"I am a neuroscientist and I can tell you for sure that the basic form of the information in a brain is not a linear bit. But it does obey the laws of physics, and everything we know points to it following pretty mundane physics."
Are you quite sure about that?
It's not widely discussed in psychology or neuroscience, but there does exist 150 years of evidence for anomalous cognition states which really blow a hole in the mind-brain relationship. Some authors are now starting to publish on this. Kelly et al's 'Irreducible Mind' came out a couple years ago and is full of footnotes:
I've had a few anomalous experiences of my own. Taken seriously, this body of material makes the 'mind == brain == machine' hypothesis very hard to stretch to explain the facts. There's certainly a loose correlation between some body/brain states and some conscious states; but there is by no means a one-to-one correlation, nor does conventional physics even begin to address the correlations seen in autogansfeld and Zener type experiments - or in remote viewing or precognitive dreams.
Light cones simply don't seem to apply - the mind is sometimes a very naughty boy and just flat-out cheats, accessing information it has no physical reason to know. Try simulating *that*.
For a mind-bending discussion of just why this affects computer programming (and why IMO the foundations of object-oriented programming and type theory are on very shaky ground - Bertrand Russell, I'm looking at YOU): http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LiskovSubstitutionPrinciple
'Identical' is one of those problematic terms which, in the real world (and possibly even in theory) turns out to be most usefully defined as 'X is identical with Y IN THE SENSE Z'.
This solves a whole lot of metaphysical problems like the Ship of Theseus. It is and it isn't identical depending on, precisely, what definition of 'identical' you choose to use.
Like Lisp's 'eq' vs 'eqv', but generalised. It turns out (according to the Boundary folks) that 3PI is sufficient for building general mathematics on.
This strikes me as interesting. It also seems to be roughly the same thing that Alfred Korzybski ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics ) was talking about, though not many people have listened yet.
"The reason email was such a boon, and the only reason it's lasted so long, is because you didn't need a login on someone else's system in order to communicate with them."
Indeed. I remember CompuServe, with its 'xxxxx.yyyyy' adddresses, and how slow they were to adopt this new-fangled Internet email thing.
Looking back, it still seems like a strange miracle that even the bones of an open Net emerged at all from that period. We're busy reinventing the locked-in 'information service' as fast as we can but... maybe something will survive.
Hmm. I'm very much INTP and I agree with your personality reading - but the opposite is true for me.To me Facebook is a godsend BECAUSE I have difficulty otherwise keeping in touch with my friends - if I don't make conscious effort, they just drift out of my life because I'm not constantly going places and doing things, so I need an automated system to be a social prosthetic.
I don't actually enjoy being alone, but I need it for my mental health and recovery; I have a fairly active social life, but it gets draining when I push it too much. The biggest problem for me of being INTP is that my sleep and attention cycle tends to desynchronise, so getting access to people via phone in the 'prime time' hours of 6pm-9pm is really hard; I'm likely to be reading the web at home and then suddenly wake up around 11pm going 'hey I should have contacted X'.
If I was only limited to real-time voice or face contact, they're not going to like me phoning them at odd hours; but if I can flick them a Facebook message, that's perfectly fine.
Oh, and I have over 200 Facebook connections; mostly people I've met in other venues. I only friend people I actually know.
I understand Facebook. The combination of real names, 'mutual friends' display, automatic friend suggestion, status updates, and events means that you can easily identify the real people you know and find out about happenings in their life and events you want to go to.
I understand Livejournal. Simple blogging and commenting.
I don't understand Twitter. Isn't it just doing what RSS was already invented to do?
I can feel the tweet swelling in you. Goooood. Strike me down with all of your blisteringly witty Web 2.0 snark, and your journey toward Big Media will be complete.
Oh, I'm afraid your friends blogging from the free Starbucks WiFi are walking into a trap...
"As soon as you insert XML that isn't well-formed into a XML parser it will barf in one way or another."
So don't do that, then?
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
""The Shack" isn't edgy or funny, it's just weird and dumb, especially because it will say NOTHING descriptive about the current business model or product offerings."
Perhaps that's the point - it means they can now get into any other business they want? Cross-marketing synergy and all that? Pick and choose the profitable fields rapidly? Cut all your roots and become a sort of virtual floaty thing?
Yeah, I don't think it's smart, but I can see how generic non-trade-relatedness could be seen as an asset in a certain light.
"Word's equivalent would have been some way to display the object hierarchy, which wouldn't necessarily have been intuitively useful to users"
On the contrary, I think this would have been an excellent feature. HTML's DOM does much the same thing. Being able to view the REAL source of your document (which can be defined to never change regardless of your ever-changing display platform) would have been a huge win.
But I imagine it was problematic to do in Word because the *way* they defined their object-orientation was probably in raw C++ or assembler optimised to low-level byte storage with no thought for canonical serialisation or data - so they never imagined any way of interacting with the object tree other than instantiating it in a live document.
I could be wrong, but that's my impression looking in from the outside as a user and wondering why so much of the data I work with on a daily basis just isn't 'friendly' to work with beyond really basic functions - it provides 'rich media interfaces' which do what the programmer has let you do - but doesn't make *itself* available. In fact, there was a whole school of OO design in the 80s (and still today( which actively taught that letting raw data be made available for user-level remix was a Very Bad Thing. Closed boxes all the way up! Only access via methods! Preserve the right to randomly change data formats and semantics at will! Components! Don't let the user SEE anything, only let them DO! And strongly restrict what they CAN do, to prevent errors!
And because of this we reduced our interfaces to Playskool GUI verbs, which meant we lost the ability to manipulate critical documents like Word.doc using third party tools because the data formats simply weren't defined at any level between 'hardcoded CPU-specific C++ ABI' and 'sequence of visual operations and mouse clicks'. Look around: you can see lots of Unix text-file manipulation tools, but very few, even now, for manipulating data structures with more structure than text but less platform-dependence than a Word document.
HTML's 'everyone can see the source code of the document all across the Internet' approach was wildly old-school in comparison, but I think it's why it worked so well, and we still haven't wrung all the juice out of that idea yet. XML is the logical successor, but... well, possibly didn't make the best design tradeoffs it could have for a universal data structure language.
Er, by which I mean, yes, I'm agreeing with the parent that 'PIN number' has a precise definition as 'that kind of PIN which is a number, as opposed to all the other possible interpretations of PIN', so it's not actually redundant. QED. By which I mean 'quod erat demonstratum', not 'quantum electrodynamics'.
The other reason why we say 'PIN number' is that of course PIN is a homophone for 'pin', which is such a common word it would be confusing if the context isn't clear. 'I lost my pin' 'oh wait it's on the ground there'.
At The Moment. Adobe Type Manager. Asynchronous Transfer Mode. Air Traffic Management.. Telescope Making. Advanced Technical Materials. Arabian Travel Market. Alcohol, Tobacco &.. Microchips?
Here in New Zealand, we tend to call them "Cashflow machines", because the first system that got installed (way back in the 1980s... we were one of the beta-test countries) was named Cashflow, from TrustBank, now Westpac.
The Westpac Cashflow is now just one of many ATMs, but too bad, the name got Xeroxed...
Yeah, and I'll multiply all those diamonds and nickel-iron asteroids by the delta-v cost required to ship them back down the gravity well... and trade the lot for water, breathable atmosphere, and a magnetosphere to keep the radiation away.
Wealth is relative. *Biology* is already wealth beyond most of our realistic expectations of space. Unless we find viable biology out there, there's nothing worth going for.
Remember, north America was colonised by tobacco, cotton, and sugar. Spinoffs were sweetcorn, tomatoes, potatoes. Got any of those on Mars?
"Part of what made the Boston Tea Party as powerful as it was is the destruction of property-- the valuable tea. The crux of the RIAA's problems is that mp3s have no inherent value. "
I wonder what would have happened if the Boston Tea Party had involved *creating* unlimited quantities of tea rather than destroying it?
"They did. They just set aside the money in the stock market."
So nuclear power is perfectly safe as long as your underlying civilisation and economy doesn't do anything outside very narrow margins? And when things do go belly-up....?
Yeah, that's what I thought, and that's why I'm cynical about nuclear safety. If the companies running this stuff can't even manage to cover normal operating and decommissioning costs which are scheduled and predictable... just how prepared are they for really catastrophic events?
Remember, the thing about fission that scares people is not how clean and safe it is when everything's running perfectly. That's admittedly pretty impressive. It's about how gracefully it degrades under stress and how rapidly it all goes nonlinear when the unexpected happens - and about the transparency and trustworthiness of the entities operating it. And since even the pure science of fission is 'born secret' if it overlaps with how to build bombs, the nuclear industry gets to live in its own deep little pond of the defense-contractor world, in which all sorts of corruption can breed.
These guys can't even manage their money with the number of nines required to meet their contract obligations, but we can trust them to do everything else perfectly that must be done perfectly.... because they say so, because we need nuclear right now darnit so the technology MUST be reliable because we don't have any other options so we must build build build.... right?
"> I found myself pulling on a door clearly marked Push."
It's even worse in Brazil. Doors are clearly labeled 'Push' and Pull' in Portuguese...... but the Portuguese word for 'pull' is 'puxe', pronounced 'push'.
Gringo entering Brazil == immediate 50 pt IQ drain!
"Once you can drag and drop one thing then you want to be able to drag and drop anything. In the case of arbitrary file formats not only must you implement code to check the incoming data stream (thus exposing yourself to all of the security considerations of "how many different ways can someone try to wax my process of checking the incoming data stream?") but you must consider that a data stream which is valid using one codec algorithm may cause a fault using another codec algorithm."
But isn't that precisely what object orientation was invented to solve? To find a way of unifying data transfer between absolutely everything, everywhere, by sending not raw data but objects which could then be queried to ask things like 'what kind of thing are you?' and 'give me your data in Format X, Y or Z which I can read'.
Drag and drop to me is one of the acid tests of 'do you actually have a functioning object model?' And pretty much every GUI OS, including Windows and OSX, fails this: drag and drop works in many places, if the developers have jumped through hoops to but not all; there's no way to universally query ANY object and do stuff with it. The only exception I can think of is, perhaps, Smalltalk/Squeak (the original OO system) with its direct-object-manipulation interface.
Why didn't the promise of OO happen? We got COM objects instead which seem to do almost precisely the opposite: be very brittle, add a whole layer of complexity, and only make sense inside huge frameworks which can't be split up into objects. C++ seems to be the anti-Smalltalk in almsot every way and yet it still gets to be called 'object oriented'. How did we allow such confusion of language?
I don't agree that the answer is 'drag and drop is far too complicated and you shouldn't be trying to do that'. We should say 'hey, this poses interesting questions about why our fundamental operating system models are, in 2009, still broken even by 1979 standards.'
Slashdot Mirror
"Cats, on the other hand, would be overwhelmingly Republican."
But of course - who do you think funds the Cato Institute?
"I am a neuroscientist and I can tell you for sure that the basic form of the information in a brain is not a linear bit. But it does obey the laws of physics, and everything we know points to it following pretty mundane physics."
Are you quite sure about that?
It's not widely discussed in psychology or neuroscience, but there does exist 150 years of evidence for anomalous cognition states which really blow a hole in the mind-brain relationship. Some authors are now starting to publish on this. Kelly et al's 'Irreducible Mind' came out a couple years ago and is full of footnotes:
http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0742547922
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC&dq=irreducible+mind&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=mp97So2GEo3-tQOVoszvCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#v=onepage&q=&f=false
For a more approachable street-level introduction: the late Elizabeth Meyer's 'Extraordinary Knowing'.
http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553803352
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AClVSWvNsWw
I've had a few anomalous experiences of my own. Taken seriously, this body of material makes the 'mind == brain == machine' hypothesis very hard to stretch to explain the facts. There's certainly a loose correlation between some body/brain states and some conscious states; but there is by no means a one-to-one correlation, nor does conventional physics even begin to address the correlations seen in autogansfeld and Zener type experiments - or in remote viewing or precognitive dreams.
Light cones simply don't seem to apply - the mind is sometimes a very naughty boy and just flat-out cheats, accessing information it has no physical reason to know. Try simulating *that*.
"It comes down to definitions (like most greek paradoxes, I'm looking at you Zeno). By 'same' do you mean identical? Identical in what way?"
Yay! Three-place identity theory! http://boundary.org/bi/articles/Three-place_Identity.pdf
For a mind-bending discussion of just why this affects computer programming (and why IMO the foundations of object-oriented programming and type theory are on very shaky ground - Bertrand Russell, I'm looking at YOU): http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LiskovSubstitutionPrinciple
'Identical' is one of those problematic terms which, in the real world (and possibly even in theory) turns out to be most usefully defined as 'X is identical with Y IN THE SENSE Z'.
This solves a whole lot of metaphysical problems like the Ship of Theseus. It is and it isn't identical depending on, precisely, what definition of 'identical' you choose to use.
Like Lisp's 'eq' vs 'eqv', but generalised. It turns out (according to the Boundary folks) that 3PI is sufficient for building general mathematics on.
This strikes me as interesting. It also seems to be roughly the same thing that Alfred Korzybski ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics ) was talking about, though not many people have listened yet.
"The reason email was such a boon, and the only reason it's lasted so long, is because you didn't need a login on someone else's system in order to communicate with them."
Indeed. I remember CompuServe, with its 'xxxxx.yyyyy' adddresses, and how slow they were to adopt this new-fangled Internet email thing.
Looking back, it still seems like a strange miracle that even the bones of an open Net emerged at all from that period. We're busy reinventing the locked-in 'information service' as fast as we can but... maybe something will survive.
Hmm. I'm very much INTP and I agree with your personality reading - but the opposite is true for me.To me Facebook is a godsend BECAUSE I have difficulty otherwise keeping in touch with my friends - if I don't make conscious effort, they just drift out of my life because I'm not constantly going places and doing things, so I need an automated system to be a social prosthetic.
I don't actually enjoy being alone, but I need it for my mental health and recovery; I have a fairly active social life, but it gets draining when I push it too much. The biggest problem for me of being INTP is that my sleep and attention cycle tends to desynchronise, so getting access to people via phone in the 'prime time' hours of 6pm-9pm is really hard; I'm likely to be reading the web at home and then suddenly wake up around 11pm going 'hey I should have contacted X'.
If I was only limited to real-time voice or face contact, they're not going to like me phoning them at odd hours; but if I can flick them a Facebook message, that's perfectly fine.
Oh, and I have over 200 Facebook connections; mostly people I've met in other venues. I only friend people I actually know.
I understand Facebook. The combination of real names, 'mutual friends' display, automatic friend suggestion, status updates, and events means that you can easily identify the real people you know and find out about happenings in their life and events you want to go to.
I understand Livejournal. Simple blogging and commenting.
I don't understand Twitter. Isn't it just doing what RSS was already invented to do?
"Unless of course you can point at a compiler which can rethink and rewrite the program."
That's exactly what Lisp was invented for.
Pity we abandoned it in the 1980s and left it half-built.
I can feel the tweet swelling in you. Goooood. Strike me down with all of your blisteringly witty Web 2.0 snark, and your journey toward Big Media will be complete.
Oh, I'm afraid your friends blogging from the free Starbucks WiFi are walking into a trap...
What's worse than finding a bug in your XML parser?
Finding half a bug.
"As soon as you insert XML that isn't well-formed into a XML parser it will barf in one way or another."
So don't do that, then?
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
""The Shack" isn't edgy or funny, it's just weird and dumb, especially because it will say NOTHING descriptive about the current business model or product offerings."
Perhaps that's the point - it means they can now get into any other business they want? Cross-marketing synergy and all that? Pick and choose the profitable fields rapidly? Cut all your roots and become a sort of virtual floaty thing?
Yeah, I don't think it's smart, but I can see how generic non-trade-relatedness could be seen as an asset in a certain light.
"Word's equivalent would have been some way to display the object hierarchy, which wouldn't necessarily have been intuitively useful to users"
On the contrary, I think this would have been an excellent feature. HTML's DOM does much the same thing. Being able to view the REAL source of your document (which can be defined to never change regardless of your ever-changing display platform) would have been a huge win.
But I imagine it was problematic to do in Word because the *way* they defined their object-orientation was probably in raw C++ or assembler optimised to low-level byte storage with no thought for canonical serialisation or data - so they never imagined any way of interacting with the object tree other than instantiating it in a live document.
I could be wrong, but that's my impression looking in from the outside as a user and wondering why so much of the data I work with on a daily basis just isn't 'friendly' to work with beyond really basic functions - it provides 'rich media interfaces' which do what the programmer has let you do - but doesn't make *itself* available. In fact, there was a whole school of OO design in the 80s (and still today( which actively taught that letting raw data be made available for user-level remix was a Very Bad Thing. Closed boxes all the way up! Only access via methods! Preserve the right to randomly change data formats and semantics at will! Components! Don't let the user SEE anything, only let them DO! And strongly restrict what they CAN do, to prevent errors!
And because of this we reduced our interfaces to Playskool GUI verbs, which meant we lost the ability to manipulate critical documents like Word .doc using third party tools because the data formats simply weren't defined at any level between 'hardcoded CPU-specific C++ ABI' and 'sequence of visual operations and mouse clicks'. Look around: you can see lots of Unix text-file manipulation tools, but very few, even now, for manipulating data structures with more structure than text but less platform-dependence than a Word document.
HTML's 'everyone can see the source code of the document all across the Internet' approach was wildly old-school in comparison, but I think it's why it worked so well, and we still haven't wrung all the juice out of that idea yet. XML is the logical successor, but... well, possibly didn't make the best design tradeoffs it could have for a universal data structure language.
Any other takers?
Depends what you mean by 'mean'. If you mean mean as meaning 'is identical with' rather than 'is correlated with' then it's easy.
Possibly my mind was contorted already.
Er, by which I mean, yes, I'm agreeing with the parent that 'PIN number' has a precise definition as 'that kind of PIN which is a number, as opposed to all the other possible interpretations of PIN', so it's not actually redundant. QED. By which I mean 'quod erat demonstratum', not 'quantum electrodynamics'.
The other reason why we say 'PIN number' is that of course PIN is a homophone for 'pin', which is such a common word it would be confusing if the context isn't clear. 'I lost my pin' 'oh wait it's on the ground there'.
At The Moment. Adobe Type Manager. Asynchronous Transfer Mode. Air Traffic Management.. Telescope Making. Advanced Technical Materials. Arabian Travel Market. Alcohol, Tobacco &.. Microchips?
Here in New Zealand, we tend to call them "Cashflow machines", because the first system that got installed (way back in the 1980s... we were one of the beta-test countries) was named Cashflow, from TrustBank, now Westpac.
The Westpac Cashflow is now just one of many ATMs, but too bad, the name got Xeroxed...
"I can just see Joe Sixpack sayin it now 'You mean we flew all the way there and we didn't land. - why don't we land that puppy.' "
And cue the "the Mars mission was obviously faked! there's no way they wouldn't have landed if it was REAL!" conspiracy theories in 3, 2...
Why hello there, Capricorn One!
Yeah, and I'll multiply all those diamonds and nickel-iron asteroids by the delta-v cost required to ship them back down the gravity well... and trade the lot for water, breathable atmosphere, and a magnetosphere to keep the radiation away.
Wealth is relative. *Biology* is already wealth beyond most of our realistic expectations of space. Unless we find viable biology out there, there's nothing worth going for.
Remember, north America was colonised by tobacco, cotton, and sugar. Spinoffs were sweetcorn, tomatoes, potatoes. Got any of those on Mars?
"Part of what made the Boston Tea Party as powerful as it was is the destruction of property-- the valuable tea. The crux of the RIAA's problems is that mp3s have no inherent value. "
I wonder what would have happened if the Boston Tea Party had involved *creating* unlimited quantities of tea rather than destroying it?
My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive. Is it true that humans have six legs?
So... Flickr are behind this?
"They did. They just set aside the money in the stock market."
So nuclear power is perfectly safe as long as your underlying civilisation and economy doesn't do anything outside very narrow margins? And when things do go belly-up....?
Yeah, that's what I thought, and that's why I'm cynical about nuclear safety. If the companies running this stuff can't even manage to cover normal operating and decommissioning costs which are scheduled and predictable... just how prepared are they for really catastrophic events?
Remember, the thing about fission that scares people is not how clean and safe it is when everything's running perfectly. That's admittedly pretty impressive. It's about how gracefully it degrades under stress and how rapidly it all goes nonlinear when the unexpected happens - and about the transparency and trustworthiness of the entities operating it. And since even the pure science of fission is 'born secret' if it overlaps with how to build bombs, the nuclear industry gets to live in its own deep little pond of the defense-contractor world, in which all sorts of corruption can breed.
These guys can't even manage their money with the number of nines required to meet their contract obligations, but we can trust them to do everything else perfectly that must be done perfectly.... because they say so, because we need nuclear right now darnit so the technology MUST be reliable because we don't have any other options so we must build build build.... right?
"> I found myself pulling on a door clearly marked Push."
It's even worse in Brazil. Doors are clearly labeled 'Push' and Pull' in Portuguese... ... but the Portuguese word for 'pull' is 'puxe', pronounced 'push'.
Gringo entering Brazil == immediate 50 pt IQ drain!
"Once you can drag and drop one thing then you want to be able to drag and drop anything. In the case of arbitrary file formats not only must you implement code to check the incoming data stream (thus exposing yourself to all of the security considerations of "how many different ways can someone try to wax my process of checking the incoming data stream?") but you must consider that a data stream which is valid using one codec algorithm may cause a fault using another codec algorithm."
But isn't that precisely what object orientation was invented to solve? To find a way of unifying data transfer between absolutely everything, everywhere, by sending not raw data but objects which could then be queried to ask things like 'what kind of thing are you?' and 'give me your data in Format X, Y or Z which I can read'.
Drag and drop to me is one of the acid tests of 'do you actually have a functioning object model?' And pretty much every GUI OS, including Windows and OSX, fails this: drag and drop works in many places, if the developers have jumped through hoops to but not all; there's no way to universally query ANY object and do stuff with it. The only exception I can think of is, perhaps, Smalltalk/Squeak (the original OO system) with its direct-object-manipulation interface.
Why didn't the promise of OO happen? We got COM objects instead which seem to do almost precisely the opposite: be very brittle, add a whole layer of complexity, and only make sense inside huge frameworks which can't be split up into objects. C++ seems to be the anti-Smalltalk in almsot every way and yet it still gets to be called 'object oriented'. How did we allow such confusion of language?
I don't agree that the answer is 'drag and drop is far too complicated and you shouldn't be trying to do that'. We should say 'hey, this poses interesting questions about why our fundamental operating system models are, in 2009, still broken even by 1979 standards.'