Ah, so you are the Nagle of the algorithm? How about an extension onto TCP as a concept:
you can tell TCP that you are willing to accept d amount of delay, with the default being the 500 ms previously used and assigned. Thus protocols like X could state that they don't need to hang waiting for an ACK, while programs that should hang waiting for ACK will continue to do so.
This extension would only require recompiling the programs that attempt to not do the prior default action of that delay, such as recompiling X11 or XFree86, and could be transparent/invisible to programs that do not care.
For the obverse side, emails to Mars or TCP packets to a Mars (or Saturn or beyond..) orbiting satellite could have a much larger delay acceptable, allowing for more to be sent prior to an ACK being received. In other words, a Nagel algorithm with an additional calling parameter which adjusts the 500 ms delay as needed.
damn, i used my brain cells with 2.2 pounds ~ 1.0 Kg, so that made it 800 lbs / 2.2 or kinda 400 / 1.1, 1 over 11 is 9.090909..., so its 360+3.6+.36, so oops I erred in my head, I should have had 363.(63)* repeating, which would have been DAMN closer. Damn the power of brainware. Who taught this AI system??? But hey, it was just a side-bar in a comment, and close enough is close enough for a commentary. It's not like I was scheduling a fly-by for Saturn's moons or anything.
Or perhaps Apple's diet made it a little leaner, yeah, yeah, that's the ticket. I was commenting on how it STILL is not quite a complete 800 lb gorilla. Yeah, that's what I meant!
Hmm, I'll have to check this out on my box when possible. Maybe Apple is finally getting big enough, with its large iPod base, to think it's morphing into a 366 Kg gorilla and that it can start its own extensions, much like MS tried to break Java. But then again, maybe it was careless unchecked buggy prototype code that was released into the wild. Either way, it shows a carelessness and thoughtlessness that shouldn't be coming out of apple products. This saddens me since I've been an Apple fanatic since the ][+ .
I believe that TIVOs also use PowerPC processors, e.g. IBM PowerPC 403GCX (see http://www.9thtee.com/insidetivo.htm or the picture of the chip at that same page. It also uses an IBM MPEG-2 Decoder chip.
Yup, someone in Oregon/Washington got in trouble for accessing the medical records of that poor girl who was kidnapped when there was absolutely no reason for them to be looking at it. The hospital happened to have a policy that audits would be performed on every high-profile client (client, that's what they called 'em instead of patient) to make sure that no inappropriate accession of data occurred. They just happened to catch three people looking at her medical records pretty much for curiosity.
Yup, and blue lasers need quite a bit of cooling and you need a lot of power for them.
LaserPower (now defunct) used to make a laser projection display with microlasers. And there's a company that projects displays directly onto the retina (microvision) with microlaser and diode-laser sources. (i don't know that I'd want to point even a low power laser device INTO my eye...
and then there's the problem with the lack of persistence for viewing the images.
ah yes, but getting a good quality blue laser to use for the projection will not only cost you a lot but also require quite a bit more cooling than you might think...
Hmm... A few newpaper articles I've seen have said that since the launch will incline 50 degrees up from the horizon and heads north that viewing it from the north is easier.
But then again, once it's over 500 feet high, you should be able to see it from almost anywhere in Florida if there isn't too much cloud cover (from what I remember about the great flat plains of central florida...)
though some people do buy and code for it because of the build in coding tools and support for the altivec ops allowing for faster code to do things like FFTs and matrix multiplies.
And some people do see the benefit of Photoshop filters running faster with altivec support over MMC opcodes on the x86 architecture. So there ARE some people who do buy apples specifically because of the PPC.
No need to take the bone out, that's what we have CAT (computerized axial tomography) and MRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging) for: to take pictures of our insides without having to cut us open. Seriously, there are places that already do this and a few patents on the topic of automatically or robotically creating or custom milling a prosthesis specifically for one person's hip socket or replacing part of a pelvis or part of the zygoma after tragic accidents.
Digital acquisition of MRI is capable of 512x512 pixels over 25 cm (~ 10 inches) or 1024x1024 pixels over the same area so the voxel sizes are below half-a-millimeter, which is pretty decent resolution for 3-d milling.
Creating an artifical femoral-head to fit into the patients hip-socket makes sure that there won't be any wierd gaps, and does not require cutting the pt open first. Just scan them.
Actually, UCSD, U.Texas.Somecity, and a few other universities havein fact tried to shut down their students from using or creating wifi spots, even if the wifi hotspots are not connected to the uni network. I can't remember the slashdot story about this. A few unis backed down when they were forced to admit that the FCC requires 802.11__ to ACCEPT all noise that may be caused by other devices and is not allowed to be regulated, unless they had it written into their dormroom regulations that wifi spots were not allowed.
but even then, it would be like the federal rules allowing sat-dishes even if an apartment or condo has rules that do not allow them at all. Federal Rule supercedes local regulations in the USA.
aha it was his master's thesis and the code word for finding it on google is "hairy brush":
BrusherApplet Recently I had reason to reimplement steve strassman's 'hairy brush' master's thesis from 1986, in the course of which I created this test applet.... http://www.flong.com/brush/
Citations: Hairy Brushes - Strassman (ResearchIndex) Steve Strassman, Hairy Brushes, ACM SIGGRAPH, Vol 20, No 4 (1986).... Steve Strassmann. Hairy brushes. In Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on... sherry.ifi.unizh.ch/context/932821/0
or that Steve Strassman did at M.I.T.'s media lab back in 1985 and 1986. See the Stuart Brand book and look in the center of it for his little brushed wet ink shrimp pictures.
And not just the last person who spoke, but the last person who speaks the loudest and has the stamina or firepower to make it so.
Who would have thought that airbrushing out of Stalin or appropriate soviet hench men and re-visioning history could be seen as just a precursor of wiki-wiki editorial capabilities?
Cultural relativism was the big catch-phrase in 9th grade history and 9th grade english: we tend to see things relative to our own era. And those who get to write history, or Orwellianly 1984ishly, re-write history get to say what happened. If there are no opposing viewpoints, then too many people leave.
You realize, sarcasm apart, that this "price fixing" or "unfair competition" is exactly what all of the TelCo's and the Wireless carriers are claiming about municipal WiFi efforts...
It's sad that corporations think that they deserve special favors, or believe that they will receive them for the right price...
There are also other known causes for Parkinson's or parkinson's like syndrome:
badly brewed methamphetamines will have a high percentage of MPTP which will cause severe damage to the substantia nigra leading to Parkinson's like symptoms even in young people. It was in fact a bad batch of MPTP causing these parkinsonian tremors and symptoms in a group of 20 year old drug abusers that led to some scientific studies and discoveries and the creation of a primate model of parkinsons by injecting MPTP into primates.
Vasular: a stroke or microinfarct to the basal ganglia or substantia nigra can cause parkinson's like symptoms.
Toxic: I read about the insect poison thing too, but don't remember any key details or whether it has any MPTP like properties.
Parkinson's has also been treated in the past with Fetal Cell tranplants directly into the substantia nigra and into the globus pallidus.
It has also been treated by implanting electronic stimulating electrodes into the thalamus, more specifically into the VIM nucleus, in an attempt to disrupt the rhythmic tremors of Parkinson's. Very cool stuff.
Okay, let's think about two things: the limited three dimensions of space, and the limited number of layers you can put on the chip wafer as it is fabricated. The limited number of layers on the wafer is a simple concept to get. The limited 3-d space to work in also limits interconnects between multiple processors in clusters by limiting the topology which the cluster can form.
The uber-cluster concept was in the Thinking Machine (TMI) something-or-other which had 1024 processors linked together in (effectively) a ten-dimensional-hypercube. When you've got clusters currently, they've got to be networked and have an efficient and rapid method for passing messages and data. If you go mebbe to four processors, I can see the interconnects fitting on the wafers tightly. Maybe even to eight...
But beyond that, you start having difficulties maintaining direct interconnects between processors. The Thinking MAchines supercomputer effectively implemented 10 interconnects for each processor by having each processor (defined / labelled as a 10-bit address) connect to each processor whose address differed from its own address at exactly one bit. So a message could pass from any of the 1024 processors to any other of the 1024 processors in at most ten steps. And like the internet fabric, there were redundant pathways for the message to take. (fairly cute bit flipping algoritms for it too).
But I don't see compressing the network connections as easily for a hypercube on a wafer. But maybe a simple linked line of processors.
I had a similar project with some AST laptops, I got five in Escondido (east of San Diego) for about 50$ and frankensteined the parts together into three working laptops. They were all 486-DX33's with 500MB-800MB hard-drives. I removed the laptop drives, used a laptopIDE-regularIDE adaptor ($5 or $5.95 at Frys) to connect it onto my 400MHz redhad machine and copied over a small version of slackware onto it.
I booted it up and after approximately ten minutes, I had 6 tty consoles up running slackware with the 2.4.something kernel. I can't remember the bogomips number from dmesg off the top of my head (the laptops are in storage in santee while I'm on the east coast on some contract work) but I was able to run some of my bench-mark work and custom c-code on there. It was a great low-low power terminal to use and really quiet when the HD spun down.
The other bonus with 486-33's is their low power consumption and no need for a cooling fan to run. It's almost as quiet as running my apple 5300c laptop. The apple is cooler in that even clicking most menu and system items does NOT spin up the hard drive. Enough of the first level of interaction menu components are cached in memory, I guess, and there is no need to spin up the HD to switch context betweeen programs that are already up and running.
Glial cells are supportive possibly nutritive cells. I remember reading somewhere about them being involved in the thought / memory process, but nothing concrete. I know that Francis Crick was going into what the proteinaceous components of memory and learning might be when he was at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, and that he was strongly interested in the interconnections and what the "seat" of consciousness might be, which is why he was severely interested in the thalamus. Cool guy, he was.
If you've got any definitive references on the glia involvment in neural processing, let me know.
As for the irreducible elements etc, somewhere else in this spaghetti of comments I made a note about how the axonal-dendritic connections are more complicated than a single synaptic connection with a single static threshold. There are multiple synaptic contacts on the hillock and each of these connections leads to a spatio-temporal concert of association.
ah but don't forget that it's not just the number of nodes, but also the huge number of interconnects.
In fact, a lot of work (or wheel spinning) is going on with modeling the individual axono-dendritic synapses. Each individual synapse, cleft, pod o' vesicles is capable of being attenuated whether inhibited or sensitized or recurrently refed by increasing reupdake of the neurotransmitter. It could be that the local modulation of all of these connection entities could underly the learning process, whereas neural nets model the nerve as a single entity (linear or nonlinear) with some threshold function for firing, and the majority of these neural nets do not take temporal aspects into account.
Thus losing the hebbian co-firing response, thus losing the cool temporo-spatial aspects of learning, thus losing the cool temporal aspects of binding labeling assigning (check out Benjamin Libet's articles or book, or how color is misperceived with the coincident flashing of a light.)
Hey, you gave a close approximation of the answer I like to give to the Chinese Room. I think I'm going to appropriate your concept and use it from now on. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
The system is more than just the room itself; in fact, the system is more than just the bag o' fluids that each individual is. Our semantics have an evolutionary component to them in that a lot of our imbued semantics are totally dependent on cultural learning (je parle francais quand j'etais nee en France, aber Deutsch, ungregi, or esperanto if born in the lair of a deluded 1960's psychology professor) and placing "red" or "rouge" on the appropriate stimulation of our selection of visual cones makes us think we share a commonality, even if we don't [e.g. brothers with slight variations in visual pigment opsin genetic sequences will have different color matching functions, some women may be tetrachromats in having four visual cone pigments and see the color in their 4-d space, some people are limited to 2-d color because of genetic limitations, et cetera]. Good golly, I feel a phantasm of Nagel's bat coming on.
And some of these subjective components, or predelictions towards certain associative components and actions, may in fact have enough reproductive advantage that they may be hardwired into the blueprint DNA of creating our nervous system, much as reflex righting actions are definitely encoded for in our DNA. We just don't know how... yet!
appropriate algebras would allow for starting with particular sequences, allowing manipulations on them, and still staying within the confines of the grammar. Any grammar that you can parse with a finite automaton would be one example. The semantic meaning is what we imbue upon if afterwards. So GIGO may apply. If you start with a symbol (even the empty set symbol) and apply syntactic operators on it, you many generate outputs that are capable of having semantically meaningful "meaning" applied to it.
Slashdot Mirror
At least it seemed it was more available than the so called "already open source" JAVA was.
Sigh.
Alas.
Ah, so you are the Nagle of the algorithm? How about an extension onto TCP as a concept:
you can tell TCP that you are willing to accept d amount of delay, with the default being the 500 ms previously used and assigned. Thus protocols like X could state that they don't need to hang waiting for an ACK, while programs that should hang waiting for ACK will continue to do so.
This extension would only require recompiling the programs that attempt to not do the prior default action of that delay, such as recompiling X11 or XFree86, and could be transparent/invisible to programs that do not care.
For the obverse side, emails to Mars or TCP packets to a Mars (or Saturn or beyond..) orbiting satellite could have a much larger delay acceptable, allowing for more to be sent prior to an ACK being received. In other words, a Nagel algorithm with an additional calling parameter which adjusts the 500 ms delay as needed.
What do you think?
damn, i used my brain cells with 2.2 pounds ~ 1.0 Kg,
so that made it 800 lbs / 2.2 or kinda 400 / 1.1,
1 over 11 is 9.090909..., so its 360+3.6+.36, so oops
I erred in my head, I should have had 363.(63)* repeating, which would have been DAMN closer. Damn the power of brainware. Who taught this AI system??? But hey, it was just a side-bar in a comment, and close enough is close enough for a commentary. It's not like I was scheduling a fly-by for Saturn's moons or anything.
Or perhaps Apple's diet made it a little leaner, yeah, yeah, that's the ticket. I was commenting on how it STILL is not quite a complete 800 lb gorilla. Yeah, that's what I meant!
Hmm, I'll have to check this out on my box when possible. Maybe Apple is finally getting big enough, with its large iPod base, to think it's morphing into a 366 Kg gorilla and that it can start its own extensions, much like MS tried to break Java. But then again, maybe it was careless unchecked buggy prototype code that was released into the wild. Either way, it shows a carelessness and thoughtlessness that shouldn't be coming out of apple products. This saddens me since I've been an Apple fanatic since the ][+ .
I believe that TIVOs also use PowerPC processors, e.g. IBM PowerPC 403GCX (see http://www.9thtee.com/insidetivo.htm or the picture of the chip at that same page. It also uses an IBM MPEG-2 Decoder chip.
Yup, someone in Oregon/Washington got in trouble for accessing the medical records of that poor girl who was kidnapped when there was absolutely no reason for them to be looking at it. The hospital happened to have a policy that audits would be performed on every high-profile client (client, that's what they called 'em instead of patient) to make sure that no inappropriate accession of data occurred. They just happened to catch three people looking at her medical records pretty much for curiosity.
Yup, and blue lasers need quite a bit of cooling and you need a lot of power for them.
LaserPower (now defunct) used to make a laser projection display with microlasers. And there's a company that projects displays directly onto the retina (microvision) with microlaser and diode-laser sources. (i don't know that I'd want to point even a low power laser device INTO my eye...
and then there's the problem with the lack of persistence for viewing the images.
ah yes, but getting a good quality blue laser to use for the projection will not only cost you a lot but also require quite a bit more cooling than you might think...
Hmm... A few newpaper articles I've seen have said that since the launch will incline 50 degrees up from the horizon and heads north that viewing it from the north is easier.
But then again, once it's over 500 feet high, you should be able to see it from almost anywhere in Florida if there isn't too much cloud cover (from what I remember about the great flat plains of central florida...)
though some people do buy and code for it because of the build in coding tools and support for the altivec ops allowing for faster code to do things like FFTs and matrix multiplies.
And some people do see the benefit of Photoshop filters running faster with altivec support over MMC opcodes on the x86 architecture. So there ARE some people who do buy apples specifically because of the PPC.
this is why they have LENSES to allow for the change in the focal plane (see Optics 101, or physics 201, or 8.021 8.022 at M.I.T.) :)
No need to take the bone out, that's what we have CAT (computerized axial tomography) and MRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging) for: to take pictures of our insides without having to cut us open. Seriously, there are places that already do this and a few patents on the topic of automatically or robotically creating or custom milling a prosthesis specifically for one person's hip socket or replacing part of a pelvis or part of the zygoma after tragic accidents.
Digital acquisition of MRI is capable of 512x512 pixels over 25 cm (~ 10 inches) or 1024x1024 pixels over the same area so the voxel sizes are below half-a-millimeter, which is pretty decent resolution for 3-d milling.
Creating an artifical femoral-head to fit into the patients hip-socket makes sure that there won't be any wierd gaps, and does not require cutting the pt open first. Just scan them.
Actually, UCSD, U.Texas.Somecity, and a few other universities havein fact tried to shut down their students from using or creating wifi spots, even if the wifi hotspots are not connected to the uni network. I can't remember the slashdot story about this. A few unis backed down when they were forced to admit that the FCC requires 802.11__ to ACCEPT all noise that may be caused by other devices and is not allowed to be regulated, unless they had it written into their dormroom regulations that wifi spots were not allowed.
but even then, it would be like the federal rules allowing sat-dishes even if an apartment or condo has rules that do not allow them at all. Federal Rule supercedes local regulations in the USA.
aha it was his master's thesis and the code word for finding it on google is "hairy brush":
...
... ...
BrusherApplet
Recently I had reason to reimplement steve strassman's 'hairy brush' master's
thesis from 1986, in the course of which I created this test applet.
http://www.flong.com/brush/
Citations: Hairy Brushes - Strassman (ResearchIndex)
Steve Strassman, Hairy Brushes, ACM SIGGRAPH, Vol 20, No 4 (1986).
Steve Strassmann. Hairy brushes. In Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on
sherry.ifi.unizh.ch/context/932821/0
or that Steve Strassman did at M.I.T.'s media lab back in 1985 and 1986. See the Stuart Brand book and look in the center of it for his little brushed wet ink shrimp pictures.
And not just the last person who spoke, but the last person who speaks the loudest and has the stamina or firepower to make it so.
Who would have thought that airbrushing out of Stalin or appropriate soviet hench men and re-visioning history could be seen as just a precursor of wiki-wiki editorial capabilities?
Cultural relativism was the big catch-phrase in 9th grade history and 9th grade english: we tend to see things relative to our own era. And those who get to write history, or Orwellianly 1984ishly, re-write history get to say what happened. If there are no opposing viewpoints, then too many people leave.
That is not the dinosaur which you meant.
Or as said in the Princess Bride, "that word, I do not think it means what you tjink it means..."
umm... I believe you mean "steganography", though if you don't know shorthand, the scribbles of a stenographer are rather cryptic.
You realize, sarcasm apart, that this "price fixing" or "unfair competition" is exactly what all of the TelCo's and the Wireless carriers are claiming about municipal WiFi efforts...
It's sad that corporations think that they deserve special favors, or believe that they will receive them for the right price...
oh wait, they believe it because it happens...
There are also other known causes for Parkinson's or parkinson's like syndrome:
badly brewed methamphetamines will have a high percentage of MPTP which will cause severe damage to the substantia nigra leading to Parkinson's like symptoms even in young people. It was in fact a bad batch of MPTP causing these parkinsonian tremors and symptoms in a group of 20 year old drug abusers that led to some scientific studies and discoveries and the creation of a primate model of parkinsons by injecting MPTP into primates.
Vasular: a stroke or microinfarct to the basal ganglia or substantia nigra can cause parkinson's like symptoms.
Toxic: I read about the insect poison thing too, but don't remember any key details or whether it has any MPTP like properties.
Parkinson's has also been treated in the past with Fetal Cell tranplants directly into the substantia nigra and into the globus pallidus.
It has also been treated by implanting electronic stimulating electrodes into the thalamus, more specifically into the VIM nucleus, in an attempt to disrupt the rhythmic tremors of Parkinson's. Very cool stuff.
Okay, let's think about two things:
the limited three dimensions of space, and the limited number of layers you can put on the chip wafer as it is fabricated. The limited number of layers on the wafer is a simple concept to get. The limited 3-d space to work in also limits interconnects between multiple processors in clusters by limiting the topology which the cluster can form.
The uber-cluster concept was in the Thinking Machine (TMI) something-or-other which had 1024 processors linked together in (effectively) a ten-dimensional-hypercube. When you've got clusters currently, they've got to be networked and have an efficient and rapid method for passing messages and data. If you go mebbe to four processors, I can see the interconnects fitting on the wafers tightly. Maybe even to eight...
But beyond that, you start having difficulties maintaining direct interconnects between processors. The Thinking MAchines supercomputer effectively implemented 10 interconnects for each processor by having each processor (defined / labelled as a 10-bit address) connect to each processor whose address differed from its own address at exactly one bit. So a message could pass from any of the 1024 processors to any other of the 1024 processors in at most ten steps. And like the internet fabric, there were redundant pathways for the message to take. (fairly cute bit flipping algoritms for it too).
But I don't see compressing the network connections as easily for a hypercube on a wafer.
But maybe a simple linked line of processors.
hmmm...
Hi,
I had a similar project with some AST laptops, I got five in Escondido (east of San Diego) for about 50$ and frankensteined the parts together into three working laptops. They were all 486-DX33's with 500MB-800MB hard-drives. I removed the laptop drives, used a laptopIDE-regularIDE adaptor ($5 or $5.95 at Frys) to connect it onto my 400MHz redhad machine and copied over a small version of slackware onto it.
I booted it up and after approximately ten minutes, I had 6 tty consoles up running slackware with the 2.4.something kernel. I can't remember the bogomips number from dmesg off the top of my head (the laptops are in storage in santee while I'm on the east coast on some contract work) but I was able to run some of my bench-mark work and custom c-code on there.
It was a great low-low power terminal to use and really quiet when the HD spun down.
The other bonus with 486-33's is their low power consumption and no need for a cooling fan to run. It's almost as quiet as running my apple 5300c laptop. The apple is cooler in that even clicking most menu and system items does NOT spin up the hard drive. Enough of the first level of interaction menu components are cached in memory, I guess, and there is no need to spin up the HD to switch context betweeen programs that are already up and running.
Kris
Hey there,
Glial cells are supportive possibly nutritive cells. I remember reading somewhere about them being involved in the thought / memory process, but nothing concrete. I know that Francis Crick was going into what the proteinaceous components of memory and learning might be when he was at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, and that he was strongly interested in the interconnections and what the "seat" of consciousness might be, which is why he was severely interested in the thalamus. Cool guy, he was.
If you've got any definitive references on the glia involvment in neural processing, let me know.
As for the irreducible elements etc, somewhere else in this spaghetti of comments I made a note about how the axonal-dendritic connections are more complicated than a single synaptic connection with a single static threshold. There are multiple synaptic contacts on the hillock and each of these connections leads to a spatio-temporal concert of association.
Thanks
ah but don't forget that it's not just the number of nodes, but also the huge number of interconnects.
In fact, a lot of work (or wheel spinning) is going on with modeling the individual axono-dendritic synapses. Each individual synapse, cleft, pod o' vesicles is capable of being attenuated whether inhibited or sensitized or recurrently refed by increasing reupdake of the neurotransmitter. It could be that the local modulation of all of these connection entities could underly the learning process, whereas neural nets model the nerve as a single entity (linear or nonlinear) with some threshold function for firing, and the majority of these neural nets do not take temporal aspects into account.
Thus losing the hebbian co-firing response, thus losing the cool temporo-spatial aspects of learning, thus losing the cool temporal aspects of binding labeling assigning (check out Benjamin Libet's articles or book, or how color is misperceived with the coincident flashing of a light.)
Hey, you gave a close approximation of the answer I like to give to the Chinese Room. I think I'm going to appropriate your concept and use it from now on. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
The system is more than just the room itself; in fact, the system is more than just the bag o' fluids that each individual is. Our semantics have an evolutionary component to them in that a lot of our imbued semantics are totally dependent on cultural learning (je parle francais quand j'etais nee en France, aber Deutsch, ungregi, or esperanto if born in the lair of a deluded 1960's psychology professor) and placing "red" or "rouge" on the appropriate stimulation of our selection of visual cones makes us think we share a commonality, even if we don't [e.g. brothers with slight variations in visual pigment opsin genetic sequences will have different color matching functions, some women may be tetrachromats in having four visual cone pigments and see the color in their 4-d space, some people are limited to 2-d color because of genetic limitations, et cetera]. Good
golly, I feel a phantasm of Nagel's bat coming on.
And some of these subjective components, or predelictions towards certain associative components and actions, may in fact have enough reproductive advantage that they may be hardwired into the blueprint DNA of creating our nervous system, much as reflex righting actions are definitely encoded for in our DNA. We just don't know how... yet!
Qualia! Qualia!
hmmm...
appropriate algebras would allow for starting with particular sequences, allowing manipulations on them, and still staying within the confines of the grammar. Any grammar that you can parse with a finite automaton would be one example. The semantic meaning is what we imbue upon if afterwards. So GIGO may apply. If you start with a symbol (even the empty set symbol) and apply syntactic operators on it, you many generate outputs that are capable of having semantically meaningful "meaning" applied to it.
Philosoph away!