String theory is already just as good, and arguably better than, QFT, except in that finding models in string theory seems to be much harder.
This is like saying, "A Ferrari is just as good, and arguably better than, a school bus, except in that carrying large numbers of people in a Ferrari seems to be much harder."
The M-theory family is beautiful and elegant and all that, but until it produces something as boringly useful as the SM it's not going to be well regarded. Really, a theoretical framework that is not fruitful with regard to models just isn't that interesting, which is one way of summarizing much of the criticism focussed on this family of theories.
It's merely a matter of making it hard enough to stop most attacks.
Nope--it's like the IRA said to Mrs. Thatcher: "To stay alive you have to get lucky every time. To kill you we only have to get lucky once."
And real security isn't through obscurity: it is through physical denial of access to the decryption key. What even hardened TPM chips do is more akin to handing a user a safe with the key inside, and giving them unlimited time and all the resources they feel like using to open it. Grad students with access to x-ray micrographs, people who like to solve near-field problems...
Additionally, here's a nice summary of one of the many non-physical reasons why TPM is not secure:
Ergo, some users must ultimately have access to keys to ensure failure recovery. Given everything we know about users, it would be ill-advised to bet against breaches driven by user behaviour even if the physically impossible were achieved and someone was able to make the hardware genuinely secure.
I can just see the headlines in 2010: "Intel Admits TPM Keys Leaked"
Of course the devil is in the details. It's fully possible to build an insecure system around a secure TPM chip, and no doubt that's going to be done, too.
Unless you change the laws of physics it is completely impossible to build a secure TPM chip. TPM is an inconvenience, nothing more, just like DRM. DRM, no matter how implemented, involves supplying the same person with:
a) the ciphertext b) the plaintext c) the decryption key
All of those things must be present on the user's system for DRM to work. TPM etc are merely means to try to make it hard for the user to access the key, and they never work. One way of thinking about it is: a TPM chip "hides" certain details inside a little bit of plastic. It is security through obscurity and nothing more, and so long as the chip emits any EM radiation the internal details will ultimately be inferable, although it is doubtful that going so far as reading internal bits via EM fields will be required.
But if it is, we can all take comfort in the fact that Maxwell's equations aren't just a good idea: they're the law.
I have to wonder what the purpose is.. You can model simplified 'point' neurons, and various aggregates that can be drawn from them...
Beyond that, there is the general argument that the brain is best modelled as a bucket of chemicals with a little bit of neuro-electrical activity on top. Purely neural models miss a vast number of interesting and important phenomena that happen in real brains.
Consciousness and memory, to say nothing of emotion, are chemical phenomena as much as they are electrical phenomena. And all of these things are important to intelligence, emotion most of all. So while neural networks do allow us to create interesting stimulus-response devices, and they are theoretically capable of emulating any behaviour, there is so much that our brains do that is not a product of neuro-electrical activity that any artificial network that emulated all of it would look nothing at all like our brain.
And yes, for the pendants in the audience, I know that neuro-electrical activity is a product of ionic potentials across synapses, and is therefore in the pedantic sense "chemical activity", but that would be missing the point that there is a lot of non-neuro-electrical chemical activity that is really important to what our brains do, and that is the chemical activity I'm talking about.
Ok, lets say the world is warming up. Is that bad? Seriously, is that really bad? Who has determined this? Where do they live? What are their motives?
Human economies are highly optimized for current conditions, which includes current climate conditions as well as tax law, etc. Here in Canada we have a bunch of people are proclaiming we they are teetering on the edge of economic disaster because of a change to the way some businesses (income trusts) are taxed. This is a tiny change compared to the global economic dislocations that might come from climate change.
As the Earth accomodates to a percent or so increase in effective insolation due to anthropogenic greenhouse gasses we are likely to experience significant economic dislocations, by which I mean things like poor harvests, shifts in errossion patterns that will disturb equilibria along coasts and rivers, and things like that. These things will cost money, and the one business group that is notably worried about global climate change is the insurance industry.
There's a reason for that, and if you trust the wisdom of the market you should take the concerns raised by the insurance industry fairly seriously.
You know what I hate most about these articles? My own bias is plainly obvious to me.
I have the same problem in the opposite sense, and am trying to solve it by reducing the anthropogenic global climate change equation to a simple, closed-form argument that no one could possibly disagree with. My current take goes like this:
There are two facts that no one disputes. The first is that the Earth's climate is in a dynamic equilibrium that is capable of excursions of civilization-ending magnitude. We have ice ages, local droughts lasting a thousand years, little ice ages, and so on. Any of of these could ruin our whole millennium. The second is that we are giving this dynamically stable system a wack with a hammer in the form of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the past two hundred years, which is equivalent to increasing the brightness of the sun by about one percent. This is a comparable change to the difference between an ice age and an interglacial.
The idea is simply that we can ignore all the details and simply focus on the fact that the Earth's climate is dynamically stable and we are giving it a push. And I don't care about the polar bears or any other charismatic megafauna. All I care about is global civilization and the economy it depends on.
So far, so good. But when digging a little deeper into the 1% figure I used in the argument, I've found even this may over-state the case.
The next question is: is it true that past catastrophic climate variations were due to changes as small as 1% in total insolation?
It is surprisingly hard to find clear statements of effects in terms of insolation variation, which seems to me to be the common currency of global climate change. In most engineering problems we want to focus in outputs rather than inputs because the two may be largely unrelated to each other due to supervening factors. But on this planet we obey the law of conservation of energy, so we know if the inputs change, effects must follow regardless of the source of those inputs.
Deniers of anthropogenic global climate change usually focus on non-human influences, like the Milankovitch cycles and volcanoes. But Milankovitch cycles are almost entirely about the relative insolation of the northern and southern hemispheres, which may vary by 10% or more over a a cycle, rather than changes in total insolation, which changes by less than 1%. Volcanoes produce cooling rather than warming, and are short-term, but the Mount Pinatubo erruption in 1992 produced prompt global cooling of about 0.5 C and was associated with a change in reflected light of about 7 W/m**2. This is good news, in one sense, as it means we have some elbow room, but it also means that we shouldn't keep dumping stuff into the atmosphere as if it's never going to matter. It will, and before the current century is out if we aren't careful.
One rational approach to this would be similar to that of earthquake risk reduction, where the goal is to ensure that the next house built will always be more earthquake resistant than the previous one. If we take the same approach to energy production and use we should be able to find a reasonable balance between the real risk on the one hand of ruining our grandchildren's millenium by inducing economically catastrophic
No it isn't. There are often radical differences in translations which can lead to serious doctrinal differences. Part of the split between Protestant and Catholic has to do with the interpretation of various passages. You're coming from the perspective of an unbeliever to whom such fine distinctions don't matter. They do to Christians.
I know of know differences in translation that make any significant differences to doctrine between mainstream Christian sects. And while interpretation was an issue between some Protestants and Catholics, the significant textual differences were due to what are now generally acknowledged to be corruptions in the Vulgate. This was not a matter of translation difficulties because no one who was not a Catholic ever produced anything like the corrupt passages in the Vulgate, but of simple fabrication on the part of Catholic authorities.
I will go so far as to say that there are no radical differences between modern, scholarly texts of the Bible in English and that there have not been any such since at least 1611. Interpretations differ. The texts do not, even in cases where they probably should, like on the question of Mary's virginity. People familiar with the history of Bible translation know that the variance in translation is a complex doctrinal issue and that none of the minor points compare to the major invariants. Love god. Love each other as you love yourself. Unbelievers will burn in hell forever. Stuff like that. Christians have for the most part come to live with the ambiguities on many other questions--it's called tolerance, and apart from Northern Ireland Christians don't do it too badly.
Translation was an issue during the Reformation because of the corruption of the Vulgate and the Church's desire to continue to control access to the scriptures. Doctrinally, the Reformer's belief that the line of Apostolic succession had been broken in the Middle Ages, making the Pope's claims to primacy illegitimate, was far more important than issues of translation and meaning.
With regard to the (nominal) cost of translation, the King James version was produced in a couple of decades with the efforts of fewer than a hundred people, building in part on earlier efforts such as the Geneva Bible. There is no possible way that this equates to "billions of dollars" by any measure, and while scholarship and translations have improved a good deal since that time, these early Protestant and Anglican translations are sufficiently accurate that no one claims the sort of radical meaning variance that everyone claims any time the meaning of any part of the Koran is brought up. Even Wycliffe's New Testament is recognizably similar to modern translations in most respects.
The only remotely substantive issue I'm aware of regarding translation accuracy in the New Testament is Paul's use of "malakoi" (or "malakee") and "arsenokoitai" in I Cor 6:9-10, which are sometimes translated to mean "homosexual" and "men who lie with men", whereas the first probably means "effeminate" and the second is a bit like "obscenity": I don't know what it means, but I know I don't like it. If Paul had meant homosexual he would have used "paiderasste", a perfectly specific, common Greek word for it. Given Paul's penchant for gender stereotypes he really probably was railing against "unmanly men". What he meant by "arsenokoitai" is an open question: the word rarely appears in Greek literature and while it is a compound consisting of the words for "man" and "bed" and therefore probably has something to do with men and sex, it is not at all clear exactly what. And in any case, the word of Paul is not the word of God, so people who use this ambiguous verse as the basis for casting the first stone have much larger doctrinal fish to fry than issues of translation.
I can understand Islamic scholars wanting to work with the Arabic text, just as I can understand NT scholars wanting to work with the Greek texts. But that is completely u
I find the whole concept interesting since in the arena of Bible translation most organizations aim primarily to capture the meaning of the original text, and not to try to make it more palatable. I could think of a number of passages in the Old Testament that amount to genocide and nobody really bothers trying to water them down. I'm not sure why this would be a major issue in translations of the Koran.
The OT is not a Christian text--it is a Jewish text that is included in the Bible for historical reasons (and frequently mis-interpreted by Christians as a Christian text.) By "not a Christian text" I mean it wasn't written by Christians for Christians. It is not a Christian text in exactly the same sense it is not a Muslim text, although it is an important document to Muslims as well.
Jesus said people should love God and love each other as they love themselves, and that "this is the law and the prophets". "The law and the prophets" refers, more-or-less, to the OT. So Christians have explicit guidance that the OT does not have moral weight, although as I said, they frequently ignore this. Christians who are moderately sane therefore have a warrant to ignore the bits in the OT they don't like, as in the instructions for acceptable raping of prisoners and whatnot.
Actually, you don't need anything quite as elaborate as what this article seems to describe. All you need is the ability for power companies to charge rates that vary in realtime based on supply/demand, and to allow customer to elect to use these rates instead of averaged-out ones.
What problem are you trying to solve?
The problem in the article is that wind power produces very large fluxuations in grid supply, and this limits the amount of wind power that can be used. In Alberta, where wind systems are localized on one area of the province, they are worried about getting much over 10% of their supply from the wind, because if it stops blowing the resulting shunting around of alternative supplies could destablize the grid.
Adding user-feedback to a moderately unstable system like the electricity grid is not necessarily the best thing to do. Adding load-leveling capacity by storing power in the form of ice is a very, very good idea.
And it is power that is being stored: temperature difference is all that matters, and it is neither more nor less correct to say that you are storing energy by cooling a block of matter below the environment than it is to say you are storing energy by heating a block of matter above the environment.
English-language translations of the Quran vary so widely that Islam doesn't accept them as translations, they are all regarded as paraphrases.
If the Koran has a meaning, it can be translated, and of the millions of English-speaking Muslims in the world there must be a few who are up to the job of translating it correctly.
The variations between the examples you give are small and in any case doctrinally relatively trivial. I'd be more interested in seeing the various translations of things like 3:118, the gist of which is: "Do not be friends with unbelievers. They all hate you." Or 2:222-224, which has some pretty harsh things to say about women, likening them to fields that a man can go into any any time he chooses.
The difficulty of translation always gets raised any time anyone mentions any of the terrible things the Koran actually says that Muslims and Muslim sympathizers would like it not to say. It gets tiresome, particularly as it always gets raised as if it were a new and interesting issue instead of an old and tired one. Muslims have been complaining about this for decades. Don't you think its about time that some Muslim leaders got together and produced an authorized edition? Bible translations vary widely too, and there are a few cases where even good translations differ on substantive matters, but the gist of the sentiment is almost always clear: God loves everyone, unbelievers will burn forever in hell, stuff like that. It isn't self-consistent, but there is no major problem with what the text actually says. Whereas no one seems to agree on even the basic sense of the most trivial passages in the Koran.
Of course, for Muslims to get together and produce an authorized translation would first require Muslims to get together, which is something they appear to have a lot of trouble doing for purposes other than burning embassies because they have been offended by some silly cartoon ~0:-{=
Well they still have some way to go before they reach Minority Report levels.
You're not kidding. From the article, this is what they've actually done:
During the study, the researchers asked volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they were later shown on a screen.
Before the numbers flashed up, they were given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance. The researchers then used a software that had been designed to spot subtle differences in brain activity to predict the person's intentions with 70% accuracy.
So perhaps the summary should read something like:
"Scientists have found a way to sometimes distinguish which of two pre-selected choices a subject has made by evaluating their brain state using fMRI. The odds of the scientists getting it right in these highly restricted and controlled circumstances, where subjects are given a choice of two possible things to plan to do, are barely better than chance. Flipping a coin would give a prediction that is 50% accurate. Using millions of dollars of machinery and the most advanced algorithms a team of monkey... err... graduate students can come up with, the researchers have achieved 70% accuracy."
For all of that, concerns about abuse of this tech are not misplaced. In a world where nonsense like polygraphs still have a modicum of public credibility something like this could easily be abused.
I hope that we never reach a time where the majority of people accept the idea of "proving one's innocence."
I'm afraid that the notion of "guilty until proven innocent" is already entrenched in American law, at least for non-citizens. See the Military Commisions Act of 2006. If any of the various organs of the state accuse a foreigner of being guilty of terrorist-related activity, they may be incarcerated indefinitely without trial, without knowledge of the crime they are accused of, and without being allowed to hear the evidence against them.
And in some cases, for some reason, they may be deported to foreign countries to be tortured. It has never been explained what the purpose of this torture is. It cannot be for the purpose of gathering intelligence, because it is a matter of uncontroversial empirical fact that torture does not produce reliable intelligence. So it must be for some other reason.
Americans are very much living in a world where, "They jailed the terrorists without trial, and I didn't stand up because I was not a terrorist. Then they jailed the foreigners suspected of terrorism without trial, and I didn't stand up because I was not a foreigner. Then they jailed the Americans suspected of terrorism without trial, and I didn't stand up because I wasn't suspected of terrorism. And there was no one left to stand up when they jailed me without trial."
There are a number of reasons that jobs cannot be filled without the H1-B visas. These include people don't want to work for MS, don't want to relocate, don't like job, don't like salary, etc.
And there's the rub: salary.
Hiring H1-B workers is a way of maintaining a lower salary environment than one would otherwise have, because supply suddenly becomes much larger than demand when you have the whole world to recruit from, including places where the average wage for the equivalent job is much lower than in the U.S.
This may or may not be a good thing for the U.S. and/or world economy as a whole, but for Americans working in areas where there is a lot of H1-B hiring the effect is to make them less scarce and therefore less valuable, even if the average H1-B is hired at the current market rate. It simply means that the current market rate does not go up as rapidly as it would otherwise, because instead of having to raise salaries companies can look overseas.
Note that I'm not saying this is right or wrong: as a non-American I've benefited from the trend to use foreign workers the U.S. But it is a certainty that the hiring of H1-B employees is a mechanism to help maintain salary levels at lower rates than they would be otherwise.
An algorithm found in a dataset speaks of a function, and understanding functions in the human genome leads to better understanding of what we truly are.
An algorithm found in a dataset speaks of imperfect compression.
As to "what we TRULY are", we are everything that we are, neither more nor less, in all our messy complexity. Reductionism generates epistemological convenience, not metaphysical revelation. Although Platonists in reductionist clothing have been overstating their case for centuries.
I used to work in medical physics (after a relatively short 13 years of undergrad, graduate school, and post-doc'ing in pure physics) and it was very clear that MD's had it made financially over PhD's, despite the fact that we had at least as much opportunity to kill people with our mistakes.
MD's are highly paid for exactly one reason. As Adam Smith once said, "Never do two or three men of the same trade sit down together over a pint of ale that it does not end up in a general conspiracy against the rest of mankind." Or words to that effect.
Much of what MD's do could be done by various forms of paramedic and nurse-practitioner. But the legal lock on "one certification to rule them all" has kept MD's in a safe, competition-free bubble for the better part of a century, and no-where moreso than in the U.S.
I was expressing incredulity. Not agreement with his methods.
I understand. Having had the "who would Jesus torture" debate with one too many Bible-believing Christians, I'm never sure that the total lack of utility of torture as means of acquiring reliable information is as widely known as such an uncontroversial fact ought to be, and wanted to remind readers of it.
I fail to see why pictures taken in legal way (I'm not talking about trespassing or even breaking-in to take interior pictures) is useful in any way?
Because extremely stupid cowards feel safer when they have more information, even if the information is of low quality and of no practical value. Extremely stupid cowards also tend to have a good deal of money, because they are wasting their lives accumulating it instead of doing anything good or decent or interesting.
So setting up a service to provide extremely stupid cowards with more information, regardless of the quality or utility of that information, is a good bet for making a buck.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". The GP is absolutely correct and backed by a mutlitude of hard statistical data: Canadians spend less on health care than Americans, the Canadian government spends less on public health care per capita than the American government spends on public health care per capita, and Canadian life spans are longer than American's, quality of life is better, and infant mortality is lower.
Now watch some idiot ignore the bold-fonts in the above and try to make some bogus counter-claim. I'll repeat it for effect: the socialized, publically-funded health-care system in the United States (Medicare and Medicaid and all that) spends more money (per capita across the whole population, not just the population that uses it) than the public health-care system in Canada. And Americans get far worse outcomes.
Oh, and you can sue a doctor in Canada. Its just that our judicial system is moderately rational, and we rarely see the kind of insane American-style jury awards.
This is not to say, as others have pointed out, that the Canadian system does not have problems. We have a two-tier system with effective rationing via waiting lists. The ultra-rich, particularly the wealthy memebers of the political class like John Rae, go skiving off to the States to get treatment and jump the queue. There is a significant push amongst Canadians to allow some level of private care, as is done in Australia, Germany and elsewhere. Unfortunately, our politicians are only capable fear-mongering and handwringing, and any suggestion that the sanctity of the Canada Health Act be violated is met with screams of anguish that our system might degenerate into something as expensive and inefficient as the American system.
Given the empirical facts of the matter, one can understand why Canadians are concerned: when something works as well, relatively speaking, as what we've got, we should be cautious about messing with it. The sad tale of a grossly expensive, mixed private-public system south of the border makes our purely public system look awfully good.
Seriously, most people don't use their taste in music to define themselves, so judging people on that is very narrow-minded.
The article is about 18 year olds, many of whom do define themselves through their musical tastes. They are of necessity narrow and shallow--they have rarely killed or fought for their life, rarely had lovers or children or freinds die, rarely risked everything to achieve a dream. They haven't had time to do anything with their lives yet. And in the West there are few tribal institutions for them to attach their loyalty to: family is thankfully not very important, religion ditto, and while a few get latched onto sports teams of one kind or another the crass commercialism of popular sport is such that a tribal affilliation with a team is too lame even for the average teenager.
To be useful as a source of the tribal feeling that all humans crave a thing must be public and communal. What is more public and communal than music? One day the teens will grow up and find a tribe of their own that is based on genuine common interests, if they're lucky. But until then they will find solace in being part of a tribe defined by the music they listen to.
This is why so many bands are decried by their early followers as "sell outs" when they become popular. It is not the kind of music they are making that has changed, but the dillution of tribal feeling, of belonging, of being part of a select and special group, that causes the psychological pain.
I didn't mean to suggest that Einstein didn't think about these problems while completing his formal education, but wanted to emphasize that Einstein's academic background was a good conventional education in the physics of his day. I perhaps mis-read your post as suggesting that Einstein was primarily self-taught in physics, whereas nothing could be further from the truth.
Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting
Einstein had a doctorate in physics, which included all of the grounding he needed to understand the problems of Brownian motion (for which he won the Nobel prize and which is to this day his most-cited work) and the issues with electro-dynamics that led him to relativity. He started with an excellent, formal, disciplined grounding in his subject of interest. His position as a patent clerk was useful because it gave him the time to work undisturbed by actual job duties (patent office employment back then not being much different from in our own time.)
While self-taught geniuses do exist (Ramanujan, for example) the vast majority of substantive contributions to any field are made by people with good formal grounding in that field. It doesn't matter how smart you are, nor how much of the literature you have read: formal education will help you learn the disciplines of mind and modes of thought that are the jumping-off point for new work. Nor does learning these things stifle creativity if you really understand them, as Einstein did.
The fact that whitespace is dogmatized by the pyhon community makes the community itself less attractive, and the language because of it
This put me off python for a long time, too. "Whitespace is not actually evil--it is just misunderstood" is a lesson I learned from SGML-based text processing, where concepts like "ignorable whitespace" reflect the reality of how strangely humans interpret such things.
But once you get over the fact that a fundamental aspect of the language's structure is based on a character set that many text editors feel free to misrepresent to the user, you'll find that python has some signficant benefits over Perl, especially for application prototyping and exploratory coding. For pure text processing I'd still choose Perl, and Perl still leads in terms of number of libraries to handle common and even pretty uncommon tasks, but python's native OO syntax and good GUI support via wxPython and the like make it a useful tool for a developer to have.
Slashdot Mirror
String theory is already just as good, and arguably better than, QFT, except in that finding models in string theory seems to be much harder.
This is like saying, "A Ferrari is just as good, and arguably better than, a school bus, except in that carrying large numbers of people in a Ferrari seems to be much harder."
The M-theory family is beautiful and elegant and all that, but until it produces something as boringly useful as the SM it's not going to be well regarded. Really, a theoretical framework that is not fruitful with regard to models just isn't that interesting, which is one way of summarizing much of the criticism focussed on this family of theories.
Nope--it's like the IRA said to Mrs. Thatcher: "To stay alive you have to get lucky every time. To kill you we only have to get lucky once."
And real security isn't through obscurity: it is through physical denial of access to the decryption key. What even hardened TPM chips do is more akin to handing a user a safe with the key inside, and giving them unlimited time and all the resources they feel like using to open it. Grad students with access to x-ray micrographs, people who like to solve near-field problems...
Additionally, here's a nice summary of one of the many non-physical reasons why TPM is not secure:
Ergo, some users must ultimately have access to keys to ensure failure recovery. Given everything we know about users, it would be ill-advised to bet against breaches driven by user behaviour even if the physically impossible were achieved and someone was able to make the hardware genuinely secure.
I can just see the headlines in 2010: "Intel Admits TPM Keys Leaked"
Of course the devil is in the details. It's fully possible to build an insecure system around a secure TPM chip, and no doubt that's going to be done, too.
Unless you change the laws of physics it is completely impossible to build a secure TPM chip. TPM is an inconvenience, nothing more, just like DRM. DRM, no matter how implemented, involves supplying the same person with:
a) the ciphertext
b) the plaintext
c) the decryption key
All of those things must be present on the user's system for DRM to work. TPM etc are merely means to try to make it hard for the user to access the key, and they never work. One way of thinking about it is: a TPM chip "hides" certain details inside a little bit of plastic. It is security through obscurity and nothing more, and so long as the chip emits any EM radiation the internal details will ultimately be inferable, although it is doubtful that going so far as reading internal bits via EM fields will be required.
But if it is, we can all take comfort in the fact that Maxwell's equations aren't just a good idea: they're the law.
I have to wonder what the purpose is.. You can model simplified 'point' neurons, and various aggregates that can be drawn from them...
Beyond that, there is the general argument that the brain is best modelled as a bucket of chemicals with a little bit of neuro-electrical activity on top. Purely neural models miss a vast number of interesting and important phenomena that happen in real brains.
Consciousness and memory, to say nothing of emotion, are chemical phenomena as much as they are electrical phenomena. And all of these things are important to intelligence, emotion most of all. So while neural networks do allow us to create interesting stimulus-response devices, and they are theoretically capable of emulating any behaviour, there is so much that our brains do that is not a product of neuro-electrical activity that any artificial network that emulated all of it would look nothing at all like our brain.
And yes, for the pendants in the audience, I know that neuro-electrical activity is a product of ionic potentials across synapses, and is therefore in the pedantic sense "chemical activity", but that would be missing the point that there is a lot of non-neuro-electrical chemical activity that is really important to what our brains do, and that is the chemical activity I'm talking about.
Ok, lets say the world is warming up. Is that bad? Seriously, is that really bad? Who has determined this? Where do they live? What are their motives?
Human economies are highly optimized for current conditions, which includes current climate conditions as well as tax law, etc. Here in Canada we have a bunch of people are proclaiming we they are teetering on the edge of economic disaster because of a change to the way some businesses (income trusts) are taxed. This is a tiny change compared to the global economic dislocations that might come from climate change.
As the Earth accomodates to a percent or so increase in effective insolation due to anthropogenic greenhouse gasses we are likely to experience significant economic dislocations, by which I mean things like poor harvests, shifts in errossion patterns that will disturb equilibria along coasts and rivers, and things like that. These things will cost money, and the one business group that is notably worried about global climate change is the insurance industry.
There's a reason for that, and if you trust the wisdom of the market you should take the concerns raised by the insurance industry fairly seriously.
I have the same problem in the opposite sense, and am trying to solve it by reducing the anthropogenic global climate change equation to a simple, closed-form argument that no one could possibly disagree with. My current take goes like this:
The idea is simply that we can ignore all the details and simply focus on the fact that the Earth's climate is dynamically stable and we are giving it a push. And I don't care about the polar bears or any other charismatic megafauna. All I care about is global civilization and the economy it depends on.
So far, so good. But when digging a little deeper into the 1% figure I used in the argument, I've found even this may over-state the case.
According to an article on the George C. Marshall Institute website whose intent is to suggest that global climate change is a non-issue the effect of doubling CO2 is to add about 4 W/m**2 to Earth's energy budget. This was the source of the original 1% figure, because Earth's average insolation is about 340 W/m**2. But the actual figure due to all anthropogenic gasses added to the atmosphere between 1750 and 2000 from the IPCC is about 2.5 W/m**2. So I've already over-stated the case.
The next question is: is it true that past catastrophic climate variations were due to changes as small as 1% in total insolation?
It is surprisingly hard to find clear statements of effects in terms of insolation variation, which seems to me to be the common currency of global climate change. In most engineering problems we want to focus in outputs rather than inputs because the two may be largely unrelated to each other due to supervening factors. But on this planet we obey the law of conservation of energy, so we know if the inputs change, effects must follow regardless of the source of those inputs.
Deniers of anthropogenic global climate change usually focus on non-human influences, like the Milankovitch cycles and volcanoes. But Milankovitch cycles are almost entirely about the relative insolation of the northern and southern hemispheres, which may vary by 10% or more over a a cycle, rather than changes in total insolation, which changes by less than 1%. Volcanoes produce cooling rather than warming, and are short-term, but the Mount Pinatubo erruption in 1992 produced prompt global cooling of about 0.5 C and was associated with a change in reflected light of about 7 W/m**2. This is good news, in one sense, as it means we have some elbow room, but it also means that we shouldn't keep dumping stuff into the atmosphere as if it's never going to matter. It will, and before the current century is out if we aren't careful.
One rational approach to this would be similar to that of earthquake risk reduction, where the goal is to ensure that the next house built will always be more earthquake resistant than the previous one. If we take the same approach to energy production and use we should be able to find a reasonable balance between the real risk on the one hand of ruining our grandchildren's millenium by inducing economically catastrophic
No it isn't. There are often radical differences in translations which can lead to serious doctrinal differences. Part of the split between Protestant and Catholic has to do with the interpretation of various passages. You're coming from the perspective of an unbeliever to whom such fine distinctions don't matter. They do to Christians.
I know of know differences in translation that make any significant differences to doctrine between mainstream Christian sects. And while interpretation was an issue between some Protestants and Catholics, the significant textual differences were due to what are now generally acknowledged to be corruptions in the Vulgate. This was not a matter of translation difficulties because no one who was not a Catholic ever produced anything like the corrupt passages in the Vulgate, but of simple fabrication on the part of Catholic authorities.
I will go so far as to say that there are no radical differences between modern, scholarly texts of the Bible in English and that there have not been any such since at least 1611. Interpretations differ. The texts do not, even in cases where they probably should, like on the question of Mary's virginity. People familiar with the history of Bible translation know that the variance in translation is a complex doctrinal issue and that none of the minor points compare to the major invariants. Love god. Love each other as you love yourself. Unbelievers will burn in hell forever. Stuff like that. Christians have for the most part come to live with the ambiguities on many other questions--it's called tolerance, and apart from Northern Ireland Christians don't do it too badly.
Translation was an issue during the Reformation because of the corruption of the Vulgate and the Church's desire to continue to control access to the scriptures. Doctrinally, the Reformer's belief that the line of Apostolic succession had been broken in the Middle Ages, making the Pope's claims to primacy illegitimate, was far more important than issues of translation and meaning.
With regard to the (nominal) cost of translation, the King James version was produced in a couple of decades with the efforts of fewer than a hundred people, building in part on earlier efforts such as the Geneva Bible. There is no possible way that this equates to "billions of dollars" by any measure, and while scholarship and translations have improved a good deal since that time, these early Protestant and Anglican translations are sufficiently accurate that no one claims the sort of radical meaning variance that everyone claims any time the meaning of any part of the Koran is brought up. Even Wycliffe's New Testament is recognizably similar to modern translations in most respects.
The only remotely substantive issue I'm aware of regarding translation accuracy in the New Testament is Paul's use of "malakoi" (or "malakee") and "arsenokoitai" in I Cor 6:9-10, which are sometimes translated to mean "homosexual" and "men who lie with men", whereas the first probably means "effeminate" and the second is a bit like "obscenity": I don't know what it means, but I know I don't like it. If Paul had meant homosexual he would have used "paiderasste", a perfectly specific, common Greek word for it. Given Paul's penchant for gender stereotypes he really probably was railing against "unmanly men". What he meant by "arsenokoitai" is an open question: the word rarely appears in Greek literature and while it is a compound consisting of the words for "man" and "bed" and therefore probably has something to do with men and sex, it is not at all clear exactly what. And in any case, the word of Paul is not the word of God, so people who use this ambiguous verse as the basis for casting the first stone have much larger doctrinal fish to fry than issues of translation.
I can understand Islamic scholars wanting to work with the Arabic text, just as I can understand NT scholars wanting to work with the Greek texts. But that is completely u
I find the whole concept interesting since in the arena of Bible translation most organizations aim primarily to capture the meaning of the original text, and not to try to make it more palatable. I could think of a number of passages in the Old Testament that amount to genocide and nobody really bothers trying to water them down. I'm not sure why this would be a major issue in translations of the Koran.
The OT is not a Christian text--it is a Jewish text that is included in the Bible for historical reasons (and frequently mis-interpreted by Christians as a Christian text.) By "not a Christian text" I mean it wasn't written by Christians for Christians. It is not a Christian text in exactly the same sense it is not a Muslim text, although it is an important document to Muslims as well.
Jesus said people should love God and love each other as they love themselves, and that "this is the law and the prophets". "The law and the prophets" refers, more-or-less, to the OT. So Christians have explicit guidance that the OT does not have moral weight, although as I said, they frequently ignore this. Christians who are moderately sane therefore have a warrant to ignore the bits in the OT they don't like, as in the instructions for acceptable raping of prisoners and whatnot.
Actually, you don't need anything quite as elaborate as what this article seems to describe. All you need is the ability for power companies to charge rates that vary in realtime based on supply/demand, and to allow customer to elect to use these rates instead of averaged-out ones.
What problem are you trying to solve?
The problem in the article is that wind power produces very large fluxuations in grid supply, and this limits the amount of wind power that can be used. In Alberta, where wind systems are localized on one area of the province, they are worried about getting much over 10% of their supply from the wind, because if it stops blowing the resulting shunting around of alternative supplies could destablize the grid.
Adding user-feedback to a moderately unstable system like the electricity grid is not necessarily the best thing to do. Adding load-leveling capacity by storing power in the form of ice is a very, very good idea.
And it is power that is being stored: temperature difference is all that matters, and it is neither more nor less correct to say that you are storing energy by cooling a block of matter below the environment than it is to say you are storing energy by heating a block of matter above the environment.
English-language translations of the Quran vary so widely that Islam doesn't accept them as translations, they are all regarded as paraphrases.
If the Koran has a meaning, it can be translated, and of the millions of English-speaking Muslims in the world there must be a few who are up to the job of translating it correctly.
The variations between the examples you give are small and in any case doctrinally relatively trivial. I'd be more interested in seeing the various translations of things like 3:118, the gist of which is: "Do not be friends with unbelievers. They all hate you." Or 2:222-224, which has some pretty harsh things to say about women, likening them to fields that a man can go into any any time he chooses.
The difficulty of translation always gets raised any time anyone mentions any of the terrible things the Koran actually says that Muslims and Muslim sympathizers would like it not to say. It gets tiresome, particularly as it always gets raised as if it were a new and interesting issue instead of an old and tired one. Muslims have been complaining about this for decades. Don't you think its about time that some Muslim leaders got together and produced an authorized edition? Bible translations vary widely too, and there are a few cases where even good translations differ on substantive matters, but the gist of the sentiment is almost always clear: God loves everyone, unbelievers will burn forever in hell, stuff like that. It isn't self-consistent, but there is no major problem with what the text actually says. Whereas no one seems to agree on even the basic sense of the most trivial passages in the Koran.
Of course, for Muslims to get together and produce an authorized translation would first require Muslims to get together, which is something they appear to have a lot of trouble doing for purposes other than burning embassies because they have been offended by some silly cartoon ~0:-{=
And it wasn't about the strength of the RN, but (supposedly) in response from complaints by the Sea Lords that he was ignoring naval tradition.
Well they still have some way to go before they reach Minority Report levels.
You're not kidding. From the article, this is what they've actually done:
During the study, the researchers asked volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they were later shown on a screen.
Before the numbers flashed up, they were given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance. The researchers then used a software that had been designed to spot subtle differences in brain activity to predict the person's intentions with 70% accuracy.
So perhaps the summary should read something like:
"Scientists have found a way to sometimes distinguish which of two pre-selected choices a subject has made by evaluating their brain state using fMRI. The odds of the scientists getting it right in these highly restricted and controlled circumstances, where subjects are given a choice of two possible things to plan to do, are barely better than chance. Flipping a coin would give a prediction that is 50% accurate. Using millions of dollars of machinery and the most advanced algorithms a team of monkey... err... graduate students can come up with, the researchers have achieved 70% accuracy."
For all of that, concerns about abuse of this tech are not misplaced. In a world where nonsense like polygraphs still have a modicum of public credibility something like this could easily be abused.
I hope that we never reach a time where the majority of people accept the idea of "proving one's innocence."
I'm afraid that the notion of "guilty until proven innocent" is already entrenched in American law, at least for non-citizens. See the Military Commisions Act of 2006. If any of the various organs of the state accuse a foreigner of being guilty of terrorist-related activity, they may be incarcerated indefinitely without trial, without knowledge of the crime they are accused of, and without being allowed to hear the evidence against them.
And in some cases, for some reason, they may be deported to foreign countries to be tortured. It has never been explained what the purpose of this torture is. It cannot be for the purpose of gathering intelligence, because it is a matter of uncontroversial empirical fact that torture does not produce reliable intelligence. So it must be for some other reason.
Americans are very much living in a world where, "They jailed the terrorists without trial, and I didn't stand up because I was not a terrorist. Then they jailed the foreigners suspected of terrorism without trial, and I didn't stand up because I was not a foreigner. Then they jailed the Americans suspected of terrorism without trial, and I didn't stand up because I wasn't suspected of terrorism. And there was no one left to stand up when they jailed me without trial."
For the rest of us, we just live in hope that we never come to the attention of any of the organs of the state in the U.S. Unlike this completely innocent Canadian software engineer.
There are a number of reasons that jobs cannot be filled without the H1-B visas. These include people don't want to work for MS, don't want to relocate, don't like job, don't like salary, etc.
And there's the rub: salary.
Hiring H1-B workers is a way of maintaining a lower salary environment than one would otherwise have, because supply suddenly becomes much larger than demand when you have the whole world to recruit from, including places where the average wage for the equivalent job is much lower than in the U.S.
This may or may not be a good thing for the U.S. and/or world economy as a whole, but for Americans working in areas where there is a lot of H1-B hiring the effect is to make them less scarce and therefore less valuable, even if the average H1-B is hired at the current market rate. It simply means that the current market rate does not go up as rapidly as it would otherwise, because instead of having to raise salaries companies can look overseas.
Note that I'm not saying this is right or wrong: as a non-American I've benefited from the trend to use foreign workers the U.S. But it is a certainty that the hiring of H1-B employees is a mechanism to help maintain salary levels at lower rates than they would be otherwise.
An algorithm found in a dataset speaks of a function, and understanding functions in the human genome leads to better understanding of what we truly are.
An algorithm found in a dataset speaks of imperfect compression.
As to "what we TRULY are", we are everything that we are, neither more nor less, in all our messy complexity. Reductionism generates epistemological convenience, not metaphysical revelation. Although Platonists in reductionist clothing have been overstating their case for centuries.
You can't get the required transform from a single shot of a two-dimensional object.
Where did you do your residency? ;)
Caltech. Only we call it a post-doc.
I used to work in medical physics (after a relatively short 13 years of undergrad, graduate school, and post-doc'ing in pure physics) and it was very clear that MD's had it made financially over PhD's, despite the fact that we had at least as much opportunity to kill people with our mistakes.
MD's are highly paid for exactly one reason. As Adam Smith once said, "Never do two or three men of the same trade sit down together over a pint of ale that it does not end up in a general conspiracy against the rest of mankind." Or words to that effect.
Much of what MD's do could be done by various forms of paramedic and nurse-practitioner. But the legal lock on "one certification to rule them all" has kept MD's in a safe, competition-free bubble for the better part of a century, and no-where moreso than in the U.S.
I was expressing incredulity. Not agreement with his methods.
I understand. Having had the "who would Jesus torture" debate with one too many Bible-believing Christians, I'm never sure that the total lack of utility of torture as means of acquiring reliable information is as widely known as such an uncontroversial fact ought to be, and wanted to remind readers of it.
I fail to see why pictures taken in legal way (I'm not talking about trespassing or even breaking-in to take interior pictures) is useful in any way?
Because extremely stupid cowards feel safer when they have more information, even if the information is of low quality and of no practical value. Extremely stupid cowards also tend to have a good deal of money, because they are wasting their lives accumulating it instead of doing anything good or decent or interesting.
So setting up a service to provide extremely stupid cowards with more information, regardless of the quality or utility of that information, is a good bet for making a buck.
Yet time after time he breaks suspects in minutes with one or two applications of electric shock, a bullet in the thigh...
What do you mean by "break"? Is that when the victim starts making stuff up to appease the torturer?
Remember: no one who wants reliable information would ever use torture to get it, because torture never produces reliable information.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". The GP is absolutely correct and backed by a mutlitude of hard statistical data: Canadians spend less on health care than Americans, the Canadian government spends less on public health care per capita than the American government spends on public health care per capita, and Canadian life spans are longer than American's, quality of life is better, and infant mortality is lower.
Now watch some idiot ignore the bold-fonts in the above and try to make some bogus counter-claim. I'll repeat it for effect: the socialized, publically-funded health-care system in the United States (Medicare and Medicaid and all that) spends more money (per capita across the whole population, not just the population that uses it) than the public health-care system in Canada. And Americans get far worse outcomes.
Oh, and you can sue a doctor in Canada. Its just that our judicial system is moderately rational, and we rarely see the kind of insane American-style jury awards.
This is not to say, as others have pointed out, that the Canadian system does not have problems. We have a two-tier system with effective rationing via waiting lists. The ultra-rich, particularly the wealthy memebers of the political class like John Rae, go skiving off to the States to get treatment and jump the queue. There is a significant push amongst Canadians to allow some level of private care, as is done in Australia, Germany and elsewhere. Unfortunately, our politicians are only capable fear-mongering and handwringing, and any suggestion that the sanctity of the Canada Health Act be violated is met with screams of anguish that our system might degenerate into something as expensive and inefficient as the American system.
Given the empirical facts of the matter, one can understand why Canadians are concerned: when something works as well, relatively speaking, as what we've got, we should be cautious about messing with it. The sad tale of a grossly expensive, mixed private-public system south of the border makes our purely public system look awfully good.
Seriously, most people don't use their taste in music to define themselves, so judging people on that is very narrow-minded.
The article is about 18 year olds, many of whom do define themselves through their musical tastes. They are of necessity narrow and shallow--they have rarely killed or fought for their life, rarely had lovers or children or freinds die, rarely risked everything to achieve a dream. They haven't had time to do anything with their lives yet. And in the West there are few tribal institutions for them to attach their loyalty to: family is thankfully not very important, religion ditto, and while a few get latched onto sports teams of one kind or another the crass commercialism of popular sport is such that a tribal affilliation with a team is too lame even for the average teenager.
To be useful as a source of the tribal feeling that all humans crave a thing must be public and communal. What is more public and communal than music? One day the teens will grow up and find a tribe of their own that is based on genuine common interests, if they're lucky. But until then they will find solace in being part of a tribe defined by the music they listen to.
This is why so many bands are decried by their early followers as "sell outs" when they become popular. It is not the kind of music they are making that has changed, but the dillution of tribal feeling, of belonging, of being part of a select and special group, that causes the psychological pain.
I didn't mean to suggest that Einstein didn't think about these problems while completing his formal education, but wanted to emphasize that Einstein's academic background was a good conventional education in the physics of his day. I perhaps mis-read your post as suggesting that Einstein was primarily self-taught in physics, whereas nothing could be further from the truth.
It is further worth emphasizing that his now-famous thought-experiment is not quite so transparent as it might seem to the non-physicist.
Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting
Einstein had a doctorate in physics, which included all of the grounding he needed to understand the problems of Brownian motion (for which he won the Nobel prize and which is to this day his most-cited work) and the issues with electro-dynamics that led him to relativity. He started with an excellent, formal, disciplined grounding in his subject of interest. His position as a patent clerk was useful because it gave him the time to work undisturbed by actual job duties (patent office employment back then not being much different from in our own time.)
While self-taught geniuses do exist (Ramanujan, for example) the vast majority of substantive contributions to any field are made by people with good formal grounding in that field. It doesn't matter how smart you are, nor how much of the literature you have read: formal education will help you learn the disciplines of mind and modes of thought that are the jumping-off point for new work. Nor does learning these things stifle creativity if you really understand them, as Einstein did.
The fact that whitespace is dogmatized by the pyhon community makes the community
itself less attractive, and the language because of it
This put me off python for a long time, too. "Whitespace is not actually evil--it is just misunderstood" is a lesson I learned from SGML-based text processing, where concepts like "ignorable whitespace" reflect the reality of how strangely humans interpret such things.
But once you get over the fact that a fundamental aspect of the language's structure is based on a character set that many text editors feel free to misrepresent to the user, you'll find that python has some signficant benefits over Perl, especially for application prototyping and exploratory coding. For pure text processing I'd still choose Perl, and Perl still leads in terms of number of libraries to handle common and even pretty uncommon tasks, but python's native OO syntax and good GUI support via wxPython and the like make it a useful tool for a developer to have.