All jokes aside, though, I think I would have been more surprised to have learned that heartbreak and social rejection does not cause some kind of negative reinforcement within the human psyche. It is, of course, still interesting research.
I think the interesting thing here is that the mechanism for reinforcement of physical avoidance and social avoidance appear to be using some of the same gene networks.
This is also not surprising: evolution is an opportunistic, elaborative process, so it tends to result in adaptations that reuse existing mechanisms in novel ways. It is possible that we had evolved an entirely new mechanism for providing negative feedback from failed social interactions, but it was always far more likely that selection occurred that resulted in novel, newly-evolved stimuli (social rejection) would result in biochemical responses that activated parts of the existing negative-feedback behavioural system.
As others here have pointed out, people who fail to learn from a broken heart are less likely to reproduce, even today, suggesting this evolution is still ongoing, which would also be unsurprising as the whole life-long repeated social mating ritual that humans go through is a relatively recent behaviour, probably not more than a few hundred thousand years old, and maybe a good deal less.
There are people who believe for some reason that evolution doesn't act on humans anymore, but of course this is nonsense: subtle selective effects like this are always going on, and can't be stopped, ever.
But every shill is an idiot, so the "but I repeat myself" follows. I was paraphrasing the famous American humourist, Mark Twain, who once said, "Are you a member of Congress? Are you an idiot? But I repeat myself..."
The best comparator for the US with regard to life expectancy is Canada, because while we have many similarities, we (Canadians) live several years longer than you (Americans.)
The two biggest differences between the countries are that our income distribution is significantly flatter than yours, and our health care system is universal and paid for via taxation (there is a nominal fee structure in some provinces, but it is equivalent to taxation.)
There are other differences: we have greater ethnic diversity than you--our Native American population alone is 4%. One in three Canadians is an immigrant. We have to deal with two official languages as well as a number of important minority languages: Hindi on the West Coast, Cree on the prairies, etc. We have a much more thinly spread population, so delivery of care and having enough people in one place to pay for big-ticket items is quite a bit harder for us than for you, with your larger, richer, denser population.
Those things are going to make it harder to deliver quality health care to Canadians, making our much longer lifespans quite remarkable. We also have a relatively large fraction of our male population working in mining, fishing, logging and farming, all of which kill people at much higher rates than other occupations (which is why they are done by men, because men dying has always been ok in all societies everywhere.)
How much of our longer lifespan is due to our flatter income distribution and how much is due to universal health care is not clear, but I think between them those are the major factors. Our flatter income distribution is achieved through more strongly progressive taxation at the top, and more robust income support at the bottom, which gives people at the bottom more latitude to make mistakes and learn from them productively, and gives people at the top less incentive to climb to the top by stepping on the faces of the oppressed masses.
Canadian society is also more democratic than American, with much hand-wringing over a recent federal election turnout that wasn't quite as low as the highest American turnouts in the past thirty years.
We are also politically and economically much more free than Americans, with far less implicit and explicit coercion regarding diversity of political opinions--as witnessed by our healthy minority and regional parties.
As a sometime small business-person who has friends doing similar work in the States I can say first hand that the burden of regulation/paperwork/bullshit on me is much smaller than in the US. You can incorporate here federally over the Web for $220 and the federal/provincial joint agreement in my province automatically handles provincial incorporation as well.
So those are some of the factors that MIGHT influence the difference, but you'd have to actually look in detail at the data and see:
a) who is dying b) what are they dying from
to get a better sense of the actual causes. It's known as empiricism, and I highly recommend it.
This is a non-sequitur, if you really dig into the numbers, you will find that the main reason for lowered life expectancies is obesity.
From the report you link: "Obesity also appears to have a negative effect on life expectancy at 65 for both men and women, although the coefficients are not statistically significant."
Which is to say, consistent with most obesity research, if you really dig into the numbers, you will find obesity does not have a significant impact on life expectancies. So I have to assume you are either an ideological shill who is pushing an agenda regardless of empirical fact, or an idiot. But I repeat myself.
The study also makes much of the false claim that obesity took a big jump between 1980 and, significantly, 1999--conveniently ignoring the redefinition of obesity that took place in 1998, lowering the threshold from 27.something to 25 for both men and women.
You might argue that the incredibly high cost of health care per capita in the US is due to obesity, which is a large factor in morbidity. But it is known to be weakly correlated with mortality, so your invocation of it, however ideologically satisfying, does not pass the most rudimentary empirical testing.
There is slowing of the clock onboard GPS satellites both due to the orbital speed (special relativity) and lower gravity (general relativity).
A colleague who used to teach a "Modern Physics for Engineers" course took great delight in detailing the history of the GPS system, and how they had to bring in some hard-core theoretical physicists to work out the GR corrections.
Engineers have a tendency to think theory is irrelevant and stupid, and this is a nice example of how the GPS system would have either failed or been full of inelegant hacks if we didn't have an esoteric but exact theory of gravity on large scales.
You could find just as serious or worse flaws in Star Wars or the Matrix
Star Wars Episode IV has a plot hole large enough to drive a truck through and no one ever complains about it: when they escape from the Death Star Leia says, "They're tracking us" when Han crows about their success in getting away. Yet they just go ahead and fly directly to the rebel base, leading the Empire there.
It is a pure case of "the plot needs the characters to do something really really stupid for no readily apparent reason" so they do.
The study is actually very poorly designed and proves nothing of the kind. Your comment is an example of confirmation bias, as are the researcher's conclusions.
A well-designed study would start half the rats on the high-fat diet, the other half on the low fat diet. Train them to run the mazes, then switch the diets.
It may well be that the effect being observed here is "massive sudden dietary change reduces cognitive performance."
If you consider how uncomfortable and distracted you'd probably be if you were subject to this kind of violent dietary manipulation you'll see how plausible the alternative explanation is.
I share your biases with regard to fatty foods, but that doesn't mean I can't tell a poorly designed study when I see one.
This is very cool stuff. But in terms of adapting 'remarkably quickly' to visual stimuli after congenital blindness, I'm slightly dubious.
Where the brain is concerned, YMMV is worth keeping in mind. There are plenty of cases where individuals exhibit far greater neurological plasticity than the norm, and from the sounds it the woman in this case had SOME sensitivity to light, so it is probable that although technically blind from birth she had sufficient visual stimuli to give her basic object-recognition skills.
The effect of treatment was not to grow a new fovea but to increase the sensitivity of the treated area and that she adapted by using that area like a "second fovea", which is in keeping the the Law of/.: if a/. story headline contains a simple declarative statement, that statement is almost certainly a falsehood made up by ignorant/. editors who are either too lazy to read the story, too stupid to understand it, or too contemptuous of their audience to care about accuracy. Remember, this is "news for people who don't give a shit about technical accuracy".
My own approach to reading/. lately has been to read the story, then do a quick review of the comments to see if anyone else has already corrected the lies, errors and distortions in the headline and summary.
To quote Terry Pratchett via Granny Weatherwax it's when you treat people like objects.
Who was paraphrasing and concretizing Kant, who said that we must treat people as ends in themselves, not SOLELY as "mere means."
This is a far better definition of evil than the silly fluff the researcher pulled out of his hat.
You are far more likely to find pure evil ("pure" meaning "unmixed with any good or redeeming features") amongst CEOs and senior politicians than amongst low-life psychopaths.
It just happened that the SSN was the first major government number that everyone was required to have.
The same is true of the Social Insurance Number (SIN) in Canada, and I don't think I've ever divulged mine to anyone who wasn't my employer, my accountant, or the Canada Revenue Agency.
So the question in my mind is why Americans have allowed their SSN's to be used in these ways, while in Canada we've not allowed a similar number to be used in similar ways? I don't think I've ever given my SIN to my cell phone provider, cable company, or anyone like that.
Having lived in the US my impression is that this is a cultural difference: Americans value convenience much more than Canadians (which probably explains why the US has somewhat higher productivity than Canada) and that the bellicosity of American culture has normalized intimidation and bullying as a means of social interaction, so American businesses are more likely to try to bully customers into giving up inappropriate information, and individual Americans are more likely to go the convenient route and give that information up.
We have found _one_ retrograde planet. Statistically this means jack
Not so.
One of the claims to fame of Bayesian statistics is that Bayesian techniques can be used to utilize singular events to increase the plausibility of some theories while decreasing the plausibility of others.
There have only been a few hundred extra-solar planets found, so finding one that has a retrograde orbit is surprising if they were thought to be much less probable than 0.5% or so.
It all depends on the meaning of "rare", which is one of those innumerate words we ought to be doing without.
Just a correction: our computers aren't Turing machines because they have finite memory, not because they have interrupts.
Finite memory is part of the "amongst other things" referred to in my original comment. That this is one reason why our computers are not Turing machines does not exclude other reasons. In particular, if you had a computer with infinite memory and interrupts, it would still not be a Turing machine, and would be able to do things (respond to real-world, real-time inputs) that no Turing machine is capable of doing.
If you disagree with this, then please show me where in the formal definition of a Turing machine interrupts can be made to happen. I don't see it. No device that has interrupts is as limited as a Turing machine is, and this is one of the many ways that real computing hardware differs from the abstract "general purpose computer."
No real computer is actually "general purpose" in the relevant sense, such that an algorithm can be translated by machine from an abstract definition into practically useful code. Practical algorithm implementations frequently include optimizations based on knowledge of the underlying specific architectures of target machines.
Someone else commented here that the strong argument against software patents is that they impede innovation, and I think this is certainly the case. The idea that a "general purpose computer" constitutes a "particular machine" is silly, though.
If people who took software patents seriously were honest they would argue that only specific implementations of algorithms for particular architectures would be patentable, because "particular architectures" are "particular machines." The abstract "general purpose computer" does not correspond to any "particular machine."
I think the best quote is: a general purpose computer should be considered a "particular machine."
This is the core contention behind the justification of software patents. It incorrectly treats all of the specific coding of any algorithm implementation as irrelevant to the patentable subject-matter, because the algorithm could theoretically be made to run on any Turing architecture.
Anyone who has ever actually implemented an algorithm, much less anyone who has invented one, knows that this is nonsense: algorithms are not implementations, and to be "useful" an algorithm has to be properly implemented in a specific language and, frequently, on a specific machine or limited range of machines, because real computers are not Turing machines. Turing machines don't have interrupts, amongst other things, which is why they are deterministic and mathematically tractable.
Even treating either of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party as a single monolithic block is a hilarious joke.
Hardly a joke, but rather an important insight.
The differences within the parties are larger than the differences between the parties.
This fact alone justifies treating the combination as a single Party, divided for convenience to create the appearance of a multi-party system where in fact there is a single class of oligarch/plutocrat who are divided on many issues... except who rules.
This is quite different from even moderately healthy parliamentary systems, where we have regional parties, special-interest (notably Labour) parties, etc. Those parties actually have to represent something vaguely resembling the interests of the people who vote for their members.
In the US, the Party represents the interests of the political class, who are divided in many ways, as much within the wings of the Party as between them. But however much they disagree on minor issues, they are united on all the ones that keep their class in power, notably gerrymandering and your crazy primary system.
It is designed to serve as a backup in the event that the machine is destroyed (i.e: building burns down) and the ballots are lost.
How often has that happened in the history of American elections?
That is exactly the kind of dramatic detail that puts my fraud-detector on alert. "Look, it's so secure that it's even secure against problems you don't have!" Typical distraction. It makes me wonder what you're hiding.
As it happens, if you google "ballots lost in fire" you get a bunch of hits on the first page about fraud and failure related to electronic voting machines.
Given the complete lack of transparency at all levels of any electronic voting system I am extremely suspicious of all of them. As we've seen in recent years, even machines that are secure at the local level do not necessarily produce accurate aggregate vote counts when the results are summed.
It seemed to offer more problems than solutions...
The "problem" is that the system of American government is fundamentally broken due to partisan capture: the government represents the Party, not the people.
Unfortunately, the solution is not to be found in messing with the voting system, and certainly not my messing with it in ways that make it more complex. Most developed nations have very relatively simple, robust voting systems that have very plain, simple, paper ballots that may--but are not always--machine counted.
Only in America is the smoke-and-mirrors of electronic voting given so much press, which is just part of the huge machinery of distraction from the elephant in the room: the Party controls the government. That the Party has two wings that go under different names is another big distraction. It lets Americans believe they aren't living in a one party state, but has no other effect.
The solution, if there is one, is to systematically de-Partisanize the American voting system, starting by eliminating the ridiculous and unseemly involvement of the Party in voter registration, which should be handled by an arms-length public organization.
It will be extremely difficult for this to happen, but a campaign to make it happen, like the campaign against gerrymandering, would at least put the fact of Partisan unity front-and-centre in what passes for American political discourse.
For example, it's clear that altruism is generally good for the community (even though it might be detrimental to an individual)
Helping behaviour (not altruism, which is an obsolete ethical term from a ridiculous moral theory that has no place in ethics, much less biology) increases the individual's chances of having his or her genes represented in future generations. That is, by the only standard of "good" that evolution recognizes, "good for the individual."
There may be other standards of good that you want to invoke for other reasons, but in any discussion of evolution, reproductive fitness, including the contribution of kin to reproductive fitness, is the only standard of good that matters.
Helping behaviour is not "good for the community" because evolution doesn't select for communities, it almost always selects for individuals or very, very closely related individuals--families at best, not communities in anything remotely resembling the usual sense of the word "community". In extremely rare and unusual cases evolution selects for individual genes, but since the unit of selection is the individual, not the gene, this is a minor effect in comparison.
... the New Sensationalist [newscientist.com] seriously as a science magazine.
Yeah, particularly as the article uses the outmoded term "altruism" for helping behaviour, and for some reason says, "most people say it doesn't make any evolutionary sense." I guess by "most people" they mean "most people who know nothing about the extensive and sound work on kin-selection and the evolutionary advantages of being a member of a group that engages in helping behaviour that has taken place in the past fifty years."
Seriously, helping behaviour hasn't been an issue for a couple of decades, and only then amongst the innumerate hangers-on from an earlier era. No one who knows anything about modern evolutionary thinking believes it is an issue today, which pretty much means, "New Sensationalist chooses ignorant ass to make up plausible bullshit to sell magazines to ignorant people under the guise of science."
Mine says reasonable people aren't upset by words, especially the ones they write themselves.
Or in other words: fuck that shit.
Is there an app that lets you read Shakespeare's plays on the iPhone? What's its rating? Amongst other juicy terms, that fine old English word, "cunt", appears in Henry V (in the language lesson scene.)
Do these so-called "reasonable people" object to that?
hy? because there was no significant selective pressure against it and probably trough some chance event (think founder effect) we as a species lost this gene.
Be very cautious of this kind of just-so story. The modified gene may have another role that we are not currently aware of. It is significant that it is expressed but not transcribed, so there is a bunch of mRNA floating around with this gene's pattern, if I read the paper properly.
Evolution is opportunistic, and it may well be that this gene has simply been exploited due to selective pressure to take on another role, rather than being abandoned due to drift. Either is possible, and neither is safe to assume.
Focused on the woman - good idea. But how does science focus on the man? How about "STOP FUCKING PEOPLE WHO AREN'T YOUR WIFE/GIRLFRIED/SIGNIFIGANT OTHER!"
How is that focused on the man? Women screw around as much as men do--or who did you think the men were screwing around with? Hint: the fraction of cheating that goes on with prostitutes is extremely small compared to the total amount of cheating, and between 2 and 25% of children are fathered by someone other than the mother's socially pair-bonded partner.
Both of those facts strongly suggest widespread female cheating, despite neo-puritan mythology to the contrary. The old-style Puritans, of course, thought that women were far more likely than men to screw around, but they at least could claim total ignorance of statistics (and almost everything else) so it is easy to forgive them their incredibly stupid mythology than the modern nonsensical belief that women aren't as horny and sexually adventurous as men.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it mean that painkillers like Ibuprofen would help to lessen the pain of being dumped?
Try it and see, then report back. But I doubt it.
Just because some of the same gene networks are involved does not mean that the specific biochemical pathway blocked by a given painkiller will work.
All jokes aside, though, I think I would have been more surprised to have learned that heartbreak and social rejection does not cause some kind of negative reinforcement within the human psyche. It is, of course, still interesting research.
I think the interesting thing here is that the mechanism for reinforcement of physical avoidance and social avoidance appear to be using some of the same gene networks.
This is also not surprising: evolution is an opportunistic, elaborative process, so it tends to result in adaptations that reuse existing mechanisms in novel ways. It is possible that we had evolved an entirely new mechanism for providing negative feedback from failed social interactions, but it was always far more likely that selection occurred that resulted in novel, newly-evolved stimuli (social rejection) would result in biochemical responses that activated parts of the existing negative-feedback behavioural system.
As others here have pointed out, people who fail to learn from a broken heart are less likely to reproduce, even today, suggesting this evolution is still ongoing, which would also be unsurprising as the whole life-long repeated social mating ritual that humans go through is a relatively recent behaviour, probably not more than a few hundred thousand years old, and maybe a good deal less.
There are people who believe for some reason that evolution doesn't act on humans anymore, but of course this is nonsense: subtle selective effects like this are always going on, and can't be stopped, ever.
But every shill is an idiot, so the "but I repeat myself" follows. I was paraphrasing the famous American humourist, Mark Twain, who once said, "Are you a member of Congress? Are you an idiot? But I repeat myself..."
The best comparator for the US with regard to life expectancy is Canada, because while we have many similarities, we (Canadians) live several years longer than you (Americans.)
The two biggest differences between the countries are that our income distribution is significantly flatter than yours, and our health care system is universal and paid for via taxation (there is a nominal fee structure in some provinces, but it is equivalent to taxation.)
There are other differences: we have greater ethnic diversity than you--our Native American population alone is 4%. One in three Canadians is an immigrant. We have to deal with two official languages as well as a number of important minority languages: Hindi on the West Coast, Cree on the prairies, etc. We have a much more thinly spread population, so delivery of care and having enough people in one place to pay for big-ticket items is quite a bit harder for us than for you, with your larger, richer, denser population.
Those things are going to make it harder to deliver quality health care to Canadians, making our much longer lifespans quite remarkable. We also have a relatively large fraction of our male population working in mining, fishing, logging and farming, all of which kill people at much higher rates than other occupations (which is why they are done by men, because men dying has always been ok in all societies everywhere.)
How much of our longer lifespan is due to our flatter income distribution and how much is due to universal health care is not clear, but I think between them those are the major factors. Our flatter income distribution is achieved through more strongly progressive taxation at the top, and more robust income support at the bottom, which gives people at the bottom more latitude to make mistakes and learn from them productively, and gives people at the top less incentive to climb to the top by stepping on the faces of the oppressed masses.
Canadian society is also more democratic than American, with much hand-wringing over a recent federal election turnout that wasn't quite as low as the highest American turnouts in the past thirty years.
We are also politically and economically much more free than Americans, with far less implicit and explicit coercion regarding diversity of political opinions--as witnessed by our healthy minority and regional parties.
As a sometime small business-person who has friends doing similar work in the States I can say first hand that the burden of regulation/paperwork/bullshit on me is much smaller than in the US. You can incorporate here federally over the Web for $220 and the federal/provincial joint agreement in my province automatically handles provincial incorporation as well.
So those are some of the factors that MIGHT influence the difference, but you'd have to actually look in detail at the data and see:
a) who is dying
b) what are they dying from
to get a better sense of the actual causes. It's known as empiricism, and I highly recommend it.
This is a non-sequitur, if you really dig into the numbers, you will find that the main reason for lowered life expectancies is obesity.
From the report you link: "Obesity also appears to have a negative effect on life expectancy at 65 for both men and women, although the coefficients are not statistically significant."
Which is to say, consistent with most obesity research, if you really dig into the numbers, you will find obesity does not have a significant impact on life expectancies. So I have to assume you are either an ideological shill who is pushing an agenda regardless of empirical fact, or an idiot. But I repeat myself.
The study also makes much of the false claim that obesity took a big jump between 1980 and, significantly, 1999--conveniently ignoring the redefinition of obesity that took place in 1998, lowering the threshold from 27.something to 25 for both men and women.
You might argue that the incredibly high cost of health care per capita in the US is due to obesity, which is a large factor in morbidity. But it is known to be weakly correlated with mortality, so your invocation of it, however ideologically satisfying, does not pass the most rudimentary empirical testing.
There is slowing of the clock onboard GPS satellites both due to the orbital speed (special relativity) and lower gravity (general relativity).
A colleague who used to teach a "Modern Physics for Engineers" course took great delight in detailing the history of the GPS system, and how they had to bring in some hard-core theoretical physicists to work out the GR corrections.
Engineers have a tendency to think theory is irrelevant and stupid, and this is a nice example of how the GPS system would have either failed or been full of inelegant hacks if we didn't have an esoteric but exact theory of gravity on large scales.
I didn't mean that, but indeed, that would be even better.
You could find just as serious or worse flaws in Star Wars or the Matrix
Star Wars Episode IV has a plot hole large enough to drive a truck through and no one ever complains about it: when they escape from the Death Star Leia says, "They're tracking us" when Han crows about their success in getting away. Yet they just go ahead and fly directly to the rebel base, leading the Empire there.
It is a pure case of "the plot needs the characters to do something really really stupid for no readily apparent reason" so they do.
Doesn't mean it ain't a great movie, though.
Eating unhealthy foods causes health problems
The study is actually very poorly designed and proves nothing of the kind. Your comment is an example of confirmation bias, as are the researcher's conclusions.
A well-designed study would start half the rats on the high-fat diet, the other half on the low fat diet. Train them to run the mazes, then switch the diets.
It may well be that the effect being observed here is "massive sudden dietary change reduces cognitive performance."
If you consider how uncomfortable and distracted you'd probably be if you were subject to this kind of violent dietary manipulation you'll see how plausible the alternative explanation is.
I share your biases with regard to fatty foods, but that doesn't mean I can't tell a poorly designed study when I see one.
This is very cool stuff. But in terms of adapting 'remarkably quickly' to visual stimuli after congenital blindness, I'm slightly dubious.
Where the brain is concerned, YMMV is worth keeping in mind. There are plenty of cases where individuals exhibit far greater neurological plasticity than the norm, and from the sounds it the woman in this case had SOME sensitivity to light, so it is probable that although technically blind from birth she had sufficient visual stimuli to give her basic object-recognition skills.
The effect of treatment was not to grow a new fovea but to increase the sensitivity of the treated area and that she adapted by using that area like a "second fovea", which is in keeping the the Law of /.: if a /. story headline contains a simple declarative statement, that statement is almost certainly a falsehood made up by ignorant /. editors who are either too lazy to read the story, too stupid to understand it, or too contemptuous of their audience to care about accuracy. Remember, this is "news for people who don't give a shit about technical accuracy".
My own approach to reading /. lately has been to read the story, then do a quick review of the comments to see if anyone else has already corrected the lies, errors and distortions in the headline and summary.
To quote Terry Pratchett via Granny Weatherwax it's when you treat people like objects.
Who was paraphrasing and concretizing Kant, who said that we must treat people as ends in themselves, not SOLELY as "mere means."
This is a far better definition of evil than the silly fluff the researcher pulled out of his hat.
You are far more likely to find pure evil ("pure" meaning "unmixed with any good or redeeming features") amongst CEOs and senior politicians than amongst low-life psychopaths.
It just happened that the SSN was the first major government number that everyone was required to have.
The same is true of the Social Insurance Number (SIN) in Canada, and I don't think I've ever divulged mine to anyone who wasn't my employer, my accountant, or the Canada Revenue Agency.
So the question in my mind is why Americans have allowed their SSN's to be used in these ways, while in Canada we've not allowed a similar number to be used in similar ways? I don't think I've ever given my SIN to my cell phone provider, cable company, or anyone like that.
Having lived in the US my impression is that this is a cultural difference: Americans value convenience much more than Canadians (which probably explains why the US has somewhat higher productivity than Canada) and that the bellicosity of American culture has normalized intimidation and bullying as a means of social interaction, so American businesses are more likely to try to bully customers into giving up inappropriate information, and individual Americans are more likely to go the convenient route and give that information up.
We have found _one_ retrograde planet. Statistically this means jack
Not so.
One of the claims to fame of Bayesian statistics is that Bayesian techniques can be used to utilize singular events to increase the plausibility of some theories while decreasing the plausibility of others.
There have only been a few hundred extra-solar planets found, so finding one that has a retrograde orbit is surprising if they were thought to be much less probable than 0.5% or so.
It all depends on the meaning of "rare", which is one of those innumerate words we ought to be doing without.
Just a correction: our computers aren't Turing machines because they have finite memory, not because they have interrupts.
Finite memory is part of the "amongst other things" referred to in my original comment. That this is one reason why our computers are not Turing machines does not exclude other reasons. In particular, if you had a computer with infinite memory and interrupts, it would still not be a Turing machine, and would be able to do things (respond to real-world, real-time inputs) that no Turing machine is capable of doing.
If you disagree with this, then please show me where in the formal definition of a Turing machine interrupts can be made to happen. I don't see it. No device that has interrupts is as limited as a Turing machine is, and this is one of the many ways that real computing hardware differs from the abstract "general purpose computer."
No real computer is actually "general purpose" in the relevant sense, such that an algorithm can be translated by machine from an abstract definition into practically useful code. Practical algorithm implementations frequently include optimizations based on knowledge of the underlying specific architectures of target machines.
Someone else commented here that the strong argument against software patents is that they impede innovation, and I think this is certainly the case. The idea that a "general purpose computer" constitutes a "particular machine" is silly, though.
If people who took software patents seriously were honest they would argue that only specific implementations of algorithms for particular architectures would be patentable, because "particular architectures" are "particular machines." The abstract "general purpose computer" does not correspond to any "particular machine."
I think the best quote is: a general purpose computer should be considered a "particular machine."
This is the core contention behind the justification of software patents. It incorrectly treats all of the specific coding of any algorithm implementation as irrelevant to the patentable subject-matter, because the algorithm could theoretically be made to run on any Turing architecture.
Anyone who has ever actually implemented an algorithm, much less anyone who has invented one, knows that this is nonsense: algorithms are not implementations, and to be "useful" an algorithm has to be properly implemented in a specific language and, frequently, on a specific machine or limited range of machines, because real computers are not Turing machines. Turing machines don't have interrupts, amongst other things, which is why they are deterministic and mathematically tractable.
Even treating either of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party as a single monolithic block is a hilarious joke.
Hardly a joke, but rather an important insight.
The differences within the parties are larger than the differences between the parties.
This fact alone justifies treating the combination as a single Party, divided for convenience to create the appearance of a multi-party system where in fact there is a single class of oligarch/plutocrat who are divided on many issues... except who rules.
This is quite different from even moderately healthy parliamentary systems, where we have regional parties, special-interest (notably Labour) parties, etc. Those parties actually have to represent something vaguely resembling the interests of the people who vote for their members.
In the US, the Party represents the interests of the political class, who are divided in many ways, as much within the wings of the Party as between them. But however much they disagree on minor issues, they are united on all the ones that keep their class in power, notably gerrymandering and your crazy primary system.
http://www.elections.ca/home.asp
Most countries in Europe and the Anglosphere have similar organizations.
It is designed to serve as a backup in the event that the machine is destroyed (i.e: building burns down) and the ballots are lost.
How often has that happened in the history of American elections?
That is exactly the kind of dramatic detail that puts my fraud-detector on alert. "Look, it's so secure that it's even secure against problems you don't have!" Typical distraction. It makes me wonder what you're hiding.
As it happens, if you google "ballots lost in fire" you get a bunch of hits on the first page about fraud and failure related to electronic voting machines.
Given the complete lack of transparency at all levels of any electronic voting system I am extremely suspicious of all of them. As we've seen in recent years, even machines that are secure at the local level do not necessarily produce accurate aggregate vote counts when the results are summed.
It seemed to offer more problems than solutions...
The "problem" is that the system of American government is fundamentally broken due to partisan capture: the government represents the Party, not the people.
Unfortunately, the solution is not to be found in messing with the voting system, and certainly not my messing with it in ways that make it more complex. Most developed nations have very relatively simple, robust voting systems that have very plain, simple, paper ballots that may--but are not always--machine counted.
Only in America is the smoke-and-mirrors of electronic voting given so much press, which is just part of the huge machinery of distraction from the elephant in the room: the Party controls the government. That the Party has two wings that go under different names is another big distraction. It lets Americans believe they aren't living in a one party state, but has no other effect.
The solution, if there is one, is to systematically de-Partisanize the American voting system, starting by eliminating the ridiculous and unseemly involvement of the Party in voter registration, which should be handled by an arms-length public organization.
It will be extremely difficult for this to happen, but a campaign to make it happen, like the campaign against gerrymandering, would at least put the fact of Partisan unity front-and-centre in what passes for American political discourse.
For example, it's clear that altruism is generally good for the community (even though it might be detrimental to an individual)
Helping behaviour (not altruism, which is an obsolete ethical term from a ridiculous moral theory that has no place in ethics, much less biology) increases the individual's chances of having his or her genes represented in future generations. That is, by the only standard of "good" that evolution recognizes, "good for the individual."
There may be other standards of good that you want to invoke for other reasons, but in any discussion of evolution, reproductive fitness, including the contribution of kin to reproductive fitness, is the only standard of good that matters.
Helping behaviour is not "good for the community" because evolution doesn't select for communities, it almost always selects for individuals or very, very closely related individuals--families at best, not communities in anything remotely resembling the usual sense of the word "community". In extremely rare and unusual cases evolution selects for individual genes, but since the unit of selection is the individual, not the gene, this is a minor effect in comparison.
Lamely replying to myself: Yes, you can get Shakespeare for your iPhone from the App Store.
Misogyny, racism, torture, obscenity, cannibalism... And for all of that, one of the outstanding pinnacles of Western culture.
So what's the problem with a dictionary again?
... the New Sensationalist [newscientist.com] seriously as a science magazine.
Yeah, particularly as the article uses the outmoded term "altruism" for helping behaviour, and for some reason says, "most people say it doesn't make any evolutionary sense." I guess by "most people" they mean "most people who know nothing about the extensive and sound work on kin-selection and the evolutionary advantages of being a member of a group that engages in helping behaviour that has taken place in the past fifty years."
Seriously, helping behaviour hasn't been an issue for a couple of decades, and only then amongst the innumerate hangers-on from an earlier era. No one who knows anything about modern evolutionary thinking believes it is an issue today, which pretty much means, "New Sensationalist chooses ignorant ass to make up plausible bullshit to sell magazines to ignorant people under the guise of science."
Mine says reasonable people aren't upset by words, especially the ones they write themselves.
Or in other words: fuck that shit.
Is there an app that lets you read Shakespeare's plays on the iPhone? What's its rating? Amongst other juicy terms, that fine old English word, "cunt", appears in Henry V (in the language lesson scene.)
Do these so-called "reasonable people" object to that?
hy? because there was no significant selective pressure against it and probably trough some chance event (think founder effect) we as a species lost this gene.
Be very cautious of this kind of just-so story. The modified gene may have another role that we are not currently aware of. It is significant that it is expressed but not transcribed, so there is a bunch of mRNA floating around with this gene's pattern, if I read the paper properly.
Evolution is opportunistic, and it may well be that this gene has simply been exploited due to selective pressure to take on another role, rather than being abandoned due to drift. Either is possible, and neither is safe to assume.
Focused on the woman - good idea. But how does science focus on the man? How about "STOP FUCKING PEOPLE WHO AREN'T YOUR WIFE/GIRLFRIED/SIGNIFIGANT OTHER!"
How is that focused on the man? Women screw around as much as men do--or who did you think the men were screwing around with? Hint: the fraction of cheating that goes on with prostitutes is extremely small compared to the total amount of cheating, and between 2 and 25% of children are fathered by someone other than the mother's socially pair-bonded partner.
Both of those facts strongly suggest widespread female cheating, despite neo-puritan mythology to the contrary. The old-style Puritans, of course, thought that women were far more likely than men to screw around, but they at least could claim total ignorance of statistics (and almost everything else) so it is easy to forgive them their incredibly stupid mythology than the modern nonsensical belief that women aren't as horny and sexually adventurous as men.