Not completely irrelevant. Organisms may inherit features of the current state of gene expression from their parents. So even though the genome is unaltered by the environment, some inherited extra-genetic information is modified by the environment.
..."who benefits from this?" Who's asking for programming to be considered an art? Certainly not the ordinary people in the street. Certainly not the artists (I don't think). It's programmers themselves, at least some programmers. And why are they asking? There must be some perceived benefit. Are they looking for arts funding? Or wanting their work displayed at exhibitions? Or looking for a way to impress the opposite sex with their artistic talent? Until we know what the ulterior motive is, it's not clear we can even begin to answer the question. There's no point just assigning 'programming' as a subset of 'art' without actually having a use for that assignment.
Now that I do have an excuse for. These were privately owned machines used to process sensitive data owned by our parent company. Running an application from an external source that communicates with a remote server would have been against company policy.
So a while back our company shut down. For the last couple of months a bunch of us worked 3 days a week on making a graceful shutdown. During that period we had about 1500 2-3GHz CPUs sitting idle. I had about 2 days spare to work on writing code, and even on the days I was working there wasn't much to do. At the start of the shutdown period I thought "Wow! A few teraflops of power available for my own personal use for two months. And the spare time to utilize it. I could write the most amazing stuff." And what did I do? Nothing. I am a sinner. I have some excuses: I had to look for a new job 'n' all that. Even so, I could have done something.
It's not a definition thing, it's a connotation thing. Memes are basically the same thing as ideas. Using the word makes it clear (at least it used to) that you're talking about ideas w.r.t to their survival. The interesting ideas are the ones that have uses, that lead to other ideas, the good ideas, so to speak, and so on. The interesting memes are the ones that survive, even if they are bad ideas (relative to some value system).
I generally keep my head out of popular science writing and haven't read Wired in a decade, so my idea of what 'meme' means might be pretty old. And I might have missed a decade of the word being worn to a bright shiny cliche.
Lakatos argued that scientific theories had a 'hard core' and a 'protective belt'. If your theory's hard core has plenty going for it then it's rational to keep tweaking stuff in the belt to make theory fit the core facts. Eg. if you make one observation in a simple mechanical system that says F!=ma, it's better to hypothesis that maybe there's another force acting that you were unaware of, than that F=ma should be thrown out. It's worth doing this because there is plenty of support for F=ma. But the core only becomes a core after years of research supporting it. Crackpot theories lack such a thing.
Driving slower than other cars or
stopping all of a sudden can be
just as bad as speeding. It tends
to make cars bunch up behind
you and it could cause a rear-end
crash. If many cars are passing
you, move into the right lane and
let them pass.
The edition I had a few years ago said "move over even if the other drivers are breaking the speed limit".
In other words, Arnie says get the hell out of the left lane if you're driving too slow.
...here. But at least this one makes a prediction that's about to be tested, so I should give it some credit. But crackpots have a tendency of adapting ingeniously to data that doesn't fit the theory. We'll see...
A minor interplanetary conflict and you call it "intergalactic war". We could exterminate you all in a microsecond and it would be no more significant than a photon escaping from a star.
Even if T symmetry is violated, we would still have to string together a good argument showing how this leads to the other arrows. In fact, it might be that T symmetry is violated, but the other arrows are still there for quite different reasons. So there's still lots of fun stuff to think about.
So you say. I can say things too. It's more interesting when the things we say follow from other things through deductions or as a result of observation. Or failing that, statements can be entertaining. Your statement is just an empty statement that is none of these things.
I do not understand what you mean by "even before there was life"
It might be argued that increasing entropy is a precondition for life. But we see increasing entropy before life appeared on Earth, so we can't use a simple anthropic argument to explain early low entropy.
I have no answers for why the universe started in a low entropy state
That's why I like the question. Unlike "why are we here?" we don't even know if it's a metaphysical question or a genuine physical one. It might be explainable, or it might just be a given we have to accept.
It's funny. Not only do these audiophiles imagine they can hear things other people can't, but they justify it with cargo cult physics. And we're supposed to take audiophiles seriously. I find the low end thing really funny. It's a pervasive belief among audiophiles that the Nyquist limit is somehow double ended so that there is a lower limit to the frequency of a signal that can be reconstructed from samples as well as an upper limit. I don't know whether to laugh or feel sorry for these people.
Of course. And if you take the decoherence route then this arrow time is the same arrow as the arrow of thermodynamics. Still, this view doesn't have a universal following, and there are a lot of details that need filling in. And it still doesn't explain why we use a causal green's function when computing the EM field from some charge.
That's Boltzmann's old argument. He posited a large universe. Dotted throughout the universe would be chance regions with low entropy and we live in one of those because we can't live anywhere else. The reason why entropy is increasing is that that is a precondition for life to exist. But that still doesn't tie together all of the different arrows of time that exist in physics - and there are more than I have listed.
You're answering "How can the human DNA sequence be so small?" but I think the question is "Why is the DNA sequence so small when that of rice isn't?" Your argument applies equally well to rice yet it has a long DNA sequence. Is this an accident? Or is there an fundamental 'architecture' difference between human and rice DNA?
My favourite is why does time have an arrow? This is closely related to one of the listed questions "why is time different from the other dimensions?"
Or to put it another way: Why does the entropy of any closed system always increase? Why do we take the 'causal' solution to Maxwell's equations when determining the field generated by an accelerating charge? Why does the evolution of a quantum system appear to involve an irreversible step - wavefunction collapse? These may in fact be the same question in different guises. I think it's the number one question in physics. Every fundamental law of physics has time reversal symmetry (or at least CPT symmetry) and 'future' and 'past' look as similar as 'left' and 'right' at a fundamental level. So the arrow of time we see so blatantly around us is in serious need of explanation. It's almost as if physicists live in denial about the fact that their fundamental theories clearly just don't seem to match up with reality. But there are some good books on the subject such as Zeh's.
In most countries where I have talked about this subject, providers of services tell you how much the service is going to cost you. Sometimes it's tricky to work out the details but generally it's all there in the contract. In the US companies refuse to declare prices inclusive of tax. It's also hard to guess what taxes you're going to pay. (Do you know what all the taxes on your phone/DSL/mobile bill are?) So - if the government wants to levy a tax on broadband, I don't mind too much, it'll probably only be a few bucks a month. But what I do mind is that broadband providers will continue to claim one price and bill me for another. The same is of course true for just about any retail purchase in the US, but service bills seem to have a habit of collecting up far more unexpected taxes than just sales tax.
Chomsky, in the book The Sound Pattern of English, argued that English spelling was in fact near optimal.
Briefly, the point is that English spelling is 'lexical' in the sense that it reflects the way the word has been constructed rather than how it is spoken. For example consider the words crumb and crumbly. The 'b' is silent in the former but not in the latter. The spelling is inconsistent from a phonetic standpoint. But both words are formed from the same stem, crumb-, so it makes perfect sense that they should be spelled the same. Another example is the past tense -ed. It's pronounced d or t or ed in different places. But the consistent spelling reflects a consistent meaning. So maybe the problem isn't with spelling, but the inconsistency of English speech.
Slashdot Mirror
Not completely irrelevant. Organisms may inherit features of the current state of gene expression from their parents. So even though the genome is unaltered by the environment, some inherited extra-genetic information is modified by the environment.
..."who benefits from this?" Who's asking for programming to be considered an art? Certainly not the ordinary people in the street. Certainly not the artists (I don't think). It's programmers themselves, at least some programmers. And why are they asking? There must be some perceived benefit. Are they looking for arts funding? Or wanting their work displayed at exhibitions? Or looking for a way to impress the opposite sex with their artistic talent? Until we know what the ulterior motive is, it's not clear we can even begin to answer the question. There's no point just assigning 'programming' as a subset of 'art' without actually having a use for that assignment.
Asset tags everywhere. Well...almost everywhere...
Now that I do have an excuse for. These were privately owned machines used to process sensitive data owned by our parent company. Running an application from an external source that communicates with a remote server would have been against company policy.
So what should I have done with that CPU power?
I generally keep my head out of popular science writing and haven't read Wired in a decade, so my idea of what 'meme' means might be pretty old. And I might have missed a decade of the word being worn to a bright shiny cliche.
Lakatos argued that scientific theories had a 'hard core' and a 'protective belt'. If your theory's hard core has plenty going for it then it's rational to keep tweaking stuff in the belt to make theory fit the core facts. Eg. if you make one observation in a simple mechanical system that says F!=ma, it's better to hypothesis that maybe there's another force acting that you were unaware of, than that F=ma should be thrown out. It's worth doing this because there is plenty of support for F=ma. But the core only becomes a core after years of research supporting it. Crackpot theories lack such a thing.
Yeah, imagine how dumb it would be if we could trademark words like 'windows' or 'apple'.
In other words, Arnie says get the hell out of the left lane if you're driving too slow.
...here. But at least this one makes a prediction that's about to be tested, so I should give it some credit. But crackpots have a tendency of adapting ingeniously to data that doesn't fit the theory. We'll see...
A minor interplanetary conflict and you call it "intergalactic war". We could exterminate you all in a microsecond and it would be no more significant than a photon escaping from a star.
Even if T symmetry is violated, we would still have to string together a good argument showing how this leads to the other arrows. In fact, it might be that T symmetry is violated, but the other arrows are still there for quite different reasons. So there's still lots of fun stuff to think about.
It's funny. Not only do these audiophiles imagine they can hear things other people can't, but they justify it with cargo cult physics. And we're supposed to take audiophiles seriously. I find the low end thing really funny. It's a pervasive belief among audiophiles that the Nyquist limit is somehow double ended so that there is a lower limit to the frequency of a signal that can be reconstructed from samples as well as an upper limit. I don't know whether to laugh or feel sorry for these people.
...though not necesaarily in the correct order.
Of course. And if you take the decoherence route then this arrow time is the same arrow as the arrow of thermodynamics. Still, this view doesn't have a universal following, and there are a lot of details that need filling in. And it still doesn't explain why we use a causal green's function when computing the EM field from some charge.
A possible answer is the anthropic one, we wouldn't be here otherwise.
But in that case, why does our distant past appear to have been in a state of even lower entropy, even before there was life?
And why do we have all of these other arrows of physics?
That's Boltzmann's old argument. He posited a large universe. Dotted throughout the universe would be chance regions with low entropy and we live in one of those because we can't live anywhere else. The reason why entropy is increasing is that that is a precondition for life to exist. But that still doesn't tie together all of the different arrows of time that exist in physics - and there are more than I have listed.
...your eyes! Not for too long however, just a glimpse would do.
You're answering "How can the human DNA sequence be so small?" but I think the question is "Why is the DNA sequence so small when that of rice isn't?" Your argument applies equally well to rice yet it has a long DNA sequence. Is this an accident? Or is there an fundamental 'architecture' difference between human and rice DNA?
If the Big Bang isn't a big enough picture that you must be a hard person to satisfy!
Or to put it another way: Why does the entropy of any closed system always increase? Why do we take the 'causal' solution to Maxwell's equations when determining the field generated by an accelerating charge? Why does the evolution of a quantum system appear to involve an irreversible step - wavefunction collapse? These may in fact be the same question in different guises. I think it's the number one question in physics. Every fundamental law of physics has time reversal symmetry (or at least CPT symmetry) and 'future' and 'past' look as similar as 'left' and 'right' at a fundamental level. So the arrow of time we see so blatantly around us is in serious need of explanation. It's almost as if physicists live in denial about the fact that their fundamental theories clearly just don't seem to match up with reality. But there are some good books on the subject such as Zeh's.
In most countries where I have talked about this subject, providers of services tell you how much the service is going to cost you. Sometimes it's tricky to work out the details but generally it's all there in the contract. In the US companies refuse to declare prices inclusive of tax. It's also hard to guess what taxes you're going to pay. (Do you know what all the taxes on your phone/DSL/mobile bill are?) So - if the government wants to levy a tax on broadband, I don't mind too much, it'll probably only be a few bucks a month. But what I do mind is that broadband providers will continue to claim one price and bill me for another. The same is of course true for just about any retail purchase in the US, but service bills seem to have a habit of collecting up far more unexpected taxes than just sales tax.
Briefly, the point is that English spelling is 'lexical' in the sense that it reflects the way the word has been constructed rather than how it is spoken. For example consider the words crumb and crumbly. The 'b' is silent in the former but not in the latter. The spelling is inconsistent from a phonetic standpoint. But both words are formed from the same stem, crumb-, so it makes perfect sense that they should be spelled the same. Another example is the past tense -ed. It's pronounced d or t or ed in different places. But the consistent spelling reflects a consistent meaning. So maybe the problem isn't with spelling, but the inconsistency of English speech.