The two skills of writing
on
Prey
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've always thought that there are two very distinct skill involved in writing. The first is storytelling, the ability to weave a yarn that is enthralling, touching, satisfying, etc. The second is skill with the language, the ability to create a rich imaginary world, enticing to all the senses, with only the written word.
There are some writers who clearly excel at both. The first that comes to mind is Pat Conroy.
Crichton (note the correct spelling, which is used selectively in the original post) falls into a category of writers with superb storytelling skills but merely competent language skill. Also in this category is Grisham. I suspect it may even have aided them in their success; in a country where supposedly the average adult reads at a fifth grade level maybe dumbing down the language is what's needed for mass market appeal.
That said, I like Crichton's past books. Sometimes it's fun to be able to zip through a book without taxing the language processing lobes of the brain much or thinking about how the story was delivered to you. But oftentimes I leave his work feeling that the story was shovelled at me with no finesse, or style, or creativity.
I had a related experience while working in the gov't. A manager had a great idea and put together a small team, 5 people, to try it out. I was on that team. We built a prototype web system based on his idea, perl generated web pages hooked to a db. People loved it.
Then, for the second iteration we went to java and built a much more sophisticated, interactve app. The brass loved that even more.
They decided it was really worth doing and therefore they must spend money on it. They initiated the monstrous government procurement process. It took some eight months or more, but finally a coalition team with Oracle and IBM and others won the $35 million contract.
After much hoo-ha, meetings, requirements gathering, countless billable hours, and the generation of untold linear yards of documentation, they finally decided to build something quite similar to our first prototype. And, after several years of work, with a team of dozens of contractors, that's what they have.
It's like the management said, "We love this, therefore we must spend millions of dollars to have it be exactly the same." But surely some assistant director's budget doubled, thus increasing their dominion, and people got to put on their resume that they oversaw a $35M contract. I'm sure everyone got awards and promotions for successfully disposing of all those unwanted taxpayer dollars.
This article is such a load of bull. Ugh, where to begin?
These stats they quote, or rather the tone and context in which they are used, are ridiculous.
The underlying tenet of this whole article is:
"If X has not been proven and approved by the scientific community then you are a laughable ignoramus for believing it might be true."
He doesn't state this overtly, because most people would reject it, but that is the attitude he holds and is trying to convince reader to adopt.
Nothing could be more asinine. That's like the patent officer who said "everything that can be invented has been invented" in 1898 (or whatever, I forget the details). To state that nothing that hasn't been scientifically proven exists, that's living in denial.
Human scientists are still struggling to understand and explain countless things. I think you could build a reasonable argument that we're not even at the halfway point of understanding our world and universe. Just look at the human body. We still do not entirely understand all the proteins in our body and how they interact. DNA, the genetic code, and how it is used to create new complete humans with all the right parts. We don't understand how the brain works, memory, learning, intelligence. How many diseases are there that we don't fully understand yet? AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer, the list is endless.
To look at all the simple things right in front of our eyes that we don't yet understand and extrapolate that to all the other things we don't know is perfectly reasonable. And to form our own theories about phenomena that are not yet explained by science is reasonable. How else will we ever figure them out?
Also, an expression of belief, or acceptance of something as possible, is not the same as saying it absolutely has been proven. If no one has a proven explanation of a phenomenon there is nothing even unscientific about me guessing about the causes. That's called a hypothesis, and it is the foundation of the scientific method. If sticking a bunch of tiny needles into people in certain spots seems to have some sort of consistent positive result, let us theorize about the possible causes of that, not mock the 88% of people who "accept" that there might be something there.
So I say Brad Hines, ram your head just a little bit farther up your ass, so it covers not only your eyes and ears, but also your mouth. Then we won't have to hear you spewing this bullshit.
These craft will be piloted only by navigators, members of the Space Guild, who, due to their heavy use of spice melange, can perceive the present and future without windows, and can fold space.
Does the AliceBot combine different AI techiniques?
If so, what techniques does it combine and how?
If not, have you considered combining different techniques, and if so what were your conclusions, and why did you rule it out?
Specifically, have you considered or used any Bayesian network or decision theory techniques?
I would speculate that, as an enhancement to basic pattern matching, Bayesian network modeling might add power to disambiguation by dealing with uncertainties in a managable way, and decision theory techniques could help the bot choose between alternative courses of action based on its current objectives and definition of utility.
Grandma, is that you? How all of the family has been searching to find you. What a joyful day this is! No one believed you were serious when you, Sjembo Obsowetu, vowed to put an Apple computer in every classroom in our home country, but look at you now.
It's a "cordless", not a "wireless". Nonsensical as the distinction may seem,
in current usage the two are very different. And/. editors should know the difference.
Somewhat interesting product. Fairly weak review.
When this is applied to cell phones (yes, "wireless") it will really be interesting.
I foresaw this as an inevitable result of voice recognition and cell technology miniaturization a couple years ago and have been waiting for it ever since. Guess I'll have to wait a while longer.
Okay, okay, we all solemnly promise not to mod it up "anymore". So it won't go above its current "+5 Funny" score. Thanks for alerting everyone to this.
My one question is, do they taste good? In my experience, the slimiest, nastiest looking fish are always the most delicious. For example catfish, and eel. Mmmm. These critters definitely fall into the slimy and nasty looking category. If they really taste good that might solve the problem, as we are very talented at harvesting to extinction anything that gives us happy tummy.
For the first two weeks I didn't really notice, then it occurred to me that I had not been annoyed by a Katz article in a while, then I started enjoying the peace and quiet. Then I thought of submitting an article speculating about the termination of his employment, but no, that would surely jinx it. I just enjoyed and wondered what had become of him.
Well our soothing reprieve is over. Katz was
silent from
Jun 04, '02 12:15 PM to Jul 02, '02 01:15 PM.
Nearly a month. Anyone care to hypothesize what he may have been doing during that time?
Reminds me of a book I just finished reading,
The Ice Master. It's a great book. It is the true story of the Karluk and its crew, who, during a polar expedition, got stuck in the arctic ice in 1913. The ice they were trapped in drifted hundreds of miles, from Alaska to Siberia, so no one could find them. They were trapped with the ship for some seven months, then the ship sank and they were stranded out there on the ice. They survived on the ice for several more months, then most of them managed to get to land, and the captain trekked hundreds of miles to get to the western coast of Siberia, where he got passage to Alaska to arrange a rescue. In the end more than half of them died, and the rescue finally got to them a year and three months after they were iced in.
Things are much better for these folks in Antarctica, of course, but if these things interest you I highly recommend the book.
Idealizing the problem, the researcher defines open-source programs as software in which the bugs are easy to find and closed-source programs as software where the bugs are harder to find. By calculating the average time before a program will fail in each case, he asserts that in the abstract case, both types of programs have the same security.
I am not sure how much value this has. There are a lot of other considerations.
With open source you have the source, so you can do something about bugs, you can fix them. And you can also look for potential issues in the code. You are in control of your own security.
And a potential attacker has no idea what you've done with your particular implementation.
With closed source you are completely dependent on the vendor to provide fixes. First you have to prove to them that something is wrong, then, if you are lucky, after some period of time, the will provide a udpate which may or may not fix your particular problem. They may not be as motivated as you would be to fix the problem.
I'll take the Open Source choice any time. That way the people who care about security are the ones in control of security, an arrangement that is likely to work better than any other.
But at least "he acknowledged that real-world considerations could easily skew his conclusions.
"
No. The tooth speaker sends vibrations through your bones to your ear. The ear is still hearing the sound. Try this as an experiment: press your chinbone firmly onto something that is vibrating, like a piano or an air conditioner, or your favorite "personal massager." You can then hear the pitch of the vibration as it is conducted through the bones in your head.
Imagine how it would sound if the pickup mike was in your tooth. But it's not. There isn't one. The article only talks about receiving sound.
Pretty wicked though.
Once the work out the mike issue this could mean *apparent* telepathy. Remember, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I can think of a dozen ethically iffy uses. Think: two people collaborating in a poker game, getting answers to questions on the SAT, a Miss Universe contestant could hear the question from a spy in the audience, even though she's in the isolation booth, etc.
The comparison of P2P use and animal populations is fascinating, and
although the parallels will be limited it might yield some useful ideas.
The most interesting parallel animal model has got to be the
experiment
designed to reduce (or eliminate)
Tsetse fly
(and
other insects
)
populations by releasing large numbers of sterilized males into
the natural population.
The process of P2P sharing would correspond to mating, since you
have to have two participants. A successful mating would correspond to
a user getting the file they wanted, and therefore being more likely to
use the service in the future. Getting a dud file is like a wild female
mating with a sterilized male. Yields no offspring, user is less likely
to continue using service. One or two cases of sterile matings have no
impact, but when it is a significant percentage the population will decline,
I'm sure the parallel with P2P holds.
The author seems focused on studying the best way to eliminate P2P,
though, so he's probably hoping to get research grant money from RIAA.
You assume that it is the reviewer's affiliate number. Perhaps you assume too much. Remember,/. has been looking for new revenue streams. Perhaps they have the cluestick firmly in hand. If that's the case, it's a fairly innocuous revenue hook. I don't mind it much.
if you are having problems with someone receiving the data you send out on a certain frequency then don't send it where everyone can receive it.
I totally agree. As a corrolary to that, I have a big problem with companies that broadcast on the public spectrum and then say it is illegal to use their signal without paying them. Like satellite tv and radio.
Hey, I didn't ask to be bombarded with their broadcasts, and I have no contracts or agreements with them, yet they send signals right to my house. Why shouldn't I be able to do whatever I want with those signals? (Including decrypting them and watching/listening to them, if I can) If they don't want me to use them don't send them to my house!!
Same goes for cell phone and any other broadcasts. The people/companies that send out the broadcasts have to accept the risk that entails. If they want it to be private they should ensure that themselves, not rely on the law for protection.
Laws that do offer protection for public broadcasts by prohibiting listening (cell wiretapping laws) or decrypting (DMCA) should be eliminated. Wiretapping laws make sense for wires, and other technologies that are inherently private, not for broadcasts, which are inherently public.
set your system policies so that my documents, all that stuff, is on the server
The problem with that approach is portability. Most offices these days are full of people with laptops, who expect their computer to work just as well at home or on an airplane.
There are quite a few s/w packages for synchronizing file systems. Maybe that would do the trick. Set up the synch s/w to run in the background, and whenever they are on the network synch the important local dirs with corresponding dirs on the server. Back up the server.
It's a 16MB capacity, and holds 52 images.
The article itself says it's enough to "slip the Logitech into a pocket and head out for a weekend trip." But I agree with you. Would be nice if it was upgradable, like you could slip a compact flash or smart memory card in there with 128 MB. No mention of that in the article. Anyone plan to hack one of these?
I was a kinda disappointed with Anakin's performance, too. Then I started considering the overall strategy Lucas is taking here, and I started to see how it fits.
Remember, the hard part here is blending this into the originals, the beginning of the originals at that. One concern is the level of the action and saber duels. Think back to 1977 and epIV, the dual between Kenobi and Vader.
You want to give people good action now, but still make the epIV not look ridiculous after wathcing I, II, and III. One way it by having those jedi remaining in IV not be the hottest dualers. There was some foreshadowing of this when Kenobi teased Anakin that if he spent as much time practicing his swordplay as practicing his wit he might be better. In IV the only remaining jedi are Vader, Kenobi, and Yoda. Luke is just a come-lately hack, of course, since he only started as an adult (remember, in epI they thought Anakin was too old to start training). With Vader you also have the excuse of his body being mangled, so maybe he not such hot stuff with the saber any more.
Another blending tactics of note is how the outfits and hairstyles are creeping toward epIV.
The story is going to work to his advantage here, too. Since we are going from the story of the Republic at its height to the story of a bunch of rebels on grungy, poor, remote planets with old, beat up equipment, the transition from massive slick CGI to 1977 model special effects will be more believable.
Episode III has a lot of territory to cover.
The transition from Republic to Empire. Doku's death. Anakin getting messed up somehow, bad enough to need that Vader suit. Anakin crossing over to the dark side, and becoming the sith apprentice. Padme squeezing out some pups, and for whatever reason deciding to "hide" Luke with Anakin's step-family, and where do Padme and Leia end up? And how does Leia become a princess? Stay tuned, folks.
The three to two satellite comparison is not a fair comparison. XM's satellites are in geo-stationary orbit, i.e. the stay over the same spot on the earth, whereas Sirius has three birds in lower orbits in a pattern that they say keeps N. America covered.
The two approaches have different plusses and minuses. With the geo-stationary birds, if you get a good signal in your driveway right now, you will most likely always get the same good signal there, while with the lower orbit birds the signal strength may cycle with position of the satellite. On the other hand, the lower orbit sats are much closer, and so might be able to get a stronger signal to you.
Neither approach has redundancy, as they need all their satellites for complete coverage. If one went down XM would have permanent dead zones, Sirius would have wandering dead zones. Take your pick.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always thought that there are two very distinct skill involved in writing. The first is storytelling, the ability to weave a yarn that is enthralling, touching, satisfying, etc. The second is skill with the language, the ability to create a rich imaginary world, enticing to all the senses, with only the written word.
There are some writers who clearly excel at both. The first that comes to mind is Pat Conroy.
Crichton (note the correct spelling, which is used selectively in the original post) falls into a category of writers with superb storytelling skills but merely competent language skill. Also in this category is Grisham. I suspect it may even have aided them in their success; in a country where supposedly the average adult reads at a fifth grade level maybe dumbing down the language is what's needed for mass market appeal.
That said, I like Crichton's past books. Sometimes it's fun to be able to zip through a book without taxing the language processing lobes of the brain much or thinking about how the story was delivered to you. But oftentimes I leave his work feeling that the story was shovelled at me with no finesse, or style, or creativity.
Then, for the second iteration we went to java and built a much more sophisticated, interactve app. The brass loved that even more.
They decided it was really worth doing and therefore they must spend money on it. They initiated the monstrous government procurement process. It took some eight months or more, but finally a coalition team with Oracle and IBM and others won the $35 million contract.
After much hoo-ha, meetings, requirements gathering, countless billable hours, and the generation of untold linear yards of documentation, they finally decided to build something quite similar to our first prototype. And, after several years of work, with a team of dozens of contractors, that's what they have.
It's like the management said, "We love this, therefore we must spend millions of dollars to have it be exactly the same." But surely some assistant director's budget doubled, thus increasing their dominion, and people got to put on their resume that they oversaw a $35M contract. I'm sure everyone got awards and promotions for successfully disposing of all those unwanted taxpayer dollars.
Sigh. No I'm not bitter, I swear. :-)
These stats they quote, or rather the tone and context in which they are used, are ridiculous.
The underlying tenet of this whole article is: "If X has not been proven and approved by the scientific community then you are a laughable ignoramus for believing it might be true."
He doesn't state this overtly, because most people would reject it, but that is the attitude he holds and is trying to convince reader to adopt.
Nothing could be more asinine. That's like the patent officer who said "everything that can be invented has been invented" in 1898 (or whatever, I forget the details). To state that nothing that hasn't been scientifically proven exists, that's living in denial.
Human scientists are still struggling to understand and explain countless things. I think you could build a reasonable argument that we're not even at the halfway point of understanding our world and universe. Just look at the human body. We still do not entirely understand all the proteins in our body and how they interact. DNA, the genetic code, and how it is used to create new complete humans with all the right parts. We don't understand how the brain works, memory, learning, intelligence. How many diseases are there that we don't fully understand yet? AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer, the list is endless.
To look at all the simple things right in front of our eyes that we don't yet understand and extrapolate that to all the other things we don't know is perfectly reasonable. And to form our own theories about phenomena that are not yet explained by science is reasonable. How else will we ever figure them out?
Also, an expression of belief, or acceptance of something as possible, is not the same as saying it absolutely has been proven. If no one has a proven explanation of a phenomenon there is nothing even unscientific about me guessing about the causes. That's called a hypothesis, and it is the foundation of the scientific method. If sticking a bunch of tiny needles into people in certain spots seems to have some sort of consistent positive result, let us theorize about the possible causes of that, not mock the 88% of people who "accept" that there might be something there.
So I say Brad Hines, ram your head just a little bit farther up your ass, so it covers not only your eyes and ears, but also your mouth. Then we won't have to hear you spewing this bullshit.
Liar!! I can see you in the picture there, no gloves!!
These craft will be piloted only by navigators, members of the Space Guild, who, due to their heavy use of spice melange, can perceive the present and future without windows, and can fold space.
Does the AliceBot combine different AI techiniques?
If so, what techniques does it combine and how?
If not, have you considered combining different techniques, and if so what were your conclusions, and why did you rule it out?
Specifically, have you considered or used any Bayesian network or decision theory techniques?
I would speculate that, as an enhancement to basic pattern matching, Bayesian network modeling might add power to disambiguation by dealing with uncertainties in a managable way, and decision theory techniques could help the bot choose between alternative courses of action based on its current objectives and definition of utility.
Beef jerky?
Somewhat interesting product. Fairly weak review.
When this is applied to cell phones (yes, "wireless") it will really be interesting. I foresaw this as an inevitable result of voice recognition and cell technology miniaturization a couple years ago and have been waiting for it ever since. Guess I'll have to wait a while longer.
Interesting idea. Even better, leave the disc and the laser fixed, and do all the spinning with optics.
Okay, okay, we all solemnly promise not to mod it up "anymore". So it won't go above its current "+5 Funny" score. Thanks for alerting everyone to this.
My one question is, do they taste good? In my experience, the slimiest, nastiest looking fish are always the most delicious. For example catfish, and eel. Mmmm. These critters definitely fall into the slimy and nasty looking category. If they really taste good that might solve the problem, as we are very talented at harvesting to extinction anything that gives us happy tummy.
Well our soothing reprieve is over. Katz was silent from Jun 04, '02 12:15 PM to Jul 02, '02 01:15 PM. Nearly a month. Anyone care to hypothesize what he may have been doing during that time?
No need to scrape the paint off. There are actual real nude pix of her out there.
Things are much better for these folks in Antarctica, of course, but if these things interest you I highly recommend the book.
I am not sure how much value this has. There are a lot of other considerations.
With open source you have the source, so you can do something about bugs, you can fix them. And you can also look for potential issues in the code. You are in control of your own security. And a potential attacker has no idea what you've done with your particular implementation.
With closed source you are completely dependent on the vendor to provide fixes. First you have to prove to them that something is wrong, then, if you are lucky, after some period of time, the will provide a udpate which may or may not fix your particular problem. They may not be as motivated as you would be to fix the problem.
I'll take the Open Source choice any time. That way the people who care about security are the ones in control of security, an arrangement that is likely to work better than any other.
But at least "he acknowledged that real-world considerations could easily skew his conclusions. "
No. The tooth speaker sends vibrations through your bones to your ear. The ear is still hearing the sound. Try this as an experiment: press your chinbone firmly onto something that is vibrating, like a piano or an air conditioner, or your favorite "personal massager." You can then hear the pitch of the vibration as it is conducted through the bones in your head.
Pretty wicked though.
Once the work out the mike issue this could mean *apparent* telepathy. Remember, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I can think of a dozen ethically iffy uses. Think: two people collaborating in a poker game, getting answers to questions on the SAT, a Miss Universe contestant could hear the question from a spy in the audience, even though she's in the isolation booth, etc.
The most interesting parallel animal model has got to be the experiment designed to reduce (or eliminate) Tsetse fly (and other insects ) populations by releasing large numbers of sterilized males into the natural population.
The process of P2P sharing would correspond to mating, since you have to have two participants. A successful mating would correspond to a user getting the file they wanted, and therefore being more likely to use the service in the future. Getting a dud file is like a wild female mating with a sterilized male. Yields no offspring, user is less likely to continue using service. One or two cases of sterile matings have no impact, but when it is a significant percentage the population will decline, I'm sure the parallel with P2P holds.
The author seems focused on studying the best way to eliminate P2P, though, so he's probably hoping to get research grant money from RIAA.
You assume that it is the reviewer's affiliate number. Perhaps you assume too much. Remember, /. has been looking for new revenue streams. Perhaps they have the cluestick firmly in hand. If that's the case, it's a fairly innocuous revenue hook. I don't mind it much.
I totally agree. As a corrolary to that, I have a big problem with companies that broadcast on the public spectrum and then say it is illegal to use their signal without paying them. Like satellite tv and radio.
Hey, I didn't ask to be bombarded with their broadcasts, and I have no contracts or agreements with them, yet they send signals right to my house. Why shouldn't I be able to do whatever I want with those signals? (Including decrypting them and watching/listening to them, if I can) If they don't want me to use them don't send them to my house!!
Same goes for cell phone and any other broadcasts. The people/companies that send out the broadcasts have to accept the risk that entails. If they want it to be private they should ensure that themselves, not rely on the law for protection.
Laws that do offer protection for public broadcasts by prohibiting listening (cell wiretapping laws) or decrypting (DMCA) should be eliminated. Wiretapping laws make sense for wires, and other technologies that are inherently private, not for broadcasts, which are inherently public.
dad wants the very latest, so get him one of these. Duh.
The problem with that approach is portability. Most offices these days are full of people with laptops, who expect their computer to work just as well at home or on an airplane.
There are quite a few s/w packages for synchronizing file systems. Maybe that would do the trick. Set up the synch s/w to run in the background, and whenever they are on the network synch the important local dirs with corresponding dirs on the server. Back up the server.
It's a 16MB capacity, and holds 52 images. The article itself says it's enough to "slip the Logitech into a pocket and head out for a weekend trip." But I agree with you. Would be nice if it was upgradable, like you could slip a compact flash or smart memory card in there with 128 MB. No mention of that in the article. Anyone plan to hack one of these?
Remember, the hard part here is blending this into the originals, the beginning of the originals at that. One concern is the level of the action and saber duels. Think back to 1977 and epIV, the dual between Kenobi and Vader.
You want to give people good action now, but still make the epIV not look ridiculous after wathcing I, II, and III. One way it by having those jedi remaining in IV not be the hottest dualers. There was some foreshadowing of this when Kenobi teased Anakin that if he spent as much time practicing his swordplay as practicing his wit he might be better. In IV the only remaining jedi are Vader, Kenobi, and Yoda. Luke is just a come-lately hack, of course, since he only started as an adult (remember, in epI they thought Anakin was too old to start training). With Vader you also have the excuse of his body being mangled, so maybe he not such hot stuff with the saber any more.
Another blending tactics of note is how the outfits and hairstyles are creeping toward epIV. The story is going to work to his advantage here, too. Since we are going from the story of the Republic at its height to the story of a bunch of rebels on grungy, poor, remote planets with old, beat up equipment, the transition from massive slick CGI to 1977 model special effects will be more believable.
Episode III has a lot of territory to cover. The transition from Republic to Empire. Doku's death. Anakin getting messed up somehow, bad enough to need that Vader suit. Anakin crossing over to the dark side, and becoming the sith apprentice. Padme squeezing out some pups, and for whatever reason deciding to "hide" Luke with Anakin's step-family, and where do Padme and Leia end up? And how does Leia become a princess? Stay tuned, folks.
The two approaches have different plusses and minuses. With the geo-stationary birds, if you get a good signal in your driveway right now, you will most likely always get the same good signal there, while with the lower orbit birds the signal strength may cycle with position of the satellite. On the other hand, the lower orbit sats are much closer, and so might be able to get a stronger signal to you.
Neither approach has redundancy, as they need all their satellites for complete coverage. If one went down XM would have permanent dead zones, Sirius would have wandering dead zones. Take your pick.
XM's satellite info page
Sirius' fairly lame "how it works" (PDF)