I got one of those Electra Lamps from ThinkGeek and ran a metal slinky over the top of the tube. When turned on, electricity would arc about half an inch from the slinky. Great for burning french fries, CDs, business cards, sales guys, etc.
Maybe you should have mentioned that step 2 in the NP-Complete definition means that there's a polynomial time transformation that will turn one NP-Complete problem into another. That's why showing that one NP-Complete problem is in P means that they're all in P.
I'm not sure I agree about the conscious/unconscious division. For example, if I were to say to someone, "I want you to make a conscious decision to raise your hand and then subsequently raise it within the next five minutes." I would imagine that they would sit there for an arbitrary amount of time, and then their hand would go up. To them, the event would seem almost simultaneous, but there would still be the feeling of mentally willing their hand up immediately followed by their hand going up. Now, it may be that they unconsciously decided that their hand was going to go up half a second earlier and that triggered their conciousness to become "aware" of that fact when the hand was about to go up. But that doesn't change the fact that the causal chain isn't "conscious willing -> physical act". It may be the case that there is an "unconscious conscious" that has "free will" but that doesn't appear in the forefront of consciousness. (Actually, most of these terms should be liberally enclosed in scare quotes. I'm assuming all sorts of things.)
I suppose I don't see why you think the decision to push a button is orthogonal to the question of whether it's a conscious decision, or not. Lacking the ability to peer inside someone's head and determine if the "conscious" part of the brain is engaged, we have to take their word for it. That is, if we tell someone to do something consciously, we have to assume that it is conscious. It's the incorrigabilty of mental phenomena. But, the point of the CD experiment is to show that it's not a conscious decision, because the muscles prepare to fire before the thought of pressing the button has entered into the consciousness. So, the question is really, can the unconscious make conscious decisions. Or, is there a state that's between consciousness and unconsciousness that makes decisions. Or, what is consciousness? (I.e., is consciousness just awareness, or is that only a small part of consciousness.)
How about another example -- it's the one they use in most intro cog-sci classes. You're driving home from work, a route you've taken every day for the past year. As you drive, you're thinking about the events of the day, what you're going to be doing tonight, following the current events on NPR. What you're not doing is thinking about things like flipping on your directional as you change lanes, stopping at stoplights, and all the little details that are part of driving. You could probably get all the way home and not recall a single thing about the trip. However, just before you reach your driveway, a kid runs in front of your car while chasing a baseball. Suddenly NPR is forgotten as you focus your entire attention on avoiding the child. Bam! Consciousness.
Now, say that you drive through a neighborhood where kids are always running in front of cars. At first, it's very distracting and you constantly need to keep your eyes peeled (so to speak). However, after doing it for a couple of months you begin to instinctively avoid the kids and you can concentrate on NPR again while your car weaves around the inadvertently suicidal kids.
I suppose I'm agreeing with you about the semantics of 'consciousness'. I kind of like the spotlight example. There's a lot going around in your head and your consciousness is a spotlight that you can direct at will to illuminate the things that are going on. So, you can automatically pick up your coffee cup and drink from it while perusing slashdot, or you can consciously pick up your coffee cup and pay particular attention to the feel of the handle, the taste of the coffee, and the sight of the mold floating in it as you realise you grabbed a cup left over from last week. (Okay, maybe I'm personalising it, here.)
I have a couple of dogs that I like experimenting on (benevolently, of course). In many ways, they seem conscious. They can do rudimentary problem solving and seem relatively conscious. If I'm at the dinner table with my SO and they don't get food from me, they'll shortly go over to her and see if she'll be more accomodating. It seems like they're saying, "Well, we'll give Alex a shot. Hmm. Doesn't look like he's going to come through. Let's try Kelly, instead." Of course, we (as people) love to anthropomorphosise (did I spell that right, CmdrTaco?) and that's probably not what's going on in the dog's head at all.
OTOH, they are hardwired in some ways. For example, if I'm working in my office and don't want to be bothered by them, I'll say (for example), "Grenouille! Get out!" and he'll get up and go out. However, if he wants to be in my room, he'll get up, leave, walk a few feet, turn right around and come back in. At which point I'll say "Out!" and he'll turn around and leave and then turn around and come back in. We can do this five or six times before he gives up. It appears that he's hardwired to leave when I say "Out!" and can't consciously countermand my order until a few seconds have passed.
I'd also like to throw out an example that I read about a few years ago that is tangentally apropos but still cool. (I read about this a few years ago, so the details may not be entirely accurate.) Remember the dollar bill trick your father probably pulled on you? Where he holds a bill by the top and you hold your fingers open about half way down? He lets go of the bill and if you close your fingers in time to catch it, it's yours. However, if you close your fingers before he lets go, you don't get to go to college. It's always a losing proposition because of the 500 ms latency between when you see it drop (and desire to catch it) and when you can close your fingers. This is because of the activation potential between desiring something and when your muscles can actually do something about it.
Now, it doesn't seem like there's always a half second gap between wanting and doing. You don't say to yourself, "I want a sip of coffee" *time passes* and then you pick up the cup. The events seem simultaneous. That's because your consciousness retcons the event. So, here's the cool part.
There was a test done a while ago where some people were hooked up to some devices that would measure blood pressure, conductivity, etc. There was a button on the desk in front of them that was wired to a CD player. They were told that the button would start the CD player and that they should press it whenever they felt like it. In fact, the electrodes measured the electrical potential of the muscles and could tell when the arm was about to hit the button before the person was even aware of it. The effect was that right when the person had the urge/intention of hitting the button, but before they moved, the CD player started playing. No matter how long or how short of a time they waited, the CD player would anticipate them. The effect was that their minds were being read, but it was just their bodies.
The point is that rather than having a causal chain that looks like:
decide to raise hand -> raise hand
it's more like:
hand raises -> consciousness says 'I meant to do that.'
I apologise if I really mangled this. If there's a question about it, I'll see if I can dig up the reference to the actual study.
I think the mistake that you're making is in assuming that things like creativity are conscious. Let me give you a f'rinstance. Consider a bird's nest. Have you ever seen a bird build one? The bird will fly down to the ground and pick through bits of twigs and grass until it finds a piece it likes. Then it will fly back to the nest and muck around until it finds a place where it should go. It inserts it (maybe tacking it in place with a bit of saliva/mucus) and repeats until done.
Now consider a furniture builder. He goes to the wood pile, finds a piece of wood that isn't too knotty and has been seasoned well. Then he carves it, planes it, sands it, and attaches it to whatever he's building and repeats.
Here's the difference -- the bird makes the same kind of nest over and over again. There will be very little variation. However, the furniture builder supposedly has some degree of creativity that allows him to build furniture that he's never built before. Maybe he's building a chair and he decides to put some scrollwork on the back. This isn't an option that a bird has when building a nest.
On the other hand, there are birds that do seem to evince creativity. For example, there's the bower bird. Not only does the male create a nest, it decorates it with colourful baubles in order to attract a female. It competes with other males in creating the best nest. It doesn't create the same nest each time. It seems to make conscious decisions about how best to design the nest. However, attributing consciousness to the bower bird is an iffy proposition. I have a hard time imagining a bower bird with an interior monologue:
BB: Yeah, baby. Check out those shells. I gotsta get me some of them for my swingin' bachelor pad. I'm gonna be pimpin' like a mother once I get hooked up with some of that shit. Those fly hoochies will be all over my jimmy! Damn.
As far as Wallace's comments about math go, you're taking it out of context. The brain doesn't excel at doing math. It excels at learning how to do something repeatedly. That's to say, it's trainable. Try this: put on a pair of glasses that have a prism in the lens so your vision is shifted to the left by 15 degrees. Now have someone pitch a ball to you. You know that your vision is off by 15 degrees, so it should be easy to compensate. Right? There's no way you're going to catch the ball. Now do it repeatedly for a half an hour. Pretty soon you'll be catching it every time. Take the glasses off and have your friend pitch you the ball again. You're going to miss because you're body is still used to the vision shift, even though you know that you're back to business as usual. My point is that your brain doesn't make "complex calculations". You have something called proprioception that is "knowledge of body in space" that allows you to do things like pick up a coffee cup without seeing the cup or your hand.
Incidentally, for more information on creativity, pick up a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pron. CHICK-ma-high). Also, Oliver Sacks has some good books on how the mind and body work together ("Leg to Stand On", "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat", "Anthropologist on Mars").
Publishers and StarOfffice: An editor's view
on
Piers Anthony Unbound
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I just wanted to make a comment about Mr. Anthony's assertion that publishers are still in the dark ages. I'm an editor with a technical publishing company and we require electronic submissions. We would never ask our authors to submit a hard copy of their manuscript. Now, I realise that technical publishing is an entirely different animal than trade publishing. It may be that Tor, Anthony's publisher, has reasons for asking for hard copy. But if that's the case, I imagine it's probably closer to a workflow issue that a technology one. For example, an author of Anthony's stature could tell the publisher that he's going to submit his manuscript written in Linear B in a clay tablet, and they'd take it. Undoubtedly, Tor (and the other similar trade publishers) have authors who want to submit in a wide variety of formats -- most authors have a favourite tool -- and hard copy is the lowest common denomenator. By requesting that all authors submit hard copy, the publisher can have a process for typesetting from that format, rather than having processes for converting from MS Word, WordPerfect, Lotus, DocBook, LaTeX, and whatever format that dedicated word processor they picked up at a rummage sale twenty years ago that they love so well uses.
Incidentally, being in the word business, I read, write, and edit proposals, manuscripts, memos, letters, and other documents daily. I run Linux and StarOffice. As long as I've been in publishing, I've never had to go into Windows.
Superman may be a genius and clever and all that, but there are certain ways that he simply won't think because it's against his nature. Batman, on the other hand, has a sick, sick mind. (That's why he keeps fighting the joker -- you get the villians you deserve.)
Also, Superman is extremely vulnerable to magic (which is why Wonder Woman's lasso can hold him). Supes gets blasted with magic more often than kryptonite. Now, I'm not saying that Batman's going to team up with David Copperfield. I'm just saying that he doesn't have to rely on kryponite.
Finally, just because Superman can think at the speed of light doesn't mean that he can solve any problem instantly. What if Batman's trap can't be solved in polynomial time?
Actually, what happened was that Batman was concerned that the JLA might run into a psychic/magical/superintelligent foe that would be able to control various members of the JLA using some sort of mind control. So, the Dark Knight figured out a way of neutralising each member of the JLA in the event that this occurred. Then R'as al Ghul managed to acquire this knowledge and defeated the JLA. This was detailed in the "Tower of Babel" run JLA issues 43-46. I believe it's in a trade paperback, as well. Great story. Additionally, there was the fallout when the JLA finally defeated R'as al Ghul (sorry to Lone Gunman it) and had to figure out what to do with someone as "dark" as Batman.
The big deal isn't so much that Alice is "just a bunch of preprogrammed responses to common statements and questions" but that there's an implication that people are the same way. It's not like everything that we say is creative and original. E.g.:
Bob: Hey, how's it going. Joe: Not bad. You? Bob: Not bad. Watch South Park last night? Joe: Yeah. Bob: Pretty funny, hey? Joe: Yeah. [Cartman voice] "Respect my authoritah!" Bob: Heh. Yeah. That's funny.
How often do you hear conversations like that versus conversations where people say things like
"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness"?
Open source software is changing the nature and the very future
of the software industry. To help you figure out how everything
fits together, we recently updated our Open Source Bibliography.
The collection of books described in this third edition represents
what we consider the best resources available on open source
technologies. (Don't worry, we didn't just select our own publications.)
Check it out at:
http://opensource.oreilly.com/news/biblio_0502.htm l
Bookstores are complicated enough to be interesting but easy enough not to cloud the issue with domain specific details. Everybody knows about books, not everybody knows about hospitals, casinos, stock markets, etc. (in a domain specific way).
For example, a book has attributes like ISBN, Title, and pages that are 1:1. It has relationships with things like publishers that are N:1 (a book has one publisher, but a publisher has many books). And it has a relationship with authors that are M:N (a book can have many authors, and an author can write many books). Just this level of detail makes it an interesting example of how to create a book database that's in 3rd normal form.
One table for book and it's main attributes like ISBN, Title, and pages. This table also has a foreign key to the publisher table. The publisher table has a primary key (pub_id) as well as name and any other main attributes you want to include (address for returns?). The author table has an author_id and the author's name. Finally, there's a book_author table that links books to authors in the required M:N way.
If you're writing an application to manage book inventory you're presented with problems like 1) how do you add books without insertion anomalies (for instance, "Catcher in the Rye" is added with author = "Salinger, J. D." and "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter" is added with author = "Salinger, JD") 2) how do you prevent deletion anomalies (if you delete all books by author Foobar McTavish, do you delete the author record?) These problems raise real issues that developers need to be aware of but doesn't cloud the issue with unnecessary detail.
On the other hand, imagine the domain of an insurance company. Well, there are policies, and policies have lines of business, and lines of business have coverages. Each coverage has a rate schedule, but, of course, the schedule varies by state. And rates also have to take schedule modifications into account, as well as the experience modifications and the loss history of the insured. But, that also depends on the dollar amount of the coverage. And the policy might actually be covered by a reinsurer, rather than the primary insurer, each of whom has underwriters who manage the coverage schedule. Ouch!
As a former insurance company employee who was responsible for designing a data model for the business (and as a former bookstore employee), I wish I had stuck with the latter!
What sort of book on UML would be helpful? A book that describes the UML specification? A book that takes real problems and shows how to use UML to describe them? A book that describes the tools?
Incidentally, I'm asking in my capacity as the editor for a technical publishing company. I agree that many of the existing books are deficient in one way or another. What sort of book would address these deficiencies?
One way of looking at this is that it's not simply a matter of slashcode getting updated, but CmdrTaco & the lot upgrading their skills. If they're going to be hackers and keep upgrading slashcode and that's it, fine, they don't have to know how to spell, close tags, etc. On the other hand, if they're going to call themselves editors, then, perhaps, they should learn the editing trade. And mostly (for the purposes of slashdot) it's simply a matter of reviewing what you do before hitting the submit button. Nobody's asking them to carry a copy of Fowler's English and The Chicago Manual of Style wherever they go, much less use them. What it comes down to is coders code and editors edit. I've seen coding here, but I haven't seen much in the way of editing.
I'm sorry, this was my error. I didn't mean matrix multiplication, I meant matrix-chain multiplication. The dynamic programming comes in in determining the optimal order for multiplying the matrices. The process and algorithm are described in 16.1 of Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest), but you can also find it on Paul Chew's Algorithms course page (lecture 11)
By and large, if you're getting a degree in CS from an American university, you're not learning how to write software applications that will be deployed in the Real World. You're learning about things like algorithmic complexity, data structures, NP completeness, and other theoretical issues. Now, these things are nice, but I've never been on a project that's failed because someone used a linked list (O(n)) instead of a hash table (O(1)).
A computer science degree gives you the foundation that you need to become a computer scientist. It's the background you need to pursue advanced coursework in computer science, in the same way a degree in physics gives you the background to do advanced work in physics. A degree in physics does not mean that your competent to build bridges, despite all you know about the law of gravity, harmonics, and tensile strengths of materials.
Schools need to have two separate programs -- computer science for budding computer scientists and software engineering for budding software engineers. And I guarantee that the demand is for the latter, but most schools only offer the former.
As a former developer, then later system architect and project manager, I found that my CS education was essentially wasted. It's nice to know how to do matrix multiplication using dynamic programming, but I've never used it. I would have traded in my entire algorithms class for a class on testing software. I'd trade data structures for a class on project lifecycles. I would have traded theory of computation for a good design class.
So, yes, I think schools should teach how to work as a team, and there are already ways to determine who does what -- the same way it's done in the real world. When I was a project manager, I knew who was pulling their weight and who wasn't. Of course, as a professor, I'd be too busy doing research and writing grant proposals to deal with my students, but that's a problem with education in general. But here's an example of a solution -- pick the top scorers on the first exam and make them team leaders for the projects. They have to manage the project (as well as code) and they have to evaluate their fellow students. The other students fill out an evaluation of their team lead.
Porn movies are made to make people excited and wanna have sex. Im sure that anybody more likely would like to have sex with a real girl instead of jerkin' off in front of the computer (or...?). Well I guess that almost all of you say yes to that, having real sex can hardly be compared to a pornmovie (simulated or not), can it?
Actually, it's the norm to prefer masturbation to actual sex. If you were to look at some real studies, rather than just making up propositions and asserting them to be true, you'd find that most men masturbate more often than having sex with their girlfriends, even when they have constant access to sex (as opposed to only seeing their girlfriends rarely). Couples who have been married 3+ years have sex approximately once a month. Do you suppose that 1) the man couldn't get sex more often and 2) that he's not punchin' the munchkin? (Incidentally, in the declining sex lives of married couples, easily most of the time, it's the male who stops wanting to have sex, not the female.) The reason is that you can take care of your business more efficiently without having to worry about getting your partner warmed up and then going the distance. You want a 3 minute wank? No problem. Masturbation follows Occam's Razor -- "one does not multiply entities except by necessity".
Theres also several reports which support the fact that the availability of child porn will increase the number of child molestations. And that also conforms to virtual stuff too (but maybe some will get a bigger "kick" out of it if they know it is real children suffering).
There are also several reports which indicate the exact opposite thing. Something else you need to consider is that often, especially with radically polarised issues like this one, agendas are set before the reports are created, and people find what they're looking for. That is, someone has the preconception that kiddie porn will increase child molestations and therefore proves it. Also, you can't just make a blanket statement that child molesters want to cause children to suffer. In fact, a large percentage of child molesters suffer extreme guilt over the harm they cause children, but they can't prevent themselves from doing the damage that they do.
And why should the producer of such a movie want to stick with just child pornography, because it is simulated they can do anything they want. They can kill the children, cut them into pieces and do more horrible stuff. I say that somewhere we have to draw the line. And I think that the line should be drawn to protect the children in our society.
I don't think you've demonstrated a causal link between viewing child pornography and increased incidences of child abuse. (Incidentally, Katherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have "reports" that pornography, both visual and literary (including the cartoon, "The Smurfs" because it depicts a woman (Smurfette) as an object) increases the incidences of violence against women. They tried passing an anti-porn law in Indianapolis, but it was struck down by the 7th Circuit as unconstitutional.) So, if there is no causal link between the two (viewing and violence), then you may as well let the market bear the responsibility of drawing the line. Because if you draw it, then someone else will draw the next line even closer and pretty soon we won't even be able to watch the smurfs.
Summary of argument: hhe_hee didn't prove a causal relationship between kiddy porn and violence against kiddies. I assert that a causal link needs to be proved before virtual kiddy porn is made illegal on those grounds. I am not saying that there is no link, and I'm not saying that kiddie porn should be legal. Incidentally, I would have moderated the above post as -1 Flamebait.
The two things that every philosophy student eventually runs into is Hume's argument against rationality (all we ever know is derived from experience, and although every time I've suspended a pencil in the air and let it go, it's dropped to the ground, that doesn't mean that it will the next time, i.e., the constant conjunction of release and drop is causally inefficacious and has no predictive power) and the argument for solipsism. Briefly, I know that I've got interior mental states and have experiences. I'm not a zombie that's programmed to behave like a human. On the other hand, I have no way of knowing that you're not a zombie -- I'll never have access to your mental states. Sure, I can look at your behaviour and liken it to mine. I whack my thumb with a hammer and scream 'cuz it hurts like hell, you whack your thumb and scream and I assume it's 'cuz it hurts like hell for you, too, but I don't actually know that your pain experience even exists, much less that it's anything like mine. [Quick joke -- Q: What did one behaviourist say to the other after sex? A: Was it good for me?]
Let's pretend that the world is made up of people like you and me -- people with genuine mental phenomena -- and zombies -- people without mental phenomena. Now, we know that there are zombies out there; their existence has been demonstrated empirically, but functionally they behave identically to you and me. However, consider that zombieism is the height of bad taste and no zombie would want to admit that he/she is a zombie -- "Yeah, when I hit my thumb with a hammer, I scream, and shake my hand, but I don't experience any of this 'pain' stuff." Given these circumstances, most zombies would probably assume all their friends are like you and me and not zombies. They've probably heard about zombies on the news, but don't actually know any. Here's the question. What percentage of the population would have to be zombies before things turned over and being a zombie was socially acceptable and being a non-zombie was unacceptable?
Okay, now, think about this. What if everyone in the world is sexually aroused by children except for you and me. What if everything was exactly the way that it is -- nothing has changed externally in the world -- but everyone else finds children sexually appealing? There are just as many incidences of child abuse as there are, now, but the mental act of pedophilia is a societal norm, rather than the converse.
The parallels between zombiehood and mental pedophilia should be obvious. I'm asking you to put aside your knee-jerk "That's sick!" for a second and do some considering.
First of all, up until fairly recently, homosexuality was considered to be both sick and confined to a very small percentage of the population. It's sick just because it is (heavy sarcasm) and it was imagined to belong to a very small minority because of the stigma attached to it. However, homosexuality, now, is much more mainstream and occupies a fairly large demographic -- large enough that there's plenty of legislation to prevent discrimination against gays.
Second of all, humans participate in a wide variety of sexual situations that have very little to do with procreation. Take a walk through the alt.sex.fetish hierarchy sometime. There are people who derive sexual pleasure by sitting on food! Incidentally, their existence doesn't mean that I live in fear of having my refrigerator raped.
Thirdly, there's a huge market in eroticizing children. On everything from the clothes that are made for children, to makeup, to basic lifestyles as presented in the media. And, frankly, it's adults who design those styles and adults who encourage their children to dress and behave like sexual objects. The media is blurring the line between children as sexual objects and non-sexual objects and we, as consumers, are complicit.
Here's what I want you to consider. Finding children sexually attractive is natural and, in some circumstances, healthy. And, when I say 'natural', I mean it's an attribute shared by a large percentage of the population.
Okay, here's the disclaimer. I asked you to consider it. I didn't say it's true. I'm not trying to persuade you that it's true. The purpose of the exercise is to try and determine what parts of your feelings are visceral and what parts are based on reason. More than most issues dealing with civil liberties, this one provokes an immediate gut response. Even the posts where people advocate the legality of virtual kiddie porn are liberally peppered posts with "people who view this are sick sick sick. (But I still defend their right to view it, the sick bastards)" But there's no discussion of why it's sick. I can think of plenty of reasons why having sex with a child is sick (personally, I believe in capital punishment for someone who has intercourse with a pre-pubescent child.) I also think it's sick to use a child as an ancillary sexual device (for example, bathing a child and using that as wank material). But, the knee-jerk aside, what makes mental kiddie porn (and by extension, virtual kiddie porn) any sicker than homosexuality or cake-sitting?
P.S. One of the reasons you've got the knee-jerk "that's sick" attitude is 'cuz you're biologically selected for it via evolution. Our forebears didn't have sex with their children because 1) it leads to weak genes and 2) it physically damages the reproductive organs of children and so they're less likely to have kids themselves. Thinking is pretty new (anthropologically speaking) while the knee-jerk has been around for longer than we've had knees. So, when you immediately react strongly to something, chances are it's your biology speaking. Strive to get past that.
P.P.S. Despite the controversial nature of this post, I'm not posting it anonymously in the spirit of engaging in genuine rational discussion. I hope that I'm not subjecting myself to a deluge of "You're a sick fucker!" e-mails. In a different vein, I also don't want e-mail from pedophiles (mental or not) either welcoming me to the fold or soliciting kiddie porn. Kids aren't my kink. Informing me of illegal behaviour will result in intervention by John Law.
fictional accounts of child/child or child/adult sexual situations (a la Lolita)
fictional accounts of child/child or child/adult explict sexual situations (what would be considered XXX material in a standard porn movie)
drawings/paintings/macrame of child/child or child/adult explict sexual situations
fake images (gimp, photoshop) of child/child or child/adult soft core sexual situations
fake images (gimp, photoshop) of child/child or child/adult hard core sexual situations
animations (cartoon) of child/child or child/adult soft core sexual situations
animations (cartoon) of child/child or child/adult hard core sexual situations
fake movies (special effects like the hobbits in LotR) with child/child or child/adult soft core sexual situations
fake movies (special effects like the hobbits in LotR) with child/child or child/adult hard core sexual situations
inflatable child sex dolls
interactive virtual reality sexual programs involving simulacrum of a child
pedomorphic robotic sex dolls (like the kid in the Kubrick A.I. movie (except as a sex doll))
organically grown child concubines (like Pris in Blade Runner, except as a kid).
I tried grouping these roughly in order of least offensive to most offensive, but it may be a reflection of my prejudice, more than anything. Also, we don't currently have the technology for some of these items, but hey, it's a thought experiment!
Slashdot Mirror
I got one of those Electra Lamps from ThinkGeek and ran a metal slinky over the top of the tube. When turned on, electricity would arc about half an inch from the slinky. Great for burning french fries, CDs, business cards, sales guys, etc.
Maybe you should have mentioned that step 2 in the NP-Complete definition means that there's a polynomial time transformation that will turn one NP-Complete problem into another. That's why showing that one NP-Complete problem is in P means that they're all in P.
I suppose I don't see why you think the decision to push a button is orthogonal to the question of whether it's a conscious decision, or not. Lacking the ability to peer inside someone's head and determine if the "conscious" part of the brain is engaged, we have to take their word for it. That is, if we tell someone to do something consciously, we have to assume that it is conscious. It's the incorrigabilty of mental phenomena. But, the point of the CD experiment is to show that it's not a conscious decision, because the muscles prepare to fire before the thought of pressing the button has entered into the consciousness. So, the question is really, can the unconscious make conscious decisions. Or, is there a state that's between consciousness and unconsciousness that makes decisions. Or, what is consciousness? (I.e., is consciousness just awareness, or is that only a small part of consciousness.)
Ah. Thank you. That explains why he doesn't return my phone calls.
Now, say that you drive through a neighborhood where kids are always running in front of cars. At first, it's very distracting and you constantly need to keep your eyes peeled (so to speak). However, after doing it for a couple of months you begin to instinctively avoid the kids and you can concentrate on NPR again while your car weaves around the inadvertently suicidal kids.
I suppose I'm agreeing with you about the semantics of 'consciousness'. I kind of like the spotlight example. There's a lot going around in your head and your consciousness is a spotlight that you can direct at will to illuminate the things that are going on. So, you can automatically pick up your coffee cup and drink from it while perusing slashdot, or you can consciously pick up your coffee cup and pay particular attention to the feel of the handle, the taste of the coffee, and the sight of the mold floating in it as you realise you grabbed a cup left over from last week. (Okay, maybe I'm personalising it, here.)
I have a couple of dogs that I like experimenting on (benevolently, of course). In many ways, they seem conscious. They can do rudimentary problem solving and seem relatively conscious. If I'm at the dinner table with my SO and they don't get food from me, they'll shortly go over to her and see if she'll be more accomodating. It seems like they're saying, "Well, we'll give Alex a shot. Hmm. Doesn't look like he's going to come through. Let's try Kelly, instead." Of course, we (as people) love to anthropomorphosise (did I spell that right, CmdrTaco?) and that's probably not what's going on in the dog's head at all.
OTOH, they are hardwired in some ways. For example, if I'm working in my office and don't want to be bothered by them, I'll say (for example), "Grenouille! Get out!" and he'll get up and go out. However, if he wants to be in my room, he'll get up, leave, walk a few feet, turn right around and come back in. At which point I'll say "Out!" and he'll turn around and leave and then turn around and come back in. We can do this five or six times before he gives up. It appears that he's hardwired to leave when I say "Out!" and can't consciously countermand my order until a few seconds have passed.
I'd also like to throw out an example that I read about a few years ago that is tangentally apropos but still cool. (I read about this a few years ago, so the details may not be entirely accurate.) Remember the dollar bill trick your father probably pulled on you? Where he holds a bill by the top and you hold your fingers open about half way down? He lets go of the bill and if you close your fingers in time to catch it, it's yours. However, if you close your fingers before he lets go, you don't get to go to college. It's always a losing proposition because of the 500 ms latency between when you see it drop (and desire to catch it) and when you can close your fingers. This is because of the activation potential between desiring something and when your muscles can actually do something about it.
Now, it doesn't seem like there's always a half second gap between wanting and doing. You don't say to yourself, "I want a sip of coffee" *time passes* and then you pick up the cup. The events seem simultaneous. That's because your consciousness retcons the event. So, here's the cool part.
There was a test done a while ago where some people were hooked up to some devices that would measure blood pressure, conductivity, etc. There was a button on the desk in front of them that was wired to a CD player. They were told that the button would start the CD player and that they should press it whenever they felt like it. In fact, the electrodes measured the electrical potential of the muscles and could tell when the arm was about to hit the button before the person was even aware of it. The effect was that right when the person had the urge/intention of hitting the button, but before they moved, the CD player started playing. No matter how long or how short of a time they waited, the CD player would anticipate them. The effect was that their minds were being read, but it was just their bodies.
The point is that rather than having a causal chain that looks like:
it's more like: I apologise if I really mangled this. If there's a question about it, I'll see if I can dig up the reference to the actual study.Now consider a furniture builder. He goes to the wood pile, finds a piece of wood that isn't too knotty and has been seasoned well. Then he carves it, planes it, sands it, and attaches it to whatever he's building and repeats.
Here's the difference -- the bird makes the same kind of nest over and over again. There will be very little variation. However, the furniture builder supposedly has some degree of creativity that allows him to build furniture that he's never built before. Maybe he's building a chair and he decides to put some scrollwork on the back. This isn't an option that a bird has when building a nest.
On the other hand, there are birds that do seem to evince creativity. For example, there's the bower bird. Not only does the male create a nest, it decorates it with colourful baubles in order to attract a female. It competes with other males in creating the best nest. It doesn't create the same nest each time. It seems to make conscious decisions about how best to design the nest. However, attributing consciousness to the bower bird is an iffy proposition. I have a hard time imagining a bower bird with an interior monologue:
As far as Wallace's comments about math go, you're taking it out of context. The brain doesn't excel at doing math. It excels at learning how to do something repeatedly. That's to say, it's trainable. Try this: put on a pair of glasses that have a prism in the lens so your vision is shifted to the left by 15 degrees. Now have someone pitch a ball to you. You know that your vision is off by 15 degrees, so it should be easy to compensate. Right? There's no way you're going to catch the ball. Now do it repeatedly for a half an hour. Pretty soon you'll be catching it every time. Take the glasses off and have your friend pitch you the ball again. You're going to miss because you're body is still used to the vision shift, even though you know that you're back to business as usual. My point is that your brain doesn't make "complex calculations". You have something called proprioception that is "knowledge of body in space" that allows you to do things like pick up a coffee cup without seeing the cup or your hand.Incidentally, for more information on creativity, pick up a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pron. CHICK-ma-high). Also, Oliver Sacks has some good books on how the mind and body work together ("Leg to Stand On", "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat", "Anthropologist on Mars").
Incidentally, being in the word business, I read, write, and edit proposals, manuscripts, memos, letters, and other documents daily. I run Linux and StarOffice. As long as I've been in publishing, I've never had to go into Windows.
Also, Superman is extremely vulnerable to magic (which is why Wonder Woman's lasso can hold him). Supes gets blasted with magic more often than kryptonite. Now, I'm not saying that Batman's going to team up with David Copperfield. I'm just saying that he doesn't have to rely on kryponite.
Finally, just because Superman can think at the speed of light doesn't mean that he can solve any problem instantly. What if Batman's trap can't be solved in polynomial time?
Actually, what happened was that Batman was concerned that the JLA might run into a psychic/magical/superintelligent foe that would be able to control various members of the JLA using some sort of mind control. So, the Dark Knight figured out a way of neutralising each member of the JLA in the event that this occurred. Then R'as al Ghul managed to acquire this knowledge and defeated the JLA. This was detailed in the "Tower of Babel" run JLA issues 43-46. I believe it's in a trade paperback, as well. Great story. Additionally, there was the fallout when the JLA finally defeated R'as al Ghul (sorry to Lone Gunman it) and had to figure out what to do with someone as "dark" as Batman.
Bob: Hey, how's it going.
Joe: Not bad. You?
Bob: Not bad. Watch South Park last night?
Joe: Yeah.
Bob: Pretty funny, hey?
Joe: Yeah. [Cartman voice] "Respect my authoritah!"
Bob: Heh. Yeah. That's funny.
How often do you hear conversations like that versus conversations where people say things like "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness"?
For example, a book has attributes like ISBN, Title, and pages that are 1:1. It has relationships with things like publishers that are N:1 (a book has one publisher, but a publisher has many books). And it has a relationship with authors that are M:N (a book can have many authors, and an author can write many books). Just this level of detail makes it an interesting example of how to create a book database that's in 3rd normal form.
One table for book and it's main attributes like ISBN, Title, and pages. This table also has a foreign key to the publisher table. The publisher table has a primary key (pub_id) as well as name and any other main attributes you want to include (address for returns?). The author table has an author_id and the author's name. Finally, there's a book_author table that links books to authors in the required M:N way.
If you're writing an application to manage book inventory you're presented with problems like 1) how do you add books without insertion anomalies (for instance, "Catcher in the Rye" is added with author = "Salinger, J. D." and "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter" is added with author = "Salinger, JD") 2) how do you prevent deletion anomalies (if you delete all books by author Foobar McTavish, do you delete the author record?) These problems raise real issues that developers need to be aware of but doesn't cloud the issue with unnecessary detail.
On the other hand, imagine the domain of an insurance company. Well, there are policies, and policies have lines of business, and lines of business have coverages. Each coverage has a rate schedule, but, of course, the schedule varies by state. And rates also have to take schedule modifications into account, as well as the experience modifications and the loss history of the insured. But, that also depends on the dollar amount of the coverage. And the policy might actually be covered by a reinsurer, rather than the primary insurer, each of whom has underwriters who manage the coverage schedule. Ouch!
As a former insurance company employee who was responsible for designing a data model for the business (and as a former bookstore employee), I wish I had stuck with the latter!
Incidentally, I'm asking in my capacity as the editor for a technical publishing company. I agree that many of the existing books are deficient in one way or another. What sort of book would address these deficiencies?
One way of looking at this is that it's not simply a matter of slashcode getting updated, but CmdrTaco & the lot upgrading their skills. If they're going to be hackers and keep upgrading slashcode and that's it, fine, they don't have to know how to spell, close tags, etc. On the other hand, if they're going to call themselves editors, then, perhaps, they should learn the editing trade. And mostly (for the purposes of slashdot) it's simply a matter of reviewing what you do before hitting the submit button. Nobody's asking them to carry a copy of Fowler's English and The Chicago Manual of Style wherever they go, much less use them. What it comes down to is coders code and editors edit. I've seen coding here, but I haven't seen much in the way of editing.
I'm sorry, this was my error. I didn't mean matrix multiplication, I meant matrix-chain multiplication. The dynamic programming comes in in determining the optimal order for multiplying the matrices. The process and algorithm are described in 16.1 of Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest), but you can also find it on Paul Chew's Algorithms course page (lecture 11)
A computer science degree gives you the foundation that you need to become a computer scientist. It's the background you need to pursue advanced coursework in computer science, in the same way a degree in physics gives you the background to do advanced work in physics. A degree in physics does not mean that your competent to build bridges, despite all you know about the law of gravity, harmonics, and tensile strengths of materials.
Schools need to have two separate programs -- computer science for budding computer scientists and software engineering for budding software engineers. And I guarantee that the demand is for the latter, but most schools only offer the former.
As a former developer, then later system architect and project manager, I found that my CS education was essentially wasted. It's nice to know how to do matrix multiplication using dynamic programming, but I've never used it. I would have traded in my entire algorithms class for a class on testing software. I'd trade data structures for a class on project lifecycles. I would have traded theory of computation for a good design class.
So, yes, I think schools should teach how to work as a team, and there are already ways to determine who does what -- the same way it's done in the real world. When I was a project manager, I knew who was pulling their weight and who wasn't. Of course, as a professor, I'd be too busy doing research and writing grant proposals to deal with my students, but that's a problem with education in general. But here's an example of a solution -- pick the top scorers on the first exam and make them team leaders for the projects. They have to manage the project (as well as code) and they have to evaluate their fellow students. The other students fill out an evaluation of their team lead.
Incidentally, Steve McConnell (author of Code Complete) has written a brilliant book on the failures of the Software Engineering industry and what needs to be done to fix it in After the Gold Rush: Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering.
Summary of argument: hhe_hee didn't prove a causal relationship between kiddy porn and violence against kiddies. I assert that a causal link needs to be proved before virtual kiddy porn is made illegal on those grounds. I am not saying that there is no link, and I'm not saying that kiddie porn should be legal. Incidentally, I would have moderated the above post as -1 Flamebait.
Let's pretend that the world is made up of people like you and me -- people with genuine mental phenomena -- and zombies -- people without mental phenomena. Now, we know that there are zombies out there; their existence has been demonstrated empirically, but functionally they behave identically to you and me. However, consider that zombieism is the height of bad taste and no zombie would want to admit that he/she is a zombie -- "Yeah, when I hit my thumb with a hammer, I scream, and shake my hand, but I don't experience any of this 'pain' stuff." Given these circumstances, most zombies would probably assume all their friends are like you and me and not zombies. They've probably heard about zombies on the news, but don't actually know any. Here's the question. What percentage of the population would have to be zombies before things turned over and being a zombie was socially acceptable and being a non-zombie was unacceptable?
Okay, now, think about this. What if everyone in the world is sexually aroused by children except for you and me. What if everything was exactly the way that it is -- nothing has changed externally in the world -- but everyone else finds children sexually appealing? There are just as many incidences of child abuse as there are, now, but the mental act of pedophilia is a societal norm, rather than the converse.
The parallels between zombiehood and mental pedophilia should be obvious. I'm asking you to put aside your knee-jerk "That's sick!" for a second and do some considering.
First of all, up until fairly recently, homosexuality was considered to be both sick and confined to a very small percentage of the population. It's sick just because it is (heavy sarcasm) and it was imagined to belong to a very small minority because of the stigma attached to it. However, homosexuality, now, is much more mainstream and occupies a fairly large demographic -- large enough that there's plenty of legislation to prevent discrimination against gays.
Second of all, humans participate in a wide variety of sexual situations that have very little to do with procreation. Take a walk through the alt.sex.fetish hierarchy sometime. There are people who derive sexual pleasure by sitting on food! Incidentally, their existence doesn't mean that I live in fear of having my refrigerator raped.
Thirdly, there's a huge market in eroticizing children. On everything from the clothes that are made for children, to makeup, to basic lifestyles as presented in the media. And, frankly, it's adults who design those styles and adults who encourage their children to dress and behave like sexual objects. The media is blurring the line between children as sexual objects and non-sexual objects and we, as consumers, are complicit.
Here's what I want you to consider. Finding children sexually attractive is natural and, in some circumstances, healthy. And, when I say 'natural', I mean it's an attribute shared by a large percentage of the population.
Okay, here's the disclaimer. I asked you to consider it. I didn't say it's true. I'm not trying to persuade you that it's true. The purpose of the exercise is to try and determine what parts of your feelings are visceral and what parts are based on reason. More than most issues dealing with civil liberties, this one provokes an immediate gut response. Even the posts where people advocate the legality of virtual kiddie porn are liberally peppered posts with "people who view this are sick sick sick. (But I still defend their right to view it, the sick bastards)" But there's no discussion of why it's sick. I can think of plenty of reasons why having sex with a child is sick (personally, I believe in capital punishment for someone who has intercourse with a pre-pubescent child.) I also think it's sick to use a child as an ancillary sexual device (for example, bathing a child and using that as wank material). But, the knee-jerk aside, what makes mental kiddie porn (and by extension, virtual kiddie porn) any sicker than homosexuality or cake-sitting?
P.S. One of the reasons you've got the knee-jerk "that's sick" attitude is 'cuz you're biologically selected for it via evolution. Our forebears didn't have sex with their children because 1) it leads to weak genes and 2) it physically damages the reproductive organs of children and so they're less likely to have kids themselves. Thinking is pretty new (anthropologically speaking) while the knee-jerk has been around for longer than we've had knees. So, when you immediately react strongly to something, chances are it's your biology speaking. Strive to get past that.
P.P.S. Despite the controversial nature of this post, I'm not posting it anonymously in the spirit of engaging in genuine rational discussion. I hope that I'm not subjecting myself to a deluge of "You're a sick fucker!" e-mails. In a different vein, I also don't want e-mail from pedophiles (mental or not) either welcoming me to the fold or soliciting kiddie porn. Kids aren't my kink. Informing me of illegal behaviour will result in intervention by John Law.
- nude portraits of children
- fictional accounts of child/child or child/adult sexual situations (a la Lolita)
- fictional accounts of child/child or child/adult explict sexual situations (what would be considered XXX material in a standard porn movie)
- drawings/paintings/macrame of child/child or child/adult explict sexual situations
- fake images (gimp, photoshop) of child/child or child/adult soft core sexual situations
- fake images (gimp, photoshop) of child/child or child/adult hard core sexual situations
- animations (cartoon) of child/child or child/adult soft core sexual situations
- animations (cartoon) of child/child or child/adult hard core sexual situations
- fake movies (special effects like the hobbits in LotR) with child/child or child/adult soft core sexual situations
- fake movies (special effects like the hobbits in LotR) with child/child or child/adult hard core sexual situations
- inflatable child sex dolls
- interactive virtual reality sexual programs involving simulacrum of a child
- pedomorphic robotic sex dolls (like the kid in the Kubrick A.I. movie (except as a sex doll))
- organically grown child concubines (like Pris in Blade Runner, except as a kid).
I tried grouping these roughly in order of least offensive to most offensive, but it may be a reflection of my prejudice, more than anything. Also, we don't currently have the technology for some of these items, but hey, it's a thought experiment!