Like most TV "sci fi", Doctor Who has always been Cargo Cult Science Fiction. It has the trappings of Science Fiction - spaceships, time travel, aliens, robots and so on - but in all its years, nobody has ever thought to write an actual science fiction Doctor Who script, until Stephen Moffat came along. The Doctor has been a little risible lately, but don't let that get in the way of the fact that Moffat has written two or three episodes that transcend the genre and rise up to the level of some of the great science fiction stories of old. I love Battelstar Galactica too, and it was well put together drama, but it doesn't have any individual story to match Moffat's writing.
> First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.
So let's consider the alternative: elliptical galaxies are actually elliptical but they have their ellipses aligned in just such a way that from Earth they could be construed as being circles with a strong preference to align towards a particular axis. Does that not sound a little ridiculous to you? There are times when having a flawed methodology makes your results sronger - not weaker. This is one of those cases.
> Damn, I'm glad I live in the U.S.A., where we hold our Government in the highest contempt on a daily basis
Oh please! You can't be serious. The USA is the land where the news agencies spout whatever lies the current administration are promulgating and where its citizens think that freedom of speech is nothing more than the right to have the word FUCK on your T-shirt. The US administration can make up entirely bogus reasons for invading another country, nobody bothers mentioning that the whole thing was a fabric of fictional constructs, and next election the administration is voted back in again. Few people in the US have the slightest clue what it means to criticise government. Watch an interview with a politician in the UK and see what it means for someone to ask a difficult question. Meanwhile in the US there are these joke interview shows called things like 'crossball' and 'hardfire' where the interviewer runs home crying to mama if the interviewee refuses to answer an unscripted question, and by the way, what's happened to Britney Simpson Lohan this week?
> What is the back-up release mechanism if there's a problem?
I know that it's fashionable on/. to be a doomsayer about every new piece of technology that comes along. Guaranteed karma 'n' all. But how to make an off switch was understood as far back as the 18th century.
I can think of an old classic game where the lack of fairness mattered. Civilization. The computer used to build wonders of the world in times that were simply impossible for you. But here fairness made sense: there was an N-player game defined and in effect the computer was just another player. You wanted to know if you were better than the computer but there was no chance of fnding out because the computer cheated. But again I contend that this is different from Goldeneye. It's just a rule of the game that enemies can just appear from round the corner and that was that. Sometimes it was annoying, but it always added to the challenge.
I'm confused. I don't really know what fairness means for a single player video game. In a game like chess, or tennis, the goal is to find out who is the better player. Fairness is important because any kind of bias in the game can lead to you not getting the correct assessment of who is better. But in a single player video game, such as Goldeneye, you aren't trying to find out whether or not the computer is better than you at Goldeneye. The notion doesn't even make sense. Having baddies respawn isn't a lack of fairness, it's a lack of realism. That's a fair enough criticism, but I consider Goldeneye to be just a game and don't care if it sacrifices realism to keep the game exciting.
> 90% of CD content blows
I'm guessing that a typical CD store contains something like 20,000 CDs. (That's a very rough guess.) That means you think 90% of those CDs blow. That means you think 2,000 CDs in a typical music store don't blow. Which is kinda interesting. If you put me in a typical music store I could imagine finding, say, 50 CDs I like. Like many other people, I can spend an hour in a CD store and not find any CDs I'd like to listen to, even when I'm in a mood to spend, spend, spend. If you think 10% of music doesn't blow then you're very lucky - you're easily pleased. And yet you say "90% of most CD content blows" as if that was a bad thing. Weird.
> Some researchers believe that autism causes it's havoc by interfering with the brains ability to prune existing connections between neurons
So why do people with autistic have such *specific* disorders, such as problems with modeling other minds? This sounds like the biological equivalent of claiming some bug is caused by "a C++ function computing some binary digits incorrectly".
And some other people say that whales don't like being killed and they'd prefer that you didn't do it. Funny how you left out the point of view of those with the highest stake in this issue.
The same old tired slashdot mantra. Oh well, I suppose I have to answer it.
I suggest complementing the surveys with a few history of science texts so see how religious and scientific belief has clashed over the last couple of millennia and how beliefs have shifted over the centuries. There's a reason why the Church has cowered every time scientific advances are made, whether it's the rediscovery of Aristotle in medieval Europe, or the work of Galileo, or the publication of Origin of Species. In fact, just pick some random atheists and ask them what supports their beliefs. Whether or not their arguments have any validity, a large number will make the claim that they do not hold religious beliefs because of their scientific beliefs. And I count myself among those people. (Also note Dawkins: "Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Charles Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist".)
Just quoting "correlation =/= causation" is the height of intellectual laziness.
> I'll give you a tip here: If someone believes in God today, the discovery of a new particle tomorrow won't make the stop believing.
Unfortunately your tip is worthless. The fact is, across the world high rates of scientific literacy is inversely correlated with religious belief. (There are countless surveys that demonstrate this. Don't just respond with some anecdotes about how some scientists are religious believers. I'm talking about highly statistically significant trends.). And not just across the world, through time as well. Every new scientific discovery that reaches the popular consciousness chips away at religion and superstition.
> There's no room for argumentation
If that were true we'd still believe the same religious beliefs that humans held when they first came up with religious beliefs. This is patently absurd.
> Our ancestors were able to make due with water as a drink and so our bodies should be acclimated to it.
And our ancestors were able to make do with dying a lot because they had no contraceptives and so they had babies at a rate that made up for the high mortality rate. Are you proposing we return to that way of life too?
Visual effects companies (eg. ILM, Sony Imageworks, Rhythm and Hues, Weta) are crying out for good mathematicians and physicists who can apply their skill and knowledge to generating images. People who study computer graphics come out with knowledge of their particular area. People who study mathematics and physics are often able to apply themselves in any area of graphics they choose. Some of these companies pay very well.
I think the same is probably true of the games companies.
> I'm saying that if the brain/ear interface actually had non-linear aspects that mattered, then it wouldn't be possible to resolve directionality
I just don't know if this is true. You get some pretty sophisticated nonlinear processing in the brain that may be able to disentangle information that's been entangled nonlinearly.
> And you do realize I was being somewhat facetious in my previous post, right?
Well I'm taking this all very seriously now. I'm thinking that if I can justify audiophilia then maybe I could get paid by a high end stereo magazine for writing this kind of stuff.
> Also, I hate audiophiles. In case you couldn't guess.
Yeah, but if you actually listened in the presence of a quadratic residue diffusor you'd change your mind.
> I think it's disingenious to talk about air as a non-linear system.
That was just an example. But you can probably make a much stronger case that the complex piece of engineering that is the ear becomes non-linear at much more reasonable sound amplitudes. (And of course it was disingenuous, I'm not making a case I actually believe...:-)
> Take two frequencies (say... 14000 and 14300). If you play them, you get a 300Hz beat. Put that on one channel. Now take a 300Hz sine on the other channel, and then adjust the phase slowly. You should "hear" the 300Hz tone moving around the sound stage.
That just demonstrates that to a good approximation you can model this particular situation linearly. What if nonlinearities start kicking in at higher frequences? Then this would prove nothing. What if the nonlinearities only become apparent when you have superpositions of many harmonics?
Look, if you're going to make up justifications for using vinyl, make them more convincing. Much of the theory about human hearing is based on the assumption that the ear acts as a linear system. If the ear were a linear system there is no way it'd be possible for "certain confluences of sound react with each other and produce further sounds". In linear systems harmonics at different frequencies simply add, there is no possible 'interaction' that can happen between them.
But nonlinear systems are quite different. The classic example is soliton waves. When two of these meet, they don't simply combine additively. In particular, different harmonics don't necessarily pass straight through each other and its quite possible for two very high frequency signals to interact and produce a low frequency signal in the result. And of course there really is no reason to expect the ear to remain close to a linear system, even ordinary sound waves in air become nonlinear if the sound is loud enough.
So if you want to sound convincing, talking about nonlinearity is your best bet. I can guarantee that 90% of the engineers you talk to won't have a sensible response because they've never studied nonlinear signal processing, and they'll be less likely to laugh at you.
Slashdot Mirror
Like most TV "sci fi", Doctor Who has always been Cargo Cult Science Fiction. It has the trappings of Science Fiction - spaceships, time travel, aliens, robots and so on - but in all its years, nobody has ever thought to write an actual science fiction Doctor Who script, until Stephen Moffat came along. The Doctor has been a little risible lately, but don't let that get in the way of the fact that Moffat has written two or three episodes that transcend the genre and rise up to the level of some of the great science fiction stories of old. I love Battelstar Galactica too, and it was well put together drama, but it doesn't have any individual story to match Moffat's writing.
No it's not. The winner of next year's Hugo award, by the same author, is even better.
> First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular. So let's consider the alternative: elliptical galaxies are actually elliptical but they have their ellipses aligned in just such a way that from Earth they could be construed as being circles with a strong preference to align towards a particular axis. Does that not sound a little ridiculous to you? There are times when having a flawed methodology makes your results sronger - not weaker. This is one of those cases.
...numerical numbers, or am I confusing it with visual graphics?
Oh please! You can't be serious. The USA is the land where the news agencies spout whatever lies the current administration are promulgating and where its citizens think that freedom of speech is nothing more than the right to have the word FUCK on your T-shirt. The US administration can make up entirely bogus reasons for invading another country, nobody bothers mentioning that the whole thing was a fabric of fictional constructs, and next election the administration is voted back in again. Few people in the US have the slightest clue what it means to criticise government. Watch an interview with a politician in the UK and see what it means for someone to ask a difficult question. Meanwhile in the US there are these joke interview shows called things like 'crossball' and 'hardfire' where the interviewer runs home crying to mama if the interviewee refuses to answer an unscripted question, and by the way, what's happened to Britney Simpson Lohan this week?
I know that it's fashionable on /. to be a doomsayer about every new piece of technology that comes along. Guaranteed karma 'n' all. But how to make an off switch was understood as far back as the 18th century.
I can think of an old classic game where the lack of fairness mattered. Civilization. The computer used to build wonders of the world in times that were simply impossible for you. But here fairness made sense: there was an N-player game defined and in effect the computer was just another player. You wanted to know if you were better than the computer but there was no chance of fnding out because the computer cheated. But again I contend that this is different from Goldeneye. It's just a rule of the game that enemies can just appear from round the corner and that was that. Sometimes it was annoying, but it always added to the challenge.
I'm confused. I don't really know what fairness means for a single player video game. In a game like chess, or tennis, the goal is to find out who is the better player. Fairness is important because any kind of bias in the game can lead to you not getting the correct assessment of who is better. But in a single player video game, such as Goldeneye, you aren't trying to find out whether or not the computer is better than you at Goldeneye. The notion doesn't even make sense. Having baddies respawn isn't a lack of fairness, it's a lack of realism. That's a fair enough criticism, but I consider Goldeneye to be just a game and don't care if it sacrifices realism to keep the game exciting.
Fairness? James Bond isn't about fairness. James Bond is about doing duty for Queen and Country, whatever the odds.
I don't know what is the best game. But there was another game for the same platform as Ocarina that was better - GoldenEye.
> 90% of CD content blows I'm guessing that a typical CD store contains something like 20,000 CDs. (That's a very rough guess.) That means you think 90% of those CDs blow. That means you think 2,000 CDs in a typical music store don't blow. Which is kinda interesting. If you put me in a typical music store I could imagine finding, say, 50 CDs I like. Like many other people, I can spend an hour in a CD store and not find any CDs I'd like to listen to, even when I'm in a mood to spend, spend, spend. If you think 10% of music doesn't blow then you're very lucky - you're easily pleased. And yet you say "90% of most CD content blows" as if that was a bad thing. Weird.
What? All of it?
> Some researchers believe that autism causes it's havoc by interfering with the brains ability to prune existing connections between neurons So why do people with autistic have such *specific* disorders, such as problems with modeling other minds? This sounds like the biological equivalent of claiming some bug is caused by "a C++ function computing some binary digits incorrectly".
The goal was to be remembered. They succeeded. Where's the irony?
And some other people say that whales don't like being killed and they'd prefer that you didn't do it. Funny how you left out the point of view of those with the highest stake in this issue.
The same old tired slashdot mantra. Oh well, I suppose I have to answer it.
I suggest complementing the surveys with a few history of science texts so see how religious and scientific belief has clashed over the last couple of millennia and how beliefs have shifted over the centuries. There's a reason why the Church has cowered every time scientific advances are made, whether it's the rediscovery of Aristotle in medieval Europe, or the work of Galileo, or the publication of Origin of Species. In fact, just pick some random atheists and ask them what supports their beliefs. Whether or not their arguments have any validity, a large number will make the claim that they do not hold religious beliefs because of their scientific beliefs. And I count myself among those people. (Also note Dawkins: "Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Charles Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist".)
Just quoting "correlation =/= causation" is the height of intellectual laziness.
> I'll give you a tip here: If someone believes in God today, the discovery of a new particle tomorrow won't make the stop believing.
Unfortunately your tip is worthless. The fact is, across the world high rates of scientific literacy is inversely correlated with religious belief. (There are countless surveys that demonstrate this. Don't just respond with some anecdotes about how some scientists are religious believers. I'm talking about highly statistically significant trends.). And not just across the world, through time as well. Every new scientific discovery that reaches the popular consciousness chips away at religion and superstition.
> There's no room for argumentation
If that were true we'd still believe the same religious beliefs that humans held when they first came up with religious beliefs. This is patently absurd.
> In such debates, people always miss the deeper question
Personally, I like to reserve the word 'deeper' for things that aren't blindingly obvious to even a child. Otherwise you debase the English language.
I'd love to see the justification for these figures that look like they were pulled out of someone's ass.
And our ancestors were able to make do with dying a lot because they had no contraceptives and so they had babies at a rate that made up for the high mortality rate. Are you proposing we return to that way of life too?
I think the same is probably true of the games companies.
I just don't know if this is true. You get some pretty sophisticated nonlinear processing in the brain that may be able to disentangle information that's been entangled nonlinearly.
> And you do realize I was being somewhat facetious in my previous post, right?
Well I'm taking this all very seriously now. I'm thinking that if I can justify audiophilia then maybe I could get paid by a high end stereo magazine for writing this kind of stuff.
> Also, I hate audiophiles. In case you couldn't guess.
Yeah, but if you actually listened in the presence of a quadratic residue diffusor you'd change your mind.
That was just an example. But you can probably make a much stronger case that the complex piece of engineering that is the ear becomes non-linear at much more reasonable sound amplitudes. (And of course it was disingenuous, I'm not making a case I actually believe... :-)
> Take two frequencies (say... 14000 and 14300). If you play them, you get a 300Hz beat. Put that on one channel. Now take a 300Hz sine on the other channel, and then adjust the phase slowly. You should "hear" the 300Hz tone moving around the sound stage.
That just demonstrates that to a good approximation you can model this particular situation linearly. What if nonlinearities start kicking in at higher frequences? Then this would prove nothing. What if the nonlinearities only become apparent when you have superpositions of many harmonics?
But nonlinear systems are quite different. The classic example is soliton waves. When two of these meet, they don't simply combine additively. In particular, different harmonics don't necessarily pass straight through each other and its quite possible for two very high frequency signals to interact and produce a low frequency signal in the result. And of course there really is no reason to expect the ear to remain close to a linear system, even ordinary sound waves in air become nonlinear if the sound is loud enough.
So if you want to sound convincing, talking about nonlinearity is your best bet. I can guarantee that 90% of the engineers you talk to won't have a sensible response because they've never studied nonlinear signal processing, and they'll be less likely to laugh at you.
I once met a real survivalist...