I think the whole thing has become so politicized that an honest viewpoint from either side is rare. The global warming believers think it's such a big impact if it's true that they feel they can't honestly present counter-evidence, and the unbelievers think the cost is so high that it can't be paid without incontrovertible evidence.
Unfortunately, climate science doesn't have a great record (the planetary ecosystem and climate are pretty goddam complicated). At the same time, we will never have evidence that the average idiot will understand and accept for anything as complex as a checking account.
Most people, myself included, have no real basis on which to make a decision, so we pick the side with the people we trust.
Personally, I trust scientists much more than businessmen. Good scientists are trained to be brutally honest with themselves, and to use methods that expose rather than hide flaws in their own reasoning.
Businessmen are trained to be confident in their abilities and conclusions regardless of reality.
This means that when businessmen look at the objective opinions of good scientists, with their "given this" and "see chart X for exceptions", they blow them off. Then they spend millions pointing out how the scientists can't even make up their mind.
For me, it's an easy choice. That doesn't mean that I am immune to arguments either way, just that I tend to listen with my own slant, and I recognize it.
I personally wish we would just give respected climate scientists some money and some peace for a couple of years to fight it out among themselves without worrying about the viewpoint of uninformed idiots, but I know it's not going to happen.
We need cell phones to have a hard switch that changes them between normal "powerful" mode and a limited secure mode.
Then you could do simple things like authentication and digital signatures in secure mode (e.g. transferring money), and do everything else in the normal mode.
Without something physical that can't be overridden with software, there is no way to be sure secure is really secure.
Of course, something physical is still vulnerable if someone gets physical access to your device for some period of time, but no security is absolute.
If your children fly through Heathrow, or went through Denver airport while it was under trial there, a millimeter wave scanner already took nude pictures of your children.
Again, that's very easy to say in retrospect. I believe this is an almost identical situation: we have a very complex set of interactions from which we derive one number: "transistor switch speed". We believe we understand those relations well enough that we can derive a fastest speed any possible silicon design can give.
This speed is far more similar to the "maximum" modem speed than it is to the melting point of some substance.
Before Ungerboeck's work, information theory seemed very clear about the fastest possible rate at which data could be reliably sent on the frequencies that would "stay on the wire" without bandwidth bleedover. Ungerboeck just demonstrated that there were artificial assumptions underlying the information coding theory on which that speed was based.
You're looking at documentation after-the-fact on modem speeds, which rightly enough talks about revolutions in theory. From the point of view of people before the revolution in the theory, you talk about physical limits. All limits we calculate are by definition theoretical limits, though.
To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: When a scientist or engineer states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I think you're just too young to have seen the whole chain of "limits" on modem speeds. For a long time we were told that 9600 baud was the absolute maximum speed, limited by the fundamental physics of modem technology over phone wire.
Regarding your "just need seawater" comment - it looks as if this experiment will use tritium for the version that's expected to achieve fusion.
You can get tritium from seawater, but it's fantastically expensive.
That is not to denigrate this result. It's still very exciting, and might even be cost effective, but tritium is so expensive that a few grams per day might cost too much to make a fusion plant make sense.
(From a cursory web search it looks as if a gram of tritium costs on the order of $100,000 US.)
We've already started working on the next version of the internet: * making server based applications (like email and web apps) serverless (and free to host) * making storage more accessible from anywhere * making network apps scalable by default * providing single sign-on across the whole net * providing infrastructure to authenticate all messages
Read more at http://persistnet.pbworks.com/. Unfortunately a significant amount of the work is still in our staging area being prepped to be made public.
How so? Every line of code in the simulation is different from the bits it represents in the original. As long as I can ask it "what's happening in this part of the universe" for any part of the universe, and have it churn to figure out what happens (happened) next, it's a simulation.
That's like saying if I figure out how to simulate electric force and it requires an if-then, it's not really a simulation.
I agree; it is not an analogy. It does demonstrate that your high level, hand-waving, english text argument that "obviously, it can't include itself, that's a feedback loop" proves nothing.
One could make the same high level english argument that obviously arithmetic is a complete, non-contradictory mathematical system, but Goedel's meticulous proof of the opposite trumps.
I still think I can make a program that includes a simulation of itself. When the program was asked for information about the sim-within-a-sim, it would just retrieve the equivalent data from the top level sim.
Dammit! I hate that the only way to make one post "no karma bonus" is to change my permanent preferences. I keep forgetting to turn it off afterwards, and it's a pain in the ass to do so, besides.
It looks to me as if Wolpert's "Physical limits of inference" paper asserts that we cannot predict the future, which is not quite the same thing.
For example, if we could simulate the evolution of the whole wave function of the universe (but not which "branch" an observation event would select), then we could simulate all possible futures, but not which one we would end up in. The future we end up in would be part of the simulation, though.
Please correct me if my cursory glance at the paper left me with the wrong understanding of its point.
I can write a program that prints itself. I can write program A that prints itself, plus does other stuff. The program it prints (B) can also print itself, plus do other stuff (since B is the same as A). The program contains the code to print itself, plus the code to do other stuff, with no problem.
Simulating the universe from within itself is quite possible. Obviously, some bits within the simulation represent more than the same number of bits in the real universe, but fortunately, lossless compression is possible.
It's not ambiguous; as literally written it's just wrong (the pi belongs in the denominator, but as written it effectively is in the numerator).
However, I assume that humans have brains enough to see what I mean w/o me parenthesizing.
And, of course, to be really accurate I'd be talking about quantum operators and commutativity rather than toy heisenberg uncertainty equations, but none of that really helps make the point:-)
True, but that doesn't help illuminate my point: heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies, but generates a much smaller minimum uncertainty in velocity and position for more massive objects than it does for e.g. an electron.
But it's about *momentum* versus position. The more mass something has, the smaller the minimum product of the uncertainty in the *velocity* & position.
h >= dp * dx / 2 * pi
where dp is uncertainty in momentum; momentum is mass times velocity.
But I write software, and I stay employed all the time, despite my unwillingness to work over 40 hours per week, and despite my insistence on a healthy six figure salary. I have done this for 16 years.
That was the point of the 'self-replicating' bit. It would only take one civilization, and at most a few million years to cover an globe hundreds of thousands of light years across. They don't have to invest resources commensurate with the return - they just have to invest enough resources to build one self-replicating unit, then let it use the resources of other stellar systems to create the rest.
Note that there are BILLIONS of years available for intelligent life to start - after all, if the universe has been compatible with the creation of intelligent life for 10 billion years, 10% of intelligent civilizations should have come about in the first billion years, giving them 9 billion to do this.
When I was in grade school, "climate science" was all about how we were about to have another ice age.
Either you or your grade school teacher failed to understand what climate science was teaching. Glacials (commonly referred to as ice ages), are the periods of glacial advance during an ice age, and were expected to occur about once every 10,000 years. It has been more than 10,000 years since the last glacial, but when you're talking about those time scales, that wouldn't in the least indicate that a glacial is imminent. (In fact, now they believe a length of ~28,000 years would be more likely for the current interglacial, but that's ignoring human influence on the climate.)
You can't use your 4th grade understanding of science being taught by a non-scientist of average intelligence as a basis to declare all of climate science hokum.
I am on the fence about global warming. On the one hand, I know it is true that humans are both increasing the amount of carbon dioxide to multiple times what it is w/o human influence. I also know that we are cutting down vast swaths of jungle, and that agriculture has been eliminating trees for many thousands of years. (And incidentally causing the topsoil to wash away en masse into the ocean.)
On the other hand, I just don't think we can accurately enough measure a 0.3 degree jump in temperature every decade for the last few decades well enough to assert that it's not experimental error. I also know that the climate is a chaotic system (a system with non-linear feedback).
I know that in 60 years, things that look impossible now will be trivial. I suspect that applies to CO2, H2O and NO2 clean-up, but I'd sure hate to be wrong.
I do think the risk, and the obvious likelihood of global warming from a massive increase in greenhouse gasses simultaneous with destruction of the natural mechanism for eliminating those gasses, is far too great to ignore.
My position on global warming is that when people argue that it's going to cut into their first-world lifestyle or profit margin to fight global warming, they deserve a big "fuck you". When people (e.g. people in the third world) are going to die from being forced to spend resources/limit options fighting global warming, I think the needs of the people dying now have to be put above the needs of people who hypothetically might die in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget about the CO2. What about the fact that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste?
I think the whole thing has become so politicized that an honest viewpoint from either side is rare. The global warming believers think it's such a big impact if it's true that they feel they can't honestly present counter-evidence, and the unbelievers think the cost is so high that it can't be paid without incontrovertible evidence.
Unfortunately, climate science doesn't have a great record (the planetary ecosystem and climate are pretty goddam complicated). At the same time, we will never have evidence that the average idiot will understand and accept for anything as complex as a checking account.
Most people, myself included, have no real basis on which to make a decision, so we pick the side with the people we trust.
Personally, I trust scientists much more than businessmen. Good scientists are trained to be brutally honest with themselves, and to use methods that expose rather than hide flaws in their own reasoning.
Businessmen are trained to be confident in their abilities and conclusions regardless of reality.
This means that when businessmen look at the objective opinions of good scientists, with their "given this" and "see chart X for exceptions", they blow them off. Then they spend millions pointing out how the scientists can't even make up their mind.
For me, it's an easy choice. That doesn't mean that I am immune to arguments either way, just that I tend to listen with my own slant, and I recognize it.
I personally wish we would just give respected climate scientists some money and some peace for a couple of years to fight it out among themselves without worrying about the viewpoint of uninformed idiots, but I know it's not going to happen.
We need cell phones to have a hard switch that changes them between normal "powerful" mode and a limited secure mode.
Then you could do simple things like authentication and digital signatures in secure mode (e.g. transferring money), and do everything else in the normal mode.
Without something physical that can't be overridden with software, there is no way to be sure secure is really secure.
Of course, something physical is still vulnerable if someone gets physical access to your device for some period of time, but no security is absolute.
If your children fly through Heathrow, or went through Denver airport while it was under trial there, a millimeter wave scanner already took nude pictures of your children.
Did you read the link? The 9.6kbaud barrier was fundamentally different than the kind of signal noise, loss introduced issues you're talking about.
Again, that's very easy to say in retrospect. I believe this is an almost identical situation: we have a very complex set of interactions from which we derive one number: "transistor switch speed". We believe we understand those relations well enough that we can derive a fastest speed any possible silicon design can give.
This speed is far more similar to the "maximum" modem speed than it is to the melting point of some substance.
Before Ungerboeck's work, information theory seemed very clear about the fastest possible rate at which data could be reliably sent on the frequencies that would "stay on the wire" without bandwidth bleedover. Ungerboeck just demonstrated that there were artificial assumptions underlying the information coding theory on which that speed was based.
You're looking at documentation after-the-fact on modem speeds, which rightly enough talks about revolutions in theory. From the point of view of people before the revolution in the theory, you talk about physical limits. All limits we calculate are by definition theoretical limits, though.
To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: When a scientist or engineer states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I think you're just too young to have seen the whole chain of "limits" on modem speeds. For a long time we were told that 9600 baud was the absolute maximum speed, limited by the fundamental physics of modem technology over phone wire.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Breaking_the_9.6k_barrier
Regarding your "just need seawater" comment - it looks as if this experiment will use tritium for the version that's expected to achieve fusion.
You can get tritium from seawater, but it's fantastically expensive.
That is not to denigrate this result. It's still very exciting, and might even be cost effective, but tritium is so expensive that a few grams per day might cost too much to make a fusion plant make sense.
(From a cursory web search it looks as if a gram of tritium costs on the order of $100,000 US.)
We've already started working on the next version of the internet:
* making server based applications (like email and web apps) serverless (and free to host)
* making storage more accessible from anywhere
* making network apps scalable by default
* providing single sign-on across the whole net
* providing infrastructure to authenticate all messages
Read more at http://persistnet.pbworks.com/. Unfortunately a significant amount of the work is still in our staging area being prepped to be made public.
How so? Every line of code in the simulation is different from the bits it represents in the original. As long as I can ask it "what's happening in this part of the universe" for any part of the universe, and have it churn to figure out what happens (happened) next, it's a simulation.
That's like saying if I figure out how to simulate electric force and it requires an if-then, it's not really a simulation.
I agree; it is not an analogy. It does demonstrate that your high level, hand-waving, english text argument that "obviously, it can't include itself, that's a feedback loop" proves nothing.
One could make the same high level english argument that obviously arithmetic is a complete, non-contradictory mathematical system, but Goedel's meticulous proof of the opposite trumps.
I still think I can make a program that includes a simulation of itself. When the program was asked for information about the sim-within-a-sim, it would just retrieve the equivalent data from the top level sim.
Actually, that might be a fun project...
Dammit! I hate that the only way to make one post "no karma bonus" is to change my permanent preferences. I keep forgetting to turn it off afterwards, and it's a pain in the ass to do so, besides.
It looks to me as if Wolpert's "Physical limits of inference" paper asserts that we cannot predict the future, which is not quite the same thing.
For example, if we could simulate the evolution of the whole wave function of the universe (but not which "branch" an observation event would select), then we could simulate all possible futures, but not which one we would end up in. The future we end up in would be part of the simulation, though.
Please correct me if my cursory glance at the paper left me with the wrong understanding of its point.
I can write a program that prints itself. I can write program A that prints itself, plus does other stuff. The program it prints (B) can also print itself, plus do other stuff (since B is the same as A). The program contains the code to print itself, plus the code to do other stuff, with no problem.
Simulating the universe from within itself is quite possible. Obviously, some bits within the simulation represent more than the same number of bits in the real universe, but fortunately, lossless compression is possible.
Math nit-pick:
If the *median* programmer starts at $60k, then half of them make less than that.
If the *average* programmer starting salary is $60k, it could mean almost all of them make $65k and some tiny fraction make $10k, for example.
It's not ambiguous; as literally written it's just wrong (the pi belongs in the denominator, but as written it effectively is in the numerator).
However, I assume that humans have brains enough to see what I mean w/o me parenthesizing.
And, of course, to be really accurate I'd be talking about quantum operators and commutativity rather than toy heisenberg uncertainty equations, but none of that really helps make the point :-)
True, but that doesn't help illuminate my point: heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies, but generates a much smaller minimum uncertainty in velocity and position for more massive objects than it does for e.g. an electron.
Ack!! Thank you!
h <= dp * dx / 2 * pi
is of course the correct equation. Note that the text was correct; I just fat-fingered the inequality.
But it's about *momentum* versus position. The more mass something has, the smaller the minimum product of the uncertainty in the *velocity* & position.
h >= dp * dx / 2 * pi
where dp is uncertainty in momentum; momentum is mass times velocity.
To me, unix (or GNU/Linux) and a functional command line are much less work than Windows and the mouse.
But I write software, and I stay employed all the time, despite my unwillingness to work over 40 hours per week, and despite my insistence on a healthy six figure salary. I have done this for 16 years.
That was the point of the 'self-replicating' bit. It would only take one civilization, and at most a few million years to cover an globe hundreds of thousands of light years across. They don't have to invest resources commensurate with the return - they just have to invest enough resources to build one self-replicating unit, then let it use the resources of other stellar systems to create the rest.
Note that there are BILLIONS of years available for intelligent life to start - after all, if the universe has been compatible with the creation of intelligent life for 10 billion years, 10% of intelligent civilizations should have come about in the first billion years, giving them 9 billion to do this.
When I was in grade school, "climate science" was all about how we were about to have another ice age.
Either you or your grade school teacher failed to understand what climate science was teaching. Glacials (commonly referred to as ice ages), are the periods of glacial advance during an ice age, and were expected to occur about once every 10,000 years. It has been more than 10,000 years since the last glacial, but when you're talking about those time scales, that wouldn't in the least indicate that a glacial is imminent. (In fact, now they believe a length of ~28,000 years would be more likely for the current interglacial, but that's ignoring human influence on the climate.)
You can't use your 4th grade understanding of science being taught by a non-scientist of average intelligence as a basis to declare all of climate science hokum.
I am on the fence about global warming. On the one hand, I know it is true that humans are both increasing the amount of carbon dioxide to multiple times what it is w/o human influence. I also know that we are cutting down vast swaths of jungle, and that agriculture has been eliminating trees for many thousands of years. (And incidentally causing the topsoil to wash away en masse into the ocean.)
On the other hand, I just don't think we can accurately enough measure a 0.3 degree jump in temperature every decade for the last few decades well enough to assert that it's not experimental error. I also know that the climate is a chaotic system (a system with non-linear feedback).
I know that in 60 years, things that look impossible now will be trivial. I suspect that applies to CO2, H2O and NO2 clean-up, but I'd sure hate to be wrong.
I do think the risk, and the obvious likelihood of global warming from a massive increase in greenhouse gasses simultaneous with destruction of the natural mechanism for eliminating those gasses, is far too great to ignore.
My position on global warming is that when people argue that it's going to cut into their first-world lifestyle or profit margin to fight global warming, they deserve a big "fuck you". When people (e.g. people in the third world) are going to die from being forced to spend resources/limit options fighting global warming, I think the needs of the people dying now have to be put above the needs of people who hypothetically might die in the future.
Hrm, I actually did say <nt/> in the title of the original message, but I used real angle brackets instead of xml encoded ones :-(
I said, "nt".