The system at the moment is that academics organise conferences, and as part of them they perform peer review on papers. That collection of papers is then given to the publisher (copyright signed over) so that the publisher can *sell* the work to other academics. The gp poster was right - it is about time that publishers died out.
OK, fair point. I wasn't really too clear first thing this morning - I meant that we can model their operation using quite simple maths such as a sigmoid. Although I've done a little bit in this area I don't know a great deal about the underlying biology and can believe that there is a more complex type of computation going on. I was trying to point out to the original poster that a model of a brain (at some level of coarseness) was indeed within the spec of the machine that they were using.
I would be interested in seeing what the hypothosis of their research is. The interesting part is indeed what they can discover about our brains from the model that they construct. I'm quite suprised if they know enough about the low level operation to do this --- but maybe that is what they are trying to discover. Experiments on which low-level patterns of connection create behaviour as seen in clusters of neurons would be breath-taking.
A neuron is *very* simple. Maybe just a sigmoid function over a sum. If thing actually is doing 22.8 terraflops (unlikely, I'm guessing that's the theoretical peak for the machine) then that gives 228 instructions per neuron. That is in the right range for operation.
There are not 'morphing' connections, they tend to mostly stabilize within the first few years of life. I can't remember the figure, its maybe on the order of a 1000 connections per neuron, so 228 floating point operations couldn't do this in real-time --- but who says it has to run realtime? Even at 1/10 speed this would useful.
I think the bigger problem isn't the processing power --- it's how you wire that network up. At the moment nobody has any idea how a brain is wired at the neural level. Imaging techniques just aren't accurate enough to tell us this. Getting your simulation to actually simulate a realistic brain would be an awesome challenge.
I was wondering about doing it the other way round. What if it could scale up to something that could reduce the glucose levels in the blood? This would be a type of cure for diabetes - both monitoring the blood sugar levels and then reducing them when they get too high. Keeping the glucose level in the right band isn't a complete fix but it would prevent any collapse or coma.
My first thought was shame hypoglycemics won't be able to use it, but then if it is only generating 0.2mw its hard to say just how much glucose it will use. Probably not much.
I think that you forget that each of us does not exist independently; without the society around us we are nothing. When a government taxes individuals, it is not the government that is taking the money, it is just redistributing it to society as a whole. If your grandma was that successful, then a large part of that success would be attributable to society, and come death, she should pay her dues. The 50% figure (or however much it is in your country) is a tradeoff between propagating that success to her descendents, and reclaiming some of it for society.
Maybe I'm not the KDE/Gnome crowds target audience but I figure that a window manager only has one purpose; opening terminal windows. It doesn't even have to move them around as I've got xwit aliases to do that. So for me the only metric is how many ms from pressing a key to seeing a prompt. Even on a 2Ghz P4 the difference between Blackbox and something heavy like a DE is noticable, hell, the drift in latency on our NFS is noticable with blackbox. Don't think that I'll rush to 0.70 though, I grabbed a cvs about a year ago and its been solid as a rock.
Addition: Any non-uniform stream of random numbers. Ok, so you can probably rule out uniform streams anyways as they are supposed to be random, but if we look at the stream [1,1,1,1,1,1,1....] then this is the stream of significant or newsworthy events - consider, how many days does the news get cancelled. So now as long as our random stream contains 'events' most days - result. That is why the 'research' is bollocks, although it is being done in a more scientific manner than most psuedo-science. They give the parameters of their RNG on their website, I can't really be bothered to work it out but with 1 sample per second, and a SD of sqrt(50) they are going to get lots of 'significant' readings in a given day.
A very interesting post. Thankyou for taking my question at face value, you've come up with a very good and thought provoking response. Perhaps we are slightly at cross-purposes over semantics here. I've only heard the phrase self-actualization with respect to self improvement seminars, most of which are just pyramid marketing schemes - in the sense that if I can convince you that I've found the truth enough, then you'll go out and spread it to other people, and we'll both pretend not to notice that all that I've done is show you how to convince people.
I've seen a lot of crap over the years, NLP, cults and lots inbetween that has left me somewhat cynical of anyone who claims to have a spiritual understanding of the world. I've also spent a lot of time exploring Zen, Sufi and other mystical viewpoints. I've seen the burning lights and felt the deep realizations of truth that these 'mystic' states can induce.
I've seen time play tricks and the veil of the future move to one side, and yet after all of this I would reject outright any spiritual description of reality. I am a hard empircal rationalist. Why? Ironically enough it is because intuitively that is how I know the universe to be. I cannot explain most of where that confidence comes from, it is simply a statiscal viewpoint of millions of semi-related observations that my brain has made. It is the funny feel that we let guide us through so much of life.
It is from this viewpoint that I see religion as obsolete. Religion was clearly an early attempt to understand the world around us. We always start with the most obvious viewpoint and the attempt to anthropormorphise fate and entropy were something that had tp be tried out. Sadly it seems to key quite well to a natural inclincation to respond to tribal authority that we all have in our psyche. It should have died out a long time ago, but it hasn't, and it is keeping that tribal part of us alive and in control for a lot of people.
Science is another attempt to understand the world around us, to find a deeper truth. It rules out the usage of blind faith and tries to stick to what is externally provable. As such it can be seen to be a step onward, and progress from our earlier attempt - religion.
Moving in the other direction, from rationalising and attempting to objectify our understanding of the world, towards a subjective belief, would clearly be a step backwards. So no, I do not believe that the other direction can be called progress.
I used to be agnostic, but over the years I have become firmly atheist in my views. I believe that there is no god. No esoteric spirtual reality in which this one is embedded. At heart it is a simple case of Occam's Razor. If we need to invent some 'other' to explain something within reality, then we simply do not understand it properly, and we cannot learn more about it this way. As these other's that we create are inevitably more complex than the subject we are trying to understand.
Please don't take this as a troll as it is a genuine question. Do you really believe all of this self-improvement crap that you've read? It's all just a collection of buzzwords and pyramid marketing speel that preys on human weakness and the desire to conform to an outside authority.
Mankind does have a desire to understand the world, but not through as process as pretentious as self-actualisation. Religion, and later science are attempts to perform this understanding.
There are many, many inaccuracies in what you've said, and on a bbs such as this it is customary to respond point-by-point and initiate a flamewar. That has always seemed somewhat pointless so I'll just respond to the most salient issues.
Your understanding of Godel's Incompleteness theorem seems to suffer from common flaws. Either that, or I'm reading more into what you've wrote than what you intended. Not all logical systems are incomplete, only those that have the descriptive power to express the natural numbers. This is not all of mathematics, but a subset. Logical systems which are less expressive than this level can be both sound and complete. There is a good description of this common fallacy on wikipedia.
You have merely restated that mathematics does refer to reality, and that reality is infinite. Neither of these arguments are verifiable. Whether maths refers to an indepent platonic realm, or is infact constrained by the reality in which we have constructed it is very much an open question and has been debated fiercely by many philosphers and mathematicians.
Truth, real truth, is self-verifying. It's the scientists and their stubborn dogmatism that want the concrete evidence.
This is an odd statement. Truth is not and cannot be self-verifying. What you are describing is faith, which is an entirely separate issue. It is truth that scientists will not take matters on trust alone and have a dogmatism for concrete evidence. This is why they have progressed where-as the mystical approach has remained in the same backwater that it has been for several thousand years. An obsolete method of trying to understand the universe.
You make some interesting points, although I fear that you slip into unnecessary obtruseness in places. One or two things that could do with a touch of clarity.
How exactly does mathematics assert that science could never explore reality fully in an infinite amount of time? Firstly, mathematics does not assert facts about reality, that is the job of the physical sciences. Mathematics operates within an abstract platonic domain indepent of reality - although its conjectures and theorems may have some utility in reality. Secondly, nobody even knows what form an ultimate description of reality will take - it could be finite, or even digital for all that we know.
Your last point seems to be based on an implicit assumption a) that the physical sciences cannot accurately describe reality and that b) experiences by the 'enlightened' are valid in any sense. Whilst it is true that these people come up with wild fantastic explanations for reality, there is no verification that anything they say is correct. Anyone could imagine a florrid description of the universe in ten minutes, the difference is that science is capable of providing a measure of objectivity about its claims.
An interesting post though, and a very old debate. Yes, the book itself is quite good. I think that Ant Fuguee was one of the more entertaing expositions and a good description of holism.
Re:#5 is too easy, and doen't need a shift operato
on
Programming Puzzles
·
· Score: 1
DOH!
Should have read:
answer = (x3) - x;
Foiled by the auto-formatting...
Re:#5 is too easy, and doen't need a shift operato
on
Programming Puzzles
·
· Score: 1
From the description it sounds as if genfft creates the C code directly, eg it is a meta-program. Hence the program would contain chunks of ML and chunks of C and an explicit knowledge of how the target program is constructed in C. This is different to writing an FFT in ocaml and having it generate C code.
You should try reading the article some time. Or even the synopsis at the top. They could keep the traffic level below a DOS so outgoing packets could still be sent.
I assumed you were referring to some DNS related reason for why they couldn't send out the message as the above is blindingly obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Peer Review is not done by Publishers.
The system at the moment is that academics organise conferences, and as part of them they perform peer review on papers. That collection of papers is then given to the publisher (copyright signed over) so that the publisher can *sell* the work to other academics. The gp poster was right - it is about time that publishers died out.
Frankly its called ringbring and we've had it for about 5 years.
http://www.ringbring.co.uk/
OK, fair point. I wasn't really too clear first thing this morning - I meant that we can model their operation using quite simple maths such as a sigmoid. Although I've done a little bit in this area I don't know a great deal about the underlying biology and can believe that there is a more complex type of computation going on. I was trying to point out to the original poster that a model of a brain (at some level of coarseness) was indeed within the spec of the machine that they were using.
I would be interested in seeing what the hypothosis of their research is. The interesting part is indeed what they can discover about our brains from the model that they construct. I'm quite suprised if they know enough about the low level operation to do this --- but maybe that is what they are trying to discover. Experiments on which low-level patterns of connection create behaviour as seen in clusters of neurons would be breath-taking.
Hold yer horses there laddie.
A neuron is *very* simple. Maybe just a sigmoid function over a sum. If thing actually is doing 22.8 terraflops (unlikely, I'm guessing that's the theoretical peak for the machine) then that gives 228 instructions per neuron. That is in the right range for operation.
There are not 'morphing' connections, they tend to mostly stabilize within the first few years of life. I can't remember the figure, its maybe on the order of a 1000 connections per neuron, so 228 floating point operations couldn't do this in real-time --- but who says it has to run realtime? Even at 1/10 speed this would useful.
I think the bigger problem isn't the processing power --- it's how you wire that network up. At the moment nobody has any idea how a brain is wired at the neural level. Imaging techniques just aren't accurate enough to tell us this. Getting your simulation to actually simulate a realistic brain would be an awesome challenge.
I was wondering about doing it the other way round. What if it could scale up to something that could reduce the glucose levels in the blood? This would be a type of cure for diabetes - both monitoring the blood sugar levels and then reducing them when they get too high. Keeping the glucose level in the right band isn't a complete fix but it would prevent any collapse or coma.
My first thought was shame hypoglycemics won't be able to use it, but then if it is only generating 0.2mw its hard to say just how much glucose it will use. Probably not much.
Whine whine whine bitch bitch whine moan bitch
whine whine bitch moan moan bitch whine whine
moan bitch moan moan moan Whine whine whine bitch
bitch whine moan bitch whine whine bitch moan
moan bitch whine whine moan bitch Whine whine
whine bitch bitch whine moan bitch whine bitch
bitch whine bitch moan moan bitch whine whine moan
bitch bitch bitch Whine whine whine bitch bitch
whine moan bitch whine whine bitch moan moan bitch
whine whine moan bitch god I had the brits moan
moan bitch whine moan bitch those bloody brits
moan bitch whine
And then I had to actually call up and ask about the line! The nerve of it...
whine moan bitch moan bitch whine whine moan bitch
And that's all I have to say about that
As long as there is a good keyboard it won't matter. Perl is a write-only language anyway...
Maybe I'm missing something here but what's wrong with doing: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=myrip.bin
I think that you forget that each of us does not exist independently; without the society around us we are nothing. When a government taxes individuals, it is not the government that is taking the money, it is just redistributing it to society as a whole. If your grandma was that successful, then a large part of that success would be attributable to society, and come death, she should pay her dues. The 50% figure (or however much it is in your country) is a tradeoff between propagating that success to her descendents, and reclaiming some of it for society.
Maybe I'm not the KDE/Gnome crowds target audience but I figure that a window manager only has one purpose; opening terminal windows. It doesn't even have to move them around as I've got xwit aliases to do that. So for me the only metric is how many ms from pressing a key to seeing a prompt. Even on a 2Ghz P4 the difference between Blackbox and something heavy like a DE is noticable, hell, the drift in latency on our NFS is noticable with blackbox. Don't think that I'll rush to 0.70 though, I grabbed a cvs about a year ago and its been solid as a rock.
;) Come on admit it, we're both just chatbots really....
Damn, I read it as '111 and 112'. Does that mean that I fail the Turing Test?
Britian is a strong country, they are good to their people and they have been for the last 60 years a pretty model citizen in the world community.
Err, what did Britain do in 1945 that made it a bad citizen in the world community? Was it defeating the nazis or did you have something else in mind?
Congratulations on a quality troll. Too bad you didn't get any bites. Has the makings of a classic slashdot flamefest.
Addition: Any non-uniform stream of random numbers. Ok, so you can probably rule out uniform streams anyways as they are supposed to be random, but if we look at the stream [1,1,1,1,1,1,1....] then this is the stream of significant or newsworthy events - consider, how many days does the news get cancelled. So now as long as our random stream contains 'events' most days - result. That is why the 'research' is bollocks, although it is being done in a more scientific manner than most psuedo-science. They give the parameters of their RNG on their website, I can't really be bothered to work it out but with 1 sample per second, and a SD of sqrt(50) they are going to get lots of 'significant' readings in a given day.
A very interesting post. Thankyou for taking my question at face value, you've come up with a very good and thought provoking response. Perhaps we are slightly at cross-purposes over semantics here. I've only heard the phrase self-actualization with respect to self improvement seminars, most of which are just pyramid marketing schemes - in the sense that if I can convince you that I've found the truth enough, then you'll go out and spread it to other people, and we'll both pretend not to notice that all that I've done is show you how to convince people.
I've seen a lot of crap over the years, NLP, cults and lots inbetween that has left me somewhat cynical of anyone who claims to have a spiritual understanding of the world. I've also spent a lot of time exploring Zen, Sufi and other mystical viewpoints. I've seen the burning lights and felt the deep realizations of truth that these 'mystic' states can induce.
I've seen time play tricks and the veil of the future move to one side, and yet after all of this I would reject outright any spiritual description of reality. I am a hard empircal rationalist. Why? Ironically enough it is because intuitively that is how I know the universe to be. I cannot explain most of where that confidence comes from, it is simply a statiscal viewpoint of millions of semi-related observations that my brain has made. It is the funny feel that we let guide us through so much of life.
It is from this viewpoint that I see religion as obsolete. Religion was clearly an early attempt to understand the world around us. We always start with the most obvious viewpoint and the attempt to anthropormorphise fate and entropy were something that had tp be tried out. Sadly it seems to key quite well to a natural inclincation to respond to tribal authority that we all have in our psyche. It should have died out a long time ago, but it hasn't, and it is keeping that tribal part of us alive and in control for a lot of people.
Science is another attempt to understand the world around us, to find a deeper truth. It rules out the usage of blind faith and tries to stick to what is externally provable. As such it can be seen to be a step onward, and progress from our earlier attempt - religion.
Moving in the other direction, from rationalising and attempting to objectify our understanding of the world, towards a subjective belief, would clearly be a step backwards. So no, I do not believe that the other direction can be called progress.
I used to be agnostic, but over the years I have become firmly atheist in my views. I believe that there is no god. No esoteric spirtual reality in which this one is embedded. At heart it is a simple case of Occam's Razor. If we need to invent some 'other' to explain something within reality, then we simply do not understand it properly, and we cannot learn more about it this way. As these other's that we create are inevitably more complex than the subject we are trying to understand.
Please don't take this as a troll as it is a genuine question. Do you really believe all of this self-improvement crap that you've read? It's all just a collection of buzzwords and pyramid marketing speel that preys on human weakness and the desire to conform to an outside authority. Mankind does have a desire to understand the world, but not through as process as pretentious as self-actualisation. Religion, and later science are attempts to perform this understanding.
Just a name of course, just a name. ;^)
There are many, many inaccuracies in what you've said, and on a bbs such as this it is customary to respond point-by-point and initiate a flamewar. That has always seemed somewhat pointless so I'll just respond to the most salient issues.
Your understanding of Godel's Incompleteness theorem seems to suffer from common flaws. Either that, or I'm reading more into what you've wrote than what you intended. Not all logical systems are incomplete, only those that have the descriptive power to express the natural numbers. This is not all of mathematics, but a subset. Logical systems which are less expressive than this level can be both sound and complete. There is a good description of this common fallacy on wikipedia.
You have merely restated that mathematics does refer to reality, and that reality is infinite. Neither of these arguments are verifiable. Whether maths refers to an indepent platonic realm, or is infact constrained by the reality in which we have constructed it is very much an open question and has been debated fiercely by many philosphers and mathematicians.
Truth, real truth, is self-verifying. It's the scientists and their stubborn dogmatism that want the concrete evidence. This is an odd statement. Truth is not and cannot be self-verifying. What you are describing is faith, which is an entirely separate issue. It is truth that scientists will not take matters on trust alone and have a dogmatism for concrete evidence. This is why they have progressed where-as the mystical approach has remained in the same backwater that it has been for several thousand years. An obsolete method of trying to understand the universe.
You make some interesting points, although I fear that you slip into unnecessary obtruseness in places. One or two things that could do with a touch of clarity.
How exactly does mathematics assert that science could never explore reality fully in an infinite amount of time? Firstly, mathematics does not assert facts about reality, that is the job of the physical sciences. Mathematics operates within an abstract platonic domain indepent of reality - although its conjectures and theorems may have some utility in reality. Secondly, nobody even knows what form an ultimate description of reality will take - it could be finite, or even digital for all that we know.
Your last point seems to be based on an implicit assumption a) that the physical sciences cannot accurately describe reality and that b) experiences by the 'enlightened' are valid in any sense. Whilst it is true that these people come up with wild fantastic explanations for reality, there is no verification that anything they say is correct. Anyone could imagine a florrid description of the universe in ten minutes, the difference is that science is capable of providing a measure of objectivity about its claims.
An interesting post though, and a very old debate. Yes, the book itself is quite good. I think that Ant Fuguee was one of the more entertaing expositions and a good description of holism.
DOH!
Should have read:
answer = (x3) - x;
Foiled by the auto-formatting...
answer = (x 3) - x;
From the description it sounds as if genfft creates the C code directly, eg it is a meta-program. Hence the program would contain chunks of ML and chunks of C and an explicit knowledge of how the target program is constructed in C. This is different to writing an FFT in ocaml and having it generate C code.
You should try reading the article some time. Or even the synopsis at the top. They could keep the traffic level below a DOS so outgoing packets could still be sent.
I assumed you were referring to some DNS related reason for why they couldn't send out the message as the above is blindingly obvious.