But is much code really "brilliant"? I accept that certain algorithms and ideas in computer science are brilliant (Djikstra's algorithm, quicksort, realtime collision detection), possibly also some ideas in software engineering and design, but code is usually just a set of logical steps in some programming language. It's easy for it to get complicated, but I think it's rarely brilliant, especially if the domain of the code is something prosaic like a desktop application or a database or networking. As many people here are saying, when it comes to code what *is* brilliant is figuring out how to avoid complexity in the first place.
What are you talking about, exactly? I've seen both, and they're completely dissimilar. Not least because Northfork was unbelievably slow and visually drab. I like quirky art-house movies, but Northfork was just rubbish.
Could you elaborate on exactly what it was that changed your mind? Were you one the of the camp that accepts "microevolution" but posits some magical barrier to species level "macroevolution" (the barrier being "irreducible complexity" perhaps)? Was there an 'aha' moment or was it a gradual accumulation of information that lead you to reject creationism? Was your error a logical fallacy or a lack of knowledge? It'd be interesting to find out what the process was, since this might shed some light on how to enlighten the intelligent but as-yet-unconverted creationists out there.
No, Lamarckism is quite different to what he described, being the idea that characteristics acquired during the lifespan of an organism are passed onto its offspring. The usual example is the giraffe's neck elongating due to each generation stretching the neck muscles a little bit more. The Darwinian explanation is that each generation has a random sample of newborns, some with longer and some with shorter necks, and the ones with longer necks are more likely to survive, leading over time to a population with very long necks.
Is this April Fools even technically plausible? I thought shaders were programs written by users to alter geometry/fragment processing. So there is no "vertex shader" on the card.
I tend to think the problem is that to make something really new and interesting, it is generally technically very difficult. If it wasn't, it would have already been done. Google's stuff is cool and interesting because they are tremendously smart and have excellent engineers. You won't get significant results out of "messing up" or goofing off or whatever you want to call it. You'll get something that might be a passable if somewhat mediocre modern art exhibit. But apparently you can also get pretty good press, as evidenced by this Slashdot article, which is presumably what keeps the lab going.
evolution does have some merits, though basically the only proof that you can give for it is that it's so 'obvious' (and I find it sad that people just accept it's true because it just feels like it should work, rather than thinking about the individual little changes that would have to occur, and wondering how that is actually going to cause a new species, rather than just a more specialised version within the same species)
It's not necessarily obvious, but the only mechanism you need for evolution to occur is for small heritable variations to occur at some rate, some fraction of which are slightly (even infinitesimally) beneficial given the animal's environment (in the sense that they increase, even infinitesimally, the probability of the animal passing on its genes, after all effects of the variation are taken into account). It's not hard to see that if this occurs, the frequency of the beneficial genes will increase with time, leading to adaptation to the environment. It's also not hard to see that this mechanism certainly exists in nature, as we know from genetics.
I just think the fundamental "aha" moment of evolutionary theory is realizing that this leads inevitably to adaptation over time, to an arbitrary extent. There is no problem with new species arising, this happens when the some subgroup evolves its reproductive machinery to such an extent that it can no longer mate with other groups in the population. (Reading Dawkins is possibly the best way to initiate the "aha" moment if you haven't already experienced it).
I think the creationists are either too confused or lacking in logical faculties to grasp the basic mechanism, or in some kind of denial like the ID people where they postulate imagined barriers like irreducible complexity.
Actually I see this as a very natural pairing, the Media Lab with the Fashion industry. They both typify obsession with surface over substance, and a disregard for common sense.
On the contrary, most scientists would say that the empirical observation of the light bending is the actual discovery (e.g. Eddington's observations of the deflection of light during a solar eclipse) and the theoretical work beforehand is just hypothesis.
I tried to understand their paper, and I must say it's exceedingly hard to understand exactly what they did. I suppose this is often the case with PRLs (due to 4 page limit), but this one seemed particularly opaque and unimpressive. If I was going to write a paper I'd want to make it crystal clear, spell everything out (you can call me on that at the arxiv).
e.g. in the paper there is a quantity Z that is introduced first without definition, then a page later defined in terms of some vectors which are never defined. I guess you have to read their (unpublished) reference, but ugh. And the "geometry of the manifold"? What manifold? Wha? Are you a statistician or a wannabe-differential geometer?
Often it seems academics delight in trying to impress their peers with their terrible sophistication for some reason, to the point where it's really unnecessarily tough to understand something (and the high-falutin ideas in these papers usually turn out to be pretty simple and obvious or otherwise wrong, in my experience). Good job getting this one published indeed.
this certainly is evidence that Archeaopterx shared a common ancestor with therapods
But every organism that ever lived shares *some* common ancestor with every other organism, if evolution is correct. Don't you mean Archeaopterix evolved from therapods?
I think there might be some political problem with killing chimps for organs... but why am i bothering, you already amply proved you're an almighty know-nothing
We didn't mutate from modern apes, we just have a common ancestor with them. That common ancestor mutated (evolved) into both humans and modern apes. And we also have a common ancestor with modern fish, and modern plants. It's a tree of life, it's beautiful. Peace.
Name a few of these things that rats and humans have in common that are not generally found in other organisms. Let us see if they are as specific as "Hingelike ankle joint, with movement mostly restricted to the fore-aft plane".
I'm sure physicists consider "causation" exactly as much as they need to. Experiments in physics frequently have controls, however often in physics you have such control over the experimental situation that you can determine what is happening directly. In such cases, there is no sloppiness. I guess you don't mean they are behaving in a less than perfect manner, you are just talking about a difference between the kinds of things physics and biology are dealing with. (If not, perhaps you can point to a case where the alleged sloppiness led to a mistake).
Time travel is purely theoretical. In that case, physicists worry about causality violation, which doesn't have anything to do with the scientific method as such, and I guess is not what we're talking about here.
biologists are sticklers for making sure statements about causation are correct in their papers (physicists, in contrast, are often quite sloppy about causation).
Are you referring to papers on time travel or something? I don't see how physicists are "sloppy about causation" anywhere else.
In the case of the arxiv, it seems that it is not really a replacement for a print journal. People publish preprints, or copies of the content of their already published article, but they need to publish it in a real paper journal, because
a) It needs to be in a refereed journal to count as a proper scientific publication. People will only really pay attention once it gets past referees.
b) Journals typeset papers to look much nicer than they do on the arxiv Most scientists aren't fantastic at figuring out to arrange their stuff on the page, typeset their equations, caption their figures etc. and journals have professionals to do that.
I suspect these nice features cost money, which comes off of subscriptions.
Slashdot Mirror
But is much code really "brilliant"? I accept that certain algorithms and ideas in computer science are brilliant (Djikstra's algorithm, quicksort, realtime collision detection), possibly also some ideas in software engineering and design, but code is usually just a set of logical steps in some programming language. It's easy for it to get complicated, but I think it's rarely brilliant, especially if the domain of the code is something prosaic like a desktop application or a database or networking. As many people here are saying, when it comes to code what *is* brilliant is figuring out how to avoid complexity in the first place.
Is that some kind of cheesy Americanism? Sounds like oral sex.
What are you talking about, exactly? I've seen both, and they're completely dissimilar. Not least because Northfork was unbelievably slow and visually drab. I like quirky art-house movies, but Northfork was just rubbish.
Could you elaborate on exactly what it was that changed your mind? Were you one the of the camp that accepts "microevolution" but posits some magical barrier to species level "macroevolution" (the barrier being "irreducible complexity" perhaps)? Was there an 'aha' moment or was it a gradual accumulation of information that lead you to reject creationism? Was your error a logical fallacy or a lack of knowledge? It'd be interesting to find out what the process was, since this might shed some light on how to enlighten the intelligent but as-yet-unconverted creationists out there.
No, Lamarckism is quite different to what he described, being the idea that characteristics acquired during the lifespan of an organism are passed onto its offspring. The usual example is the giraffe's neck elongating due to each generation stretching the neck muscles a little bit more. The Darwinian explanation is that each generation has a random sample of newborns, some with longer and some with shorter necks, and the ones with longer necks are more likely to survive, leading over time to a population with very long necks.
Is this April Fools even technically plausible? I thought shaders were programs written by users to alter geometry/fragment processing. So there is no "vertex shader" on the card.
I tend to think the problem is that to make something really new and interesting, it is generally technically very difficult. If it wasn't, it would have already been done. Google's stuff is cool and interesting because they are tremendously smart and have excellent engineers. You won't get significant results out of "messing up" or goofing off or whatever you want to call it. You'll get something that might be a passable if somewhat mediocre modern art exhibit. But apparently you can also get pretty good press, as evidenced by this Slashdot article, which is presumably what keeps the lab going.
loved your work on Minix, darling.
uh, nobody really cares about the Media Lab's shit. It's what's known as hype.
evolution does have some merits, though basically the only proof that you can give for it is that it's so 'obvious' (and I find it sad that people just accept it's true because it just feels like it should work, rather than thinking about the individual little changes that would have to occur, and wondering how that is actually going to cause a new species, rather than just a more specialised version within the same species)
It's not necessarily obvious, but the only mechanism you need for evolution to occur is for small heritable variations to occur at some rate, some fraction of which are slightly (even infinitesimally) beneficial given the animal's environment (in the sense that they increase, even infinitesimally, the probability of the animal passing on its genes, after all effects of the variation are taken into account). It's not hard to see that if this occurs, the frequency of the beneficial genes will increase with time, leading to adaptation to the environment. It's also not hard to see that this mechanism certainly exists in nature, as we know from genetics.
I just think the fundamental "aha" moment of evolutionary theory is realizing that this leads inevitably to adaptation over time, to an arbitrary extent. There is no problem with new species arising, this happens when the some subgroup evolves its reproductive machinery to such an extent that it can no longer mate with other groups in the population. (Reading Dawkins is possibly the best way to initiate the "aha" moment if you haven't already experienced it).
I think the creationists are either too confused or lacking in logical faculties to grasp the basic mechanism, or in some kind of denial like the ID people where they postulate imagined barriers like irreducible complexity.
I afraid I thought Heavenly Creatures was shit. The girls were just unbelievably annoying and acted in such a fake way, I couldn't stand it.
Actually I see this as a very natural pairing, the Media Lab with the Fashion industry. They both typify obsession with surface over substance, and a disregard for common sense.
On the contrary, most scientists would say that the empirical observation of the light bending is the actual discovery (e.g. Eddington's observations of the deflection of light during a solar eclipse) and the theoretical work beforehand is just hypothesis.
Emacs works quite nicely on OS X too you know...
I tried to understand their paper, and I must say it's exceedingly hard to understand exactly what they did. I suppose this is often the case with PRLs (due to 4 page limit), but this one seemed particularly opaque and unimpressive. If I was going to write a paper I'd want to make it crystal clear, spell everything out (you can call me on that at the arxiv).
e.g. in the paper there is a quantity Z that is introduced first without definition, then a page later defined in terms of some vectors which are never defined. I guess you have to read their (unpublished) reference, but ugh. And the "geometry of the manifold"? What manifold? Wha? Are you a statistician or a wannabe-differential geometer?
Often it seems academics delight in trying to impress their peers with their terrible sophistication for some reason, to the point where it's really unnecessarily tough to understand something (and the high-falutin ideas in these papers usually turn out to be pretty simple and obvious or otherwise wrong, in my experience). Good job getting this one published indeed.
Well done for coming up with the 3^3 example. Nice
this certainly is evidence that Archeaopterx shared a common ancestor with therapods
But every organism that ever lived shares *some* common ancestor with every other organism, if evolution is correct. Don't you mean Archeaopterix evolved from therapods?
I think there might be some political problem with killing chimps for organs... but why am i bothering, you already amply proved you're an almighty know-nothing
We didn't mutate from modern apes, we just have a common ancestor with them. That common ancestor mutated (evolved) into both humans and modern apes. And we also have a common ancestor with modern fish, and modern plants. It's a tree of life, it's beautiful. Peace.
And you're saying that pigs have more in common with humans than say chimpanzees? Uh, no.
Name a few of these things that rats and humans have in common that are not generally found in other organisms.
Let us see if they are as specific as "Hingelike ankle joint, with movement mostly restricted to the fore-aft plane".
I'm sure physicists consider "causation" exactly as much as they need to. Experiments in physics frequently have controls, however often in physics you have such control over the experimental situation that you can determine what is happening directly. In such cases, there is no sloppiness. I guess you don't mean they are behaving in a less than perfect manner, you are just talking about a difference between the kinds of things physics and biology are dealing with. (If not, perhaps you can point to a case where the alleged sloppiness led to a mistake).
Time travel is purely theoretical. In that case, physicists worry about causality violation, which doesn't have anything to do with the scientific method as such, and I guess is not what we're talking about here.
biologists are sticklers for making sure statements about causation are correct in their papers (physicists, in contrast, are often quite sloppy about causation).
Are you referring to papers on time travel or something? I don't see how physicists are "sloppy about causation" anywhere else.
In the case of the arxiv, it seems that it is not really a replacement for a print journal.
People publish preprints, or copies of the content of their already published article, but they
need to publish it in a real paper journal, because
a) It needs to be in a refereed journal to count as a proper scientific publication.
People will only really pay attention once it gets past referees.
b) Journals typeset papers to look much nicer than they do on the arxiv
Most scientists aren't fantastic at figuring out to arrange their stuff on the page,
typeset their equations, caption their figures etc. and journals have professionals to
do that.
I suspect these nice features cost money, which comes off of subscriptions.
you want a glossy screen? Are you a masochist?