I agreed with the premise of your original post, actually. I like the gun trap/pi analogy, but feel it's rather weak because of the following:
The gun in your clever trap is an arbitrary punishment for refusing to play by the (arbitrary) rules. There is no "natural" connection between approximating pi and the gun. However, in the innoculation/evolution scenario, arbitrary rules are somewhat removed: there IS a "natural" connection between the strains the innoculation is supposed to protect against and the method by which those strains are predicted, and that connection is---loosely---evolution.
The analogy is sound if one has an understanding of the arguments presented in the first case, and is willing to accept the overall message, if not the details.
These plants were designed to shut down in case of a fall in the power reaching them from *other sources* (because they need, e.g., to run cooling pumps for a safe shutdown and can't count on their own power). I'm not sure why the outside power browned out, but it did, so these plants did what they were designed to do.
I suspect that the 1 - 3 hour act of slowly fanning the wings and relaxing after the emergence from the chrysalis is what is really important. Apparently a healthy, successful emergence can take as little as 10 minutes, with several hours of cool-down afterwards.
I don't even know if insects' hearts increase pumping rates during "exercise". I *do* happen to know that grasshoppers' respiration rates go up during activity (because it's so easy to observe the abdominal motion which comes with respiration in those large insects), but I don't know if the added motion helps waft O2 in more quickly through their spiracles, or get rid of waste gases, or what, or if there is a concomitant increase in *heart* rate.
just like a butterfly emerging from the cocoon; if you see it struggle and decide to help it out, it won't have the ability to survive on its own later. You know, I'd never heard this analogy before, so I looked it up online. Every reference to it that I can *easily* find has some sort of religious message behind it.
My own personal suspicion is that one very easily can help a butterfly emerge from its crystalis; if one doesn't damage the wings in the process, the butterfly would probably benefit greatly from not having to struggle free. It's not as though they face great epistemological issues in their daily lives.
I apologize to any *individual* who may have been hit hard by these 'sploits. But if they're forcing better security on those sites, and hitting IE hard, I say Good For The "Criminals"!
Why is it many kids are teased on playgrounds around the world every day and very very very few of them ever follow through with such a drastic action. My guess(es):
i) More than you think are teased on playgrounds, and DO take "drastic action".
ii) Playground teasing is often MORE offensive than online teasing (direct face-to-face contact, it's a very public place, etc.). This leads to earlier, more public signs of remorse, which parents and friends can pick up on, and do something about it (provide comfort, go to school officials, etc.).
iii) The kids aren't _supposed_ to be online without monitoring (whereas they are expected to play on the playground). This leads to hiding the teasing from those people who might help them, and helps to engender a sense of guilt.
The blog post makes a nice contribution by linking to Feynman's original thoughts (for example, here: http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/feynman.html ), ones I haven't read for a long time (and was happy to be reminded of). However, the author makes the mistake of thinking that the original thoughts need to be interpreted and summarized for the reader. Feynman's words by themselves are simple to understand, are concise, and contain just the tone for which geeks go gaga. Anyone interested in the subject will be able to make his or her own judgements about the engineering and politics involved in the Shuttle development, engineering in general, and the extensions to software development.
From what I could tell from the article, the research was probably released in the form of a talk (probably 12 minutes, or whatever format the AAS usually wants at these meetings). A paper may follow; one never knows.
So far as I know, only time is sufficiently convolved with our "regular" three spatial dimensions so as to be considered another (via Lorentz transforms). Higher dimensionality is invoked all the -- ahem -- time, but these are generally things like Hilbert spaces, of infinite dimensionality.
Hyperspace coordinates are eminently helpful in, e.g., nuclear theory, but there are mappings from these to 4-space, and I am unaware if anyone thinks that the transformations are merely convenient ways to separate out effects, or if there is some fundamental, many-to-one mapping to four-space in which calculations *have* to be done (which extra coordinates might qualify as new dimensions).
Actually, it seems to me that the universe expanding completely uniformly in higher dimensions than what is visible would still explain all of the non-uniform expansion that dark matter was apparently invented to explain. It baffles me as to why they would invent the notion of something invisible to explain anomalous observations instead of going with a no less workable and radically simpler theory. Something like... higher dimensions?
Slashdot Mirror
I agreed with the premise of your original post, actually. I like the gun trap/pi analogy, but feel it's rather weak because of the following:
The gun in your clever trap is an arbitrary punishment for refusing to play by the (arbitrary) rules. There is no "natural" connection between approximating pi and the gun. However, in the innoculation/evolution scenario, arbitrary rules are somewhat removed: there IS a "natural" connection between the strains the innoculation is supposed to protect against and the method by which those strains are predicted, and that connection is---loosely---evolution.
The analogy is sound if one has an understanding of the arguments presented in the first case, and is willing to accept the overall message, if not the details.
The reason that doesn't work is that the conversations reduce to:
A: You're being irrational.
B: So?
It doesn't matter how compelling an argument is, if you refuse to accept it as a possibility, it isn't going to influence you.
Where "influence" doesn't include sickness and death from the flu, presumably.
You must've been new here.
Indeed. See this 1956 paper: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9947(195605)82%3A1%3C128%3AOTCMOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P (warning: links to only an abstract on JSTOR).
Conformal mapping is pretty easy to explain to a lay audience (no, not necessarily hookers); the original article did a horrible job.
I hate you. :)
"wherewithal" :)
(NPR is running a story on it right now):
These plants were designed to shut down in case of a fall in the power reaching them from *other sources* (because they need, e.g., to run cooling pumps for a safe shutdown and can't count on their own power). I'm not sure why the outside power browned out, but it did, so these plants did what they were designed to do.
They keep making fencepost errors, though.
A few other people have talked about this (that I can find). For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TenOfAllTrades/temp3#Struggling_Butterflies
I suspect that the 1 - 3 hour act of slowly fanning the wings and relaxing after the emergence from the chrysalis is what is really important. Apparently a healthy, successful emergence can take as little as 10 minutes, with several hours of cool-down afterwards.
I don't even know if insects' hearts increase pumping rates during "exercise". I *do* happen to know that grasshoppers' respiration rates go up during activity (because it's so easy to observe the abdominal motion which comes with respiration in those large insects), but I don't know if the added motion helps waft O2 in more quickly through their spiracles, or get rid of waste gases, or what, or if there is a concomitant increase in *heart* rate.
My own personal suspicion is that one very easily can help a butterfly emerge from its crystalis; if one doesn't damage the wings in the process, the butterfly would probably benefit greatly from not having to struggle free. It's not as though they face great epistemological issues in their daily lives.
Heck, it could preemptively slashdot the entire internet into submission.
Perhaps it can run spell- and grammar-checks on Slashdot submissions!
I apologize to any *individual* who may have been hit hard by these 'sploits. But if they're forcing better security on those sites, and hitting IE hard, I say Good For The "Criminals"!
"Natalie
Not true! The only thing there is a "sound"stage where the aliens faked their Earth landing.
i) More than you think are teased on playgrounds, and DO take "drastic action".
ii) Playground teasing is often MORE offensive than online teasing (direct face-to-face contact, it's a very public place, etc.). This leads to earlier, more public signs of remorse, which parents and friends can pick up on, and do something about it (provide comfort, go to school officials, etc.).
iii) The kids aren't _supposed_ to be online without monitoring (whereas they are expected to play on the playground). This leads to hiding the teasing from those people who might help them, and helps to engender a sense of guilt.
What's to debug?
The blog post makes a nice contribution by linking to Feynman's original thoughts (for example, here: http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/feynman.html ), ones I haven't read for a long time (and was happy to be reminded of). However, the author makes the mistake of thinking that the original thoughts need to be interpreted and summarized for the reader. Feynman's words by themselves are simple to understand, are concise, and contain just the tone for which geeks go gaga. Anyone interested in the subject will be able to make his or her own judgements about the engineering and politics involved in the Shuttle development, engineering in general, and the extensions to software development.
My gerbils take offense to this. (No Richard Gere jokes, please)
The *abstract* of the paper (presumably; it fits) here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AAS...211.1420G
From what I could tell from the article, the research was probably released in the form of a talk (probably 12 minutes, or whatever format the AAS usually wants at these meetings). A paper may follow; one never knows.
So far as I know, only time is sufficiently convolved with our "regular" three spatial dimensions so as to be considered another (via Lorentz transforms). Higher dimensionality is invoked all the -- ahem -- time, but these are generally things like Hilbert spaces, of infinite dimensionality.
Hyperspace coordinates are eminently helpful in, e.g., nuclear theory, but there are mappings from these to 4-space, and I am unaware if anyone thinks that the transformations are merely convenient ways to separate out effects, or if there is some fundamental, many-to-one mapping to four-space in which calculations *have* to be done (which extra coordinates might qualify as new dimensions).