Your point is somewhat valid, but you're overstating it.
We have one firm example. That's not enough to do regular stats with. However, we're not trying to do that (btw - you've used the term "statistically insignificant" incorrectly).
We do know something about each of the individual steps involved in abiogenesis and the evolution of intelligence. We have examples of amino acids and other biological precursors forming independently many times in very unlikely places. We also know of several plausible ways to go from those to self reproducing cell analogues. Moving up, we're beginning to get some hard data on the types of changes that are necessary to go from great ape-style intelligence to radio-building intelligence.
We've got some details to work out, but most of these steps don't seem terribly unlikely. Probably the most difficult is having a planet of the right size in the right place, but we're becoming more confident that the universe is littered with such things.
From the other side, we know of very good reasons why we would not have detected another intelligent species yet, if they existed.
It's quite likely that in the next twenty to fifty years we'll have duplicated all the steps necessary to go from inorganic compounds to intelligent life, although probably not in a single chain. Then we'll be able to assign fairly good probabilities to them happening. So even though we'll still almost certainly not have observed another intelligent species by then, we will be able to make reasonable statements about the likelihood of such things, just as we can predict the performance of a new aircraft before we actually fly it. We can do so now, in fact, just with much larger error bars.
Interesting. In my experience, rewriting the code is almost always a better approach than making the old stuff work. The old stuff was likely written by a grad student who didn't know much about writing code, to function just well enough to perform his experiment. Perhaps it won't even compile on modern hardware and you need to keep that G3 or SGI running.
There IS some very good, quite old code, mostly written in Fortran, that's been optimized by people who know what they're doing over the years and isn't worth messing with. But it's very different from the spaghetti that grad student wrote ten years ago so he could publish a paper and get a degree.
Doctors don't use Latin. They use their native languages and a bunch of proper nouns that happen to be Latin (or Greek) words or phrases.
Latin (or Greek) used to be the language of academia because it's what the Greeks used and the Romans translated the Greeks into. And the church loved Aristotle and ironically, the church pretty much defined western academia.
Except for their education apps they insist they're NOT doing targeted advertising. Or at least, they insist they're not doing a list of specific things that might make you assume they're not doing targeted advertising.
Google is a giant advertising company. They rode an overly credulous public (led by geeks) to a market dominating position. Job well done, shareholders happy.
Teachers get paid. Most places their salary ranges are a matter of public record. If they don't get paid, they stop teaching. It's an exchange where everybody knows what they're getting, and at what price.
Google is a for-profit publicly traded company with a legal obligation to make as much money as (legally) possible for their shareholders. They insist they're giving this product away for free, no strings attached. See the difference?
Dude, it's Google! This for-profit, publicly owned company (owned by the likes of Fidelity, Black Rock and Vanguard), is of course giving things away for free with no strings attached! Everyone is so cynical.
A lot of math errors are easily recognized and eliminated by a careful reader too. Grammatically incorrect math or English is often readable. It just takes more effort, shows that the writer is either sloppy or unskilled in the use of the language, and, if the former, doesn't have much resect for the reader.
Of course, people who sit in class thinking "what a boring bitch" probably have a general lack of respect for their fellow human beings.
My CS finals in the late 90s were generally on paper. Including a couple varieties of assembler. The digital design final was in the lab though. Using the compiler as an error checker was frowned upon.
Ha, just used the same number as the OP. 13th century. There was probably a 14th century one too. And the famous alchemist who "predicted" a multiverse in the seventeenth century, of course. I believe his name was Newton.
Sure they did. That's why the slave trade was protected in the US constitution until 1808, right? 1808 is when the importation of slaves was banned, rather after the country was founded. And why most of the founding fathers were slave owners? And why two thirds of the years between Washington and Lincoln the country was run by a slave-owning president? Or why slavery continued to be legal in parts of the US until 1865-6, well after it was abolished in most of the rest of the world?
Your statements are (very) twisted truth rather than ignorance, so either you're practicing some hefty revisionist history or you've taken the word of someone who was.
The point remains. When the US was founded, slavery was legal, extensive and protected by the constitution. Americans have since decided slavery isn't tolerable and banned it. The morals and ethics of the US at the time of its formation are not the same as the morals and ethics of the present day.
As time goes on we learn new things. Need a concrete example? At the time your nation was founded, keeping people as slaves was just fine. Do you want to go back to that too?
Hanging is fairly humane if you do it right. If you mess it up, which is very easy to do, it's not.
It also includes some compounds that mimic human hormones. Soy isn't necessarily bad for you in moderation, just like anything else, but you probably don't want it used as cheap filler in your diet (it IS used extensively by the food industry) any more than anything else.
Except that the article says to move the proportion of overall macronutrient intake a little towards protein and away from fat and carbohydrates. Atkins, or at least his followers, said to radically cut carbohydrate intake to the point where you're in a ketotic state, more often associated with severe metabolic problems. There's a difference.
Buying synthetic amnio acid supplements at the pharmacy isn't exactly part of a "natural" diet. You can certainly be a healthy vegetarian/vegan, but it does require some attention beyond "don't eat anything that had parents." The easy way is to supplement your diet using the products of modern biochemistry. The harder way is to balance your diet using knowledge of modern biochemistry.
Tofu is what you get if you squish beans, pretend they're milk, and scoop off the "curd." It didn't exist until about 2000 years ago. So yes, abnormal.
It's very high in protein and low in everything else though, so it does make a good protein supplement, but it certainly ain't what we evolved to eat.
You can do all the name calling you want, but it makes for terrible public health policy. The article is pointing out an interesting mechanism by which anybody who eats engineered food may instinctually consume too many calories in an effort to get a required macronurtient. If true, changing that could solve a worldwide problem that all your self-righteous finger wagging hasn't touched. And all you got out of the article was fat people eat too much. Pity.
As you lose weight your caloric requirements will decrease. Your weight is really a state of dynamic equilibrium. If you eat a certain number of calories a day your weight will increase or decrease until your daily requirement matches your daily intake.
You CAN lose weight quickly by greatly reducing your intake, then upping it again when you've lost enough. But that's not particularly good for you, is difficult because your body thinks it's starving (because it is), and the upward adjustment at the end is notoriously hard to get right, even if you do make it to that point.
A much better strategy is to lower your caloric intake (or increase your activity to increase caloric demand) by a reasonable amount that you intend to stick with long term. Your body weight will then adjust to match.
The article, published in Nature, disagrees with your Slashdot post. They have actual numbers to back it up too. The proportion of the American diet made up of protein has declined since 1971.
The problem is that "processed food" is very unspecific. The article uses the term "engineered food" which is better. If the food you're eating is some concoction created in a factory, designed by an engineer, there's a financial incentive for it to have a poor balance of macro-nutrients. Food that is processed, but not engineered (e.g. plain canned foods, waxed fruits, frozen berries) doesn't have that problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point is somewhat valid, but you're overstating it.
We have one firm example. That's not enough to do regular stats with. However, we're not trying to do that (btw - you've used the term "statistically insignificant" incorrectly).
We do know something about each of the individual steps involved in abiogenesis and the evolution of intelligence. We have examples of amino acids and other biological precursors forming independently many times in very unlikely places. We also know of several plausible ways to go from those to self reproducing cell analogues. Moving up, we're beginning to get some hard data on the types of changes that are necessary to go from great ape-style intelligence to radio-building intelligence.
We've got some details to work out, but most of these steps don't seem terribly unlikely. Probably the most difficult is having a planet of the right size in the right place, but we're becoming more confident that the universe is littered with such things.
From the other side, we know of very good reasons why we would not have detected another intelligent species yet, if they existed.
It's quite likely that in the next twenty to fifty years we'll have duplicated all the steps necessary to go from inorganic compounds to intelligent life, although probably not in a single chain. Then we'll be able to assign fairly good probabilities to them happening. So even though we'll still almost certainly not have observed another intelligent species by then, we will be able to make reasonable statements about the likelihood of such things, just as we can predict the performance of a new aircraft before we actually fly it. We can do so now, in fact, just with much larger error bars.
Not necessarily in any sense, and quite plausibly not really in any practical sense.
Interesting. In my experience, rewriting the code is almost always a better approach than making the old stuff work. The old stuff was likely written by a grad student who didn't know much about writing code, to function just well enough to perform his experiment. Perhaps it won't even compile on modern hardware and you need to keep that G3 or SGI running.
There IS some very good, quite old code, mostly written in Fortran, that's been optimized by people who know what they're doing over the years and isn't worth messing with. But it's very different from the spaghetti that grad student wrote ten years ago so he could publish a paper and get a degree.
Doctors don't use Latin. They use their native languages and a bunch of proper nouns that happen to be Latin (or Greek) words or phrases.
Latin (or Greek) used to be the language of academia because it's what the Greeks used and the Romans translated the Greeks into. And the church loved Aristotle and ironically, the church pretty much defined western academia.
Except for their education apps they insist they're NOT doing targeted advertising. Or at least, they insist they're not doing a list of specific things that might make you assume they're not doing targeted advertising.
Google is a giant advertising company. They rode an overly credulous public (led by geeks) to a market dominating position. Job well done, shareholders happy.
Teachers get paid. Most places their salary ranges are a matter of public record. If they don't get paid, they stop teaching. It's an exchange where everybody knows what they're getting, and at what price.
Google is a for-profit publicly traded company with a legal obligation to make as much money as (legally) possible for their shareholders. They insist they're giving this product away for free, no strings attached. See the difference?
Dude, it's Google! This for-profit, publicly owned company (owned by the likes of Fidelity, Black Rock and Vanguard), is of course giving things away for free with no strings attached! Everyone is so cynical.
As opposed to one of the best available alternate methods for determining universal constants, astronomy?
Physicists and chemists are aware of how to use statistics to make good estimates in the presence of heterogeneity.
A lot of math errors are easily recognized and eliminated by a careful reader too. Grammatically incorrect math or English is often readable. It just takes more effort, shows that the writer is either sloppy or unskilled in the use of the language, and, if the former, doesn't have much resect for the reader.
Of course, people who sit in class thinking "what a boring bitch" probably have a general lack of respect for their fellow human beings.
Odd you choose math as an example, a subject where your grammar must be perfect or what you've written is nonsense.
The ends of an extended object stretching perpendicular to it's orbital direction (port/starboard) will feel a force towards the centre of the object.
NSEW have the same meaning in LEO as they do on the surface.
My CS finals in the late 90s were generally on paper. Including a couple varieties of assembler. The digital design final was in the lab though. Using the compiler as an error checker was frowned upon.
Ha, just used the same number as the OP. 13th century. There was probably a 14th century one too. And the famous alchemist who "predicted" a multiverse in the seventeenth century, of course. I believe his name was Newton.
D: 14th century dude develops a descriptive model that modern researchers converted into equations that have more than one solution.
Ooooh, profound!
Sure they did. That's why the slave trade was protected in the US constitution until 1808, right? 1808 is when the importation of slaves was banned, rather after the country was founded. And why most of the founding fathers were slave owners? And why two thirds of the years between Washington and Lincoln the country was run by a slave-owning president? Or why slavery continued to be legal in parts of the US until 1865-6, well after it was abolished in most of the rest of the world?
Your statements are (very) twisted truth rather than ignorance, so either you're practicing some hefty revisionist history or you've taken the word of someone who was.
The point remains. When the US was founded, slavery was legal, extensive and protected by the constitution. Americans have since decided slavery isn't tolerable and banned it. The morals and ethics of the US at the time of its formation are not the same as the morals and ethics of the present day.
As time goes on we learn new things. Need a concrete example? At the time your nation was founded, keeping people as slaves was just fine. Do you want to go back to that too?
Hanging is fairly humane if you do it right. If you mess it up, which is very easy to do, it's not.
It also includes some compounds that mimic human hormones. Soy isn't necessarily bad for you in moderation, just like anything else, but you probably don't want it used as cheap filler in your diet (it IS used extensively by the food industry) any more than anything else.
Except that the article says to move the proportion of overall macronutrient intake a little towards protein and away from fat and carbohydrates. Atkins, or at least his followers, said to radically cut carbohydrate intake to the point where you're in a ketotic state, more often associated with severe metabolic problems. There's a difference.
Buying synthetic amnio acid supplements at the pharmacy isn't exactly part of a "natural" diet. You can certainly be a healthy vegetarian/vegan, but it does require some attention beyond "don't eat anything that had parents." The easy way is to supplement your diet using the products of modern biochemistry. The harder way is to balance your diet using knowledge of modern biochemistry.
Tofu is what you get if you squish beans, pretend they're milk, and scoop off the "curd." It didn't exist until about 2000 years ago. So yes, abnormal.
It's very high in protein and low in everything else though, so it does make a good protein supplement, but it certainly ain't what we evolved to eat.
You can do all the name calling you want, but it makes for terrible public health policy. The article is pointing out an interesting mechanism by which anybody who eats engineered food may instinctually consume too many calories in an effort to get a required macronurtient. If true, changing that could solve a worldwide problem that all your self-righteous finger wagging hasn't touched. And all you got out of the article was fat people eat too much. Pity.
As you lose weight your caloric requirements will decrease. Your weight is really a state of dynamic equilibrium. If you eat a certain number of calories a day your weight will increase or decrease until your daily requirement matches your daily intake.
You CAN lose weight quickly by greatly reducing your intake, then upping it again when you've lost enough. But that's not particularly good for you, is difficult because your body thinks it's starving (because it is), and the upward adjustment at the end is notoriously hard to get right, even if you do make it to that point.
A much better strategy is to lower your caloric intake (or increase your activity to increase caloric demand) by a reasonable amount that you intend to stick with long term. Your body weight will then adjust to match.
The article, published in Nature, disagrees with your Slashdot post. They have actual numbers to back it up too. The proportion of the American diet made up of protein has declined since 1971.
The problem is that "processed food" is very unspecific. The article uses the term "engineered food" which is better. If the food you're eating is some concoction created in a factory, designed by an engineer, there's a financial incentive for it to have a poor balance of macro-nutrients. Food that is processed, but not engineered (e.g. plain canned foods, waxed fruits, frozen berries) doesn't have that problem.