Compared to the rest of the summary, which says: "The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive." getting the journal wrong is a pretty trivial error.
These machines were designed and built by humans to be capable of adaptation and learning, so it actually proves Turing's thesis false. They then use the adaptation and learning capability their human designers built into them to adapt and learn, but according to the very next sentence don't produce outcomes that are as good as purely human-designed ones.
So why bring Turing's name into it at all? I suspect marketing has something to do with it. Which is too bad, because the results themselves are quite interesting, although I'm curious how the robots reproduce... if this actually an evolutionary system rather than a merely adaptive/learning one. For the confused: growing children do not "evolve", except in the loosest and least interesting metaphorical sense. They learn. As near as I can tell these robots do the same thing.
I seem to recall that other studies have shown that hands-free cell phone conversations are just as distracting as conversations carried out while holding the phone.
I seem to remember exactly the opposite, wshich is also why cell phone bans permit hands-free phones: there is evidence that they do not increase accident rates.
Others here have suggested that the kind of clueless assholes who are more likely to crash due to inattention while driving and talking are also the ones least likely to obey the law. This seems to me to be a far more plausible cause for the lack of accident reduction.
It got modded up because those of us who've moved around and seen the world have come across far too many scumbags who've been monetarily successful, often while loudly proclaiming their own high moral standards (self-described "Bible-believing Christians" are my personal favourite--there is no better signal that a person is a cheat and a scoundrel.)
I'm not sure why you'd think my impressions come from TV or the movies, rather than a wide range of successful experience in both business and academia in the U.S. and Canada. What I've learned in 20 years of that is that extremely wealthy people generally have a moral compass that points due Self.
Case in point, you rather strangely proclaim obedience to the law as a measure of your moral worth, as if that was the least bit interesting. That's very strong evidence of moral bankruptcy right there: that you think not cheating on your audited accounts and not lying to customs officers who have the power to arrest you for lying to them are in any way evidence that you are a good person. It proves you are careful and cautious, not good. The two have nothing to do with each other.
If you want to get a sense of your own moral worth one question you can ask is: how many highly lucrative and completely legal business deals have you turned down because they deviated from your moral sense?
If the number is zero then you either have very little business experience or very little moral sense, or both.
I'm not tempted into crime where I see a Ferrari on the street -- and I would guess that the same is true for most folks.
Which is why most folks don't own Ferraris, and most Ferrari owners have some pretty questionable behaviour in their past. You don't get that kind of money without doing something pretty slimey for a living, like being a bank executive or otherwise participating in the amoral circus that is the American financial system.
Actually, in Japanese, the word for "boat crew" is not the English word "sailor".
When Japanese sailors are referred to by English speakers they are described as "sailors", not as the Japanese term. But "taikinaut" is an English word, not a Chinese word. "Naut" is a latin suffix for "traveller". Chinese typically generates words for new concepts by simple combinations of existing words, so there is a generic word for "wheeled vehicle" and various added words for different kinds--I believe "automobile" is a combination of "fire" and "wheeled vehicle" in Chinese. I would expect their term for astronaut is the same.
The weird practice that there be a different English word for every nation's astronauts just reflects the strange place the space program resides in: a political and cultural bauble, not an essential activity for the future of the human race. It's sad.
By the standard of building and maintaining their own aerospace infrastructure. I'm sure they'll import technology, just as the Americans imported the robotic manipulators on the shuttle and ISS from Canada, but the overall management of the American space program is American, in the same way the overall management of the Indian space program is Indian.
Americans, Britons, Canadians, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Sri Lankan, Egyptian, Indian... etc... people who crew boats are called "sailors". Likewise, people from all nations who fly planes are called "pilots" or "aircrew".
Why anyone thinks the nationality of a human being in space is so important that we ought to have 200 different words for "human being in space" is beyond me. This kind of petty nationalism may have served a purpose during the Cold War. Today it just tells us that if people are doing it they believe that the exploration of space is still nothing but a nationalist pissing contest, of no practical value at all.
With a large enough sample size a result like this can be highly statistically significant, but still useless as a predictor.
For example, if I have 2000 marbles, half white and half black, and pull them out randomly and ask you to predict what colour each one is, if you guessed correctly 60% of the time (you got 600 white marbles correct and 600 black marbles correct) you'd be bumping up against three sigma (over 99%) odds of your results NOT being due to chance, but some incredible marble-colour-guessing gene that evolution or possibly archeobacteria had slipped you. Up the number to 20,000 marbles with 60% accuracy and you'd be a proven phenomenon, even though you utility as a marble-colour picker would be pretty much useless unless it also happened to work on a roulette wheel.
This is something that it can be hard for people outside the machine learning community to understand: an enormously significant result, statistically, can still make for a practically useless classifier.
Ok, I've read the original paper now, and it is almost as moronic as the New Sensationalist makes it out to be.
Their argument is analogous to the following claim:
I can stand on dry land, or I can swim in the water, but there is the broad swath of territory that is neither dry land nor water so deep I can do nothing but swim in it. Therefore, the concept of "land" (or "water") may actually be completely useless! Aren't we clever?
Scientists have a tendency toward various kinds of conceptual realism, where they think that there is exactly one way to properly understand the universe, and the entities picked out by that way are "real" and no others are. When they find a case that they can't crisply classify under the existing concepts there are two moves: the smart one, that refines existing concepts and introduces new ones to deal with the boundary cases; and the idiotic one, that claims that since the existing concepts don't deal well with the new case, they must not pick out anything "real" after all and should be thrown away.
That the biological species concept fails in various ways has been known for a long time. They are now pointing out that certain criteria that would normally be used to delineate individuals might also fail under some circumstances. To this I say: big deal. The biological species concept, like the concept of Newtonian mass, is still incredibly useful in understanding reality under a wide range of circumstances, which is all a scientist can hope for. If their new concepts--which they don't really offer--transform smoothly into the biological species concept in the appropriate circumstances I'll be interested. Otherwise, they're just gabbling.
Thanks, as the New Sensationalist article is full of lies and hyperbole, completely idiotic, transparent falsehoods like, "This code is universal, shared by all organisms, and biologists have long known that it has remarkable properties"
This simply a lie, as is the claim that 64 combinations producing 20 codons is "redundancy". The reason there are only 20 is well-known to anyone with the least little bit of familiarity with the subject: it is the maximum number of unambiguous combinations, so that if you get six bases in a row there is exactly one way to read them, because no two codons together can result in a third codon being read between them.
The arXiv article may have something interesting to say, although inter-species genetic transfer has been known to occur amongst micro-organisms for a long time. From a Darwinian perspective the genes available in the environment are just that: another perfectly ordinary part of the environment. Since Darwin's Law depends only on the laws of probability and the fact of imperfect replication, it applies to situations where horizontal transfer takes place just as much as when imperfect copies of genes come from ancestors.
The details of Darwinian evolution will change a little in the context where organisms are taking genetic resources directly from the environment, but it's still a Darwinian process.
The weird statements about "questioning if organisms even exist as individuals" are just idiotic marketing hype that pretty much ensure the whole argument is vastly less interesting and important than the authors want to make it appear. Otherwise, why the need for such anti-scientific hype? Unless it is the New Sensationalist characteristically ripping an innocent statement out of context.
My point is that with the mobility of knowledge we have today that a match or that implementation being documented else where isn't definitive one way or the other.
I'm not sure what this "definitive" thing you're talking about is.
Informed judgment is always a matter of balancing probabilities. Why anyone would talk about anything being "definitive" instead of "highly probable" is not clear.
In this case, the evidence, both who the target was (Chinese human rights organizations) and the low-level details of the code (a specific CRC-16 implementation) significantly increase the probability that the attacks originated inside China, which means pursuing further evidence that the attacks originated inside China, and with the human-rights-hating Chinese Communist Party, which controls the Chinese government, is a sensible way to spend your time.
You say that like there is a guaranteed income in "full time employment".
I'm totally unclear why you would think that. You are a cost center to your employer. They will lay you off the instant it becomes convenient to do so.
And oddly enough there are people who will swap those two positions, and dismiss this (rightfully) as computationally sophisticated speculation, while for some reason taking arguably even less physical GCMs seriously. This simulation probably conserves energy and has reasonably physical boundary conditions, and doesn't parameterize away everything that happens on scales that are inconveniently difficult to model.
GCMs are still on basic theoretical grounds arguably better models than this one, so it is possible to take them somewhat seriously, but as a computational physicist my take on comparative plausibility is:
where * is this black hole speculation and each "x" represents an order of magnitude or so.
Anyone who is properly sceptical of computer models as arbiters of reality ought to have as their very first reflex the same dismissive attitude toward GCMs as they have toward this result, and only when GCMs have demonstrated the ability to predict long-term climate shift in the past (which they have notably failed to do in a couple of important cases) should they serve as a basis for public policy.
Because then the people who spent their resources on developing new ways to kill use those innovations on the people that didn't.
Nope.
Genocide is really rare. Invasion, colonization and assimilation is a lot more common.
Killing people is almost entirely pointless. Threatening to kill people is what does the job, because people happen to be wired in ways that let them be controlled up to a point by such threats. When the threat level becomes too high they always fight back, of course, because they happen to be wired that way, too.
Gandhi's big trick was to realize that death threats are not generally credible, and react accordingly, which means not allowing your behaviour to be controlled by threats, and being willing to die rather than submit. There are specific circumstances where that won't work at all--such as the Jews in Nazi Germany--but in almost all cases peaceful, active resistance is far more effective.
These weapons, as others here have pointed out, are aimed at Gandhi-style tactics: by having a non-lethal response to a peaceful, active resistance it tilts the tables back toward the oppressors, who are basically engaging in mass instantaneous public torture-at-a-distance via the use of these weapons.
These weapons are designed to generate compliance with the alpha chimp's wishes by engaging people's pain response rather than their fear response. The latter can be fairly easily subverted, depending as it does on a vague cognitive connection between threat and outcome. The former is much tougher nut to crack, although it'll be interesting to see the first time the cops are on the receiving end of one of these weapons, which will no-doubt be reduced to hand-held form factors in the next couple of years.
i'd like for any place we occupy to have as few civilian deaths as possible, so i think working on systems like this is a good thing.
One possible means of reducing civilian deaths is to occupy fewer places. It's quite a bit cheaper, too, and fewer Americans get killed in the process as well.
Some native American tribes (in Mexico, I think) still are a testament to that. They walk hundrets of miles in one trip. In crappy shoes or barefoot. (After all, we’re built for it.) No problem. And they never get sick. They have some of the best healths on the planet.
Non-European population... check.
Very far away and hard to get to vaguely specified location... check.
Remarkable physical feets (as it were)... check.
Amazing health claims... check.
Ok! You win a "Jean-Jacques Rousseau Noble Savage Bullshit Prize"!
The people you're talking about are Taramuhara Mayans in Mexico. They've been moderately studied by one enthusiast. They run barefoot or very nearly and are very good at it, strongly suggesting a case can be made for minimalist running, much to the chagrin of the Running Shoe-Industrial Complex.
The claims that they "never get injuries" and keep running into their 80's and 90's are not exactly based on a formal review of treatment records at the local hospital. The claims that they "never get sick" are just the usual hyperbolic amplification that people pursuing the "Noble Savage Bullshit Prize" engage in, heedless of the terrible damage it does to their own brains and the brains of everyone around them.
You need to be more careful: we know that if a sufficient amount of Noble Savage Bullshit builds up in the world it can actually bring about the end of civilization.
They are focusing on economically productive activities, not deadweight loss activities like the military, but mine clearance is more important to civilian populations than the the military, so it might count.
It would have been a coconut and he would have been killed when it hit his head. No theory of gravity.
Although it is true that falling coconuts kill more people every year than sharks, it is not clear why you think Newton was hit on the head by an apple.
The text makes it obvious he was seeing an apple fall (probably more than one if he really sat in an orchard for any length of time. It's fairly rare that we have an opportunity to observe a freely falling object from a distance, and orchards are excellent places for such observation.
Newton's reflections as reported by Stukeley are just what one would expect of genius, as well: he asks himself why something that is commonplace and taken for granted happens the way it does, rather than just assuming "well of course that's the way it happens... how else could it be?" He imagines the apply falling sideways, or upwards, and realizes that it's fall is always perpendicular to the surface of the Earth, which is to say toward the centre, rather than toward any other part of it.
I guess if non-scientists historians were reading this over the last 300 years they might have "debunked" it based on their ignorance of the way scientists think, but it seems quite plausible to me, and the sort of thing a mere biographer at the outset of the scientific revolution would be unlikely to be able to invent so plausibly.
Furthermore, it is hard to envision any non-violent and democratic way which British Catholics could have used at the time.
As Barbie might have said, "Thinking of non-violent means of political change is hard. Let's go kill people!"
Fuck that and the horse it rode in on. Sure it's hard to come up with non-violent means of influencing governments. But y'know what? It actually is known to work pretty well when people take the time to think about it, whereas killing people is pretty much an epic fail. As you yourself point out:
But as often happens when using violence to get your way, the opposite happened
Indeed, this happens so often that anyone who continues to opt for violence today, after centuries of idiots pretending to use violence for change and failing pretty badly, is clearly killing people because that's what they like to do, not because they have any genuine belief that violence will bring about their purported political ends.
Violence is the end, whether it's the US bombing Iraq or the 19 nitwits blowing up the twin towers.
The Basque, the Tamils, the Sikhs, the Irish on both sides, the Scots in the 1700's, the Palestinians today... all these people tried to use violence as a means of effecting political change, sometimes for decades--the Basque have recently come up on the half century mark. They've all killed hundreds of people, at least. None of them have gotten even close to what they claim to want, which is an entirely predicticable outcome of political violence.
It's not that it never works, but it is demonstrably inefficient and ineffective. Whereas intelligent, adaptive, non-violent political action of the kind Gandhi used in India is demonstrably effective and efficient (efficiency is measured by the number of peopled "freed" by the "freedom fighters" divided by the square of the number of people they kill.)
So given that the entirely predictable outcome of violence is usually the opposite of what the perpetrators nominally intend, we should look at anyone who advocates "war" of any kind as the equivelent of someone who is going to cure cancer with blood-letting and prayer. We can't prove it won't work ever, but we can be pretty damned sure there are other approaches--some of which are HARD, and require actually reseach and intelligence to implement--that will work a hell of a lot better.
The mystery is why anyone anywhere thinks anyone advocating or using poltical violence is anything but an idiot.
I actually saw a guy three or four years ago in a rest stop somewhere near Albany NY who looked amazingly like Osama, dressed in long robe and turban and everything. He was washing his sandalled feet in the bathroom sink.
Admittedly I suck at facial recognition, and in my memory he is quite a bit younger, but the resemblance was sufficiently uncanny to make me wonder sometimes if your speculation isn't actually on the mark...
Therefore, abuse of any economic system is guaranteed, given sufficient time.
Indeed, which is why inherently limited systems like social democratic or liberal democratic are vastly superior to either communism or capitalism. The only people who claim otherwise are the corrupt or the ignorant.
I used to be one of the ignorant, of the capitalist variety, so I have some sympathy for the species, but anyone who reaches the age of thirty or forty and has not become either a social or liberal democrat (I'm a lib dem--those capitalist roots die hard!) is just a lamer.
It is a measure of how utterly the corrupt have captured the mainstream political discourse in the US (and to some extent Canada as well) that most people couldn't even tell you what a social democrat or liberal democrat is (the former believe the state should yield to the market where there is a clear public-policy reason to do so, and the latter believe the market should yield to the state when there is a clear public policy reason for doing so. They both reach a similar middle ground, but from different ends and with different biases.)
How do you keep those two sentences in your head without your skull exploding?
Just possibly because I was not "responding to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is", I was instead agreeing with the idiot I was responding to that the US is not a model citizen to take the wind out of his ignorant sails and we could get back to talking about China.
You will, of course, see when you read very carefully and think very hard about what I actually said, instead of vaguely noticing that I a) criticized people who for a very specific reason and in a very specific context introduce an attack on the US as an way of distracting from a major evil being done by another country and b) criticize the US myself under quite different circumstances, for the purposes of getting the argument back on track.
Apparently instead I've attracted the notice of a bunch of people with really poor reading comprehension and logic skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to the rest of the summary, which says: "The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive." getting the journal wrong is a pretty trivial error.
These machines were designed and built by humans to be capable of adaptation and learning, so it actually proves Turing's thesis false. They then use the adaptation and learning capability their human designers built into them to adapt and learn, but according to the very next sentence don't produce outcomes that are as good as purely human-designed ones.
So why bring Turing's name into it at all? I suspect marketing has something to do with it. Which is too bad, because the results themselves are quite interesting, although I'm curious how the robots reproduce... if this actually an evolutionary system rather than a merely adaptive/learning one. For the confused: growing children do not "evolve", except in the loosest and least interesting metaphorical sense. They learn. As near as I can tell these robots do the same thing.
I seem to recall that other studies have shown that hands-free cell phone conversations are just as distracting as conversations carried out while holding the phone.
I seem to remember exactly the opposite, wshich is also why cell phone bans permit hands-free phones: there is evidence that they do not increase accident rates.
Others here have suggested that the kind of clueless assholes who are more likely to crash due to inattention while driving and talking are also the ones least likely to obey the law. This seems to me to be a far more plausible cause for the lack of accident reduction.
Now fusion energy is only 10 years away!
And will be for the next fifty years.
It got modded up because those of us who've moved around and seen the world have come across far too many scumbags who've been monetarily successful, often while loudly proclaiming their own high moral standards (self-described "Bible-believing Christians" are my personal favourite--there is no better signal that a person is a cheat and a scoundrel.)
I'm not sure why you'd think my impressions come from TV or the movies, rather than a wide range of successful experience in both business and academia in the U.S. and Canada. What I've learned in 20 years of that is that extremely wealthy people generally have a moral compass that points due Self.
Case in point, you rather strangely proclaim obedience to the law as a measure of your moral worth, as if that was the least bit interesting. That's very strong evidence of moral bankruptcy right there: that you think not cheating on your audited accounts and not lying to customs officers who have the power to arrest you for lying to them are in any way evidence that you are a good person. It proves you are careful and cautious, not good. The two have nothing to do with each other.
If you want to get a sense of your own moral worth one question you can ask is: how many highly lucrative and completely legal business deals have you turned down because they deviated from your moral sense?
If the number is zero then you either have very little business experience or very little moral sense, or both.
I'm not tempted into crime where I see a Ferrari on the street -- and I would guess that the same is true for most folks.
Which is why most folks don't own Ferraris, and most Ferrari owners have some pretty questionable behaviour in their past. You don't get that kind of money without doing something pretty slimey for a living, like being a bank executive or otherwise participating in the amoral circus that is the American financial system.
Actually, in Japanese, the word for "boat crew" is not the English word "sailor".
When Japanese sailors are referred to by English speakers they are described as "sailors", not as the Japanese term. But "taikinaut" is an English word, not a Chinese word. "Naut" is a latin suffix for "traveller". Chinese typically generates words for new concepts by simple combinations of existing words, so there is a generic word for "wheeled vehicle" and various added words for different kinds--I believe "automobile" is a combination of "fire" and "wheeled vehicle" in Chinese. I would expect their term for astronaut is the same.
The weird practice that there be a different English word for every nation's astronauts just reflects the strange place the space program resides in: a political and cultural bauble, not an essential activity for the future of the human race. It's sad.
but by what standards?
By the standard of building and maintaining their own aerospace infrastructure. I'm sure they'll import technology, just as the Americans imported the robotic manipulators on the shuttle and ISS from Canada, but the overall management of the American space program is American, in the same way the overall management of the Indian space program is Indian.
Americans, Britons, Canadians, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Sri Lankan, Egyptian, Indian... etc... people who crew boats are called "sailors". Likewise, people from all nations who fly planes are called "pilots" or "aircrew".
Why anyone thinks the nationality of a human being in space is so important that we ought to have 200 different words for "human being in space" is beyond me. This kind of petty nationalism may have served a purpose during the Cold War. Today it just tells us that if people are doing it they believe that the exploration of space is still nothing but a nationalist pissing contest, of no practical value at all.
60% versus 50%? How is that WAY better?
With a large enough sample size a result like this can be highly statistically significant, but still useless as a predictor.
For example, if I have 2000 marbles, half white and half black, and pull them out randomly and ask you to predict what colour each one is, if you guessed correctly 60% of the time (you got 600 white marbles correct and 600 black marbles correct) you'd be bumping up against three sigma (over 99%) odds of your results NOT being due to chance, but some incredible marble-colour-guessing gene that evolution or possibly archeobacteria had slipped you. Up the number to 20,000 marbles with 60% accuracy and you'd be a proven phenomenon, even though you utility as a marble-colour picker would be pretty much useless unless it also happened to work on a roulette wheel.
This is something that it can be hard for people outside the machine learning community to understand: an enormously significant result, statistically, can still make for a practically useless classifier.
http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0702015 [arxiv.org]
Ok, I've read the original paper now, and it is almost as moronic as the New Sensationalist makes it out to be.
Their argument is analogous to the following claim:
I can stand on dry land, or I can swim in the water, but there is the broad swath of territory that is neither dry land nor water so deep I can do nothing but swim in it. Therefore, the concept of "land" (or "water") may actually be completely useless! Aren't we clever?
Scientists have a tendency toward various kinds of conceptual realism, where they think that there is exactly one way to properly understand the universe, and the entities picked out by that way are "real" and no others are. When they find a case that they can't crisply classify under the existing concepts there are two moves: the smart one, that refines existing concepts and introduces new ones to deal with the boundary cases; and the idiotic one, that claims that since the existing concepts don't deal well with the new case, they must not pick out anything "real" after all and should be thrown away.
That the biological species concept fails in various ways has been known for a long time. They are now pointing out that certain criteria that would normally be used to delineate individuals might also fail under some circumstances. To this I say: big deal. The biological species concept, like the concept of Newtonian mass, is still incredibly useful in understanding reality under a wide range of circumstances, which is all a scientist can hope for. If their new concepts--which they don't really offer--transform smoothly into the biological species concept in the appropriate circumstances I'll be interested. Otherwise, they're just gabbling.
Thanks, as the New Sensationalist article is full of lies and hyperbole, completely idiotic, transparent falsehoods like, "This code is universal, shared by all organisms, and biologists have long known that it has remarkable properties"
This simply a lie, as is the claim that 64 combinations producing 20 codons is "redundancy". The reason there are only 20 is well-known to anyone with the least little bit of familiarity with the subject: it is the maximum number of unambiguous combinations, so that if you get six bases in a row there is exactly one way to read them, because no two codons together can result in a third codon being read between them.
The arXiv article may have something interesting to say, although inter-species genetic transfer has been known to occur amongst micro-organisms for a long time. From a Darwinian perspective the genes available in the environment are just that: another perfectly ordinary part of the environment. Since Darwin's Law depends only on the laws of probability and the fact of imperfect replication, it applies to situations where horizontal transfer takes place just as much as when imperfect copies of genes come from ancestors.
The details of Darwinian evolution will change a little in the context where organisms are taking genetic resources directly from the environment, but it's still a Darwinian process.
The weird statements about "questioning if organisms even exist as individuals" are just idiotic marketing hype that pretty much ensure the whole argument is vastly less interesting and important than the authors want to make it appear. Otherwise, why the need for such anti-scientific hype? Unless it is the New Sensationalist characteristically ripping an innocent statement out of context.
My point is that with the mobility of knowledge we have today that a match or that implementation being documented else where isn't definitive one way or the other.
I'm not sure what this "definitive" thing you're talking about is.
Informed judgment is always a matter of balancing probabilities. Why anyone would talk about anything being "definitive" instead of "highly probable" is not clear.
In this case, the evidence, both who the target was (Chinese human rights organizations) and the low-level details of the code (a specific CRC-16 implementation) significantly increase the probability that the attacks originated inside China, which means pursuing further evidence that the attacks originated inside China, and with the human-rights-hating Chinese Communist Party, which controls the Chinese government, is a sensible way to spend your time.
and no guaranteed income
You say that like there is a guaranteed income in "full time employment".
I'm totally unclear why you would think that. You are a cost center to your employer. They will lay you off the instant it becomes convenient to do so.
Where exactly is the "guarantee" in that?
And oddly enough there are people who will swap those two positions, and dismiss this (rightfully) as computationally sophisticated speculation, while for some reason taking arguably even less physical GCMs seriously. This simulation probably conserves energy and has reasonably physical boundary conditions, and doesn't parameterize away everything that happens on scales that are inconveniently difficult to model.
GCMs are still on basic theoretical grounds arguably better models than this one, so it is possible to take them somewhat seriously, but as a computational physicist my take on comparative plausibility is:
*xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxGCMxxxExperiment/observation
where * is this black hole speculation and each "x" represents an order of magnitude or so.
Anyone who is properly sceptical of computer models as arbiters of reality ought to have as their very first reflex the same dismissive attitude toward GCMs as they have toward this result, and only when GCMs have demonstrated the ability to predict long-term climate shift in the past (which they have notably failed to do in a couple of important cases) should they serve as a basis for public policy.
faith in the claims of science
That word you keep using...
Because then the people who spent their resources on developing new ways to kill use those innovations on the people that didn't.
Nope.
Genocide is really rare. Invasion, colonization and assimilation is a lot more common.
Killing people is almost entirely pointless. Threatening to kill people is what does the job, because people happen to be wired in ways that let them be controlled up to a point by such threats. When the threat level becomes too high they always fight back, of course, because they happen to be wired that way, too.
Gandhi's big trick was to realize that death threats are not generally credible, and react accordingly, which means not allowing your behaviour to be controlled by threats, and being willing to die rather than submit. There are specific circumstances where that won't work at all--such as the Jews in Nazi Germany--but in almost all cases peaceful, active resistance is far more effective.
These weapons, as others here have pointed out, are aimed at Gandhi-style tactics: by having a non-lethal response to a peaceful, active resistance it tilts the tables back toward the oppressors, who are basically engaging in mass instantaneous public torture-at-a-distance via the use of these weapons.
These weapons are designed to generate compliance with the alpha chimp's wishes by engaging people's pain response rather than their fear response. The latter can be fairly easily subverted, depending as it does on a vague cognitive connection between threat and outcome. The former is much tougher nut to crack, although it'll be interesting to see the first time the cops are on the receiving end of one of these weapons, which will no-doubt be reduced to hand-held form factors in the next couple of years.
i'd like for any place we occupy to have as few civilian deaths as possible, so i think working on systems like this is a good thing.
One possible means of reducing civilian deaths is to occupy fewer places. It's quite a bit cheaper, too, and fewer Americans get killed in the process as well.
Some native American tribes (in Mexico, I think) still are a testament to that. They walk hundrets of miles in one trip. In crappy shoes or barefoot. (After all, we’re built for it.) No problem.
And they never get sick. They have some of the best healths on the planet.
Non-European population... check.
Very far away and hard to get to vaguely specified location... check.
Remarkable physical feets (as it were)... check.
Amazing health claims... check.
Ok! You win a "Jean-Jacques Rousseau Noble Savage Bullshit Prize"!
The people you're talking about are Taramuhara Mayans in Mexico. They've been moderately studied by one enthusiast. They run barefoot or very nearly and are very good at it, strongly suggesting a case can be made for minimalist running, much to the chagrin of the Running Shoe-Industrial Complex.
The claims that they "never get injuries" and keep running into their 80's and 90's are not exactly based on a formal review of treatment records at the local hospital. The claims that they "never get sick" are just the usual hyperbolic amplification that people pursuing the "Noble Savage Bullshit Prize" engage in, heedless of the terrible damage it does to their own brains and the brains of everyone around them.
You need to be more careful: we know that if a sufficient amount of Noble Savage Bullshit builds up in the world it can actually bring about the end of civilization.
Automated mine clearance also comes to mind.
They are focusing on economically productive activities, not deadweight loss activities like the military, but mine clearance is more important to civilian populations than the the military, so it might count.
It would have been a coconut and he would have been killed when it hit his head. No theory of gravity.
Although it is true that falling coconuts kill more people every year than sharks, it is not clear why you think Newton was hit on the head by an apple.
The text makes it obvious he was seeing an apple fall (probably more than one if he really sat in an orchard for any length of time. It's fairly rare that we have an opportunity to observe a freely falling object from a distance, and orchards are excellent places for such observation.
Newton's reflections as reported by Stukeley are just what one would expect of genius, as well: he asks himself why something that is commonplace and taken for granted happens the way it does, rather than just assuming "well of course that's the way it happens... how else could it be?" He imagines the apply falling sideways, or upwards, and realizes that it's fall is always perpendicular to the surface of the Earth, which is to say toward the centre, rather than toward any other part of it.
I guess if non-scientists historians were reading this over the last 300 years they might have "debunked" it based on their ignorance of the way scientists think, but it seems quite plausible to me, and the sort of thing a mere biographer at the outset of the scientific revolution would be unlikely to be able to invent so plausibly.
Furthermore, it is hard to envision any non-violent and democratic way which British Catholics could have used at the time.
As Barbie might have said, "Thinking of non-violent means of political change is hard. Let's go kill people!"
Fuck that and the horse it rode in on. Sure it's hard to come up with non-violent means of influencing governments. But y'know what? It actually is known to work pretty well when people take the time to think about it, whereas killing people is pretty much an epic fail. As you yourself point out:
But as often happens when using violence to get your way, the opposite happened
Indeed, this happens so often that anyone who continues to opt for violence today, after centuries of idiots pretending to use violence for change and failing pretty badly, is clearly killing people because that's what they like to do, not because they have any genuine belief that violence will bring about their purported political ends.
Violence is the end, whether it's the US bombing Iraq or the 19 nitwits blowing up the twin towers.
The Basque, the Tamils, the Sikhs, the Irish on both sides, the Scots in the 1700's, the Palestinians today... all these people tried to use violence as a means of effecting political change, sometimes for decades--the Basque have recently come up on the half century mark. They've all killed hundreds of people, at least. None of them have gotten even close to what they claim to want, which is an entirely predicticable outcome of political violence.
It's not that it never works, but it is demonstrably inefficient and ineffective. Whereas intelligent, adaptive, non-violent political action of the kind Gandhi used in India is demonstrably effective and efficient (efficiency is measured by the number of peopled "freed" by the "freedom fighters" divided by the square of the number of people they kill.)
So given that the entirely predictable outcome of violence is usually the opposite of what the perpetrators nominally intend, we should look at anyone who advocates "war" of any kind as the equivelent of someone who is going to cure cancer with blood-letting and prayer. We can't prove it won't work ever, but we can be pretty damned sure there are other approaches--some of which are HARD, and require actually reseach and intelligence to implement--that will work a hell of a lot better.
The mystery is why anyone anywhere thinks anyone advocating or using poltical violence is anything but an idiot.
I have a feeling that he's in the US
I actually saw a guy three or four years ago in a rest stop somewhere near Albany NY who looked amazingly like Osama, dressed in long robe and turban and everything. He was washing his sandalled feet in the bathroom sink.
Admittedly I suck at facial recognition, and in my memory he is quite a bit younger, but the resemblance was sufficiently uncanny to make me wonder sometimes if your speculation isn't actually on the mark...
Therefore, abuse of any economic system is guaranteed, given sufficient time.
Indeed, which is why inherently limited systems like social democratic or liberal democratic are vastly superior to either communism or capitalism. The only people who claim otherwise are the corrupt or the ignorant.
I used to be one of the ignorant, of the capitalist variety, so I have some sympathy for the species, but anyone who reaches the age of thirty or forty and has not become either a social or liberal democrat (I'm a lib dem--those capitalist roots die hard!) is just a lamer.
It is a measure of how utterly the corrupt have captured the mainstream political discourse in the US (and to some extent Canada as well) that most people couldn't even tell you what a social democrat or liberal democrat is (the former believe the state should yield to the market where there is a clear public-policy reason to do so, and the latter believe the market should yield to the state when there is a clear public policy reason for doing so. They both reach a similar middle ground, but from different ends and with different biases.)
No Godwin for you!
How do you keep those two sentences in your head without your skull exploding?
Just possibly because I was not "responding to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is", I was instead agreeing with the idiot I was responding to that the US is not a model citizen to take the wind out of his ignorant sails and we could get back to talking about China.
You will, of course, see when you read very carefully and think very hard about what I actually said, instead of vaguely noticing that I a) criticized people who for a very specific reason and in a very specific context introduce an attack on the US as an way of distracting from a major evil being done by another country and b) criticize the US myself under quite different circumstances, for the purposes of getting the argument back on track.
Apparently instead I've attracted the notice of a bunch of people with really poor reading comprehension and logic skills.