In Genesis, God tells man "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Gen. 2, 16-17, NIV). Then, referencing what God told them, the serpent tells the woman: "You will not surely die" and that "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."( Gen. 3, 4-5. NIV).
When they actually eat the fruit, they don't die, like God said they would, but they do acquire knowledge of good and evil, like the serpent told them they would.
Did God lie to the first man and woman? Didn't the serpent tell them the truth? We know that he later makes them mortal as punishment for eating the fruit, but that wasn't a direct result of eating the fruit. So he didn't *have* to make them mortal; he seemed to decide that after they had already eaten the fruit.
Just because they are out of the womb, doesn't mean they are all set and ready to go. The nervous system is still growing, and it takes about two years for it to become fully developed -- right about the time they begin walking and talking.
If you look at gestation time compared to development time, you would see that, compared to other animals, humans should have a gestation time of about 2.5 - 3 years. Humans are all born as preemies, because otherwise their heads would be too big to get out. If humans had as much *relative* development time in the womb as other mammals did, they would come out walking and talking.
When you see a baby flailing helplessly about for 2 years before they finally start walking, it might seem like they are learning. It's easy to get fooled because people do learn things later on in their life. However, when you look at the biology of early childhood development, you will see that the nervous system isn't fully grown until they are about 2 years old. It's not learning, it's simply growth. Remember correlation is not causation. Everyone was fooled until very recently, when we were able to do X-rays and MRIs, and had moral permission from the church to do autopsies.
"
On the other hand, it is a learned behavior, so the "lookup table" idea is not as far off as you would think. It's almost like the rules themselves are dynamically learned (and refined), allowing them to be applied to many scenarios."
Most of our movement is hard-coded. It is not learned behavior. When we teach ourselves to throw a lay-up shot or throw a football, the conscious part of your brain is only doing very high-level stuff. When your body actually goes to move out these patterns, your using muscles you're not even aware of, muscles that you can't even feel. Most of our everyday movements are unconscious, automatic, and not learned or taught. They are hardwired.
Have you ever seen the nature documentary of the Zebra being born? It plops out of the womb straight on to the ground in a curled mess of afterbirth. Then it stands up and starts trotting around, finally breaking into a run. Five minutes ago, it was literally curled up in the womb with no ability to move freely. Tell me, how did it teach itself to run?
The answer is that our DNA has evolved to grow a nervous system that already has these movement capabilities, without the need to learn them. Even if it were so that there were organisms with nervous systems that could do a lot of learning, they would quickly be out-competed by organisms that were ready to go and didn't have to waste any time learning anything.
I'm not saying that *all* of our movement is hard-coded, but the examples usually cited, such as throwing a ball, are *consciously* self-taught at a very high level ( such as "OK, move my arm a little higher a little later on" not "rotate deltoid 30* at 132 ms" ), and throwing a ball is a very simple activity compared to, say, ambulating with 6, 4, or even 2 legs.
"This is completely different than the way humans make mistakes. When we move incorrectly, we move almost correctly. Then we move closer to correctly, and so on."
Have you looked at any physiology or kinetics? You can't just talk about people *consciously* teaching themselves how to throw a ball, you have to look at *all organisms* moving their body.
A boy learning to throw a football is totally different than a toddler learning to walk. It's also totally different than learning to ride a bike.
"
"Do you have any references for your 'lookup table' theory, or is this just a pet theory?"
It's not a theory, it's an image used to describe the process"
That doesn't make it not a theory.
"
Neural nets are very well understood. How they do their calculations is also well understood. The question is what imagery you want to use to simplify that for normal life. My contention is that "doing calculus" is a poorly chosen image."
Nueral nets are clearly understood. They are also totally unrealted to organic nervous systems. Nerve cells grow in very specific patterns that are hard-coded in the DNA. I suggest if you want to understand organisms, you get away from the circuitboards and start looking at the biology.
"Sigh. Clearly, you aren't good with math. I don't think you have a good grasp of what you even mean by doing calculus. My strong suspicion would be that you read Douglas Adams and that his enticing picture of the powers the mind has which we don't have access to caught your imagination. He's a great writer, but a lot of his scientific speculation lacks rigor. He doesn't have to define what he means by what he says. It's just an image in a story.
Well, you're totally off-base again. The writer whose writings I am basing my arguments off of is Stephen Pinker. In _How the Mind Works_, he does a good job of debunking 'blank slate' and self-organizing nueral network models of organic nervous systems. Organic nervous systems are built by DNA and the revision history is millions of years old. I'm not surprised that a rat brain can pilot a jet -- the rat body is many times more complex, with many more inputs and outputs, and that rat nervous system has 'piloted' many different body types in its evolutionary history.
So where is the artificial neural network that can fly a jet? It doesn't exist, because nueral nets can teach themselves to fly a plane. An organic nervous system is not a nueral net.
"What does "doing calculus" mean? If you mean analyzing a function and running the calculation through, then your brain isn't doing that.
It means solving an equation using the principles of calculus, not relying on a look-up table. How do you know your brain isn't doing that? You obviously have no background in biology.
"I think what you mean is "fitting curves." You've got your function which describes the path of the ball. You observe that you are able to extrapolate that curve until it hits your hand, and that you can fit that curve to how hard the ball was thrown. You can then throw a ball similarly."
'Fitting curves' is not *only* what I mean. Humans are the only animal that can throw a ball, and it's a simple trick. I'm talking about the calculous involved in pouncing on a gazelle, tilting tail and flight feathers just right so you get lift from a hot-air currrent, running a zig-zag pattern through underbrush to escape a predator, or tilting your entire neck-head complex while running so you can catch a bird in your mouth."
You've been taught in school that one way to do this is to figure out the function which describes the movement of the ball, then twiddle the variables. There are other ways to do this calculation. Many of them are highly accurate. Neural nets are one way. There are methods with bits of string or elastic. They used to have big machines that did it using cogs and cams of different shapes and sizes, back before the advent
"Past experience? I don't think that a labrat knows a thing about physics or circuitry design, but if every time he hits the button he gets knocked across the room, he'll quickly learn to not hit the button."
That's the problem with the labratory-oriented experiment. The idea of the lab is to get rid of all variables except one. In the real world where this organism evolved, they will never have the same experience twice -- there are many variables, and they are all different! Once you get eaten, you're done. No chance to be trained on that! An organism that survives has to be able to handle new and unexpected scenarios. So seeing how an organism behaves in a repeated stimulous-response situation doesn't really tell us anything about what the nervous system evolved to handle.
"
Not that there are really tables stored in memory. The neurons themselves are the table elements. If you miss the ball because you moved your hand too fast, your body tells the neurons to move slower next time."
Except there is no "next time". You will never have to catch a ball with those exact same parameters again. Your body will be in a different position, the ball will be at a different speed, angle, and trajectory, different wind and environment conditions, etc.
"Think also about this: When you do calculus in the normal way that we speak of doing calculus, what does a mistake do? A misplaced sign or a confusion about division gives you a terribly inaccurate answer. You can end up with the wrong answer by orders of magnitude.
Your body almost never does that. You rarely reach up to catch a ball that's a foot above your hand and accidentally throw yourself across the room. Even slashdotters aren't that bad."
Yes, but you have millions of years of evolution that have weeded out mistakes and orders-of-magnitude errors in your nervous system.
Furthermore, a mistake in your look-up table would be as deadly as a mistake in doing the calculus.
Do you have any references for your 'lookup table' theory, or is this just a pet theory?
I'm not good with math, but isn't the idea of calculus so you can sum *infinite series*? How are you going to have a look-up table for an infinite series?
"Conversely, do you do the math when you shift in a manual? No. You just know how the engine sounds when it's time to shift. Stimulus response, honed by trial and error."
I'm not saying you are consciously doing the calculus, but your spine is, and sending the commands to your limbs. The problem with stimulous response is that you will never get the same stimulous again. You can't 'hone' in an ever-changing environment. You have to be able to calculate all the variables -- i.e., do the math.
"Rather than implying that we might have an "innate sense of geometry" - it merely shows that we're able to pick up basic concepts of 3D objects by working and interacting with them every day as we go through our lives."
Correlation is not causation. It seems that from this experiment you can't make a conclusion one way or the other. If this study *does not* show that we have an innate sense, that doesn't mean that it therefore must be learned. Say that in reality we do have an innate sense -- it just means that this experiment is lousy, and didn't demonstrate it.
"The fact that adults tended to score better on these tests than kids did further illustrates this. "
Not necessarily. An adult mind is different than a child's mind. It could mean that, instead of the adult learning over a lifetime, and adult brain is fully developed and has all the innate abilities up and running, whereas a childs' mind doesn't.
"The longer you've been around on this planet (formally educated or not), the more time you've had to work with objects and draw conclusions about what makes an object "different" from other similar ones."
There is a famous studies with babies and their perception of 'impossible' scenes. You can read about it in Stephen Pinker's _How the Mind Works_. The babies in the studies were 2-12 months -- they weren't walking around, they didn't have fully developed minds, and they certainly didn't have much experience. However, they showed the babies 'possible' scenes, such as a ball knocking into another ball, and the second ball moving. Then they showed the babies 'impossible' scenes through optical illusions -- such as a ball dissapearing, a ball hitting another ball and coming to a dead stop, etc. The babies stared longer at the impossible scenes than the possible scenes. This seems to imply that they perceived some sort of difference between the possible and impossible scenes. We can reasonably conclude that the babies had some innate sense of physics -- what is possible and impossible in our world -- and therefore were befuddled by the illusions and stared at them longer. Remember, these are babies that are still being carried around by their mothers, no older than 12 months. The have very little experience with everyday physics.
"We have found models for describing things like you're talking about (catching frisbee's, etc.), but do you really think we (much less your dog) are solving differential equations in your head in order to catch a frisbee?"
I don't think anyone is consciously doing algebra in their imagination when they throw a ball (for that matter, I think dogs are hardly conscious, even though I am a dog person). However, the nuerons in the brain, spinal cord, and arm probably are doing calculus.
Remember that the body's actions are not a purely mechanical event, like water flowing. In order to successfully run, jump, or throw a ball, any body, from ants to gazelles, has to model the natural world and how the body will move within it. If the body and its neurons are *not* using calculus, then they must have another method of solving these equations. Are you claiming they are not using math?
I've always had a problem with sentence-style math. Anything beyond long division I can't handle. However, I am very good at visual gemoetry.
In my high school, the sophomore math class was geometry. We constructed shapes and did geometric proofs. A lot of people just couldn't get it. Some of them were vrey frustrated because they were really good at regular math, but they just weren't visual thinkers.
There were about 5 of us, including me, who were great at it. I remember one homework at the beginning of the class where we were to find triangles in a complex, overlapping shape. Most people found 10-15. The 5 or so of us who were really great at it found 32 (one guy found 31), which I believe is the maximum number in that figure.
Or, you can become a consultant and bid out jobs locally, then have Indians do it for next to nothing. After four years of doing this at school, you would be pretty good at managing such projects.
I know a few consultants in my area that don't do any programming anymore. They have a team in Asia and a team in Eastern Europe working on their projects 24/7. It's not a complete retirement, because you do have to negotiate cultural barriers (such as what "I need it tomorrow" means), and you are not within ass-kicking distance of the people you are relying on.
We have these grammar rules so that we are all on the same page. You're overlooking the point of grammar which is exactly to make sense.
The example you use is a red herring. "I went too the store." is easy to understand. However, once we decide we can break the rules, then it's up to each individual poster as to what rules they want to follow, and what rules they want to discard. The replier says "Earlier you said that..." and the original poster says "No, you misunderstand me..." It's everybody's personal preference for what is a meaningful grammar rule, instead of having an objective ruleset.
Yes, some of the rules are crufty and old, like "its", "it's" and "its'". However, the vast majority of grammar rules are here so that we can understand each other. Let me repeat that, ignoring a few grammar rules:
can understand
vast
that we
each so
majority
the of
rules
are
here other.
grammar
So we have a few dumb spellings and grammar rules. Suck it up and learn them.
Leadership starts at the top. If people at the very top aren't doing 100%, no one below is going to do any better. It just goes downhill quickly.
If you look at the position of 'editor' in any other organization in any point in the history of editors, editors make sure that the text has correct spelling and grammar. If you aren't doing that, are you really doing your job? I know you say that you repair articles for sense, linking, etc. -- but if you still allow these stupid, easily fixed errors through, how do I know you are doing anything at all, other than clicking an 'Approve' button? It just smacks of laziness and not taking the site seriously. Which, hey, if you don't care, why should I? I'll stop previewing my articles, trying to make insightful, interesting points with facts and good logic. I'll just troll the site. After all, if the editors aren't keeping the place clean, why should I?
I think the slashdot editing policy worked when this site was still in someone's basement or however it started. However, if you are seriously asking for people for money, get your act together. No more dupes, no more spelling errors, a lot less grammatical errors.
Yes, we are saddled with a stupid, ancient, crufty spelling system that is in serious need of revision. No, it is not going to happen anytime soon. Just buck up and start looking up words. It doesn't bother you, but it doesn bother others, a lot.
What point are you trying to prove? That you can't hire a competent professional? That grammar and spelling are hard, even for professionals?
[Takes off hat].
For some reason I always think that programmers, if they weren't sticklers for spelling rules, could at least know and use them. Therefore computer and technology sites -- real hardcore geek sites, should be sancutaries from bad spelling and grammar. But there seems to be a real divide between people that have logical and language ability -- some people are good at math, and some people are good at writing. Rarely do you see someone with talents in both.
"We all know that the investment in space has done nothing to enable silly little technologies like weather satellites, telecommunications, etc... things that certainly don't improve the lives of people. "
If you want improvemets in weather satellite technology, make investements in weather satellite technology. If you want improvements in telecommunications, make investments in telecommunications research.
I'm not saying that we have gotten *no* benefit from the space program, but that *it's very little*, and *less than proponents have made it out to be*.
If the reason we are going into space is these everday life improvements, then we are better off investing the money directly into those areas, instead of wasting it on rocketry a zero-g research and areas that are only applicable to space.
It's like saying we need to send team after team to the bottom of the ocean and establish a base down there to make our everyday lives better. Anyone can see we're better off not building the submarines. But somehow with the space program, sending up shuttle after shuttle to watch plants and ants grow in zero G makes food and fuel cheaper or something crazy like that.
"There are no homeless people in the usa starving. If they are they choose to starve."
Logical contradictions in the first two sentences will get you far in slashdot.
But I'll take your bait. The US has a large population of insane homeless people -- they get messages from outer space, they work for the CIA, etc. etc. In the rest of the civilized world, they put them in hospitals. We used to do that here, but then Reagan came in and de-funded all of these huge wasteful government programs, so now we have paranoid schizophrenics wandering the streets.
Because, as you pointed out, a guy who gets radio signals in his brain from the FBI is choosing to wander the streets instead of working.
Uh, the United States is the only western country that has starving homeless people. The other western countries, including Canada, the UK, Scandinavia, continental Europe, Australia, have extensive social programs that prevent people from starving and being homeless. You may disagree with socialist policy and philosophy, but it is factually inaccurate to say that rates of hunger and homelessness are in the US and the rest of the western world are comparable.
Also, 'fallout' from technological innovations from the space programs helping everyday people is something that has been frequently debunked -- about the only thing we got is teflon for our frying pans. The US engaged in the space program in order to perfect ICBM, rocketry, and satellite technology in order to have a good chance of winning WWIII.
If you want to actually improve the lives of eveday people, invest in research in that area, instead of space. That's like saying deep sea research will eventually pay off in your everday. Sure, it might, but if that's what your goal is, just go ahead and fund it directly. Otherwise, stop trying to make it seem like shooting rockets into space is helping the average American. It isn't, and we don't have to beat the Ruskies anymore.
"WTF? - that's a complete non-sequitur. How does there being lots of land stop weapons being useful. Here's a hint - it's hasn't up to now."
North Korea and Iraq are not a threat to the United States because we have LOTS OF LAND (not to mention water) between us, and those countries don't have missles that can cover THAT MUCH LAND.
If warlords don't have ICBMs then they can only project power as far as they can march their armies. Which won't be as far as ICBM missles.
Slashdot Mirror
In Genesis, God tells man "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Gen. 2, 16-17, NIV). Then, referencing what God told them, the serpent tells the woman: "You will not surely die" and that "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."( Gen. 3, 4-5. NIV).
When they actually eat the fruit, they don't die, like God said they would, but they do acquire knowledge of good and evil, like the serpent told them they would.
Did God lie to the first man and woman? Didn't the serpent tell them the truth? We know that he later makes them mortal as punishment for eating the fruit, but that wasn't a direct result of eating the fruit. So he didn't *have* to make them mortal; he seemed to decide that after they had already eaten the fruit.
Just because they are out of the womb, doesn't mean they are all set and ready to go. The nervous system is still growing, and it takes about two years for it to become fully developed -- right about the time they begin walking and talking.
If you look at gestation time compared to development time, you would see that, compared to other animals, humans should have a gestation time of about 2.5 - 3 years. Humans are all born as preemies, because otherwise their heads would be too big to get out. If humans had as much *relative* development time in the womb as other mammals did, they would come out walking and talking.
When you see a baby flailing helplessly about for 2 years before they finally start walking, it might seem like they are learning. It's easy to get fooled because people do learn things later on in their life. However, when you look at the biology of early childhood development, you will see that the nervous system isn't fully grown until they are about 2 years old. It's not learning, it's simply growth. Remember correlation is not causation. Everyone was fooled until very recently, when we were able to do X-rays and MRIs, and had moral permission from the church to do autopsies.
It's all according to his plan. You'll understand once you get to heaven and the Veil of Uncertainty ( +2 ) is lifted.
So you best start believing!
/sarcasm
If the human mind can *consciously* invent calculus, why can't nuerons have evovled to use calculus modelling of real events?
" On the other hand, it is a learned behavior, so the "lookup table" idea is not as far off as you would think. It's almost like the rules themselves are dynamically learned (and refined), allowing them to be applied to many scenarios."
Most of our movement is hard-coded. It is not learned behavior. When we teach ourselves to throw a lay-up shot or throw a football, the conscious part of your brain is only doing very high-level stuff. When your body actually goes to move out these patterns, your using muscles you're not even aware of, muscles that you can't even feel. Most of our everyday movements are unconscious, automatic, and not learned or taught. They are hardwired.
Have you ever seen the nature documentary of the Zebra being born? It plops out of the womb straight on to the ground in a curled mess of afterbirth. Then it stands up and starts trotting around, finally breaking into a run. Five minutes ago, it was literally curled up in the womb with no ability to move freely. Tell me, how did it teach itself to run?
The answer is that our DNA has evolved to grow a nervous system that already has these movement capabilities, without the need to learn them. Even if it were so that there were organisms with nervous systems that could do a lot of learning, they would quickly be out-competed by organisms that were ready to go and didn't have to waste any time learning anything.
I'm not saying that *all* of our movement is hard-coded, but the examples usually cited, such as throwing a ball, are *consciously* self-taught at a very high level ( such as "OK, move my arm a little higher a little later on" not "rotate deltoid 30* at 132 ms" ), and throwing a ball is a very simple activity compared to, say, ambulating with 6, 4, or even 2 legs.
"This is completely different than the way humans make mistakes. When we move incorrectly, we move almost correctly. Then we move closer to correctly, and so on."
Have you looked at any physiology or kinetics? You can't just talk about people *consciously* teaching themselves how to throw a ball, you have to look at *all organisms* moving their body.
A boy learning to throw a football is totally different than a toddler learning to walk. It's also totally different than learning to ride a bike.
" "Do you have any references for your 'lookup table' theory, or is this just a pet theory?"
It's not a theory, it's an image used to describe the process"
That doesn't make it not a theory.
" Neural nets are very well understood. How they do their calculations is also well understood. The question is what imagery you want to use to simplify that for normal life. My contention is that "doing calculus" is a poorly chosen image."
Nueral nets are clearly understood. They are also totally unrealted to organic nervous systems. Nerve cells grow in very specific patterns that are hard-coded in the DNA. I suggest if you want to understand organisms, you get away from the circuitboards and start looking at the biology.
"Sigh. Clearly, you aren't good with math. I don't think you have a good grasp of what you even mean by doing calculus. My strong suspicion would be that you read Douglas Adams and that his enticing picture of the powers the mind has which we don't have access to caught your imagination. He's a great writer, but a lot of his scientific speculation lacks rigor. He doesn't have to define what he means by what he says. It's just an image in a story.
Well, you're totally off-base again. The writer whose writings I am basing my arguments off of is Stephen Pinker. In _How the Mind Works_, he does a good job of debunking 'blank slate' and self-organizing nueral network models of organic nervous systems. Organic nervous systems are built by DNA and the revision history is millions of years old. I'm not surprised that a rat brain can pilot a jet -- the rat body is many times more complex, with many more inputs and outputs, and that rat nervous system has 'piloted' many different body types in its evolutionary history.
So where is the artificial neural network that can fly a jet? It doesn't exist, because nueral nets can teach themselves to fly a plane. An organic nervous system is not a nueral net.
"What does "doing calculus" mean? If you mean analyzing a function and running the calculation through, then your brain isn't doing that.
It means solving an equation using the principles of calculus, not relying on a look-up table. How do you know your brain isn't doing that? You obviously have no background in biology.
"I think what you mean is "fitting curves." You've got your function which describes the path of the ball. You observe that you are able to extrapolate that curve until it hits your hand, and that you can fit that curve to how hard the ball was thrown. You can then throw a ball similarly."
'Fitting curves' is not *only* what I mean. Humans are the only animal that can throw a ball, and it's a simple trick. I'm talking about the calculous involved in pouncing on a gazelle, tilting tail and flight feathers just right so you get lift from a hot-air currrent, running a zig-zag pattern through underbrush to escape a predator, or tilting your entire neck-head complex while running so you can catch a bird in your mouth."
You've been taught in school that one way to do this is to figure out the function which describes the movement of the ball, then twiddle the variables. There are other ways to do this calculation. Many of them are highly accurate. Neural nets are one way. There are methods with bits of string or elastic. They used to have big machines that did it using cogs and cams of different shapes and sizes, back before the advent
"Why they celebrate birthdays and not conception days (they're so adamant at trying to control non-believers definitions of "life")."
I'm not a Christian, but here's an answer: we can be certain when the birthday was. We may not always be sure when the conception date was.
So we have a choice: A. most people pick an arbitrary day close to the day of their conception or B. Eveyone uses their birthday.
"Past experience? I don't think that a labrat knows a thing about physics or circuitry design, but if every time he hits the button he gets knocked across the room, he'll quickly learn to not hit the button."
That's the problem with the labratory-oriented experiment. The idea of the lab is to get rid of all variables except one. In the real world where this organism evolved, they will never have the same experience twice -- there are many variables, and they are all different! Once you get eaten, you're done. No chance to be trained on that! An organism that survives has to be able to handle new and unexpected scenarios. So seeing how an organism behaves in a repeated stimulous-response situation doesn't really tell us anything about what the nervous system evolved to handle.
" Not that there are really tables stored in memory. The neurons themselves are the table elements. If you miss the ball because you moved your hand too fast, your body tells the neurons to move slower next time."
Except there is no "next time". You will never have to catch a ball with those exact same parameters again. Your body will be in a different position, the ball will be at a different speed, angle, and trajectory, different wind and environment conditions, etc.
"Think also about this: When you do calculus in the normal way that we speak of doing calculus, what does a mistake do? A misplaced sign or a confusion about division gives you a terribly inaccurate answer. You can end up with the wrong answer by orders of magnitude.
Your body almost never does that. You rarely reach up to catch a ball that's a foot above your hand and accidentally throw yourself across the room. Even slashdotters aren't that bad."
Yes, but you have millions of years of evolution that have weeded out mistakes and orders-of-magnitude errors in your nervous system.
Furthermore, a mistake in your look-up table would be as deadly as a mistake in doing the calculus.
Do you have any references for your 'lookup table' theory, or is this just a pet theory?
I'm not good with math, but isn't the idea of calculus so you can sum *infinite series*? How are you going to have a look-up table for an infinite series?
"Conversely, do you do the math when you shift in a manual? No. You just know how the engine sounds when it's time to shift. Stimulus response, honed by trial and error."
I'm not saying you are consciously doing the calculus, but your spine is, and sending the commands to your limbs. The problem with stimulous response is that you will never get the same stimulous again. You can't 'hone' in an ever-changing environment. You have to be able to calculate all the variables -- i.e., do the math.
That's nothing. The incredible human mind can recognize faces in computer monitor pixels or even ink spots on paper.
"Rather than implying that we might have an "innate sense of geometry" - it merely shows that we're able to pick up basic concepts of 3D objects by working and interacting with them every day as we go through our lives."
Correlation is not causation. It seems that from this experiment you can't make a conclusion one way or the other. If this study *does not* show that we have an innate sense, that doesn't mean that it therefore must be learned. Say that in reality we do have an innate sense -- it just means that this experiment is lousy, and didn't demonstrate it.
"The fact that adults tended to score better on these tests than kids did further illustrates this. "
Not necessarily. An adult mind is different than a child's mind. It could mean that, instead of the adult learning over a lifetime, and adult brain is fully developed and has all the innate abilities up and running, whereas a childs' mind doesn't.
"The longer you've been around on this planet (formally educated or not), the more time you've had to work with objects and draw conclusions about what makes an object "different" from other similar ones."
There is a famous studies with babies and their perception of 'impossible' scenes. You can read about it in Stephen Pinker's _How the Mind Works_. The babies in the studies were 2-12 months -- they weren't walking around, they didn't have fully developed minds, and they certainly didn't have much experience. However, they showed the babies 'possible' scenes, such as a ball knocking into another ball, and the second ball moving. Then they showed the babies 'impossible' scenes through optical illusions -- such as a ball dissapearing, a ball hitting another ball and coming to a dead stop, etc. The babies stared longer at the impossible scenes than the possible scenes. This seems to imply that they perceived some sort of difference between the possible and impossible scenes. We can reasonably conclude that the babies had some innate sense of physics -- what is possible and impossible in our world -- and therefore were befuddled by the illusions and stared at them longer. Remember, these are babies that are still being carried around by their mothers, no older than 12 months. The have very little experience with everyday physics.
"We have found models for describing things like you're talking about (catching frisbee's, etc.), but do you really think we (much less your dog) are solving differential equations in your head in order to catch a frisbee?"
I don't think anyone is consciously doing algebra in their imagination when they throw a ball (for that matter, I think dogs are hardly conscious, even though I am a dog person). However, the nuerons in the brain, spinal cord, and arm probably are doing calculus.
Remember that the body's actions are not a purely mechanical event, like water flowing. In order to successfully run, jump, or throw a ball, any body, from ants to gazelles, has to model the natural world and how the body will move within it. If the body and its neurons are *not* using calculus, then they must have another method of solving these equations. Are you claiming they are not using math?
I've always had a problem with sentence-style math. Anything beyond long division I can't handle. However, I am very good at visual gemoetry.
In my high school, the sophomore math class was geometry. We constructed shapes and did geometric proofs. A lot of people just couldn't get it. Some of them were vrey frustrated because they were really good at regular math, but they just weren't visual thinkers.
There were about 5 of us, including me, who were great at it. I remember one homework at the beginning of the class where we were to find triangles in a complex, overlapping shape. Most people found 10-15. The 5 or so of us who were really great at it found 32 (one guy found 31), which I believe is the maximum number in that figure.
Dag nabbit! They got me with their Anti-calculus!
Or, you can become a consultant and bid out jobs locally, then have Indians do it for next to nothing. After four years of doing this at school, you would be pretty good at managing such projects.
I know a few consultants in my area that don't do any programming anymore. They have a team in Asia and a team in Eastern Europe working on their projects 24/7. It's not a complete retirement, because you do have to negotiate cultural barriers (such as what "I need it tomorrow" means), and you are not within ass-kicking distance of the people you are relying on.
You don't understand the point of standards.
..." and the original poster says "No, you misunderstand me..." It's everybody's personal preference for what is a meaningful grammar rule, instead of having an objective ruleset.
We have these grammar rules so that we are all on the same page. You're overlooking the point of grammar which is exactly to make sense.
The example you use is a red herring. "I went too the store." is easy to understand. However, once we decide we can break the rules, then it's up to each individual poster as to what rules they want to follow, and what rules they want to discard. The replier says "Earlier you said that
Yes, some of the rules are crufty and old, like "its", "it's" and "its'". However, the vast majority of grammar rules are here so that we can understand each other. Let me repeat that, ignoring a few grammar rules:
can understand vast that we each so majority the of rules are here other. grammar
So we have a few dumb spellings and grammar rules. Suck it up and learn them.
I'll bet a couple of nerds in WV are shitting themselves right now.
Print it or keep the SMS.
Don't take this personally.
Leadership starts at the top. If people at the very top aren't doing 100%, no one below is going to do any better. It just goes downhill quickly.
If you look at the position of 'editor' in any other organization in any point in the history of editors, editors make sure that the text has correct spelling and grammar. If you aren't doing that, are you really doing your job? I know you say that you repair articles for sense, linking, etc. -- but if you still allow these stupid, easily fixed errors through, how do I know you are doing anything at all, other than clicking an 'Approve' button? It just smacks of laziness and not taking the site seriously. Which, hey, if you don't care, why should I? I'll stop previewing my articles, trying to make insightful, interesting points with facts and good logic. I'll just troll the site. After all, if the editors aren't keeping the place clean, why should I?
I think the slashdot editing policy worked when this site was still in someone's basement or however it started. However, if you are seriously asking for people for money, get your act together. No more dupes, no more spelling errors, a lot less grammatical errors.
Yes, we are saddled with a stupid, ancient, crufty spelling system that is in serious need of revision. No, it is not going to happen anytime soon. Just buck up and start looking up words. It doesn't bother you, but it doesn bother others, a lot.
Let me put on my mean-spirited hat ;)
What point are you trying to prove? That you can't hire a competent professional? That grammar and spelling are hard, even for professionals?
[Takes off hat].
For some reason I always think that programmers, if they weren't sticklers for spelling rules, could at least know and use them. Therefore computer and technology sites -- real hardcore geek sites, should be sancutaries from bad spelling and grammar. But there seems to be a real divide between people that have logical and language ability -- some people are good at math, and some people are good at writing. Rarely do you see someone with talents in both.
"We all know that the investment in space has done nothing to enable silly little technologies like weather satellites, telecommunications, etc... things that certainly don't improve the lives of people. "
If you want improvemets in weather satellite technology, make investements in weather satellite technology. If you want improvements in telecommunications, make investments in telecommunications research.
I'm not saying that we have gotten *no* benefit from the space program, but that *it's very little*, and *less than proponents have made it out to be*.
If the reason we are going into space is these everday life improvements, then we are better off investing the money directly into those areas, instead of wasting it on rocketry a zero-g research and areas that are only applicable to space.
It's like saying we need to send team after team to the bottom of the ocean and establish a base down there to make our everyday lives better. Anyone can see we're better off not building the submarines. But somehow with the space program, sending up shuttle after shuttle to watch plants and ants grow in zero G makes food and fuel cheaper or something crazy like that.
"There are no homeless people in the usa starving. If they are they choose to starve."
Logical contradictions in the first two sentences will get you far in slashdot.
But I'll take your bait. The US has a large population of insane homeless people -- they get messages from outer space, they work for the CIA, etc. etc. In the rest of the civilized world, they put them in hospitals. We used to do that here, but then Reagan came in and de-funded all of these huge wasteful government programs, so now we have paranoid schizophrenics wandering the streets.
Because, as you pointed out, a guy who gets radio signals in his brain from the FBI is choosing to wander the streets instead of working.
Uh, the United States is the only western country that has starving homeless people. The other western countries, including Canada, the UK, Scandinavia, continental Europe, Australia, have extensive social programs that prevent people from starving and being homeless. You may disagree with socialist policy and philosophy, but it is factually inaccurate to say that rates of hunger and homelessness are in the US and the rest of the western world are comparable.
Also, 'fallout' from technological innovations from the space programs helping everyday people is something that has been frequently debunked -- about the only thing we got is teflon for our frying pans. The US engaged in the space program in order to perfect ICBM, rocketry, and satellite technology in order to have a good chance of winning WWIII.
If you want to actually improve the lives of eveday people, invest in research in that area, instead of space. That's like saying deep sea research will eventually pay off in your everday. Sure, it might, but if that's what your goal is, just go ahead and fund it directly. Otherwise, stop trying to make it seem like shooting rockets into space is helping the average American. It isn't, and we don't have to beat the Ruskies anymore.
"Yet almost all conflicts, from cavemen with sticks, to WW2, to the Palestinians in Gaza, are over natural resources - usually land."
What you mean "yet"? How does that contradict my point?
If anything, of course people should fight over land because more land protects you from weapons, besides being useful for living on and farming.
"WTF? - that's a complete non-sequitur. How does there being lots of land stop weapons being useful. Here's a hint - it's hasn't up to now."
North Korea and Iraq are not a threat to the United States because we have LOTS OF LAND (not to mention water) between us, and those countries don't have missles that can cover THAT MUCH LAND.
If warlords don't have ICBMs then they can only project power as far as they can march their armies. Which won't be as far as ICBM missles.