarer than good commercial releases.) The intermediaries bridge the time lag gap and the riskiness of projects. The 50 bucks pay partially this risk premium, in the strictest economic sense.
So, when you see a good game on a shelf, think of it as just a statistical by-product, and give these people another chance some time later.
Yes, the said algorithm is simply a rehash of the idea that exists for MANY years in scientific publications. We know a publication (website/webpage) is an "authority" if many people cite it (hyperlink to it). And we know that a publication is a "hub" (good starting point) if it cites many publications. Good scientific papers are authoritative papers. Good review articles in books etc are hubs.
Unfortunately, google doesn't have a good review system to further improve the signal to noise ratio. But then, it's hard to get someone to review the whole web. In this case,/. does a much better jobs in promoting peer review, since information is tighter and manageable here. Maybe/. could use the ideas of "authorities and hubs"?
I've seen some basic laboratory work in a physics conference and read some theoretical works prior to this report. If you think of neurons as basic units (as they should be), what is the optimal behaviour they all should have in the beginning (birth)? This is one of the central issues of neural computing. It's now believed by many that the spike trains that neurons emit to their neighbours contains the "information content". The first thing one could do with the spike trains is to retransmit them, or return them to the senders. It turns out that it is exactly what neurons do when they first find each other out. Only things get really messy and intractable when they seem to know what they are doing. (one obvious behaviour is specialization, which could be a result of instability, or phase separation, of the syncronization process). The efforts these guys are trying are probably to exploit some known behaviour after neurons somehow begin to stabilize into some functional units.
One reason why the problem is so difficult is that information is not encoded in a static physical format. In a digital computer, you may stop the quartz oscillator and hold some gates to on or off to read out the specs, painstakingly. On a neuron, you can't do that! Spike trains are dynamical processes that have many more possible ways to encode information. A useful analogy is from languages. Let's say every single individual in this world speaks a different language in the beginning, but with the same alphabets. When I write "one" on the floor, how would the guy next to me know what it means when the word of the same meaning for him/her is "aye caramba"!
This field is a very broad subject encompassing biology, physics and statistical mechanics. One may found an interesting but quite speculative starting point to work its way backward from Frank C. Hoppensteadt et al. in the April 5 issue of Physical Review Letters, 1999. Science and Nature also may often have articles on the latest development in this field.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the writing speed of MiniDisc?
Can the crusoe chip morph efficiently when, for example, a C program invokes a java program, eliminating the "virtual machine" paradigm?
HFF
I agree, but usually you can define evil people as those with bad credits.
95% false? that leaves 5% of a language untranslatable to another!
I would not go so far as saying a language "restricts" particular thoughts, but I'm sure that some concepts can be more concisely expressed in some languages more than others. For example, I do not know if the phrase "Moral hazard" has any simple translation in chinese or thai, without going through a lengthy explanation AND WITH an example. Try the same with "Deja vu": English speakers eventually borrow the phrase.
I do agree that the issues are mostly a question of finding the right tool for the job.
HFF
cli is known for its compact form, as are many components of the unix OS (directory structure, for instance). In the hand of a skilled user (and probably with a good shell/emacs client), cli flies. Resorting to standardized interface would probably introduces unnecessary complexities to what's fundamental: efficiency in expression. Take the flags as examples: they are like prepositions. We call down a disobedient student, we call off a trip, but we put down important things in a notebook, and we put off doing homework until the last minute. See, much of a language's richness lies in the very flexibility in conveying alot of things with just a few words.
HFF
Like painting. It takes so many man years to development something like half-life, unreal tournament, it makes the venture highly risky from a financier's perspective. Picasso's or Michelangelo's reach to fame before their death were highly unusual. Let's face it: we (at least I) should be thankful that once in a while there ARE good games!
Oh, and we need intermediaries between gamers (who like to play good games but who don't like to pay $50 bucks 2 years in advance) and game programmers (who LIKE to make good games but who have to suffer ALOT in doing so). Without these publishers, sharewares are probably our only choices (Yes, there are good sharewares, and they are even rarer than good commercial releases.) The intermediaries bridge the time lag gap and the riskiness of projects. The 50 bucks pay partially this risk premium, in the strictest economic sense.
So, when you see a good game on a shelf, think of it as just a statistical by-product, and give these people another chance some time later.
HFF
Yes, the said algorithm is simply a rehash of the idea that exists for MANY years in scientific publications. We know a publication (website/webpage) is an "authority" if many people cite it (hyperlink to it). And we know that a publication is a "hub" (good starting point) if it cites many publications. Good scientific papers are authoritative papers. Good review articles in books etc are hubs.
/. does a much better jobs in promoting peer review, since information is tighter and manageable here. Maybe /. could use the ideas of "authorities and hubs"?
Unfortunately, google doesn't have a good review system to further improve the signal to noise ratio. But then, it's hard to get someone to review the whole web. In this case,
I've seen some basic laboratory work in a physics conference and read some theoretical works prior to this report. If you think of neurons as basic units (as they should be), what is the optimal behaviour they all should have in the beginning (birth)? This is one of the central issues of neural computing. It's now believed by many that the spike trains that neurons emit to their neighbours contains the "information content". The first thing one could do with the spike trains is to retransmit them, or return them to the senders. It turns out that it is exactly what neurons do when they first find each other out. Only things get really messy and intractable when they seem to know what they are doing. (one obvious behaviour is specialization, which could be a result of instability, or phase separation, of the syncronization process). The efforts these guys are trying are probably to exploit some known behaviour after neurons somehow begin to stabilize into some functional units.
One reason why the problem is so difficult is that information is not encoded in a static physical format. In a digital computer, you may stop the quartz oscillator and hold some gates to on or off to read out the specs, painstakingly. On a neuron, you can't do that! Spike trains are dynamical processes that have many more possible ways to encode information. A useful analogy is from languages. Let's say every single individual in this world speaks a different language in the beginning, but with the same alphabets. When I write "one" on the floor, how would the guy next to me know what it means when the word of the same meaning for him/her is "aye caramba"!
This field is a very broad subject encompassing biology, physics and statistical mechanics. One may found an interesting but quite speculative starting point to work its way backward from Frank C. Hoppensteadt et al. in the April 5 issue of Physical Review Letters, 1999. Science and Nature also may often have articles on the latest development in this field.