Possibly true of mechanics. Probably not true of painters. Quite a few great paintings are in serious trouble because the paints are falling off the canvas after only a 100 years.
Definitely not true of musicians who think in radically different terms from insturment builders. There seems to be a big hole in your analogy. Building an insturment is not analogous to writing in assembly language. A better analogy would be to say that building an insturment is analogous to building a CPU. Musicians think in abstractions such as beats and tones rather than in the terms of resonance, refraction, interference, and reflection that are central to insturment designers. Likewise, most programmers (even assembly programmers) think in terms of abstract bits moved or transformed from location to location rather than thinking in terms of resistance, capacitance, induction, and heat.
A better analogy would be to say that musicians learn a lot from practicing and composing etudes, compositions that focus on the relationship between musical theory and technique.
My argument is that I believe that one of the reasons that you don't find things like rocket-powered vehicles in nature is that they have such a huge inherent complexity that it is almost improbable that you will ever reach even the simplest version of the machine, let alone a final, usable product.
Actually, reaction-thrust engines have evolved at least three unrelated times to my knowledeg (squids, plant seeds, and fungal spores).
As I said before, if the machine must replicate by making complete copies of itself, and it is using materials that are superior to organics but require a larger starting mass, more energy, and more complex and specific organization, abiogenesis is less likely to take place, because the starting conditions are much harder.
Um, in regards to microscopic-level self-replicating machines, what materials are superior to organics? The reason why organisms don't do much work with pure iron, magnesium, titanium and silicon has to do with the basic fact that these materials require too much energy to work with in their pure form. Carbon occupies the thermodynamic sweet spot on the periodic table where it releases just enough energy when oxidized to be useful, while not being too hard to reduce. Even so, biological organisms have to do a lot of work to manage the basic toxicity of oxygen at the molecular level.
It tends to create organisms which can only operate within a certain set of parameters.
However, any machine that lives on organic matter will have to deal with the same parameters: 1: How to get usable energy out of catabolism. 2: Managing oxygen toxicity (an even worse problem for non-carbon nanomachines.) 3: How to metabolize a huge variety of organic molecules with a wide variety of different chemical characteristics.
The laws of thermodynamics don't change for artificial machines as opposed to natural machines. Grey goo proponents completely ignore the problems of chemestry and ecological competition that makes a grey goo highly unfeasible.
Next news flash: Archeologists discover Plato's Cave.
Not that great of a coincidence. Since most cultures (including the culture that Plato claims to have gotten the Atlantis story from) developed around rivers, huge disasterous floods are quite common. Secondly, Plato's own language in writing the dialogues is a hints to the allegory of the story, with it set "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away."
Yep, or as a contrast, why does Chuck Jones have so much popularity? Too much is made of Pixar's image production and not enough from their storytelling.
The only reason anybody created this thing is to attract the media magpies who go "ohh, shiny, ohh, innovative, ohh nifty". They grab the press packet, plagarize, rewriwe, and publish the press release (along with the included press photo) with "look at what Toyota is doing thinking outside of the box!"
Then after the season the concept is put to the scrap heap while they go back to making 2-door compacts and sedans.
This happens over and over again. Someone posts a link to an article about a concept car, and then everyone here takes it too seriously, "ohh, that would never work, because..."
It's a concept car! It is only eye candy to create buzz and you just bought it, hook line and sinker.
Concept cars are not meant to be driven, or even put into production, they are intended to cause debate and contraversy. They are the bright shiny objects that draw the magpies of the press to the car shows because there is no such thing as bad publicity.
But of course, being Slashdot we have to be the only group of people to take this thing seriously.
Re:Animation is not necessarily realism
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a theory that people are more accepting of animated characters the less photo-realistic they are. The more realistic you make the character, the more our brains try to pick up on the subtle flaws that make us think, "that's not right, he/she's lying."
"...and may be the source of the myth of Atlantis."
It's this last claim that is questionable. Plato can't even keep key geographic details about Atlantis consistent. The "myth of Atlantis" was born in the 19th century. Before that time, people who read Plato agreed that Atlantis was a fictional utopia for talking about politics.
Atlantis is "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away." When Plato talks about Atlantis, he puts it both in an inconcievably distant past and in a location that was inconcievably inacessible to his contemporaries. With a wink and a nod, he tells us that this knowledge comes down through an improbable series of occult channels. Then he gets to the meat of the story about a corrupt but powerful kingdom overthrown by a rag-tag group of sincere rebels.
The basic problem is that Atlantis is not a story about a place. It is a story about politics. It is such a sweeping hypothetical conflict that Plato had to set it in a place that never really existed. Atlantis is to politics what Narnia is to theology.
Homer's Troy is rather like Camelot. By the time we get to Homer the stories have been filtered through multiple waves of successive political change, invasion, appropriation and technological advance that there is little link to historical fact. One of the biggest problems with linking the real Troy to Homer's Troy is that Homer was writing about armor and tactics that he was familiar with.
Camelot is another case. By all means there are late-Roman Bitish fortifications that imply the existence of powerful political figures, but by the time we actually see anything about Arthur, what we get is is a mish-mash of details that borrow on much later events.
With Plato's Atlantis, we should be looking with more than a few grains of salt. Plato is not relating history, but morality. The geographic and political details change between his two Atlantis stories. The setup screams "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away." "Atlantis" seems to be a metaphor for "Athens." Is it possible that Plato was tapping into older stories about destroyed cities? Perhaps. However that does not mean that his Atlantis stories should be read as history.
I think that the whole "pluto is not a planet, because there may be more objects like pluto out there" is based less on reason, then on some sort of visceral discomfort with the idea of a solar system with dozens of planets rather than a tidy 9.
For me, the best argument is that an object large enough to round its self off is likely to be structurally different from an oblong conglomerate. Compaction produces heat, which gets to the surface through some mechanism. The surface/volume ratio of larger bodies means that heat produced through radioactive decay will result in chemestries not found in smaller objects. Finally, objects big enough to round off are also likely to result in gravitational sorting to a significantly higher degree.
The end result is that objects the size of Pluto, no matter how numerous are likely to undergo processes analogous to what we observe on Mars, Venus, Europa and Titan.
The problem Lindows ran into was in Europe. In the United States, courts rejected the claim that Windows could be trademarked on the grounds that it is a common word for an interface. However, that argument did not work in Europe.
While building from source can be fun, and necessary sometimes, I don't think it makes sense. You spend far too much time tweaking minor issues, and lose sight of major problems.
Bwah? At least on freeBSD most of the time it is just a matter of "portinstall foo" and let the system-wide defaults handle the rest. Likewise, most source packages I've seen tend to have reasonable defaults for where to put files. Just because you can use a different PREFIX does not mean that everyone does.
They did not get a man to the moon but they did get thier explorer there, learnt that there was nothing much to learn there, and left it to the US to go and play golf.
I just got done reading The Big Splat by Dana Andrews. The book is a history of human knowledge about the moon with a focus on the impact theory of the moon's origins. It highlights the fact that we really did not know much about what the moon was made of, until the Apollo missions recovered geologic specimens. What we learned from Apollo was a necessary prerequisite for all of the planetary science that followed.
The A Wizard of Earthsea, Tombs and Furthest Shore cluster together as a story about the career of a single character (Ged). The later books, developed 20 years later, focus on different characters, different themes and are done in a different style. Probably the best way to think of them is as a trilogy with two sequels.
The criterion that a planet is large enough to compact into a sphere is actually quite useful and justified. If something is big enough to shape its self into a sphere, then it is also big enough for gravitational sorting to be a factor in its structure and chemistry.
There is also the problem that Hubble is the wrong tool for the job of finding planets, asteroids and comets. The way you find an object in orbit around the sun is not by getting lucky and snapping a picture of it, but by observing that an object is moving in relationship to background stars. The way this is done is by obsessively taking photographs of the same bits of sky night after night and hoping that you catch something moving when you compare images taken months apart. This is one of the reasons why comet hunting is an area of astronomy where amateurs can make new discoveries. Consistancy and obsession are more important than resolving power.
Also, you can't easily change the way email is done because its use is so widespread.
I'm not so certain of that. I've seen us go from a mailsystem where RedHat came configured as an open relay by default to increasing adoption of authenticated smtp and smtp-over-ssl.
I think that there is still a big problem with this logic which is that the argument that an information commons can be "proprietized" is rather weak. It depends on a bit of cognitive dissonance that argues software is a non-rivalous resource, but that software commons need to be protected as a rivalous resource.
If anything, history has shown that the best defense against something being "proprietized" is to make it ubiquitous. Shakespeare, Twain, Bronte and Austin have survived multiple proprietary publications, editions and adaptations because they are ubiquitous.
It's fine to say RTFM to a spotty student who spends his entire free time in front of his Linux box...
And then there is the problem that most manuals, well, suck. Note, this is not just a problem unique to Free or Open Source Software (FOSS), but for some reason FOSS seems to be loaded with badly written manuals, badly structured manuals, manuals with no understanding of the target audience, incomplete manuals, or even no manual to be found.
Then there is the problem in unix systems that finding the right command for the job requires some technical skills.
And then the problem that a large chunk of manuals are written with such a high level of jargon that translating them to Chaucer's English may even be better.
And the annoying habit that even if there is information useful to people new to the program, it is usually embedded in the bottom of the documentation.
The end result is that I rarely tell people to RTFM because frequently the manual is a piece of trash.
I think that you have to factor in the full cost over time, rather than just the cost of the motherboard/cpu bundle. Once you add in all the extra hardware to keep the whole thing cool, the beefier power supplies, and the additional power cosumption over time, this starts to look like a viable alternative.
Given that the FSF has a pretty explicit political agenda for promoting copyleft, I don't think that the FSF is in a position to make this kind of compromise. Creative Commons strikes me as a better organizer in general.
But I guess I don't see the problem with multiple licenses. The reason for multiple GPL-compatible licenses is that there are a host of issues that have to be addressed in a license these days including: permission to use, permission to copy, permission to create derivative works, liability, endorsement clauses, credit, notification of license, documentation of license, and copyleft. The end result is that I don't think it is possible to create a license that satifies everybody's needs.
However, some of us can't avoid having a publically available e-mail address. For example, writers such as myself rely on feedback from readers who are, in nearly all cases, strangers (and sometimes strange, but that's another story...) Avoiding false positives from strangers is very important to me. I want their messages. But, since my e-mail address is published frequently (hence no reason to hide it here), I obviously receive a ton of spam.
Um, read the actual proposal. It addresses your concerns. Email messages from stranger that are sent just to you will get through. Spam that uses a dictionary attack will not.
Still, in the long run I support proposals that shift the economics of e-mail in ways that have minimal impact on human beings while making spam unprofitable. Changing the economic model of spam is the only sure solution; relying solely on technology will simply keep us locked in an ongoing arms race.
The proposal points out that you don't need high filtering efficiency to make spam unprofitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly true of mechanics. Probably not true of painters. Quite a few great paintings are in serious trouble because the paints are falling off the canvas after only a 100 years.
Definitely not true of musicians who think in radically different terms from insturment builders. There seems to be a big hole in your analogy. Building an insturment is not analogous to writing in assembly language. A better analogy would be to say that building an insturment is analogous to building a CPU. Musicians think in abstractions such as beats and tones rather than in the terms of resonance, refraction, interference, and reflection that are central to insturment designers. Likewise, most programmers (even assembly programmers) think in terms of abstract bits moved or transformed from location to location rather than thinking in terms of resistance, capacitance, induction, and heat.
A better analogy would be to say that musicians learn a lot from practicing and composing etudes, compositions that focus on the relationship between musical theory and technique.
My argument is that I believe that one of the reasons that you don't find things like rocket-powered vehicles in nature is that they have such a huge inherent complexity that it is almost improbable that you will ever reach even the simplest version of the machine, let alone a final, usable product.
Actually, reaction-thrust engines have evolved at least three unrelated times to my knowledeg (squids, plant seeds, and fungal spores).
As I said before, if the machine must replicate by making complete copies of itself, and it is using materials that are superior to organics but require a larger starting mass, more energy, and more complex and specific organization, abiogenesis is less likely to take place, because the starting conditions are much harder.
Um, in regards to microscopic-level self-replicating machines, what materials are superior to organics? The reason why organisms don't do much work with pure iron, magnesium, titanium and silicon has to do with the basic fact that these materials require too much energy to work with in their pure form. Carbon occupies the thermodynamic sweet spot on the periodic table where it releases just enough energy when oxidized to be useful, while not being too hard to reduce. Even so, biological organisms have to do a lot of work to manage the basic toxicity of oxygen at the molecular level.
It tends to create organisms which can only operate within a certain set of parameters.
However, any machine that lives on organic matter will have to deal with the same parameters:
1: How to get usable energy out of catabolism.
2: Managing oxygen toxicity (an even worse problem for non-carbon nanomachines.)
3: How to metabolize a huge variety of organic molecules with a wide variety of different chemical characteristics.
The laws of thermodynamics don't change for artificial machines as opposed to natural machines. Grey goo proponents completely ignore the problems of chemestry and ecological competition that makes a grey goo highly unfeasible.
Next news flash: Archeologists discover Plato's Cave.
Not that great of a coincidence. Since most cultures (including the culture that Plato claims to have gotten the Atlantis story from) developed around rivers, huge disasterous floods are quite common. Secondly, Plato's own language in writing the dialogues is a hints to the allegory of the story, with it set "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away."
Yep, or as a contrast, why does Chuck Jones have so much popularity? Too much is made of Pixar's image production and not enough from their storytelling.
Um, who the heck mods this up insightful?
It's a concept car!
The only reason anybody created this thing is to attract the media magpies who go "ohh, shiny, ohh, innovative, ohh nifty". They grab the press packet, plagarize, rewriwe, and publish the press release (along with the included press photo) with "look at what Toyota is doing thinking outside of the box!"
Then after the season the concept is put to the scrap heap while they go back to making 2-door compacts and sedans.
This happens over and over again. Someone posts a link to an article about a concept car, and then everyone here takes it too seriously, "ohh, that would never work, because..."
It's a concept car! It is only eye candy to create buzz and you just bought it, hook line and sinker.
Concept cars are not meant to be driven, or even put into production, they are intended to cause debate and contraversy. They are the bright shiny objects that draw the magpies of the press to the car shows because there is no such thing as bad publicity.
But of course, being Slashdot we have to be the only group of people to take this thing seriously.
I have a theory that people are more accepting of animated characters the less photo-realistic they are. The more realistic you make the character, the more our brains try to pick up on the subtle flaws that make us think, "that's not right, he/she's lying."
"...and may be the source of the myth of Atlantis."
It's this last claim that is questionable. Plato can't even keep key geographic details about Atlantis consistent. The "myth of Atlantis" was born in the 19th century. Before that time, people who read Plato agreed that Atlantis was a fictional utopia for talking about politics.
Atlantis is "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away." When Plato talks about Atlantis, he puts it both in an inconcievably distant past and in a location that was inconcievably inacessible to his contemporaries. With a wink and a nod, he tells us that this knowledge comes down through an improbable series of occult channels. Then he gets to the meat of the story about a corrupt but powerful kingdom overthrown by a rag-tag group of sincere rebels.
The basic problem is that Atlantis is not a story about a place. It is a story about politics. It is such a sweeping hypothetical conflict that Plato had to set it in a place that never really existed. Atlantis is to politics what Narnia is to theology.
On the other hand...
Homer's Troy is rather like Camelot. By the time we get to Homer the stories have been filtered through multiple waves of successive political change, invasion, appropriation and technological advance that there is little link to historical fact. One of the biggest problems with linking the real Troy to Homer's Troy is that Homer was writing about armor and tactics that he was familiar with.
Camelot is another case. By all means there are late-Roman Bitish fortifications that imply the existence of powerful political figures, but by the time we actually see anything about Arthur, what we get is is a mish-mash of details that borrow on much later events.
With Plato's Atlantis, we should be looking with more than a few grains of salt. Plato is not relating history, but morality. The geographic and political details change between his two Atlantis stories. The setup screams "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away." "Atlantis" seems to be a metaphor for "Athens." Is it possible that Plato was tapping into older stories about destroyed cities? Perhaps. However that does not mean that his Atlantis stories should be read as history.
I think that the whole "pluto is not a planet, because there may be more objects like pluto out there" is based less on reason, then on some sort of visceral discomfort with the idea of a solar system with dozens of planets rather than a tidy 9.
For me, the best argument is that an object large enough to round its self off is likely to be structurally different from an oblong conglomerate. Compaction produces heat, which gets to the surface through some mechanism. The surface/volume ratio of larger bodies means that heat produced through radioactive decay will result in chemestries not found in smaller objects. Finally, objects big enough to round off are also likely to result in gravitational sorting to a significantly higher degree.
The end result is that objects the size of Pluto, no matter how numerous are likely to undergo processes analogous to what we observe on Mars, Venus, Europa and Titan.
The problem Lindows ran into was in Europe. In the United States, courts rejected the claim that Windows could be trademarked on the grounds that it is a common word for an interface. However, that argument did not work in Europe.
While building from source can be fun, and necessary sometimes, I don't think it makes sense. You spend far too much time tweaking minor issues, and lose sight of major problems.
Bwah? At least on freeBSD most of the time it is just a matter of "portinstall foo" and let the system-wide defaults handle the rest. Likewise, most source packages I've seen tend to have reasonable defaults for where to put files. Just because you can use a different PREFIX does not mean that everyone does.
Should not post before first coffee of the morning. The Big Splat is by Dana Mackenzie, not Dana Andrews.
They did not get a man to the moon but they did get thier explorer there, learnt that there was nothing much to learn there, and left it to the US to go and play golf.
I just got done reading The Big Splat by Dana Andrews. The book is a history of human knowledge about the moon with a focus on the impact theory of the moon's origins. It highlights the fact that we really did not know much about what the moon was made of, until the Apollo missions recovered geologic specimens. What we learned from Apollo was a necessary prerequisite for all of the planetary science that followed.
On the other hand:
The A Wizard of Earthsea, Tombs and Furthest Shore cluster together as a story about the career of a single character (Ged). The later books, developed 20 years later, focus on different characters, different themes and are done in a different style. Probably the best way to think of them is as a trilogy with two sequels.
The criterion that a planet is large enough to compact into a sphere is actually quite useful and justified. If something is big enough to shape its self into a sphere, then it is also big enough for gravitational sorting to be a factor in its structure and chemistry.
There is also the problem that Hubble is the wrong tool for the job of finding planets, asteroids and comets. The way you find an object in orbit around the sun is not by getting lucky and snapping a picture of it, but by observing that an object is moving in relationship to background stars. The way this is done is by obsessively taking photographs of the same bits of sky night after night and hoping that you catch something moving when you compare images taken months apart. This is one of the reasons why comet hunting is an area of astronomy where amateurs can make new discoveries. Consistancy and obsession are more important than resolving power.
Also, you can't easily change the way email is done because its use is so widespread.
I'm not so certain of that. I've seen us go from a mailsystem where RedHat came configured as an open relay by default to increasing adoption of authenticated smtp and smtp-over-ssl.
I'm personally loving alterslash http://alterslash.org/
I think that there is still a big problem with this logic which is that the argument that an information commons can be "proprietized" is rather weak. It depends on a bit of cognitive dissonance that argues software is a non-rivalous resource, but that software commons need to be protected as a rivalous resource.
If anything, history has shown that the best defense against something being "proprietized" is to make it ubiquitous. Shakespeare, Twain, Bronte and Austin have survived multiple proprietary publications, editions and adaptations because they are ubiquitous.
It's fine to say RTFM to a spotty student who spends his entire free time in front of his Linux box...
And then there is the problem that most manuals, well, suck. Note, this is not just a problem unique to Free or Open Source Software (FOSS), but for some reason FOSS seems to be loaded with badly written manuals, badly structured manuals, manuals with no understanding of the target audience, incomplete manuals, or even no manual to be found.
Then there is the problem in unix systems that finding the right command for the job requires some technical skills.
And then the problem that a large chunk of manuals are written with such a high level of jargon that translating them to Chaucer's English may even be better.
And the annoying habit that even if there is information useful to people new to the program, it is usually embedded in the bottom of the documentation.
The end result is that I rarely tell people to RTFM because frequently the manual is a piece of trash.
I think that you have to factor in the full cost over time, rather than just the cost of the motherboard/cpu bundle. Once you add in all the extra hardware to keep the whole thing cool, the beefier power supplies, and the additional power cosumption over time, this starts to look like a viable alternative.
Given that the FSF has a pretty explicit political agenda for promoting copyleft, I don't think that the FSF is in a position to make this kind of compromise. Creative Commons strikes me as a better organizer in general.
But I guess I don't see the problem with multiple licenses. The reason for multiple GPL-compatible licenses is that there are a host of issues that have to be addressed in a license these days including: permission to use, permission to copy, permission to create derivative works, liability, endorsement clauses, credit, notification of license, documentation of license, and copyleft. The end result is that I don't think it is possible to create a license that satifies everybody's needs.
However, some of us can't avoid having a publically available e-mail address. For example, writers such as myself rely on feedback from readers who are, in nearly all cases, strangers (and sometimes strange, but that's another story...) Avoiding false positives from strangers is very important to me. I want their messages. But, since my e-mail address is published frequently (hence no reason to hide it here), I obviously receive a ton of spam.
Um, read the actual proposal. It addresses your concerns. Email messages from stranger that are sent just to you will get through. Spam that uses a dictionary attack will not.
Still, in the long run I support proposals that shift the economics of e-mail in ways that have minimal impact on human beings while making spam unprofitable. Changing the economic model of spam is the only sure solution; relying solely on technology will simply keep us locked in an ongoing arms race.
The proposal points out that you don't need high filtering efficiency to make spam unprofitable.