Uhm, I really don't get the relevance to my question. What, if anything, is the difference between Gould and the standard evol biology model?
(I am asking a bit of a trick question. The way, if any, which Gould's position was different from standard evol biology is diffuse. Gould liked it that way. See e.g. for something Gould didn't want to answer...)
Besides that.
How do you explain that evolutionary algorithms work if you don't think evolution works? You have seen articles discussing evolution of e.g. eyes, I hope? Go read up on criticism of
Behe, or something.
Darwin's old fashioned- Gould's theory of evolutionary spurts claims that a beneficial mutation can appear in as little as a single generation- though it takes multiple generations of that mutation being successfull in the environment to survive.
Could you specify what exactly Gould wrote that contradicted Darwin -- and that was new in evolutionary biology?
For instance, I thought a mutation by definition happened in an individual organism in a generation? The rest, as much of it as parses, doesn't seem exactly new, either.
Serious references, please, not just books by Gould.
Damn the maximum lengths of sigs... Point 1-4 from this would look good.
The bad part is that the "dumb shmuck" is modded down to 0, so it looks like he comments on my post above.:-)
Re:Anyone here ever actually HAD brazilian coffee?
on
Coffee Bean Gene Mapped
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
North America doesn't just have the worse beer it seems.
Well, not being an American -- but isn't both of these changing?
Arguably with all the microbreweries the US should have at least as good beer as the average in Europe (except for e.g. the British islands and Belgium).
Then we have the Starbucks revolution. It's a first step, but soon they will have coffee culture, too!
Orion starship that could get to Alpha Centauri in 130 years [..]. Thats much faster than a solar sail could ever hope to do.
I'm a big fan of the Orion project. (And that design would use megaton fusion bombs! Cool!)
But a laser pumped solar sail could be faster. Those big laser will be a big investment, though... and the "misuse" applications should be about the same as for lots megaton bombs!
(It's mentioned e.g.
here.)
Read "Flight of the Dragonfy"/"Rocheworld" (they are the same book) by Doctor Robert L. Forward for an informative and entertaining novel using (laser pumped) solar sails.
That was new!
Now, I'll agree with informative -- but entertaining??
I usually describe Forward as the absolutely worst author whose books I buy in hardcover.
You must be a nerd and talking about the physics and engineering as "entertaining" -- and not any literary qualities!
(-: Reminds me of when I recommended a Farmer book to an ex girl friend. I said "this is a classic that changed the sf/f genre, well worth reading!" She thought I meant it was good and is still angry, 8-10 years later...:-)
First, it starts as a serious question so the reader's fingers starts twitching when s/he starts thinking of a reply.
Then it gets more and more weird until you realize it's a quite funny joke.
What made it work was the lead up. I guess Seinfeld et al could do better, but the point is that you have to think through the path that the readers/users will think when reading the joke. (I've read that artists think the same way when {composing, writing, painting}).
My point is that software and documentation is usually better when you've thought through the way the user thinks will be thinking and accessing it. But (if it's not a joke) you need to put those assumptions at the top of what you write.
Sorry for this irrelevant rant -- which probably is too obvious for people other than me -- but this is something I've been thinking about for a while. (-: And if some of you guys (names withheld) read this and grokks, I've made the world a better place for all of us!:-)
On topic, I installed with a Beta a month or two ago and it worked well (except for not setting the partition type when it formatted partitions(!) which made grub confused, which confused me. -- yes, I reported the bug).
I'm changing courses at school, from a tech job route, to Commercial Pilot. I'm almost positive that when I got out of college/university following the tech sector route I'd have a harder time looking for work.
Trust me, there aren't lots of computer people here that will remember this and laugh evilly in 10 years when they automate flying of planes...:-)
If/. had such a system in place, it would be known.
(I am a bit confused about Karma, though. I don't really... hmmm.... optimize my posting for it. So I wonder a bit about how it's given out. But I don't really care.)
[test anti-trolling methods} by taking a troll user and stuffing them in their own world. All their posts would be modded up and their view of the site was totally different than the users who were not trolls.
The new edition of PARANOIA changes the relationship between Gamemaster and players from open malevolence (as established in the 1987 second edition) to a more interesting Skinnerian psychology.
I loved to play the game (and even have an first price from a con), but I had to stop being a GM.
The game content literally had me ROTFLMAO, but I couldn't really do the kind of stuff to people.
Sigh, should post anon, really. I'm ashamed for being too much a wimp for my own (and others) good.:-(
Re:Sounds Like...
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Does anybody who's read Simmons' stuff and the reviews book care to comment?
Very different.
It's similar to, but not really a Carbon copy of, "Voice of the Whirlwind" by Walter Jon Williams.
Is this religious literature?
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's a safe bet that Morgan is not a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party.
I really enjoyed "Altered Carbon".
So I bought "Market forces" -- and have never been so disappointed in my life.
It was like religious writing from the Bible belt with Chomsky as Jesus. Where idealism and propaganda go in not only reason and integrity go out -- but also fun and interesting literature.:-(
When you write the above aboue "Broken Angels", does it mean this book has also been seduced by the author's political opinions to write about conspiracy theories about why the present society is just a capitalist stalinism?
(No, I'm not a fanatic -- I really like most of MacLeod's books, for instance. I just have a dislike like for Believers, no matter the religion.)
If the columnists aren't Mac press, who the hell are they? They're in a trade/industry/computer magazine, they're part of the press. Seriously.
Was the trivial distinction that unclear?!
OK. I maybe should have written:
"The only articles in the computer press that was upset about the quality and speed of that Office version were the columnists -- they had contracts that said that they could write what they wanted. This was when I became a total cynic regarding the computer media's integrity."
Clear enough?
I'm aware of the background story at Microsoft. As I wrote -- I might believe a foulup (using totally untested tools that generated code for a shipping version) the most probable answer for a company with business morals. Even if it happened to knecap a competitor, like here (was not a good time for more problems at Apple).
You don't have a link to a good site about Microsoft business dealings? Should be popular, if anyone has done it?
Microsoft doesn't provide support (read: technical support) for running Linux under MSVPC, but it works fine.
It probably will continue to work for a while, too... Let me tell you about a case where Microsoft was "strategically incompetent".
Word 6 (and the rest of Office) for Mac was total garbage. Running a PC emulator on the Mac and use the Win version of Office was literally as fast -- and more stable.
This is also the point when i lost all trust in the computer media. The Mac press didn't give that POS bad reviews -- but the columnists screamed bloody murder, since they had the freedom to write what they wanted.
Gates promised that they were on the problem and would fix it. The updated version didn't work much better.
Jobs did a deal when he came back to Apple and traded not suing Microsoft (code theft of quicktime code) for among other things a functioning Office and a statement of support.
(It's possible Word 6 was incompetence that just happened to come at a bad time for Apple. That assumption would have been probable for some other company than M-soft.)
BTW: Is there a good site that collects all these stories about Microsoft's backstabbing, astroturfing, etc, etc? I looked in google some time ago but didn't find anything.
[the eBook manufacturers] hope to get in on the start of a content distribution system similar to a modern video-game console - ie, total lock-in to their chosen format and "branded" titles.
Well, the world need that -- too.
Much data will never show up in eBook format without a DRM system. The publishers need to trust that they get paid.
But the eBook people will never get any market penetration for their eBook readers without being able to show e.g. pdf. That is what could drive acceptance.
I want to buy a two A4 large eInk screen viewer that could download data via bluetooth/usb/etc. I'd use it to read my manuals, source code, etc. Just like you, I guess.
But I also want to buy copies of my "real" books for that viewer. I'd then burn my paper books with bookshelves -- and buy everything in that format instead. (-: I'd earn the money back by getting a smaller place to live without those parasites taking over my present apartment...:-)
So, basically, what you are saying is, just because there are standard languages out there that everyone has come to know and use, we should completely bow and use your language of choice because you hate all others?
No. What he said, basically, was that in his reasoned opinion, based on experience with lots of languages, this language was better. He (-: obviously not a she:-) also acknowledged the point that support from e.g. other people would be a problem, so he'd have problems using it at work.
Your flame was not relevant and probably reflects more on you than on the AC.
(I don't know anything about Caml, OO or not, so I can't have an opinion on his statement that when you express ideas in it, it becomes so clear that it results in fewer runtime errors.)
My favorites are Perl and Lisp. I've mostly done C and C++ in my too long life.
If it is possible to make yourself into a great hacker, the way to do it may be to make the following deal with yourself: you never have to work on boring projects (unless your family will starve otherwise), and in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a half-assed job.
Besides, am I missing the idiom (as a non-native English speaker), or was that "bend over.. and be the next IBM" a reference to something like this? Wouldn't that be a bit tasteless in a serious article -- (-: but it contained violence so it's ok with puritan American ideals...?:-)
the biologists probably don't know enough about the living situation for the fish to have more than hypotheses about why their generations are optimized like that.
So the researchers probably don't know yet.
(And yes, bacteria do evolve fast. That's why our immune system isn't based on DNA -- we have too long generations.)
*may* be an advantage? That's awfully certain. Not to mention that by this logic bacteria have a greater advantage over pretty much all other life, since they can "evolve" so rapidly.
The way I've seen evolutionary biologists write about this, is that built in length of life is optimized differently for different situations/evol. niches.
For instance, it's quite expensive in energy to build bodies that can age (good cell repair, etc) so if the average time before an animal is eaten by a predator is short, it's probably not a large evolutionary pressure to be able to get old. The energy is put into growing up fast and get to reproductive age early, instead.
I was talking about regexes as a programmer interface, not a user interface. As a programmer interface GLR parsing is by far superior to regexes,
My point was too trivial. You wrote that "real" parsers should take over Regular Expr:s. I can't see them competing.
RE:s are simple if I only want to get some trivial lexical data out (split on ":", get the second word, check so the string is all digits, etc, etc, etc).
Same advantage as when using Emacs.
If I need to parse a simple language/config file I (mostly) reach for a true parser.
Similar to why I use bash/Perl for oneliners and don't make a dir, start Emacs to write a makefile and a.c file.
Slashdot Mirror
(I am asking a bit of a trick question. The way, if any, which Gould's position was different from standard evol biology is diffuse. Gould liked it that way. See e.g. for something Gould didn't want to answer...)
Besides that.
How do you explain that evolutionary algorithms work if you don't think evolution works? You have seen articles discussing evolution of e.g. eyes, I hope? Go read up on criticism of Behe, or something.
For instance, I thought a mutation by definition happened in an individual organism in a generation? The rest, as much of it as parses, doesn't seem exactly new, either.
Serious references, please, not just books by Gould.
The bad part is that the "dumb shmuck" is modded down to 0, so it looks like he comments on my post above. :-)
Arguably with all the microbreweries the US should have at least as good beer as the average in Europe (except for e.g. the British islands and Belgium).
Then we have the Starbucks revolution. It's a first step, but soon they will have coffee culture, too!
US is on the way to become a civilized place. :-)
But a laser pumped solar sail could be faster. Those big laser will be a big investment, though... and the "misuse" applications should be about the same as for lots megaton bombs! (It's mentioned e.g. here.)
So that was why he stopped writing. :-(
You miss important stuff when you're too busy.
Now, I'll agree with informative -- but entertaining??
I usually describe Forward as the absolutely worst author whose books I buy in hardcover.
You must be a nerd and talking about the physics and engineering as "entertaining" -- and not any literary qualities!
(-: Reminds me of when I recommended a Farmer book to an ex girl friend. I said "this is a classic that changed the sf/f genre, well worth reading!" She thought I meant it was good and is still angry, 8-10 years later...:-)
Then it gets more and more weird until you realize it's a quite funny joke.
What made it work was the lead up. I guess Seinfeld et al could do better, but the point is that you have to think through the path that the readers/users will think when reading the joke. (I've read that artists think the same way when {composing, writing, painting}).
My point is that software and documentation is usually better when you've thought through the way the user thinks will be thinking and accessing it. But (if it's not a joke) you need to put those assumptions at the top of what you write.
Sorry for this irrelevant rant -- which probably is too obvious for people other than me -- but this is something I've been thinking about for a while. (-: And if some of you guys (names withheld) read this and grokks, I've made the world a better place for all of us! :-)
On topic, I installed with a Beta a month or two ago and it worked well (except for not setting the partition type when it formatted partitions(!) which made grub confused, which confused me. -- yes, I reported the bug).
If /. had such a system in place, it would be known.
(I am a bit confused about Karma, though. I don't really ... hmmm .... optimize my posting for it. So I wonder a bit about how it's given out. But I don't really care.)
Now I understand how I got Excellent Karma! :-)
(If the reason is old Perl code or uneducated programmers, I do think that your complaint is a bit overblown...)
You deserve more than a 5.
The game content literally had me ROTFLMAO, but I couldn't really do the kind of stuff to people.
Sigh, should post anon, really. I'm ashamed for being too much a wimp for my own (and others) good. :-(
It's similar to, but not really a Carbon copy of, "Voice of the Whirlwind" by Walter Jon Williams.
So I bought "Market forces" -- and have never been so disappointed in my life.
It was like religious writing from the Bible belt with Chomsky as Jesus. Where idealism and propaganda go in not only reason and integrity go out -- but also fun and interesting literature. :-(
When you write the above aboue "Broken Angels", does it mean this book has also been seduced by the author's political opinions to write about conspiracy theories about why the present society is just a capitalist stalinism?
(No, I'm not a fanatic -- I really like most of MacLeod's books, for instance. I just have a dislike like for Believers, no matter the religion.)
OK. I maybe should have written:
"The only articles in the computer press that was upset about the quality and speed of that Office version were the columnists -- they had contracts that said that they could write what they wanted. This was when I became a total cynic regarding the computer media's integrity."
Clear enough?
I'm aware of the background story at Microsoft. As I wrote -- I might believe a foulup (using totally untested tools that generated code for a shipping version) the most probable answer for a company with business morals. Even if it happened to knecap a competitor, like here (was not a good time for more problems at Apple).
You don't have a link to a good site about Microsoft business dealings? Should be popular, if anyone has done it?
Word 6 (and the rest of Office) for Mac was total garbage. Running a PC emulator on the Mac and use the Win version of Office was literally as fast -- and more stable.
This is also the point when i lost all trust in the computer media. The Mac press didn't give that POS bad reviews -- but the columnists screamed bloody murder, since they had the freedom to write what they wanted.
Gates promised that they were on the problem and would fix it. The updated version didn't work much better.
Jobs did a deal when he came back to Apple and traded not suing Microsoft (code theft of quicktime code) for among other things a functioning Office and a statement of support.
(It's possible Word 6 was incompetence that just happened to come at a bad time for Apple. That assumption would have been probable for some other company than M-soft.)
BTW: Is there a good site that collects all these stories about Microsoft's backstabbing, astroturfing, etc, etc? I looked in google some time ago but didn't find anything.
Mod parent up. It contains trivial facts that many people writing here seems to not know...
Much data will never show up in eBook format without a DRM system. The publishers need to trust that they get paid.
But the eBook people will never get any market penetration for their eBook readers without being able to show e.g. pdf. That is what could drive acceptance.
I want to buy a two A4 large eInk screen viewer that could download data via bluetooth/usb/etc. I'd use it to read my manuals, source code, etc. Just like you, I guess.
But I also want to buy copies of my "real" books for that viewer. I'd then burn my paper books with bookshelves -- and buy everything in that format instead. (-: I'd earn the money back by getting a smaller place to live without those parasites taking over my present apartment... :-)
Your flame was not relevant and probably reflects more on you than on the AC.
(I don't know anything about Caml, OO or not, so I can't have an opinion on his statement that when you express ideas in it, it becomes so clear that it results in fewer runtime errors.)
My favorites are Perl and Lisp. I've mostly done C and C++ in my too long life.
Ah well, never mind the question.
the biologists probably don't know enough about the living situation for the fish to have more than hypotheses about why their generations are optimized like that.
So the researchers probably don't know yet.
(And yes, bacteria do evolve fast. That's why our immune system isn't based on DNA -- we have too long generations.)
For instance, it's quite expensive in energy to build bodies that can age (good cell repair, etc) so if the average time before an animal is eaten by a predator is short, it's probably not a large evolutionary pressure to be able to get old. The energy is put into growing up fast and get to reproductive age early, instead.
RE:s are simple if I only want to get some trivial lexical data out (split on ":", get the second word, check so the string is all digits, etc, etc, etc).
Same advantage as when using Emacs.
If I need to parse a simple language/config file I (mostly) reach for a true parser.
Similar to why I use bash/Perl for oneliners and don't make a dir, start Emacs to write a makefile and a .c file.