Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004[citation needed], refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.
The problem is that quite a few people were doing this long before "Web 1.0" came along. Once Web 1.0 came along, it was almost immediately picked up as the medium of choice for most people building this kind of application.
When exactly was that? I did a look around at some of the the developments in social computing, online community, and interactivity kicked around as characteristic of "Web 2.0" and I'm seeing things that came into existence in the infantcy of the WWW. WikiWikiWeb? 1994. eBay? 1995. Flickr and YouTube? Binary exchanges going back to usenet. CSCL/W software that could handle multimedia and document attachments predates the web.
The fact of the matter is that social networked computing has over a decade of history before the the WWW came into existence. People were designing and building web-based online social networks and communities starting with the development of CGI. If there was a mythical time when the web was "just like gopher" it was over and gone quickly.
Observations of the universe are more uncertain. Perhaps the researcher made a mistake (not saying they did) or engaged in fraud (not saying they did). The identification of this particular object as a MECO is one interpretation of telescopic evidence. Perhaps there are mechanisms compatible with black holes that explain the observed phenomena? Perhaps not. This is why theories don't live or die on single observations.
The foundation of the technology singularity, as I always understood it, is that new technology (not necessarily AI) increases the pace of further technologic development, until development accelerates to infinity.
And from a systems point of view, profound skepticism about anything that "accelerates to infinity" is well warranted. Almost always, some other process kicks in to put on the breaks. For example, in ecology, such run-away processes quickly smack into a constraint of limited resources, or hit a wall regarding some fundamental time-limiting process that can't be easily worked around.
So for some potential factors: 1: where will the resources for this runaway innovation come from? 2: adoption of technology actually tends to put the breaks on innovation because you create a demand for backwards compatibility. 3: technology on its own is about as useful as a bump on a log, and so far there is little evidence that human social systems in which technology must live are changing as rapidly.
Is this really a new issue? Winsor McCay was doing animated movies without human models or voice talent in the 1920s. Human voice actors and performance models have never been needed for great animation; but many animators have found voice actors and performance models to be very effective. What is The Grinch without Boris Karlof or the Warner stable of characters without Mel Blanc?
And there is an entirely different direction that filmmakers can go that started with Tron and was used extensively in Lord of the Rings and Mirrormask. In addition to CGI characters built on human motion-capture, you can build the CGI setting around the human performances. Then, you don't have to worry so much about the complex optics of skin tone, or the physics of hair and clothing.
Actors are also necessary for commercial success. Silent films or films with minimal dialog are automatically doomed to be "art films."
I use desktop search on a daily basis, but I don't think its going to replace the container metaphor any time soon. Just as an example, you copy a version of a file to a network or usb "drive" for work on a different computer. You fire-up your search engine (Google, Copernic, Glimpse, Beagle, Spotlight) and get multiple hits. Which one do you want? How do you tell?
Advocates of abandoning containers neglect to note that with the exception of the device name, file paths are just metadata, with the last few elements often related to topic an task. Perhaps more importantly, they provide ways to manipulate groups of related itmes.
Mostly what I'm reacting to is the concept of x-men style views of evolution where once in a blue moon, some magical event happens and you have a mutation that provides that organism with a relatively super-power (at least compared to other members of its species.)
Quantitative genetics focuses on the distribution of phenotypes among a population. In any population of bears that has not been severely bottlenecked, you will have a range of hair color due to multiple genes acting together along with environmental inputs. If one end of the range experiences higher mortality than the other end of the range, the mean for that will drift one way or the other.
The *sensation* they have is "real", not to sound like Morpheus: feels like bugs in skin. The sensation goes away quickly when Pimozide is prescribed.
That's interesting. I had that experience one time during a really bad round of depression. Thankfully, I'm skeptical enough to realize that those bugs were psychosomatic, but they still were irritating. I've had friends also experience the crawling bugs under the skin due to changes in anti-depressant doses.
Even knowing that it's an illusion, the effect is still creepy as heck.
While the lack of transitional fossils is a mild gap in the theory of evolution. But it highlights a few misconceptions about evolution as a theory.
1: The core of evolution is not about which species begat another species, but about collections of species as cousins and siblings. We have a family tree of tens of thousands of species catalogued and identified. We can sort these species into groups by morphology, physiology, and similarities in DNA. And what we get is a pattern that looks a heck of a lot like descent with modification.
2: Transitional fossils really are not that important to evolutionary biology. Why? Because there is abundant evidence for evolution, using multiple chains of evidence that evolution is a slam-dunk in science. No one has ever directly observed the Milky Way galaxy, and yet, the Milky Way galaxy is not a controversial theory. No one has directly observed the Big Bang, but we have multiple chains of evidence that it happened. No one has directly observed the effects of Special Relativity, but we have multiple chains of evidence that they exist. The evidence for evolution as the dominant mechanism for biodiversity is as strong, if not stronger, than the Milky Way, the Big Bang, and Special Relativity.
Re:Evolution isn't just adapting to environment
on
Is Evolution Predictable?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Now that leads to the question "What really causes DNA mutations?"
Chances are it could be do to higher radiation events during magnetic pole reversals or gamma ray bursts where the radiation is so high that many species die of cancer and health problems, but those who do survive have random mutations. After that... Any mutation that doesn't kill the species off due to environmental factors passes those genes on.
Not bad up until this point.
For one thing, most evolution has less to do with mutations, and more to do with subtle variations between members of a species. So with the case of fur color in mammals, you have multiple genes that contribute to the quantity of melanin in hair. Individuals with combinations ideally suited to the environment are more successful than others.
Secondly, we know many of the actions for how mutations happen at the biochemical level. Most mutations occur because of errors in DNA replication and repair. Another class of mutations occurs because DNA can fold back on its self under certain conditions, or become attached to other strands. These mutations occur all the time and with a frequency stable enough that we can use them as timers to estimate the geologic time that has elapsed since Kodiak bears and Polar bears shared a common ancestor.
Abiogenesis and the formation of the earliest RNA/DNA molecules is largely outside of the domain of evolution. Evolution describes changes in biodiversity among a group of living organisms in an environment. How those organisms got here, (panspermia vs. hot springs vs. mud) is a question for biochemistry.
Make your own opinions. Mine is that he's a poor troll. Okay, so he correctly predicted that Apple would move to Intel. But if you fire enough shots and make enough random predictions, you're eventually going to get one on the bullseye.
And personally, I don't think the Intel move was that obscure given the direction of mobile CPUs over the last few years.
Yes, to one, no to the other. I'm admittedly overgeneralizing a bit here. But saying that the normal tools of drama an myth are distinct is to my mind certainly not a false dichotomy. They are distinct as oil and water. Combining them is not impossible, it's more like... uh... making mayonaise. There's an art to it. C.S Lewis, for example, combines symbolism and psychological insight, although I'm not sure he'd consider the latter a compliment.
What is impossible (in my opinion) is to alter the balance of the elements of fantasy and mimesis in a work without fundamentally altering it. You could not adapt the fairy tale "The Glass Coffin" for stage, because it is practically pure symbolism.
To me it seems like you are confusing message "myth" with the medium "drama." In fact, quite a bit of drama throughout history has been almost purely mythological. Take for example mummer's plays which come in some variations including:
* The hero combat play consisting of a hero, an antagonist, and a doctor.
* The fool play consisting of a fool, molly, the dancers, and a doctor.
The interesting thing about mummer's plays is that the hero and antagonist can be any hero and antagonist: St. George vs. The Moor is common, but you can also have Robin Hood vs. Galatians, or Alexander the Great vs. the King of Egypt. They meet, they fight, one dies, the quack doctor comes in to raise the dead, and they exit with a dance.
I don't see why "The Glass Coffin" is that much more difficult than "Swan Lake" (to pick a similar story with a very popular dramatic adaptation.)
As other examples of mythological drama, how about playing Santa and Kachina dancers? Or for that matter, "professional wrestling" which attempts to frame each matchup as a battle of good vs. evil? I think that if you look over multiple cultures and the vast timespan of history, the psychological drama is relatively recent and limited compared to mythic and ritual drama. Of course, most attempts to present mythic and ritual drama get criticized as simplistic and naive these days.
Arguably the weakest parts of the movie version stem from this problem. For example, the movie script tries to give Faramir something indicative of an interior life: he must change his mind. In dramatic terms this is sometimes cited as being "more interesting", but really I think the issue might as well have been practical. Tolkien assiduously provides us with parallel iconic examples (Theoden/Denethor, Faramir/Boromir, Frodo/Gollum) representing the consequences of choices and character. But this takes space. Drama for reasons of economy has to collapse as much as it can into fewer characters, which in turn demands that characters evolve.
Indeed, change is the very essence of drama, and timelessness the essence of myth.
To me it seems that you are sweeping with a fairly broad brush here, and presenting a bit of a false dichotomy. Much of the LOTR and The Hobbit include stretches of character development and change. The climax of The Hobbit is not the confrontation with Smaug, but with Bilbo's confrontation with the same dwarves who spent chapter one pushing him around to comic effect.
Likewise, quite a bit of drama focuses on iconic characters and timeless mythology. In fact, drama originated as a sacred performance of iconic mythological stories, a role that has persisted in a variety of forms including passion plays, pageants, mummers, and mythological operas. Of course modern theatre has become increasingly concerned with internal states of mind. But then again, so has most form of art in the modern era.
I read e-texts all the time and I think most people participating in this discussion do as well. Some of my examples are the Common Lisp Hyperspec, and Python and emacs documentation. I rarely buy a print manual for a software package if the e-text documentation is sufficient. Just about every bit of documentation that I use for research is in some searchable digitial form.
On the other hand, there are other genres where I prefer print texts. With a library card, I have access to more than a quarter-million texts on a wide variety of subjects. I don't have to worry about contrast or battery capacity with a paperback. Although I probably shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, the art and typographic design are important aesthetic values for printed text. When I work 8-14 hour days in front of a screen, print provides me with a nice break.
IMNSHO, treating e-text as just a new medium for the novel or the short story collection shows a profound lack of artistic creativity. The novel owes its existence to the printing press. It didn't take long for artists to realize that the photograph was unique compared to the painting, woodcut, etching, lithograph and pencil drawing. Cinema quickly established that it was a different form of performance than the stage play. And radio and audio-recording involved changes in vocal and instrumental style as various forms of electric amplification and effects became available.
DHS was a consolidation of a wide variety of agencies including Immigration, Coast Guard, FEMA and Treasury. I suspect that DHS inhereted some jurisdictional mandates regarding bank fraud and money laundering from Treasury.
My understanding of this case is that banks are obligated to report transactions over a certain size. However, many banks have started the practice of voluntarily flagging transactions for various reasons.
Let's say you're at some event in an auditorium and some asshole pulls a knife and stabs someone in the neck and everyone runs out in a panic. So you're sitting there, holding your buddy, pressing a piece of your torn tee shirt to his jugular... you're not gonna leave him to go find a phone when you've got a perfectly good cell phone on you. oh. and oops, the guy in charge of activating/deactivating the paint is sleeping on the job. your cell is no good. hopefully someone is coming to help.
If I'm actively giving emergency first aid to someone, I'm probably not going to have a free hand to fiddle with a cell phone either. Instead, I'll just ask the equally probable monkey flying out of my butt to make the call.
The original Dark Crystal was excellent but it was a kid's movie. We liked because we were kids when we saw it. When we look at the original through adult's eyes, it won't be anywhere near as impressive, because the new Dark Crystal will also be a kids movie.
Speak for yourself. I find Dark Crystal an impressive work as an adult. I don't buy the claim that "kid's movies" or for that matter fiction written for "kids" should be automatically bad or less impressive in scope than works created for adults. Some of the best fantasy of the 20th century fits neatly on young adult bookshelves, The Hobbit, Earthsea and to a lesser extent, Narnia.
Dark Crystal is strongly impressive to me for a couple of reasons. First, it's one of the few fantasies that attempt to create an entire world in which human characters are non-existent. Second, it amazed me that Henson and Froud had the balls to produce a fantasy based on new-age conceptions of duality and schism rather than "slay the monster."
E.g. compare the box office of Harry Potter movies with Serenity. First one was unashamedly aimed at kids, second one aimed at 30 something sci fi geeks. Harry Potter makes hundreds of millions of dollars, Serenity just about broke even. If you look at the whole HP franchise - all the HP films, it will make literally billions of dollars, hundreds or thousands of times more than the Serenity franchise, because Serenity was only one film, and it's much harder to make the first film of a series than the subsequent ones.
And the sticky problem that Sorcerer's Stone was better-written, had a better cast, and ended up a considerably more entertaining afternoon than Serenity probably didn't have much to do with it. I suspect Rowling gets more adult than children's readers. And on the other side, the Disney empire distributes almost a dozen "family" movies a year, about half of which go direct to DVD/cable, and they get only one or two "hits" a year. As a few other datapoints, Hollywood gets a sci-fi blockbuster about once a year.
There is a phrase there which highlights the basic problem, "aimed at 30 something sci fi geeks." I suspect that such demographic targeting is one of the best ways to make a bad film. Pixar's success has largely been because they manage to produce G-Rated scripts that can be enjoyed by all ages.
Well, the biggest problem is that it does not open many doors for inquiry. Let's look at a much less contraversial theory: plate techtonics. Creationism doesn't provide much in the way of an explanation. Why is Mt. Everest tall? God works in mysterious ways. Why are ocean trenches deep? God works in mysterious ways. Why does Japan have volcanos? God works in mysterious ways.
Plate techtonics as a theory not only explains some if the more interesting features of the planet, but it also provides a framework for further questions. Scientists in general love unanswered questions because unanswered questions can be parlayed into grant funding.
Which BTW. The creation of the Earth has squat to do with Evolution.
I guess I'm seeing a problem that has not been adequately resolved - people do lose files on a semi-regular basis. A problem that has not been perfectly resolved is a prime place to look for and implement some new innovation... i like to flex the creative/problem-solving part of my brain once in a while, to keep it from getting too rusty.
Certainly. My suggestion is that giving up on heirarchal organization schemes is likely to fix some problems and create other problems. The predicted demise of the file heirachy is greatly exaggerated because heirarchies offer quite a bit of utility, and work well with the ways in which human beings tend to think about the world. I also don't think that seaching entirely solves the problem of "I lost that file."
Why a relational database? why to relate the data of course!:)
Which doesn't answer the question. "Relational" in "relational database" indirectly refers to data. More precisely it refers to flat tables linked by relations to other flat tables. Why the assmption that the best type of database would be built around that kind of structure? (Of course you can convert any kind of database structure into a normalized relational database, but not without some sacrifices along the way.)
I guess my point was only that just because people use the current hierarchy of folders to store their files doesn't mean it is in fact the best possible way to organise and retrieve them. Folders and Files are a virtual implementation of a physical operation: Filing cabinets filled with documents.... since when does a physical-world operation translate directly to the best virtual-world implementation?
Well, to me this is begging the question. Folders and Files are a virtual implementation of a physical operation. But filing cabinets filled with documents are a physical implementation of a cognitive operation: sorting items into types and subtypes. Other examples of this include Dante's Inferno (sorting types of sin into categories), the Dewey Decimal System (which combines hierachies with indexes), and the Linnaean Taxonomy (sorting animals and plants into multiple levels of classification.) The indexed database of "attributes" or "keywords" is also a virtual implementation of a cognitive process that was performed as a physical operation. (For examples, card catalogs, book indexes, and a thesaurus.)
So I would argue that Folders and Files are a good implementation because they are strongly analogous to the ways in which human beings think about their world. At any rate, a "Folder" is simply a collection of objects that can be manipulated (viewed, copied, transferred, archived, deleted, etc.,) as a group. That folder could be created as a heirarchal list of attributes (such as $HOME/Projects/Mushrooms/Yellowstone/) or generated as a search through an index. The point is that file paths are just one way of assigning attributes to files.
If on the other hand, at file-save- / -creation-time, multiple tags could be associated with it, and this stored in a (relational) database, then finding like-files would be a database search...much quicker.
How is this incompatible with having file paths? There are similar systems that do exactly this: beagle, spotlight, Copernic Desktop Search.
IME these full-text tagging and searching schemes are less useful than is claimed. The primary problem is that it frequently takes multiple searches to find a combination of search keywords that deliver a reasonable number of hits including the file I want.
(And why a relational database?)
These tags must be created either by the person authoring the file, or by me when I receive the file, and this is much more time-consuming than clicking Save-As and dumping it a folder...
I shouldn't think so. Whenever singularities appear in any model of the real world, it generally means a breakdown of the model. So this singularity means an acceleration of technological advance to a point where our ability to forecast breaks down and we really can't say what will happen.
There is a big reason why I wouldn't bet on a singularity hidden in this statement. It makes sweeping assumptions regarding exponential growth of one part of a system isolated from other parts of the system. After all, if exponential growth trends held true, then the total mass of all humanity should be greater than the solar system at some point in the future.
In most models of the real world systems, exponential functions don't persist indefinitely. Usually, some form of feedback kicks in. Bacteria run out of nutrients; predators adapt physically and behaviorally to the new alien species. With many prior technologies, we have analogous examples: the speed and capacity of land and air transportation, manufacturing automation.
Markets tend to have a strong moderating effect on innovations. The more widely accepted a technology is, the more it becomes a standard, the harder it is for new technologies to break into the market. Where I think that the religious believers in the singularity loose touch with reality is in thinking that technology on its own is so wonderful that it will transform markets overnight. This has not happened at any point in the past, is not happening now, so why imagine that it will happen in the future?
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is very probable wrong." -Clark's First Law.
Which is a silly statement on its face. Pauling, Hoyle, Copernicus, and Lord Kelvin all reached the status of "distinguished but elderly" and all of them ended up on the wrong side of history regarding key theories.
Slashdot Mirror
Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004[citation needed], refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.
The problem is that quite a few people were doing this long before "Web 1.0" came along. Once Web 1.0 came along, it was almost immediately picked up as the medium of choice for most people building this kind of application.
O'Reilly media is late to the party.
When exactly was that? I did a look around at some of the the developments in social computing, online community, and interactivity kicked around as characteristic of "Web 2.0" and I'm seeing things that came into existence in the infantcy of the WWW. WikiWikiWeb? 1994. eBay? 1995. Flickr and YouTube? Binary exchanges going back to usenet. CSCL/W software that could handle multimedia and document attachments predates the web.
The fact of the matter is that social networked computing has over a decade of history before the the WWW came into existence. People were designing and building web-based online social networks and communities starting with the development of CGI. If there was a mythical time when the web was "just like gopher" it was over and gone quickly.
Really, is there any way that technology has enhanced your web experience for the better?
Time-lapse weather maps.
However...
Observations of the universe are more uncertain. Perhaps the researcher made a mistake (not saying they did) or engaged in fraud (not saying they did). The identification of this particular object as a MECO is one interpretation of telescopic evidence. Perhaps there are mechanisms compatible with black holes that explain the observed phenomena? Perhaps not. This is why theories don't live or die on single observations.
The foundation of the technology singularity, as I always understood it, is that new technology (not necessarily AI) increases the pace of further technologic development, until development accelerates to infinity.
And from a systems point of view, profound skepticism about anything that "accelerates to infinity" is well warranted. Almost always, some other process kicks in to put on the breaks. For example, in ecology, such run-away processes quickly smack into a constraint of limited resources, or hit a wall regarding some fundamental time-limiting process that can't be easily worked around.
So for some potential factors:
1: where will the resources for this runaway innovation come from?
2: adoption of technology actually tends to put the breaks on innovation because you create a demand for backwards compatibility.
3: technology on its own is about as useful as a bump on a log, and so far there is little evidence that human social systems in which technology must live are changing as rapidly.
Or more likely, a Raman spectometer which identifies substances using properties of scattered laser light.
Is this really a new issue? Winsor McCay was doing animated movies without human models or voice talent in the 1920s. Human voice actors and performance models have never been needed for great animation; but many animators have found voice actors and performance models to be very effective. What is The Grinch without Boris Karlof or the Warner stable of characters without Mel Blanc?
And there is an entirely different direction that filmmakers can go that started with Tron and was used extensively in Lord of the Rings and Mirrormask. In addition to CGI characters built on human motion-capture, you can build the CGI setting around the human performances. Then, you don't have to worry so much about the complex optics of skin tone, or the physics of hair and clothing.
Actors are also necessary for commercial success. Silent films or films with minimal dialog are automatically doomed to be "art films."
I use desktop search on a daily basis, but I don't think its going to replace the container metaphor any time soon. Just as an example, you copy a version of a file to a network or usb "drive" for work on a different computer. You fire-up your search engine (Google, Copernic, Glimpse, Beagle, Spotlight) and get multiple hits. Which one do you want? How do you tell?
Advocates of abandoning containers neglect to note that with the exception of the device name, file paths are just metadata, with the last few elements often related to topic an task. Perhaps more importantly, they provide ways to manipulate groups of related itmes.
Mostly what I'm reacting to is the concept of x-men style views of evolution where once in a blue moon, some magical event happens and you have a mutation that provides that organism with a relatively super-power (at least compared to other members of its species.)
Quantitative genetics focuses on the distribution of phenotypes among a population. In any population of bears that has not been severely bottlenecked, you will have a range of hair color due to multiple genes acting together along with environmental inputs. If one end of the range experiences higher mortality than the other end of the range, the mean for that will drift one way or the other.
The *sensation* they have is "real", not to sound like Morpheus: feels like bugs in skin. The sensation goes away quickly when Pimozide is prescribed.
That's interesting. I had that experience one time during a really bad round of depression. Thankfully, I'm skeptical enough to realize that those bugs were psychosomatic, but they still were irritating. I've had friends also experience the crawling bugs under the skin due to changes in anti-depressant doses.
Even knowing that it's an illusion, the effect is still creepy as heck.
While the lack of transitional fossils is a mild gap in the theory of evolution. But it highlights a few misconceptions about evolution as a theory.
1: The core of evolution is not about which species begat another species, but about collections of species as cousins and siblings. We have a family tree of tens of thousands of species catalogued and identified. We can sort these species into groups by morphology, physiology, and similarities in DNA. And what we get is a pattern that looks a heck of a lot like descent with modification.
2: Transitional fossils really are not that important to evolutionary biology. Why? Because there is abundant evidence for evolution, using multiple chains of evidence that evolution is a slam-dunk in science. No one has ever directly observed the Milky Way galaxy, and yet, the Milky Way galaxy is not a controversial theory. No one has directly observed the Big Bang, but we have multiple chains of evidence that it happened. No one has directly observed the effects of Special Relativity, but we have multiple chains of evidence that they exist. The evidence for evolution as the dominant mechanism for biodiversity is as strong, if not stronger, than the Milky Way, the Big Bang, and Special Relativity.
Now that leads to the question "What really causes DNA mutations?"
Chances are it could be do to higher radiation events during magnetic pole reversals or gamma ray bursts where the radiation is so high that many species die of cancer and health problems, but those who do survive have random mutations. After that... Any mutation that doesn't kill the species off due to environmental factors passes those genes on.
Not bad up until this point.
For one thing, most evolution has less to do with mutations, and more to do with subtle variations between members of a species. So with the case of fur color in mammals, you have multiple genes that contribute to the quantity of melanin in hair. Individuals with combinations ideally suited to the environment are more successful than others.
Secondly, we know many of the actions for how mutations happen at the biochemical level. Most mutations occur because of errors in DNA replication and repair. Another class of mutations occurs because DNA can fold back on its self under certain conditions, or become attached to other strands. These mutations occur all the time and with a frequency stable enough that we can use them as timers to estimate the geologic time that has elapsed since Kodiak bears and Polar bears shared a common ancestor.
Abiogenesis and the formation of the earliest RNA/DNA molecules is largely outside of the domain of evolution. Evolution describes changes in biodiversity among a group of living organisms in an environment. How those organisms got here, (panspermia vs. hot springs vs. mud) is a question for biochemistry.
Make your own opinions. Mine is that he's a poor troll. Okay, so he correctly predicted that Apple would move to Intel. But if you fire enough shots and make enough random predictions, you're eventually going to get one on the bullseye.
And personally, I don't think the Intel move was that obscure given the direction of mobile CPUs over the last few years.
Yes, to one, no to the other. I'm admittedly overgeneralizing a bit here. But saying that the normal tools of drama an myth are distinct is to my mind certainly not a false dichotomy. They are distinct as oil and water. Combining them is not impossible, it's more like ... uh ... making mayonaise. There's an art to it. C.S Lewis, for example, combines symbolism and psychological insight, although I'm not sure he'd consider the latter a compliment.
What is impossible (in my opinion) is to alter the balance of the elements of fantasy and mimesis in a work without fundamentally altering it. You could not adapt the fairy tale "The Glass Coffin" for stage, because it is practically pure symbolism.
To me it seems like you are confusing message "myth" with the medium "drama." In fact, quite a bit of drama throughout history has been almost purely mythological. Take for example mummer's plays which come in some variations including:
* The hero combat play consisting of a hero, an antagonist, and a doctor.
* The fool play consisting of a fool, molly, the dancers, and a doctor.
The interesting thing about mummer's plays is that the hero and antagonist can be any hero and antagonist: St. George vs. The Moor is common, but you can also have Robin Hood vs. Galatians, or Alexander the Great vs. the King of Egypt. They meet, they fight, one dies, the quack doctor comes in to raise the dead, and they exit with a dance.
I don't see why "The Glass Coffin" is that much more difficult than "Swan Lake" (to pick a similar story with a very popular dramatic adaptation.)
As other examples of mythological drama, how about playing Santa and Kachina dancers? Or for that matter, "professional wrestling" which attempts to frame each matchup as a battle of good vs. evil? I think that if you look over multiple cultures and the vast timespan of history, the psychological drama is relatively recent and limited compared to mythic and ritual drama. Of course, most attempts to present mythic and ritual drama get criticized as simplistic and naive these days.
Arguably the weakest parts of the movie version stem from this problem. For example, the movie script tries to give Faramir something indicative of an interior life: he must change his mind. In dramatic terms this is sometimes cited as being "more interesting", but really I think the issue might as well have been practical. Tolkien assiduously provides us with parallel iconic examples (Theoden/Denethor, Faramir/Boromir, Frodo/Gollum) representing the consequences of choices and character. But this takes space. Drama for reasons of economy has to collapse as much as it can into fewer characters, which in turn demands that characters evolve.
Indeed, change is the very essence of drama, and timelessness the essence of myth.
To me it seems that you are sweeping with a fairly broad brush here, and presenting a bit of a false dichotomy. Much of the LOTR and The Hobbit include stretches of character development and change. The climax of The Hobbit is not the confrontation with Smaug, but with Bilbo's confrontation with the same dwarves who spent chapter one pushing him around to comic effect.
Likewise, quite a bit of drama focuses on iconic characters and timeless mythology. In fact, drama originated as a sacred performance of iconic mythological stories, a role that has persisted in a variety of forms including passion plays, pageants, mummers, and mythological operas. Of course modern theatre has become increasingly concerned with internal states of mind. But then again, so has most form of art in the modern era.
I read e-texts all the time and I think most people participating in this discussion do as well. Some of my examples are the Common Lisp Hyperspec, and Python and emacs documentation. I rarely buy a print manual for a software package if the e-text documentation is sufficient. Just about every bit of documentation that I use for research is in some searchable digitial form.
On the other hand, there are other genres where I prefer print texts. With a library card, I have access to more than a quarter-million texts on a wide variety of subjects. I don't have to worry about contrast or battery capacity with a paperback. Although I probably shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, the art and typographic design are important aesthetic values for printed text. When I work 8-14 hour days in front of a screen, print provides me with a nice break.
IMNSHO, treating e-text as just a new medium for the novel or the short story collection shows a profound lack of artistic creativity. The novel owes its existence to the printing press. It didn't take long for artists to realize that the photograph was unique compared to the painting, woodcut, etching, lithograph and pencil drawing. Cinema quickly established that it was a different form of performance than the stage play. And radio and audio-recording involved changes in vocal and instrumental style as various forms of electric amplification and effects became available.
DHS was a consolidation of a wide variety of agencies including Immigration, Coast Guard, FEMA and Treasury. I suspect that DHS inhereted some jurisdictional mandates regarding bank fraud and money laundering from Treasury.
My understanding of this case is that banks are obligated to report transactions over a certain size. However, many banks have started the practice of voluntarily flagging transactions for various reasons.
Let's say you're at some event in an auditorium and some asshole pulls a knife and stabs someone in the neck and everyone runs out in a panic. So you're sitting there, holding your buddy, pressing a piece of your torn tee shirt to his jugular... you're not gonna leave him to go find a phone when you've got a perfectly good cell phone on you. oh. and oops, the guy in charge of activating/deactivating the paint is sleeping on the job. your cell is no good. hopefully someone is coming to help.
If I'm actively giving emergency first aid to someone, I'm probably not going to have a free hand to fiddle with a cell phone either. Instead, I'll just ask the equally probable monkey flying out of my butt to make the call.
The original Dark Crystal was excellent but it was a kid's movie. We liked because we were kids when we saw it. When we look at the original through adult's eyes, it won't be anywhere near as impressive, because the new Dark Crystal will also be a kids movie.
Speak for yourself. I find Dark Crystal an impressive work as an adult. I don't buy the claim that "kid's movies" or for that matter fiction written for "kids" should be automatically bad or less impressive in scope than works created for adults. Some of the best fantasy of the 20th century fits neatly on young adult bookshelves, The Hobbit, Earthsea and to a lesser extent, Narnia.
Dark Crystal is strongly impressive to me for a couple of reasons. First, it's one of the few fantasies that attempt to create an entire world in which human characters are non-existent. Second, it amazed me that Henson and Froud had the balls to produce a fantasy based on new-age conceptions of duality and schism rather than "slay the monster."
E.g. compare the box office of Harry Potter movies with Serenity. First one was unashamedly aimed at kids, second one aimed at 30 something sci fi geeks. Harry Potter makes hundreds of millions of dollars, Serenity just about broke even. If you look at the whole HP franchise - all the HP films, it will make literally billions of dollars, hundreds or thousands of times more than the Serenity franchise, because Serenity was only one film, and it's much harder to make the first film of a series than the subsequent ones.
And the sticky problem that Sorcerer's Stone was better-written, had a better cast, and ended up a considerably more entertaining afternoon than Serenity probably didn't have much to do with it. I suspect Rowling gets more adult than children's readers. And on the other side, the Disney empire distributes almost a dozen "family" movies a year, about half of which go direct to DVD/cable, and they get only one or two "hits" a year. As a few other datapoints, Hollywood gets a sci-fi blockbuster about once a year.
There is a phrase there which highlights the basic problem, "aimed at 30 something sci fi geeks." I suspect that such demographic targeting is one of the best ways to make a bad film. Pixar's success has largely been because they manage to produce G-Rated scripts that can be enjoyed by all ages.
Well, the biggest problem is that it does not open many doors for inquiry. Let's look at a much less contraversial theory: plate techtonics. Creationism doesn't provide much in the way of an explanation. Why is Mt. Everest tall? God works in mysterious ways. Why are ocean trenches deep? God works in mysterious ways. Why does Japan have volcanos? God works in mysterious ways.
Plate techtonics as a theory not only explains some if the more interesting features of the planet, but it also provides a framework for further questions. Scientists in general love unanswered questions because unanswered questions can be parlayed into grant funding.
Which BTW. The creation of the Earth has squat to do with Evolution.
I guess I'm seeing a problem that has not been adequately resolved - people do lose files on a semi-regular basis. A problem that has not been perfectly resolved is a prime place to look for and implement some new innovation... i like to flex the creative/problem-solving part of my brain once in a while, to keep it from getting too rusty.
:)
Certainly. My suggestion is that giving up on heirarchal organization schemes is likely to fix some problems and create other problems. The predicted demise of the file heirachy is greatly exaggerated because heirarchies offer quite a bit of utility, and work well with the ways in which human beings tend to think about the world. I also don't think that seaching entirely solves the problem of "I lost that file."
Why a relational database? why to relate the data of course!
Which doesn't answer the question. "Relational" in "relational database" indirectly refers to data. More precisely it refers to flat tables linked by relations to other flat tables. Why the assmption that the best type of database would be built around that kind of structure? (Of course you can convert any kind of database structure into a normalized relational database, but not without some sacrifices along the way.)
I guess my point was only that just because people use the current hierarchy of folders to store their files doesn't mean it is in fact the best possible way to organise and retrieve them. Folders and Files are a virtual implementation of a physical operation: Filing cabinets filled with documents.... since when does a physical-world operation translate directly to the best virtual-world implementation?
Well, to me this is begging the question. Folders and Files are a virtual implementation of a physical operation. But filing cabinets filled with documents are a physical implementation of a cognitive operation: sorting items into types and subtypes. Other examples of this include Dante's Inferno (sorting types of sin into categories), the Dewey Decimal System (which combines hierachies with indexes), and the Linnaean Taxonomy (sorting animals and plants into multiple levels of classification.) The indexed database of "attributes" or "keywords" is also a virtual implementation of a cognitive process that was performed as a physical operation. (For examples, card catalogs, book indexes, and a thesaurus.)
So I would argue that Folders and Files are a good implementation because they are strongly analogous to the ways in which human beings think about their world. At any rate, a "Folder" is simply a collection of objects that can be manipulated (viewed, copied, transferred, archived, deleted, etc.,) as a group. That folder could be created as a heirarchal list of attributes (such as $HOME/Projects/Mushrooms/Yellowstone/) or generated as a search through an index. The point is that file paths are just one way of assigning attributes to files.
If on the other hand, at file-save- / -creation-time, multiple tags could be associated with it, and this stored in a (relational) database, then finding like-files would be a database search...much quicker.
How is this incompatible with having file paths? There are similar systems that do exactly this: beagle, spotlight, Copernic Desktop Search.
IME these full-text tagging and searching schemes are less useful than is claimed. The primary problem is that it frequently takes multiple searches to find a combination of search keywords that deliver a reasonable number of hits including the file I want.
(And why a relational database?)
These tags must be created either by the person authoring the file, or by me when I receive the file, and this is much more time-consuming than clicking Save-As and dumping it a folder...
I shouldn't think so. Whenever singularities appear in any model of the real world, it generally means a breakdown of the model. So this singularity means an acceleration of technological advance to a point where our ability to forecast breaks down and we really can't say what will happen.
There is a big reason why I wouldn't bet on a singularity hidden in this statement. It makes sweeping assumptions regarding exponential growth of one part of a system isolated from other parts of the system. After all, if exponential growth trends held true, then the total mass of all humanity should be greater than the solar system at some point in the future.
In most models of the real world systems, exponential functions don't persist indefinitely. Usually, some form of feedback kicks in. Bacteria run out of nutrients; predators adapt physically and behaviorally to the new alien species. With many prior technologies, we have analogous examples: the speed and capacity of land and air transportation, manufacturing automation.
Markets tend to have a strong moderating effect on innovations. The more widely accepted a technology is, the more it becomes a standard, the harder it is for new technologies to break into the market. Where I think that the religious believers in the singularity loose touch with reality is in thinking that technology on its own is so wonderful that it will transform markets overnight. This has not happened at any point in the past, is not happening now, so why imagine that it will happen in the future?
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is very probable wrong." -Clark's First Law.
Which is a silly statement on its face. Pauling, Hoyle, Copernicus, and Lord Kelvin all reached the status of "distinguished but elderly" and all of them ended up on the wrong side of history regarding key theories.