It's true such a list exists. Hilbert's list is of course very good, and there's a new one out by Smale, and the CMI prizes.
These lists, although quite influential, are not quite like a "distributed computing" idea. These are just big open questions sitting out there. They're really hard to solve. Now, one could imagine that someone posts on usch a server saying, i think we can parse this certain problem into the following 15 pieces, and then people can solve this. This is exactly what one does with their advisor when working on a PhD thesis, for example. Such a system would bring the problems closer to the forefront, so to speak.
Frankly, I think we're saying the same thing in principle. But, using the correct vocabulary, the whole thing is just one random process. Of course, you can take the mechanism, and call it two mechanisms, but that's an overcomplication.
Consider a simple example: a random walk on a line. Start off a particle at x=0. At each time step, say the particle has a 50/50 chance of going right or left. We know intuitively what we expect to happen: the expected position of the particle is of course 0. The math backs this up, and tells us even more: that after N steps, we really expect to see the particle between \sqrt{N} and -\sqrt{N}. We can analyze this situation even fuirther, but it's not important.
Now, make the example more complicated. Let's say that at every time step, the particle has a 70% chance to go right, and 30% to go left. (It's not too interesting to consider the case where the particle can sit still, since we can just rename our timesteps to be the times of motion.) Anyway, what you see mathematically is what you expect: a mean drift to the right. Now, you won't always see motion to the right, but the longer you wait, the more you expect to see right-ward motion. In particular, the statement is that as N goes to infinity, the probability that the particle is to the right of 0 goes to 1. (In particular, in this case, as N goes to infinity, the probability that the particle is to the right of any integer goes to 1.) Now, of course, this is a simple example, you could let the probability of going right be dependent on the place you're at, etc.
But this simple model is somewhat reminiscent of the natural selection case. According to mathematical terminology, this section case is still considered a "random process", just with a mean drift. Think of it as natural selection, where right is somehow "better" than left.
Again, it's ok to say that natural selection is not random (of course it isn't), but as we see from the above example, the whole mechanism can be put in the framework of a random process, which makes it of course more elegant conceptually.
For anyone who's really interested in the math, this is an absolutely wonderful treatment of the subject (although quite advanced mathematically).
This sounds pretty good, at least at first. In some sense, this is precisely what the academic paradigm is in the first place. For example, any academic works on problems of this sort, without any expectation of financial compensation, only wanting recognition.
Looking at it this way, this system is simply a clearinghouse for problems people find interesting. If people work to break these big problems into manageable and concrete pieces, then these little pieces may be perfect for undergraduate or even graduate students to work on. I know that such a clearinghouse would be very valuable in mathematics. I've always imagined that such a thing would exist before too long for the mathematical community, and this would be a good thing.
The main reason that I think this would be a good thing is that for a young researcher starting out, one has to spend a lot of time understanding the big picture of a certian field, and generating good open problem on one's own. Such a system could bring the problems to the researchers more quickly. This could speed the process up by quite a bit. Such a thing sort of exists already, in the form of preprint servers, and I'm sure there's more to come! What doesn't really exist now is such a "big picture" fremework in a public domain, IMHO.
it has been studied and theorized how butterflies in Africa, or bats in Brazil can cause chaotic effects on the weather.
It has? I'm not so sure about that...
Although, that would be pretty funny. "Yeah, well, we noticed that whenever that group of bats in Hyderabad go apeshit and start flying in circles, it snows in Toledo."
Of course, I'm sure my fellow/.ers are posting about the paucity of data in this sample. So, I won't worry about the fact that we can't derive too much useful information from this.
OTOH, I imagine that the air traffic, in, say, the US varies quite a bit from day-to-day. For example, the day before Tgiving is berzerk, and there's probably some days where noone travels. Anyway, one way to get more data on this theory would be to correlate, over a long time, the cloud (or whatever) variables with the number of planes in the air. Do this every day for about a year, and see what you get.
One thing to note is that although these three days are not much data, it's actually very strong, in the sense that nothing flew those days. So it's the strongest data you could get over any three-day period. I'm sure we'll see more stuff coming out soon.
Actually, I'm kind of confused as to why my original got modded to "Flamebait"... mod it "Redundant", or even "Crap", but, hey, it was politely worded... Anyway:
>>I think the first poster had a valid point, and that is that in the popular conception, any change over this timescale is seen as evolution, when, sometimes, it's just change.
The popular conception which you descibe is infact correct. Evolution is change over time. Evolution doesn't have to use the mechanism put forward by Darwin and refined by various others. Stellar evolution is a example of this.
What you have just stated is, IMHO, a confusion between two different meanings of the word "evolution". It is unfortunate that the scientific community uses the words differently, and the example you showed was a good one. For example, as a mathematician, I'm forever talking about "evolution equations" when I don't mean anything biological or Darwinistic, but just a physical process which changes in time.
On the other hand, the usage of the word in biology, and in this article, was that of biological evolution which arises from natural selection. And, yes, my point is still valid: in the popular conception of evolution, whenever we see speciation, or change in a biological organism, it is expected that there is some sort of evolution going on which is driven by natural selection, and this is simply untrue. Sometimes change is just change. In fact, most major changes in the genome are highly detrimental (e.g. go hang out in Chernobyl for a while). Just because they happen does not imply evolution in any Darwinian sense.
Your post is also misleading in stating that the "The mechanism for evolution is a random process". Random processes are only a part of evolution. The natural selection bit also plays a very considerable role. To leave it out, leaves one open to creationist probability strawmen.
This last paragraph of yours is wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe I'll get "Flamebait" again, but there's no polite way to tell you that you misunderstand the issues in a fundamental way.
All evolutionary change is as the result of a random process. If you think anything differently, you are a creationist (or some other type of "directed evolution"ist) yourself. The fundamental mechanism for evolution is a random process. What you call natural selection is a selection bias in this random process. Obviously, organisms which work better are selected for, and those which don't are selected against. So of course there is a mean drift in the direction of "better" organisms. But the assertion that this is not random is, quite frankly, creationism.
This is exactly Darwin's (and others') fundamental insight into the field, that a random process can drive a progression towards more complicated lifeforms. This is the most misunderstood part of Darwin's theory.
The shame is that the armchair scientists (so to speak) play down this part of the theory, since it's a difficult thing for a layman to wrap his mind around. The anti-evolution arguments always state "Well how can these complicated objects arise randomly?", but this is the beauty of the theory. "Defenders of evolution" do it a disservice by cutting this part out so that it is more palatable to its enemies.
Because, let's be honest. The creationists aren't going to buy anything the scientists say at all, no matter how beautifully worded, because they don't buy the scientific method. So fuck 'em.
Woah, there... no need for a kneejerk pro-evolution response.
I think the first poster had a valid point, and that is that in the popular conception, any change over this timescale is seen as evolution, when, sometimes, it's just change.
Incidentally, the hyper-Darwinstic viewpoint is not accepted by most scientists, either. (By h-D I mean, as I stated above, the conception that all change is evolution.) The mechanism for evolution is a random process. We can only hope to understand it in the average, large-scale dynamics. And a good amount of the time, a random change will not lead to progress. It's just that since there is a selection bias towards things that work, you do see it.
Yeah, this would be the Holy Grail of power sources for a moon colony. There would be a lot of energy down there, much more than we could use.
The only problem I could see is the same one which stops us from using geothermal effectively here; we can't drill deep enough to get a large enough temperature differential to make it worthwhile. Perhaps some engineer could elaborate on this...
This is why the East Coast kicks all the ass in the world, really.
Ok, flamebait aside, I still find it amazing that people can deal with this stuff on a regular basis. I've been through quakes a few times, and I have absolutely no desire to repeat the experience.
How on earth do all you Californians deal with it? I would be heading out on the next flight.
Give me nor-easters and rude subway drivers any day...;-)
The parent of this comment is very inaccurate in many of its details. I don't want to do a point-by-point, but it is full of all of the popular misconceptions about mathematics. Actually, if you believed the exact opposite of everything that post asserts, you'd be pretty close.
Don't get me wrong, either... I'm not trying to dog on this particular guy, since there are a bunch of other crap posts in reply to this story.
So, before we start, I am a mathematician, and I pretty much do applied dynamical systems (applied chaos theory, in lay-terms). (Always wanted to drop that N... Woo)
If we buy the argument above (essentially: weather is chaotic, therefore cannot be modeled, so let's quit), then there would be almost no science done on nonlinear systems. But people are studying chaotic systems all of the time, and doing good science.
Yes, it is true that the weather exhibits sensitive dependence on IC, but so does just about every physical system, even linear ones. (Think of standing a pencil on its end. Let it go. Which way will it fall? Repeat 100 times.) Just because something exhibits SDIC does not mean it cannot be modelled and does not mean no prediction is good. For example, consider a mixing fluid (say milk in your coffee). There's no question that there is chaos in the coffee if you look at it, but, no matter what you do, you expect to see a homogeneous light-brown mixture eventually. To say that I cannot predict the eventual state of my coffee is wrong.
I want to make three points:
Just because a system is chaotic does not mean that its average, or other statistical quantities, are chaotic. The coffee is a good example of that. In the case of the weather, it may be true that the day-to-day temperature in NYC is completely chaotic... but that the average temperature in the U.S. on a yearly cycle could be very well-behaved. Noone knows whether or not this is true, and the popular misconception that "if you take a simple system which is chaotic, and embed it in a larger system, the larger system will be worse". This is very much untrue.
Because a system is chaotic, we cannot understand it. The Lorentz oscillator is a good counterexample to this. Although the Lorentz system is complicated at first glance, we find that it has a chaotic attractor, but that this attractor has a relatively low dimension. Thus we need understand the dynamics on this low-dimensional object. They're bad, but not so bad. Of course, the LO comes from a model of fluid convection in a cube, and you're taking an infinite-dimensional system, taking only three variables, and finding chaos. Thus the full system must be much crazier, right? No. There's a lot of evidence that the full fluid system that LO comes from is not qualitatively more complicated than the LO itself. We really may understand this system pretty well.
Just because we don't have a rigorous, detailed mathematical model to describe a physical process does not mean it is completely unintelligible. I know that most physics that/.'ers have seen is at a relatively basic level (say college undergrad), and, in this case, almost always the systems are mathematically understood very well. This is the exception in science. Most physical (and forget biological) systems are not understood at the variables level. Noone can actually solve the fluid equations for the interior of the sun. But scientists know a hell of a lot about sunspots. As another example, if you go to the doctor, he does a lot of good science without understanding anything at a basic level. For example, one could apply the previous poster's argument to the human body, which is probably much more complicated than the weather, and certainly AS complicated. You walk into the doctor's office coughing up blood, he's going to do something to stop that... and he's not going to worry about if his model of the interaction between your pancreas and liver is exactly correct. The previous poster's argument is, well, the body is a chaotic system with tons of variables, any model the doctor uses will break down, therefore he can't say anything useful about my health. If he tells me to stop sucking down the greaseball McDonald's burgers because he found a heart murmur, it doesn't matter, because some completely nonlinear interaction between my toe and my ear could counteract it, therefore the doctor is no more likely to be correct than chance. You buy that argument? I don't. The bottom line is, we can make inferences based on data which is observed. No, this is of course not as good as a mathematical theory with all variables accounted for, but it does pretty damn well. This is the way most science is done.
I also don't want to get into the debate about global warming which inevitably comes up, but some of the above fallacies always crop up in the arguments against it. It is certainly true that we don't understand the climate completely, not by a long shot. But the amount of evidence that the earth is warming, and that we are playing a role in this warming, is becoming very large. It is certainly not sure one way or the other, but, anyone who says that they are sure it is not happening (as I have seen other posters in this thread do) is simply completely full of shit.
Well, ok, that's enough rambling for one night... just wanted to get that off my chest
Add in the twenty five years or so in which I have observed organised religion, inside and out, and you get quite a well-considered opinion.
Of course... your past experiences, objective as they were, give you enough data to dispense with the necessity of reflection in this case. Why consider things on a case-by-case basis, since you already know all there is to know about the subject?
Again, your ability to analyze this problem in such a straightforward manner, without extraneous details such as the facts, is commendable.
I'd like to see the raw numbers on that one. Are you counting them one-by-one, or what?
WWI , WWII , American Civil War, Vietnam, Korea, Gulf War, Hundred Years War, on and on. As a matter of fact, it's kind of hard for me to think of any recent major wars which were caused by religion. You're so wrong it's hard to describe it in words.
And if you count by number of deaths, then the figure is more like 5%. But thanks for playing.
Gosh, we're being accused of ignorance and hatred by someone who appreciates (and may even be a member of) the Catholic Church.
Good call... The guy you're replying to actually had the temerity to defend the Catholic Church instead of knowing that, of course, any freethinking person could safely assume the opposite without having to think about it.
It's also commendable that you were able to come to the correct answer so quickly, and with so little reflection.
Second, you are no longer talking about nano-technology here. You're talking about biologics. The two are vastly different (although there is some work [eetimes.com] being done using bacteria as transistors).
Just a point of information...
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "biologics", but I'm guessing you mean studying biological, as opposed to man-made and mechanical, structures. If so, then you have a misconception.
I think the popular conception of nanotech is these tiny robots or whatever, but this is a very bad misconception. In reality, most of the successful research in what is called "nano-technology" is really in the realm of biology. Just peruse the NSF's site and you'll see all kinds of biological stuff here at first glance.
One more thing... the plural of virus ain't "virii".
Ok, let me start off by saying that IANANTD (I am not a nano-tech dude); I'm actually not a scientist at all, technically, but a mathematician. That being said, I am an applied mathematician, I am involved with a group of mathematicians who are identifying theoretical questions in the theory (which we will subsequently try to solve). Also, I am at a university where a huge amount of experimental work is being done in nanotech, and we have of course been talking to the experimentalists extensively about what they are doing. So, long story short, I'm not quite an expert, but I'm on the fringes. I'd like to hear what an experimentalists out there might think...
Put simply, this article is utter horseshit. This should be obvious to anyone to begin with, since the author repeatedly mentions the fact that he has no evidence to back up his claims, and the article turns into a polemic on "why it would have been bad for the government to restrict computers". In fact, the only content that I can see in this article is that he thinks it would be bad for scientists to ignore a new technology. Wow, that's a controversial opinion. Let me be a little more explicit: This article is simply muckraking, and has little to no evidence backing up any of its claims.
The facts are that the money flowing into nanotech is just unbelievable, and a good portion of this is from the U.S. government, through agences such as the NSF, etc. (I won't attempt to hide the fact that this is exactly why the group I am involved with is trying to find good mathematical problems in the field.) Several national agencies have specific nanotech initiatives, and, consequently, the number of good people working in this field is exploding. Of course it is impossible to know what is being done that is classified (that's the point), but the amount of open science being done is
both extensive and growing rapidly,
strongly, strongly, strongly encouraged by both public and private funding.
Also (and this is somewhat tangential), I think most people have a bit of a misconception about what nanotech is, because I certainly did. The impression I had a few years ago was that engineers are building some really small robots to do stuff on small scales (like in that book by Neal Stephenson, I forget the title, but it might have been his second?). Anyway, this is very much what is not going on right now (since this is far in the future). Essentially, the successful research being done in this field is two major groups: material science and microbiology. People are finding ways to build structures at the nanometer scale (but very simple ones, like tubes and boxes... no machines as of yet). People are also studying "biological motors", for example very complex proteins in our cells which convert energy to complex mechanical operations. Long story short, the problems are not nearly as sexy as is portrayed in the media (which should be no surprise), although they are very interesting, IMHO, from a physical and chemical viewpoint. (Not to oversimplify, there is work that is being done that doesn't fall into either of these two categories, but these are the biggest two.) Anyway, what I'm saying is that even what the engineers are doing right now is building things which, for the most part, have no specific purpose, but are just simple building blocks for something we may one day build.
Disclaimer (if I need it): the above does not reflect the opinion of any organization with which I am affiliated, or the opinion of the university to which I am attached. It is simply the personal opinion of a working mathematician.
Cancer is a cessation of energy flow to an area of the body, which eventually causes that area to 'die' and begin to be reclaimed by opportunistic organisms that break down decaying matter. Similar tot he concept of 'bions' but without the mysticism.
The problem is that totalitarian states don't spring into existence fully formed. They evolve one step at a time and at each step people say "that sounds reasonable, after all it's for our safety".
This is a statement, and a point of view, which is repeated very often. However, I don't think there's much evidence to back it up.
Think about all of the totalitarian regimes in history, and how have they formed? The Soviet Union certainly did not gradually move from a free society to a totalitarian one; there is a clear violent overthrow, a clear demarcation date. The various fascist powers in Europe right before WWII also came into power very quickly, in several cases in a revolutionary fashion. China did not evolve into a state headed by Mao; it became one quite suddenly. Elsewhere in the modern world, consider the horrible totalitarian regimes in Africa. These did not gradually evolve post-colonization, but sprung into being through violence.
The point of view of the "slippery slope" and the gradual evolution into dictatorship is frequently bandied about, but, in my view, it is simply a misinterpretation of history. In fact, I cannot think of even one example where such a thing has happened. I'm sure it might have happened in a few cases, but it is certainly not the norm. Totalitarian states are brought into existence through violent revolution; history is full of examples of this.
(One possible counterexample to my claim is that countries such as Western Europe and the U.S. are actually totalitarian in many ways, which is something that I've heard people claim, but is really just posturing, IMHO.)
Revisionist history gets involved not because I think there is an organized plot to control people's minds but because people need to understand that history is not immutable. Just because you read it in an "real" textbook doesn't make it true.
Textbooks are chosen to satisfy a constituency. That constituency is largely comfortable with the current common view of the world. If the current view is that we should all have a national id complete with biometric information then there is a risk that anyone who suggested otherwise (Orwell perhaps?) will be quietly dropped from the curriculum.
This is of course true. What is taught in schools reflects the current trends, and even fads, in popular thinking. This may or may not be bad, but it is inevitable. A good example of this is the eugenics movement, which was heavily based in the U.S. at the turn of the century, and in some ways was led by the U.S. At the time, it was considered completely acceptable to espouse and teach these ideas. After WWII, this line of thought became quite unpopular (for obvious reasons), and was of course dropped from curricula.
I think it might be a mistake to equate not teaching something in high school to trying to censor it. For example, I think we could all agree that we were given a fairly inaccurate picture of U.S. history while in high school. I don't think this was at all because my teachers, or the government, had a plot to confuse my thinking. There just simply isn't enough time to teach everything that could be relevant, or even what was thought to be relevant 50 years ago.
Every time you add something, you have to remove something. For example, a student growing up in the U.S. today needs to know much more about world affairs than one growing up in the 1950's. So you have to cut things to make room, and things like Teddy Roosevelt and Ben Franklin will get the axe. I hear people my parents' age bemoaning the things my generation didn't learn in school that they did. They forget all the things we learned that they didn't.
On the other hand, the libraries are open to anyone who wants to learn more about anything. If you can point to a situation where old books and old facts are being held from the public at large, then, yes, that is a serious problem. But this is quite different from deciding what to give students in a standard curriculum. Choosing to not teach a particular thing in "9th grade history" is not censorship; it is an efficiency calculation. Destroying books because of their content is censorship.
Slashdot Mirror
These lists, although quite influential, are not quite like a "distributed computing" idea. These are just big open questions sitting out there. They're really hard to solve. Now, one could imagine that someone posts on usch a server saying, i think we can parse this certain problem into the following 15 pieces, and then people can solve this. This is exactly what one does with their advisor when working on a PhD thesis, for example. Such a system would bring the problems closer to the forefront, so to speak.
Consider a simple example: a random walk on a line. Start off a particle at x=0. At each time step, say the particle has a 50/50 chance of going right or left. We know intuitively what we expect to happen: the expected position of the particle is of course 0. The math backs this up, and tells us even more: that after N steps, we really expect to see the particle between \sqrt{N} and -\sqrt{N}. We can analyze this situation even fuirther, but it's not important.
Now, make the example more complicated. Let's say that at every time step, the particle has a 70% chance to go right, and 30% to go left. (It's not too interesting to consider the case where the particle can sit still, since we can just rename our timesteps to be the times of motion.) Anyway, what you see mathematically is what you expect: a mean drift to the right. Now, you won't always see motion to the right, but the longer you wait, the more you expect to see right-ward motion. In particular, the statement is that as N goes to infinity, the probability that the particle is to the right of 0 goes to 1. (In particular, in this case, as N goes to infinity, the probability that the particle is to the right of any integer goes to 1.) Now, of course, this is a simple example, you could let the probability of going right be dependent on the place you're at, etc.
But this simple model is somewhat reminiscent of the natural selection case. According to mathematical terminology, this section case is still considered a "random process", just with a mean drift. Think of it as natural selection, where right is somehow "better" than left.
Again, it's ok to say that natural selection is not random (of course it isn't), but as we see from the above example, the whole mechanism can be put in the framework of a random process, which makes it of course more elegant conceptually.
For anyone who's really interested in the math, this is an absolutely wonderful treatment of the subject (although quite advanced mathematically).
Looking at it this way, this system is simply a clearinghouse for problems people find interesting. If people work to break these big problems into manageable and concrete pieces, then these little pieces may be perfect for undergraduate or even graduate students to work on. I know that such a clearinghouse would be very valuable in mathematics. I've always imagined that such a thing would exist before too long for the mathematical community, and this would be a good thing.
The main reason that I think this would be a good thing is that for a young researcher starting out, one has to spend a lot of time understanding the big picture of a certian field, and generating good open problem on one's own. Such a system could bring the problems to the researchers more quickly. This could speed the process up by quite a bit. Such a thing sort of exists already, in the form of preprint servers, and I'm sure there's more to come! What doesn't really exist now is such a "big picture" fremework in a public domain, IMHO.
It has? I'm not so sure about that...
Although, that would be pretty funny. "Yeah, well, we noticed that whenever that group of bats in Hyderabad go apeshit and start flying in circles, it snows in Toledo."
OTOH, I imagine that the air traffic, in, say, the US varies quite a bit from day-to-day. For example, the day before Tgiving is berzerk, and there's probably some days where noone travels. Anyway, one way to get more data on this theory would be to correlate, over a long time, the cloud (or whatever) variables with the number of planes in the air. Do this every day for about a year, and see what you get.
One thing to note is that although these three days are not much data, it's actually very strong, in the sense that nothing flew those days. So it's the strongest data you could get over any three-day period. I'm sure we'll see more stuff coming out soon.
Incidentally, what does WAG stand for? Wack-Ass Guessin'?
>>I think the first poster had a valid point, and that is that in the popular conception, any change over this timescale is seen as evolution, when, sometimes, it's just change.
The popular conception which you descibe is infact correct. Evolution is change over time. Evolution doesn't have to use the mechanism put forward by Darwin and refined by various others. Stellar evolution is a example of this.
What you have just stated is, IMHO, a confusion between two different meanings of the word "evolution". It is unfortunate that the scientific community uses the words differently, and the example you showed was a good one. For example, as a mathematician, I'm forever talking about "evolution equations" when I don't mean anything biological or Darwinistic, but just a physical process which changes in time.
On the other hand, the usage of the word in biology, and in this article, was that of biological evolution which arises from natural selection. And, yes, my point is still valid: in the popular conception of evolution, whenever we see speciation, or change in a biological organism, it is expected that there is some sort of evolution going on which is driven by natural selection, and this is simply untrue. Sometimes change is just change. In fact, most major changes in the genome are highly detrimental (e.g. go hang out in Chernobyl for a while). Just because they happen does not imply evolution in any Darwinian sense.
Your post is also misleading in stating that the "The mechanism for evolution is a random process". Random processes are only a part of evolution. The natural selection bit also plays a very considerable role. To leave it out, leaves one open to creationist probability strawmen.
This last paragraph of yours is wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe I'll get "Flamebait" again, but there's no polite way to tell you that you misunderstand the issues in a fundamental way.
All evolutionary change is as the result of a random process. If you think anything differently, you are a creationist (or some other type of "directed evolution"ist) yourself. The fundamental mechanism for evolution is a random process. What you call natural selection is a selection bias in this random process. Obviously, organisms which work better are selected for, and those which don't are selected against. So of course there is a mean drift in the direction of "better" organisms. But the assertion that this is not random is, quite frankly, creationism.
This is exactly Darwin's (and others') fundamental insight into the field, that a random process can drive a progression towards more complicated lifeforms. This is the most misunderstood part of Darwin's theory.
The shame is that the armchair scientists (so to speak) play down this part of the theory, since it's a difficult thing for a layman to wrap his mind around. The anti-evolution arguments always state "Well how can these complicated objects arise randomly?", but this is the beauty of the theory. "Defenders of evolution" do it a disservice by cutting this part out so that it is more palatable to its enemies.
Because, let's be honest. The creationists aren't going to buy anything the scientists say at all, no matter how beautifully worded, because they don't buy the scientific method. So fuck 'em.
Way to live up to your namesake, mate! Keep up the good work, wreckin' the big boys grill...
You ever read any academic works? Heh.
I think the first poster had a valid point, and that is that in the popular conception, any change over this timescale is seen as evolution, when, sometimes, it's just change.
Incidentally, the hyper-Darwinstic viewpoint is not accepted by most scientists, either. (By h-D I mean, as I stated above, the conception that all change is evolution.) The mechanism for evolution is a random process. We can only hope to understand it in the average, large-scale dynamics. And a good amount of the time, a random change will not lead to progress. It's just that since there is a selection bias towards things that work, you do see it.
Actually, maybe the memos DON'T always some back to haunt them... only the few we hear about...;-)
No, seriously, it's possible that all kinds of funny shit in going on behind closed doors at MS, and we'll never hear about it.
The reason it's labelled "funny" is because the story is obviously not true and meant in jest.
Yeah, this would be the Holy Grail of power sources for a moon colony. There would be a lot of energy down there, much more than we could use.
The only problem I could see is the same one which stops us from using geothermal effectively here; we can't drill deep enough to get a large enough temperature differential to make it worthwhile. Perhaps some engineer could elaborate on this...
Ok, flamebait aside, I still find it amazing that people can deal with this stuff on a regular basis. I've been through quakes a few times, and I have absolutely no desire to repeat the experience.
How on earth do all you Californians deal with it? I would be heading out on the next flight.
Give me nor-easters and rude subway drivers any day...;-)
I guess this begs the question: is it better to lick your sys admin, or a toilet seat?
Don't get me wrong, either... I'm not trying to dog on this particular guy, since there are a bunch of other crap posts in reply to this story.
So, before we start, I am a mathematician, and I pretty much do applied dynamical systems (applied chaos theory, in lay-terms). (Always wanted to drop that N... Woo)
If we buy the argument above (essentially: weather is chaotic, therefore cannot be modeled, so let's quit), then there would be almost no science done on nonlinear systems. But people are studying chaotic systems all of the time, and doing good science.
Yes, it is true that the weather exhibits sensitive dependence on IC, but so does just about every physical system, even linear ones. (Think of standing a pencil on its end. Let it go. Which way will it fall? Repeat 100 times.) Just because something exhibits SDIC does not mean it cannot be modelled and does not mean no prediction is good. For example, consider a mixing fluid (say milk in your coffee). There's no question that there is chaos in the coffee if you look at it, but, no matter what you do, you expect to see a homogeneous light-brown mixture eventually. To say that I cannot predict the eventual state of my coffee is wrong.
I want to make three points:
I also don't want to get into the debate about global warming which inevitably comes up, but some of the above fallacies always crop up in the arguments against it. It is certainly true that we don't understand the climate completely, not by a long shot. But the amount of evidence that the earth is warming, and that we are playing a role in this warming, is becoming very large. It is certainly not sure one way or the other, but, anyone who says that they are sure it is not happening (as I have seen other posters in this thread do) is simply completely full of shit.
Well, ok, that's enough rambling for one night... just wanted to get that off my chest
What you say?!?
Of course... your past experiences, objective as they were, give you enough data to dispense with the necessity of reflection in this case. Why consider things on a case-by-case basis, since you already know all there is to know about the subject?
Again, your ability to analyze this problem in such a straightforward manner, without extraneous details such as the facts, is commendable.
You said "[Evolution] is Neither True or False", and you think other people's lack of scientific knowledge is sad?
?!?
I'd like to see the raw numbers on that one. Are you counting them one-by-one, or what?
WWI , WWII , American Civil War, Vietnam, Korea, Gulf War, Hundred Years War, on and on. As a matter of fact, it's kind of hard for me to think of any recent major wars which were caused by religion. You're so wrong it's hard to describe it in words.
And if you count by number of deaths, then the figure is more like 5%. But thanks for playing.
Good call... The guy you're replying to actually had the temerity to defend the Catholic Church instead of knowing that, of course, any freethinking person could safely assume the opposite without having to think about it.
It's also commendable that you were able to come to the correct answer so quickly, and with so little reflection.
The speed of your openmindedness is remarkable.
Just a point of information...
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "biologics", but I'm guessing you mean studying biological, as opposed to man-made and mechanical, structures. If so, then you have a misconception.
I think the popular conception of nanotech is these tiny robots or whatever, but this is a very bad misconception. In reality, most of the successful research in what is called "nano-technology" is really in the realm of biology. Just peruse the NSF's site and you'll see all kinds of biological stuff here at first glance.
One more thing... the plural of virus ain't "virii".
Put simply, this article is utter horseshit. This should be obvious to anyone to begin with, since the author repeatedly mentions the fact that he has no evidence to back up his claims, and the article turns into a polemic on "why it would have been bad for the government to restrict computers". In fact, the only content that I can see in this article is that he thinks it would be bad for scientists to ignore a new technology. Wow, that's a controversial opinion. Let me be a little more explicit: This article is simply muckraking, and has little to no evidence backing up any of its claims.
The facts are that the money flowing into nanotech is just unbelievable, and a good portion of this is from the U.S. government, through agences such as the NSF, etc. (I won't attempt to hide the fact that this is exactly why the group I am involved with is trying to find good mathematical problems in the field.) Several national agencies have specific nanotech initiatives, and, consequently, the number of good people working in this field is exploding. Of course it is impossible to know what is being done that is classified (that's the point), but the amount of open science being done is
Also (and this is somewhat tangential), I think most people have a bit of a misconception about what nanotech is, because I certainly did. The impression I had a few years ago was that engineers are building some really small robots to do stuff on small scales (like in that book by Neal Stephenson, I forget the title, but it might have been his second?). Anyway, this is very much what is not going on right now (since this is far in the future). Essentially, the successful research being done in this field is two major groups: material science and microbiology. People are finding ways to build structures at the nanometer scale (but very simple ones, like tubes and boxes... no machines as of yet). People are also studying "biological motors", for example very complex proteins in our cells which convert energy to complex mechanical operations. Long story short, the problems are not nearly as sexy as is portrayed in the media (which should be no surprise), although they are very interesting, IMHO, from a physical and chemical viewpoint. (Not to oversimplify, there is work that is being done that doesn't fall into either of these two categories, but these are the biggest two.) Anyway, what I'm saying is that even what the engineers are doing right now is building things which, for the most part, have no specific purpose, but are just simple building blocks for something we may one day build.
Disclaimer (if I need it): the above does not reflect the opinion of any organization with which I am affiliated, or the opinion of the university to which I am attached. It is simply the personal opinion of a working mathematician.
Whaddaya mean, "without the mysticism"?
This is a statement, and a point of view, which is repeated very often. However, I don't think there's much evidence to back it up.
Think about all of the totalitarian regimes in history, and how have they formed? The Soviet Union certainly did not gradually move from a free society to a totalitarian one; there is a clear violent overthrow, a clear demarcation date. The various fascist powers in Europe right before WWII also came into power very quickly, in several cases in a revolutionary fashion. China did not evolve into a state headed by Mao; it became one quite suddenly. Elsewhere in the modern world, consider the horrible totalitarian regimes in Africa. These did not gradually evolve post-colonization, but sprung into being through violence.
The point of view of the "slippery slope" and the gradual evolution into dictatorship is frequently bandied about, but, in my view, it is simply a misinterpretation of history. In fact, I cannot think of even one example where such a thing has happened. I'm sure it might have happened in a few cases, but it is certainly not the norm. Totalitarian states are brought into existence through violent revolution; history is full of examples of this.
(One possible counterexample to my claim is that countries such as Western Europe and the U.S. are actually totalitarian in many ways, which is something that I've heard people claim, but is really just posturing, IMHO.)
Revisionist history gets involved not because I think there is an organized plot to control people's minds but because people need to understand that history is not immutable. Just because you read it in an "real" textbook doesn't make it true. Textbooks are chosen to satisfy a constituency. That constituency is largely comfortable with the current common view of the world. If the current view is that we should all have a national id complete with biometric information then there is a risk that anyone who suggested otherwise (Orwell perhaps?) will be quietly dropped from the curriculum.
This is of course true. What is taught in schools reflects the current trends, and even fads, in popular thinking. This may or may not be bad, but it is inevitable. A good example of this is the eugenics movement, which was heavily based in the U.S. at the turn of the century, and in some ways was led by the U.S. At the time, it was considered completely acceptable to espouse and teach these ideas. After WWII, this line of thought became quite unpopular (for obvious reasons), and was of course dropped from curricula.
I think it might be a mistake to equate not teaching something in high school to trying to censor it. For example, I think we could all agree that we were given a fairly inaccurate picture of U.S. history while in high school. I don't think this was at all because my teachers, or the government, had a plot to confuse my thinking. There just simply isn't enough time to teach everything that could be relevant, or even what was thought to be relevant 50 years ago.
Every time you add something, you have to remove something. For example, a student growing up in the U.S. today needs to know much more about world affairs than one growing up in the 1950's. So you have to cut things to make room, and things like Teddy Roosevelt and Ben Franklin will get the axe. I hear people my parents' age bemoaning the things my generation didn't learn in school that they did. They forget all the things we learned that they didn't.
On the other hand, the libraries are open to anyone who wants to learn more about anything. If you can point to a situation where old books and old facts are being held from the public at large, then, yes, that is a serious problem. But this is quite different from deciding what to give students in a standard curriculum. Choosing to not teach a particular thing in "9th grade history" is not censorship; it is an efficiency calculation. Destroying books because of their content is censorship.