No shit. There's always a loss when you record with analog, too. You miss a bunch of inaudible frequencies. You miss the thump of powerful speakers. You miss standing in the midst of a crowd that is all tuned into the same experience. You miss being there at the moment of creation. Nobody mistakes a recording for a live performance without being keyed for it (Milli Vanilli, anyone?) and even then it isn't easy.
A recording is not live. Whining about how very high-quality digital is worse than very high-quality analog is pointless. I guarantee that in a double-blind test you wouldn't be able to reliably pick which is which, and I further bet that you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference were the same event recorded both ways.
I think holography is the way to go. There are systems already in use, though I'm sure they're way too expensive to think about home use at the moment. Gorillaz, the virtual band, did a concert for MTV and were projected onstage as holograms. See this video. Skip to 4:40 to see a live dancer walk around and be occluded by one of the holograms.
It's pretty wild stuff, and while still in its infancy has the greatest potential for making true 3D an entertainment staple, among other things.
Re:The brain doesn't like what doesn't make sense
on
The Joke Known As 3D TV
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If you give the brain realistic input that could actually happen, people would be more comfortable with it and it would be more likely to sell.
This is why 3D gaming makes much more sense than 3D movies.
A lot of film techniques rely on changing between multiple cameras, and that dramatic, angled close-up that is so effective in 2D results in a depth-of-field change that's going to fatigue people in 3D. Many games, especially racing, FPS, and platformers, rarely do that sort of thing. 3D would add lots of immersion with fewer drawbacks. There's always room for abuse, but it doesn't seem as inherent to the medium as in film.
I think this could become more evident pretty quickly with the launch of Nintendo's 3DS, depending on how many developers they get on board.
This is true. Parents of the last 50 years and today face greater changes in what we eat than had taken place in the previous, oh, four thousand years.
You used to look for the ripest, juiciest-looking tomato on the vine. Now they're all engineered to look that way, and damn the nutritional consequences. Antibiotics and hormones, all invisible and undocumented, pervade the entire meat supply. HFCS and other chemicals from corn are present in almost everything and affect our bodies differently than the natural components they replace.
It isn't the parents who are worse, it's the food supply.
Because we are not going to accept the loss of independence created by a government nanny state.
Er...you know the FDA and USDA already exist, right?
The fact that they're staffed almost entirely, at the higher levels, with former executives and affiliates from Monsanto, however, shows that it's not worked out very well in practice.
Or maybe it's because in the West food, and especially bad food, is easily available and cheap, and people don't have the money to take control of their diet
FTFY.
Government really does share a lot of the blame, since much of the subsidies it creates are made at the behest of food corporations.
There are bound to be multiple causes--in real life there always are--but high fructose corn syrup is undoubtedly one of the primaries. The cost factor may come into play, indeed it's only sugar tariffs and corn subsidies that make it viable, but the bigger issue with HFCS is that, unlike real sugar, it doesn't trigger the body's "full" feeling. Were other food items containing real sugar cost-equivalent, we would still see people who chose HFCS eating more.
This doesn't deserve a flamebait mod. Someone didn't recognize the emoticon.
Seriously, though, pretension will get you pretty far in the art world. I know a relatively successful artist, a painter, and I've seen him charm people from the scene. In private, he's fond of saying "there is no room for modesty in the arts," and he's admitted to spouting volumes of bullshit when asked about the meaning of his work. You're right that pretension alone won't work if it isn't backed up by good art, but pretension really can boost your reputation if your work is up to snuff.
Oh, yes, I hadn't even considered an organ. A drawbar organ is a rare find--especially a Hammond, which I bet is tons of fun to play--but it is pretty easy to find full-size electromechanical organs for free, and some of them even work! Similar to a synth, many of them have rows of switches or stops that affect the tone, some effects like vibrato and percussion hits, and if you get lucky like I did, a bult-in rotary speaker. Others have built-in accompaniment that'd teach a young person rhythm.
X, do you put your music online? I recently started uploading my songs to bandcamp. Anyone interested in chillout electronica should give 'em a listen.
Seconded. Especially a virtual analog synth that has friendly knobs which will immediately affect the sound being produced when tweaked.
Or, you could go for a real analogue synth like the Korg Monotron, a tiny, simple true analog synth able to create all kinds of neat sounds.
None of these things will have the bright screen to draw his eye, but they are far more intuitive and engaging for a young mind: pushing different keys and twisting different knobs will effect a definite and immediate change in the sound he hears, whereas pounding on the keyboard of a laptop will generally result in little onscreen action. Synth programming is real programming, too, without the complexity of dealing with language. This will foster his creativity more greatly than any other electronic device, especially if he plays with it as he begins to understand the structure of music.
Korg Monotrons can be bought new for under $80. The only problems I foresee are that Dad might be having too much fun with it to let his son have a try, that adults have a low tolerance for atonal, high-pitched sounds, and that nobody wants their kid to be a starving artist when they grow up =)
If living creatures are machines, we are machines of startling complexity. We can construct hard, cold machines that do amazing things, like the space shuttle, yet we cannot build a living creature as simple as a gnat, or even a bacterium, out of whole cloth. No hard, cold machine has come close to cognition and I believe it perfectly feasible that such a level of complexity is necessary for something like consciousness.
This is the exact thought that I had. I hope you get some responses offering justification. My own theory is that magical thinking is very much alive and well today, yet it's only (and all too readily) accepted if it's coated in a veneer of scientific jargon.
Things like this are in News, while things like research on how monkeys make the same mistakes humans do when it comes to money are thrown in Idle. This story is a novelty while that one has implications for how we do things. These are far from the only examples. What gives?
I don't think I'd mind nearly as much if Idle's comments page wasn't so broken; it makes a story otherwise worth discussing too much of a pain in the ass.
As mentioned in the movie, the resolution of a hologram is the wavelength of the light used. With a specially built microscope, you could actually look at the bacteria captured in film, even though your subject might be a macroscopic object.
The image you see when you look into a hologram is a virtual image, like that of a mirror. What's interesting and has to my knowledge never been examined for implications is that there is an invisible but real image behind the film.
Each half of a holographic plate sliced in half still contains the entire image, only at half the size. The halving can be repeated indefinitely, within physical limits. (Incidentally, this is one of several references to holograms made in The Book of the New Sun.)
The most interesting aspect is holography is that each part in some sense contains the whole. There is a theory of physics that postulates that the universe is structured as a hologram. It never gained much traction yet it was never disproven, and its creator David Bohm was a well-respected physicist. Additionally, Karl Pribam is a psychologist who believes that our brains operate holographically, our brainwaves acting as the laser with our neurons as film.
This may indeed be a technology that is simply ahead of its time, virtually useless to us without a much more mature understanding of physics or without the insight of some genius on how to do more with holograms than make eerie monochromatic volumes.
I've been drinking and I've got karma to burn, so...
I like flash.
I don't like it when it's misused, and I think it's a pretty awful idea for most websites to use flash elements. Yet it has its uses, chiefly among them being web cartoons and web games.
The barrier for entry is low, so there's a lot of junk out there, but the good stuff tends to rise to the top. A great example is the game N, the quirky 2D gold-grabbing platformer with the fun physics and tricky, exacting level design. They now have game deals on more traditional media, but this one would never have got off the ground if it weren't for the ubiquity of Flash. On the animation side, the same can be said for Strong Bad.
I've started dabbling in game design again, and this time around I'm using ActionScript along with the FlashPunk framework. The thing that's always kept me from completing things in the past was having an engine and language that both lived at a level sufficient to let me do what I wanted without making me do the tedious low-level work. PyGame took too long to do all but the simplest animation, and while Torque GameBuilder's dev environment was very good its scripting language was no fun to work with. Neither had the advantage of being instantly playable over the web, which is a huge deal when you're trying out a game you've never heard of. The ActionScript language is essentially JavaScript that has access to Flash's libraries, so it is both familiar and quite powerful to work with, while FlashPunk has a good basic, extensible framework for game creation that lets me work at a higher level but doesn't get in my way. Flex Builder's power as an IDE is also worth noting.
Most of the advantages to using Flash are due to its existing momentum. if HTML5 gets enough traction to have people write good content-creation tools for it, I'll certainly give it a shot. Right now, though, I'm very happy with Flash.
if (chemicalX_present()) { do_this(); } else { do_that(); }
It's not a simple off/on switch. The concentration of neurotransmitters matters greatly, is constantly in flux, and varies throughout the brain. Changes will affect neuronal action nearby but not far away, so that the physical layout of neurons takes on importance as well.
[Digital computers] are still useful tools to simulate the brain, if we understand it better, we can build specialized hardware for the task.
While I certainly think that such research can be useful should continue, it's time to take a more sober look at our expectations.
I specified "digital computers" intentionally and I'm glad you picked up on it. Analog computers more closely mimic nature, so they may hold more promise for running consciousness. Yet analog computers are finicky and often fragile creatures, and even without those issues, it is only digital computers that hold the promise of uploading, copying or transferring brain states. I wish I knew enough about quantum computing to guess whether or not it holds potential.
In my opinion there are other major problems with the idea of brain sims of any stripe, one of the big ones being that brains require unfathomable amounts of constant stimulus. I am not alone in postulating that consciousness arises stochastically from being forced to deal with all of that sensation. This leads me to believe that a brain without a body simply will not become conscious, or if it's an upload, will go haywire almost immediately.
I may be wrong about any number of things, but it's clear to me that the task for the uploaders is unquestionably far more difficult than they'd have you believe, or even believe themselves. It's hard to have a good discussion about the topic when most of the people who are interested in it only look at it from the computing side and remain ignorant of the difficulties arising from fields external to theirs. I urge anyone with an interest in it to read a few books, the most important being Godel, Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a thick treatise on consciousness that will at times leave you reeling, but is very entertaining and informative. He writes from something like an information-theory perspective, which should sit well with most of the/. population. That book is what began to shake my certainty of the Singularity. Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind/e
You also lack an understanding of what is involved in the functioning brain.
Biochemistry is incredibly important. The brain is not just a neural network; it is an electrochemical organ and the chemicals floating around in there greatly affect the operation of neurons. There is no distinction between "hardware" and "software" in the brain--every new thought or stimulus causes the physical structure to change: neurons form new pathways, areas get flooded with neurotransmitters, etc. This shit is way more complex than you believe, and not in a way that is friendly to computation.
Computer people like to think that if we just throw enough cores at the idea it will magically come to fruition. In reality there are many important differences between brains and computers, enough that I don't think digital computers are going to be more than a dead end. I could maybe see implants that let us control real-world stuff with concentrated thought, but that's about the limit of digital interfaces.
Exactly. I have actually played the Machinarium demo and found it enjoyable, but the $20 price seemed a little steep. I just purchased the full game at its $5 sale price, because even if I never get around to playing it or finishing it, it was too cheap to pass up.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard this expressed as "Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice." =)
But I wholeheartedly disagree with the government giving 'special' rights in exchange for money.
I'd be interested to see how many people who are against this measure are okay with carbon credits.
No shit. There's always a loss when you record with analog, too. You miss a bunch of inaudible frequencies. You miss the thump of powerful speakers. You miss standing in the midst of a crowd that is all tuned into the same experience. You miss being there at the moment of creation. Nobody mistakes a recording for a live performance without being keyed for it (Milli Vanilli, anyone?) and even then it isn't easy.
A recording is not live. Whining about how very high-quality digital is worse than very high-quality analog is pointless. I guarantee that in a double-blind test you wouldn't be able to reliably pick which is which, and I further bet that you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference were the same event recorded both ways.
I think holography is the way to go. There are systems already in use, though I'm sure they're way too expensive to think about home use at the moment. Gorillaz, the virtual band, did a concert for MTV and were projected onstage as holograms. See this video. Skip to 4:40 to see a live dancer walk around and be occluded by one of the holograms.
It's pretty wild stuff, and while still in its infancy has the greatest potential for making true 3D an entertainment staple, among other things.
If you give the brain realistic input that could actually happen, people would be more comfortable with it and it would be more likely to sell.
This is why 3D gaming makes much more sense than 3D movies.
A lot of film techniques rely on changing between multiple cameras, and that dramatic, angled close-up that is so effective in 2D results in a depth-of-field change that's going to fatigue people in 3D. Many games, especially racing, FPS, and platformers, rarely do that sort of thing. 3D would add lots of immersion with fewer drawbacks. There's always room for abuse, but it doesn't seem as inherent to the medium as in film.
I think this could become more evident pretty quickly with the launch of Nintendo's 3DS, depending on how many developers they get on board.
This is true. Parents of the last 50 years and today face greater changes in what we eat than had taken place in the previous, oh, four thousand years.
You used to look for the ripest, juiciest-looking tomato on the vine. Now they're all engineered to look that way, and damn the nutritional consequences. Antibiotics and hormones, all invisible and undocumented, pervade the entire meat supply. HFCS and other chemicals from corn are present in almost everything and affect our bodies differently than the natural components they replace.
It isn't the parents who are worse, it's the food supply.
Because we are not going to accept the loss of independence created by a government nanny state.
Er...you know the FDA and USDA already exist, right?
The fact that they're staffed almost entirely, at the higher levels, with former executives and affiliates from Monsanto, however, shows that it's not worked out very well in practice.
Or maybe it's because in the West food, and especially bad food, is easily available and cheap, and people don't have the money to take control of their diet
FTFY.
Government really does share a lot of the blame, since much of the subsidies it creates are made at the behest of food corporations.
Watch Food, Inc.
There are bound to be multiple causes--in real life there always are--but high fructose corn syrup is undoubtedly one of the primaries. The cost factor may come into play, indeed it's only sugar tariffs and corn subsidies that make it viable, but the bigger issue with HFCS is that, unlike real sugar, it doesn't trigger the body's "full" feeling. Were other food items containing real sugar cost-equivalent, we would still see people who chose HFCS eating more.
This doesn't deserve a flamebait mod. Someone didn't recognize the emoticon.
Seriously, though, pretension will get you pretty far in the art world. I know a relatively successful artist, a painter, and I've seen him charm people from the scene. In private, he's fond of saying "there is no room for modesty in the arts," and he's admitted to spouting volumes of bullshit when asked about the meaning of his work. You're right that pretension alone won't work if it isn't backed up by good art, but pretension really can boost your reputation if your work is up to snuff.
Oh, yes, I hadn't even considered an organ. A drawbar organ is a rare find--especially a Hammond, which I bet is tons of fun to play--but it is pretty easy to find full-size electromechanical organs for free, and some of them even work! Similar to a synth, many of them have rows of switches or stops that affect the tone, some effects like vibrato and percussion hits, and if you get lucky like I did, a bult-in rotary speaker. Others have built-in accompaniment that'd teach a young person rhythm.
X, do you put your music online? I recently started uploading my songs to bandcamp. Anyone interested in chillout electronica should give 'em a listen.
"Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case."
- William James
Seconded. Especially a virtual analog synth that has friendly knobs which will immediately affect the sound being produced when tweaked.
Or, you could go for a real analogue synth like the Korg Monotron, a tiny, simple true analog synth able to create all kinds of neat sounds.
None of these things will have the bright screen to draw his eye, but they are far more intuitive and engaging for a young mind: pushing different keys and twisting different knobs will effect a definite and immediate change in the sound he hears, whereas pounding on the keyboard of a laptop will generally result in little onscreen action. Synth programming is real programming, too, without the complexity of dealing with language. This will foster his creativity more greatly than any other electronic device, especially if he plays with it as he begins to understand the structure of music.
Korg Monotrons can be bought new for under $80. The only problems I foresee are that Dad might be having too much fun with it to let his son have a try, that adults have a low tolerance for atonal, high-pitched sounds, and that nobody wants their kid to be a starving artist when they grow up =)
Maybe the guy looking for drugs.
If living creatures are machines, we are machines of startling complexity. We can construct hard, cold machines that do amazing things, like the space shuttle, yet we cannot build a living creature as simple as a gnat, or even a bacterium, out of whole cloth. No hard, cold machine has come close to cognition and I believe it perfectly feasible that such a level of complexity is necessary for something like consciousness.
This is the exact thought that I had. I hope you get some responses offering justification. My own theory is that magical thinking is very much alive and well today, yet it's only (and all too readily) accepted if it's coated in a veneer of scientific jargon.
Don't Brie silly, the Tyning was all off.
Things like this are in News, while things like research on how monkeys make the same mistakes humans do when it comes to money are thrown in Idle. This story is a novelty while that one has implications for how we do things. These are far from the only examples. What gives?
I don't think I'd mind nearly as much if Idle's comments page wasn't so broken; it makes a story otherwise worth discussing too much of a pain in the ass.
As mentioned in the movie, the resolution of a hologram is the wavelength of the light used. With a specially built microscope, you could actually look at the bacteria captured in film, even though your subject might be a macroscopic object.
The image you see when you look into a hologram is a virtual image, like that of a mirror. What's interesting and has to my knowledge never been examined for implications is that there is an invisible but real image behind the film.
Each half of a holographic plate sliced in half still contains the entire image, only at half the size. The halving can be repeated indefinitely, within physical limits. (Incidentally, this is one of several references to holograms made in The Book of the New Sun.)
The most interesting aspect is holography is that each part in some sense contains the whole. There is a theory of physics that postulates that the universe is structured as a hologram. It never gained much traction yet it was never disproven, and its creator David Bohm was a well-respected physicist. Additionally, Karl Pribam is a psychologist who believes that our brains operate holographically, our brainwaves acting as the laser with our neurons as film.
This may indeed be a technology that is simply ahead of its time, virtually useless to us without a much more mature understanding of physics or without the insight of some genius on how to do more with holograms than make eerie monochromatic volumes.
I've been drinking and I've got karma to burn, so...
I like flash.
I don't like it when it's misused, and I think it's a pretty awful idea for most websites to use flash elements. Yet it has its uses, chiefly among them being web cartoons and web games.
The barrier for entry is low, so there's a lot of junk out there, but the good stuff tends to rise to the top. A great example is the game N, the quirky 2D gold-grabbing platformer with the fun physics and tricky, exacting level design. They now have game deals on more traditional media, but this one would never have got off the ground if it weren't for the ubiquity of Flash. On the animation side, the same can be said for Strong Bad.
I've started dabbling in game design again, and this time around I'm using ActionScript along with the FlashPunk framework. The thing that's always kept me from completing things in the past was having an engine and language that both lived at a level sufficient to let me do what I wanted without making me do the tedious low-level work. PyGame took too long to do all but the simplest animation, and while Torque GameBuilder's dev environment was very good its scripting language was no fun to work with. Neither had the advantage of being instantly playable over the web, which is a huge deal when you're trying out a game you've never heard of. The ActionScript language is essentially JavaScript that has access to Flash's libraries, so it is both familiar and quite powerful to work with, while FlashPunk has a good basic, extensible framework for game creation that lets me work at a higher level but doesn't get in my way. Flex Builder's power as an IDE is also worth noting.
Most of the advantages to using Flash are due to its existing momentum. if HTML5 gets enough traction to have people write good content-creation tools for it, I'll certainly give it a shot. Right now, though, I'm very happy with Flash.
if (chemicalX_present()) { do_this(); } else { do_that(); }
It's not a simple off/on switch. The concentration of neurotransmitters matters greatly, is constantly in flux, and varies throughout the brain. Changes will affect neuronal action nearby but not far away, so that the physical layout of neurons takes on importance as well.
[Digital computers] are still useful tools to simulate the brain, if we understand it better, we can build specialized hardware for the task.
While I certainly think that such research can be useful should continue, it's time to take a more sober look at our expectations.
I specified "digital computers" intentionally and I'm glad you picked up on it. Analog computers more closely mimic nature, so they may hold more promise for running consciousness. Yet analog computers are finicky and often fragile creatures, and even without those issues, it is only digital computers that hold the promise of uploading, copying or transferring brain states. I wish I knew enough about quantum computing to guess whether or not it holds potential.
In my opinion there are other major problems with the idea of brain sims of any stripe, one of the big ones being that brains require unfathomable amounts of constant stimulus. I am not alone in postulating that consciousness arises stochastically from being forced to deal with all of that sensation. This leads me to believe that a brain without a body simply will not become conscious, or if it's an upload, will go haywire almost immediately.
I may be wrong about any number of things, but it's clear to me that the task for the uploaders is unquestionably far more difficult than they'd have you believe, or even believe themselves. It's hard to have a good discussion about the topic when most of the people who are interested in it only look at it from the computing side and remain ignorant of the difficulties arising from fields external to theirs. I urge anyone with an interest in it to read a few books, the most important being Godel, Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a thick treatise on consciousness that will at times leave you reeling, but is very entertaining and informative. He writes from something like an information-theory perspective, which should sit well with most of the /. population. That book is what began to shake my certainty of the Singularity. Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind/e
You also lack an understanding of what is involved in the functioning brain.
Biochemistry is incredibly important. The brain is not just a neural network; it is an electrochemical organ and the chemicals floating around in there greatly affect the operation of neurons. There is no distinction between "hardware" and "software" in the brain--every new thought or stimulus causes the physical structure to change: neurons form new pathways, areas get flooded with neurotransmitters, etc. This shit is way more complex than you believe, and not in a way that is friendly to computation.
Computer people like to think that if we just throw enough cores at the idea it will magically come to fruition. In reality there are many important differences between brains and computers, enough that I don't think digital computers are going to be more than a dead end. I could maybe see implants that let us control real-world stuff with concentrated thought, but that's about the limit of digital interfaces.
Exactly. I have actually played the Machinarium demo and found it enjoyable, but the $20 price seemed a little steep. I just purchased the full game at its $5 sale price, because even if I never get around to playing it or finishing it, it was too cheap to pass up.
History of science definitely seems to agree with the "programmed" argument. Other histories ... even more.
Er...how, exactly?